Review: 'Surf-Age Nuggets: Trash & Twang Instrumentals'

I love The Beach Boys, but they never were a true surf band. They sang about catching waves and driving woodies because they just needed something to sing about, and really, surf music wasn't made for singers, even ones with voices as heavenly as The Beach Boys. Surf music was supposed to be something rougher, darker, more on the same wavelength as the actual sport, which is pretty dangerous. 

So you shouldn't expect sunny Brian Wilson—let alone goofy Jan and Dean—harmonies when diving into a collection like Surf-Age Nuggets: Trash & Twang Instrumentals. Like a legit Nuggets compilation, RockBeat Records' set aimed to convey the rougher underbelly of its subgenre. The Shan-Tones pound tom toms on "Sheba"like a bushy, bushy blond head pounding the rocks after a wipe out. The Velvetones wield guitar strings like switchblades on "Doheny Run". The screaming, rough-and-tumble "Don't Call Me Fly Face" implies what will happen if you do, indeed, insult The Reekers by calling them Fly Face. Even the band's name is nasty!

Review: 'Horror of Dracula' Blu-ray

In 1957, the world gasped before the film that defined Hammer Horror. With Terence Fisher behind the camera, and Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, classic monster source material, and an unprecedented degree of violence and sex in front of it, The Curse of Frankenstein laid out the Hammer essentials. 

The following year the same elements perfected it. Fisher's Dracula was even better than his excellent Frankenstein adaptation, this time matching a great villain with an equally formidable hero. Lugosi's Dracula may have still been a bit too iconic for Lee to beat, but Cushing's charming, action-packed Van Helsing was definitive. With Jack Asher's colorful, autumnal photography and Jimmy Sangster's tight script—as well as strong support from Michael Gough, Melissa Stribling and Carol Marsh—Dracula proved to be the finest film from one of horror's defining studios.

Review: 'The Hammer Story: Revised and Expanded Edition"

The first book on Hammer Horror I ever read was A Thing of Unspeakable Horror. Sinclair McKay's study is a thorough, witty, and critically astute trek through the history of Britain's most important and adored purveyor of blood and beastliness. It's a great read, but the little paperback barely tries to convey the ghastly, often sexy, always vibrant imagery that usually outweighed mere matters of storytelling in Hammer pictures. For that you'd have to dig in to The Hammer Story (or, you now, watch the movies). 

Review: 'Frankenhooker' Blu-ray

What is there to say about Frankenhooker that Bill "If you see one movie this year, it should be Frankenhooker" Murray hasn't already said? Needing to explain to someone why they should see a movie about a grieving mad-scientist who uses the body parts of prostitutes to rebuild his fiancée recently deceased due to a routine lawnmower accident doesn't seem like something a grown man should be doing, even if Patty Mullen comes right to the precipice of genius in her face-contorting performance as the title creature. Will this kind of thing fly amongst those with 2026 sensibilities and sensitivities? What am I, a psychiatrist? All I know is that, much as it is with Bush-era terrorists, you're either with Frankenhooker or against Frankenhooker. If you fall into the latter camp, you probably do enjoy your bong hits.

Review: 'The Bad Seed' Blu-ray

In 1954, William March published a book about a child who kills not because she's an invading alien, like the kids in The Midwich Cuckoos, or because she's the antichrist, like the kid in The Omen, but because she's entitled, covetous, and completely immoral, like Donald Trump. Because of its all-too-human monster, The Bad Seed was a genuinely scary novel, and with its tight storytelling and clearly defined characters, it was ripe for adaptation into an equally chilling movie.

 The problem was it was a little too ripe. Producer/director Mervyn LeRoy should have sat on The Bad Seed until Hollywood was ready to make a picture about children killing children without pulling punches. Instead, Warner Bros. rushed it into theaters in 1956, forcing LeRoy to defang March's tale with camp eight years before Susan Sontag even got a chance to define the term.

Review: 'The Hammer Horror Omnibus'

Hammer horror was always more about aesthetics and the enthralling presence of the studio's big stars than story. What is Hammer without all of that crimson house-paint blood, those lush Victorian sets, the decayed Gothic castles and cemeteries, and the enthralling presence of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee? 

Review: 'Dracula Has Risen from the Grave' Blu-ray

A quaint little village is still reeling from Dracula's last rampage, and though the count is dead, the local priest can still feel his evil presence. That's probably because "dead" is a relative term when it comes to vampires, especially one in a long series of Hammer Dracula movies.

So what happens next? The title says it all. Freddie Francis's Dracula Has Risen from the Grave is Hammer's fourth vampire picture, and it's the third with Christopher Lee and the second without Peter Cushing as valiant Van Helsing. Cushing is sorely missed, but a couple of youngsters take up the slack: Barbara Ewing as sexy barmaid Zena and Barry Andrews as refreshing atheist Paul. Because this is a Hammer picture, which always balanced its buckets of red-paint blood and leering close-ups of cleavage with a pretty conservative outlook, you know Paul will see the light by the time the closing credits roll, but it does this with enough subtlety to not be totally off-putting. 

Review: 'Night of the Living Dead: The Official Story of the Film'

When a scrappy commercial production agency decided to branch out into feature films, the Latent Image team had no idea they would change the face of horror forever. As violent and despairing as Night of the Living Dead would be, the story behind the movie is kind of adorable. Its creation was a true all-hands-on-deck operation, as actors doubled as makeup artists, foley artists, and sound mixers. Pennsylvania locals pitched in to play zombies more than willing to stuff Silly Putty and actual intestines into their mouths. While the job of film-director tends to attract only the most massive of egos, George Romero had to be talked into directing the picture after trying to fob it off on Karl Hardman, who co-produced the film and played surly dad Harry Cooper, among several other behind-the-scenes roles. And everyone dressed up and rode in limos to attend the boozy premier in Pittsburgh, which lavished the film with the local attention it wouldn't really receive nationally until it became a Midnight Movie sensation.

Review: 'Ad Nauseum: Newsprint Nightmares from the '70s & '80s'

As a young child in the seventies and early eighties, I'd flip through the newspaper every day and stop at two sections: the comics and the movies. When I'd come across an ad for a horror movie, I'd inevitably think, "What kind of disturbed, sick individual would want to torture themselves by watching this horrible stuff?" What I should have been thinking when perusing the paper was "Does anyone actually think B.C. is funny?"

Review: 'White Zombie' Blu-ray

White Zombie was the first major zombie film, though today's legions of walking dead devotees might find it bewildering unless they somehow came across a musty box of classic E.C. comics. Victor Halperin's film features the voodoo variety of zombies rather than the shuffling brain-eaters that gave them the bum's rush right out the crypt door. Current sensitivities being what they are, this is probably for the best since the original zombie stories were so entwined with real-world issues of race and slavery. Garnett Weston's script does indeed identify slavery as evil, but it takes the zombification of a white woman to get anyone in his film to do anything about it. Plus there's one highly uncomfortable scene involving a white actor in blackface, which is especially galling considering how many genuine black extras there are in this movie. Welcome to 1932.

Review: 'Beasts in the Cellar: The Exploitation Film Career of Tony Tenser'

Tigon Films-founder Tony Tenser didn't produce exploitation movies to satisfy a fetish, like Russ Meyer. He was simply a businessman, more like Roger Corman. So despite some of his dubious accomplishments, like opening a member's only movie theater/men's club and coining the term "sex kitten", Beasts in the Cellar: The Exploitation Film Career of Tony Tenser is only lurid when describing the plots of some of his movies. And along with bringing such smutty stuff as Naked—As Nature Intended and Not Now, Darling into being, he also produced some genuine genre classics, such as Repulsion, Witchfinder General, Frightmare, and The Blood on Satan's Claw. 

'Monster Mayhem Collection' Blu-ray

Even in an age when bad movies like Hocus Pocus and Clue achieve classic status there have to be limits. Yet here we are with a special edition set of movies even fans of The Monster Squad will recognize as crappy. According to the ballyhoo for The Monster Mayhem Collection, this two-disc set features four films scanned from 35mm archival prints, maintaining their original aspect ratios, and supplemented with feature commentaries and several featurettes. A presentation fit for Citizen Kane! 

So which classics of Hollywood's golden age were lavished with such cinephile splendor. Well...

Review: 'David Lynch' Revised & Updated Edition

Break the code, solve the crime. One thing that draws a lot of viewers to the films of David Lynch is Lynch's refusal to express his intentions on the surface. In an age when every film's message must be explicitly stated for an audience with the attention span of a puppy, David Lynch's dogged refusal to ever play that dull game is especially thrilling. 

It also means that theories about what, say, that blue box in Mulholland Dr. means are more plentiful than donuts in Agent Cooper's mouth. Whether they be glib brain farts or endless exegeses, explanations of what Lynch really meant are everywhere. To the late filmmaker's credit, he rarely validated any, but also rarely outright said any were wrong either.

Review: 'A Place Both Wonderful and Strange: The Extraordinary Until History of Twin Peaks'

A Place Both Wonderful and Strange: The Extraordinary Until History of Twin Peaks had already been on my radar for a bit when my wife told me she'd listened to Glen Weldon's podcast, and self-described Peaks superfan Weldon said he was surprised by how much he'd learned from Scott Meslow's book. 

Review: 'Classic Monsters, Modern Art'

When I took my wife to see The Bride of Frankenstein at NY's Museum of Modern Art on one of our first dates, the one thing she commented on after seeing it for the first time was how "iconic" every frame of it is. It may not be as lauded as Citizen Kane, but Kane doesn't have an image half as indelible as Karloff's monster lumbering through a crypt or Lanchester's Bride shrieking in horror when she first meets him. As far as I'm concerned, the horror of the unseen (see The Haunting or The Blair Witch Project) will always be scariest, but the monsters, crypts, and graveyards of less frightening films will never fail to scratch the itchy shoulders of those like me who look forward to Halloween more than Christmas.

Review: John Williams's 'Jaws: (Music From the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)' "Blood in the Water" Vinyl

It was fifty years ago that a certain movie swam up to make people afraid to go in the water and movie execs afraid to not end their blockbusters with a big explosion. Jaws altered the face of cinema in many ways, some great and some not so great, but I'm pretty sure everyone agrees that at least one element of the film is unassailable: that John Williams score (okay, the dialog, acting, and directing are unassailable too). 

Review: 'Rewinding the '80s'

When I think of the movies of the eighties, I tend to think of a really fun filmography, whether we're talking about horror, teen movies, sci-fi, or fantasy, the genre that tended to most bleed into all the others. Following a decade in which the defining cinematic style was bleakness, eighties cinema seems like a toy box of action, loud music, product tie-ins, and welcome silliness. 

Review: 'Rocky Horror by Mick Rock'

Mick Rock was a rock star photographer both in the sense that he photographed rock stars and that he was something of a rebel star himself. He gravitated toward the most visually electrifying artists of his time, including Queen, Bowie, Iggy, and T. Rex. So he was the perfect fit to serve as set photographer during the making of that most visual, rocking, and rebellious of seventies cult classic films, The Rocky Horror Picture Show. 

Review: 'David Lynch: His Work, His World'

Over the course of a lovely but tiring seventeen years of Psychobabbling I've scaled way back on writing anything but reviews here. So I allowed a big, awful milestone to pass without much more than changing the banner at the top of this page. I'm talking about the death of David Lynch, my favorite artist, one who was so versatile, open, and willing to tap into dreams and nightmares, so old-fashioned hardworking, that he has been nothing short of the biggest creative inspiration in my own life. 

I got my start as a writer when my article on the role of dream worlds in Lynch's work was published in the final issue of the Twin Peaks fanzine Wrapped in Plastic way back in 2005. Although I've since published a couple of books, and even got to work on one of them with one of my top music heroes, Dave Davies, the biggest thrill of my career was seeing my name on the cover of Wrapped in Plastic beneath those of Peaks co-creator Mark Frost, star Catherine Coulson, writer Bob Engels, editor Mary Sweeney, and David Lynch. 

Review: 'The Book of Horror: The Anatomy of Fear in Film'

Horror movies are horror movies because they're scary, but there are many more reasons to watch them than the thrill of a good jolt. For the most veteran, and therefore calloused, of horror viewers, the possibility of being scared is a hell of a lot less likely than simply enjoying some rich Gothic atmosphere, cool monster makeup, the fine acting and directing one finds in a good movie of any genre, or, for the baser of us, vats of gore. You know who you are.