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Vintage Trash: Reel Wild Cinema Free Online (and Legal!)

Vintage Trash: Reel Wild Cinema Free Online (and Legal!)

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As many of you will remember, back in the 1980s and 90s there was a huge increase of interest in old B movies. People of my generation who had grown up watching “Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster” on rainy Saturday afternoons, or snuck down to the TV room to catch Creature Features on the late late show, were now in college or work and had money to spend. Suddenly VCRs across the nation were being filled with monster films, 1930s exploitation films, Italian Mondo films, and every other kind of vintage oddity. It was a wave of ironic nostalgia that put the later hipster movement to shame.

Magazines like Psychotronic Video and Cult Movies Magazine were crammed with articles about obscure directors and their output, along with lots of great movie stills and posters. There were also ads for various film distributors, one of the most popular being Something Weird Video.

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Making Myth in a Digital Alexandria

Making Myth in a Digital Alexandria

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Xena-cerchioDid you hear about the Xena reboot? How about the new Voltron series? Twin Peaks is re-launching this summer, and you may already have your tickets to the next comic book movie.

What is up with that? Is Hollywood completely out of ideas? Have they gotten so risk-averse that all they can do is recycle old material? Or is it simply nostalgia run amok, a nation full of millennials who don’t want to grow up?

I think it’s something different, and something pretty exciting. I don’t think our love of reboots is a lack of creativity at all. In fact, I think this is an incredibly vibrant artistic period, and is about to become even more so.

Why? Because we’ve seen this before. Bear with me, guys.

The Hellenistic period of the Ancient World begins with the death of Alexander the Great and extends until the rise of the Roman Empire. There, we got our hard facts out of the way. You may even remember that from history class.

Historians like their categories, and periods of history broken down into neat charts with clear defining events.

But in this case, we can talk about the way Ancient Mediterranean Culture shifted dramatically in a very short period of time. We became more and more able to talk about a Mediterranean culture, for one. The disparate cultures of Greece, the Near East, Northern Africa, and the Italian peninsula came into much closer contact because of Alexander’s Imperial ambitions. Trade had existed before, but the construction of travel networks and large cities allowed for an even greater exchange of information.

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The Exhumation of Myra Maynard

The Exhumation of Myra Maynard

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mysteries-of-myra-book-225x320myra1Most people have never heard of The Mysteries of Myra, much less seen the surviving footage. This 1916 silent serial was produced by publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst and directed by The Wharton Brothers for The Whartons Studio in Ithaca, New York. As late as the early talkie era, New York was still a rival for Hollywood with Paramount Pictures based on the East Coast until the early 1930s. The Mysteries of Myra was intended to carry on the tradition of The Perils of Pauline and The Exploits of Elaine, it was the work of the same screenwriter of those two lucrative serials, Charles Goddard, but The Mysteries of Myra was very different from any serial before or since in terms of structure and content.

Charles Goddard’s 15 chapter screenplay was developed from an original story treatment by real life occult detective, Hereward Carrington. Dr. Carrington was a member of the infamous Society for Psychical Research and a colleague of Harry Houdini. While a skeptic who exposed many false claims of psychic phenomena and hauntings, Dr. Carrington was also a believer in demonic possession, the afterlife, and other preternatural occurrences. The hero of the piece, Dr. Payson Alden, occult detective is clearly based on Hereward Carrington. The Mysteries of Myra is concerned with Dr. Alden’s efforts to save heiress Myra Maynard from the occult society, The Black Order and to win her heart from her contemptible fiancé , Arthur Varney, who is the right hand man of The Grand Master of The Black Order.

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Goth Chick News: Waist Deep in the Horror or Covering the Halloween and Haunted Attractions Show 2016

Goth Chick News: Waist Deep in the Horror or Covering the Halloween and Haunted Attractions Show 2016

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Transworld Halloween 2016-small

A 4 a.m. wakeup call, ten hours in the car, more coffee and Mountain Dew than can reasonably be tallied, two shots of Fireball whisky and over 100K square feet of blood, guts and latex.

No, it isn’t the Black Gate holiday party in Vegas. If it were, there would be way more than two shots of Fireball…

It is in fact, the biggest haunt show of the year; the Transworld Halloween & Haunted Attraction Show in St Louis, Missouri and Black Gate photog Chris Z and I are hopping on the road at zero-dark-thirty to cover it for the sixteenth year running – Chicago to Saint Louie and back in one day.

WTF? I hear you asking. But trust me when I say getting an inside peep at this “industry only” show is well worth the long day and the dry cleaning bill to get the smell of rotting flesh (courtesy of Sinister Scents) out of our Black Gate polo’s.

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Here Come the Replicants! – Blade Runner 2 Moved Up

Here Come the Replicants! – Blade Runner 2 Moved Up

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BladeRunnerThe long awaited sequel from Ridley Scott, starring Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, Robin Wright and Dave Bautista (yes, the former wrestler), was originally slated for January of 2018. That’s not exactly prime release time. Or a sign that the studio has confidence in the film. Instead, it’s been moved up to the weekend of October 6, 2017, which would put it in the Oscar discussion. If it is any good, of course.

Feelings about the sequel are certainly mixed. Though I think folks should remember that Blade Runner was not a hit upon release and had fared so poorly in test screenings that the film was recut before general distribution. However, it has grown to cult status. It’s one of my favorites and certainly a classic of scifi noir.

The script continues the story from the first film, which was an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Which is well worth a read.

K.W. Jeter wrote two official sequel novels, which I’m happy to say, have nothing to do with the film. The first was readable: the second was terrible.

If you enjoyed Blade Runner, there’s a superb book on the making of the film, Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner.

I remain hopeful about this film. And Vangelis is 73 years old. Will he be doing the soundtrack? It was a big part of the original.

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Star Trek Movie Rewatch: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

Star Trek Movie Rewatch: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

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Star Trek 4 The Probe-small

I’m not always the most attentive or detail oriented movie watcher. So, as I came to the end of The Voyage Home, the fourth of the original cast Star Trek movies, I realized that I still didn’t know exactly what was going on with those whales.

After movie three — The Search For Spock — the crew of the late starship Enterprise (watch the aforementioned for more details on that) are laying over on Vulcan, getting their commandeered Klingon ship up to speed when Earth finds itself menaced by a Big Dumb Object of some sort. It demands that it be paid a tribute of whales – or something like that — or it will wipe out the Earth in dramatic fashion. Our heroes enact that time honored SF convention of slingshotting around the sun to go several centuries back in time (with keen precision, I must note) and pick up a few whales, which they spirit off in a hastily built whale tank in the Klingon ship.

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Check Out the Teaser Trailer for Marvel’s Doctor Strange

Check Out the Teaser Trailer for Marvel’s Doctor Strange

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I’m very excited by Marvel’s upcoming Doctor Strange movie, even more than I usually am by big-budget comic adaptations. And the brand new teaser trailer — featuring our first look at Benedict Cumberbatch as Stephen Strange, Tilda Swinton as the Ancient One, and Chiwetel Ejiofor as the sinister Baron Mordo — isn’t helping me stay calm at all.

I view Doctor Strange at the last major untapped Marvel property. The 1960s comic, by Stan Lee and the brilliant Steve Ditko, the team that created Spider-Man, created in Doctor Strange a truly unique comic character, a sorcerer-hero who learned to navigate the strange paths between our reality and the next, and in the process discovered an endless chain of bizarrely-connected — and frequently very dangerous — parallel dimensions. I had real fears the movie would gloss over that aspect of his origin story, or ignore it entirely, but this trailer has put those to rest. It’s going to be epic.

Doctor Strange is scheduled for release November 4. It also stars Rachel McAdams and Mads Mikkelsen, and is directed by Scott Derrickson (The Messengers, Sinister). See our previous coverage here and here. Derek Kunsken took a detailed look at Lee and Ditko’s original comic here and here.

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: John Cleese as Holmes – Take One

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: John Cleese as Holmes – Take One

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Cleese_ElementaryJohn Cleese is best known, of course, as the sardonic Q opposite Pierce Brosnan’s James Bond in Die Another Day. Though not as well remembered, he also played a key role in the British comedy troupe, Monty Python.

I’m kidding!

On January 18, 1973, the final episode of Python’s third season aired. It was Cleese’s last episode with the group, which would continue on for one more season. That very same same day, Cleese’s next project aired – Comedy Playhouse Presents: Elementary, My Dear Watson. It was produced by Barry Took, who had brought the Python members together.

I’m going to tackle the Achilles heel (really, it’s more like the entire torso) of this show, the plot: or rather, the lack of one. It’s barely a story. Try to stick with me, and no, I’m not leaving things out: it really goes like this…

The show opens in a room full of dead lawyers, slumped over their desks, each with a knife in the back.  Some would say that’s a pretty good start, but let’s stay focused. Thus the show’s subtitle, The Strange Case of the Dead Solicitors. A policeman and a secretary exchange what are intended to be witty comments, which immediately brings the lame laugh track to the viewer’s attention. This is not the most robust laugh track you’ll come across.

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Goth Chick News: Doctor Sleep Gets the Hollywood Treatment

Goth Chick News: Doctor Sleep Gets the Hollywood Treatment

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Doctor Sleep-smallThey say for good or bad, you never forget your first love; and so it went with me and Stephen King.

I fell deeply in love with him in those heady, early days of Carrie, Salem’s Lot and Firestarter when thankfully I was advised by an older and wiser high school friend, to “read King in order.” But by the time I arrived at The Stand and Gerald’s Game I had begun to spend more and more time with other authors, as King started to feel… well… a little predictable. And ultimately, I never even cracked The Dark Tower books (though I have heard they are quite good) because by that time my literary horror affections were firmly turned elsewhere.

Ah well… I was young.

So it was with some trepidation that I picked up Doctor Sleep when it was released in October, 2013. I mean, King to me was “back then”; was I really proposing to give him another chance?

Ultimately, I was moved by the warm memories I had of The Shining, in spite of being in the heretical subset who think Kubrick’s interpretation is every bit as good a movie as the source material. Doctor Sleep was, after all, King’s hotly-anticipated sequel.

Well as you probably know, there I was the minute I closed the back cover of the novel, literally gushing about King all over you in Goth Chick News. Doctor Sleep was not only fantastic, but may well rank in my top 10 favorite reads ever. And that’s saying quite a lot.

All that old magic came flooding back.

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A Helluva Detour: The Mysterious Island

A Helluva Detour: The Mysterious Island

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Mysterious Island poster-small

The Mysterious Island (1961)
Based on a novel by Jules Verne
Directed by Cy Endfield

It wasn’t my intention to watch a bunch of adventure movies lately that all dated from the early Sixties. It just worked out that way. As coincidence would have it, the three I watched shared a similar theme — that of being stranded. The Lost World (1960) found a group of adventurers stranded on a high plateau in South America. In Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964), well, you can figure that one out. In The Mysterious Island (1961), a group of Union soldiers and a Confederate find their balloon swept way off course, all the way from Virginia to a point located somewhere in the South Sea Islands of the Pacific Ocean. Which is a helluva detour, by my reckoning.

Like The Lost World, which was based on a story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Mysterious Island is an adaption of a work by a well-known author of yesteryear. Jules Verne’s first novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon, was published in 1863 and in the next decade or so he turned out a number of books, including Journey to the Center of the Earth, From the Earth to the Moon, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and Around the World in Eighty Days. He returned to balloon adventures in The Mysterious Island, which was published in 1874. But it was hardly the end of the line for the prolific Verne, who had written his best known novels by this time, but who turned out many more novels before his death in 1905.

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