Watch your eyeballs, because Monday it’s time to celebrate Lucio Fulci! Sure, everyone knows Zombi and House by the Cemetary. But we’re gonna get into some, well, deep cuts.

New York Ripper: Fulci’s roughest, most brutal film. This one reduced the London censor board for years and haunts them to this very day. You’ll never see Donald Duck the same way again.

The Devil’s Honey: Newly released by Severin in the US, this movie starts off with a saxphone aided love scene and only gets weirder .

Murder Rock: Flashdance ala Fulci…or a giallo with leotards.

Touch of Death: Late career Fulci that even Sam had trouble sitting the whole way through!

Demonia: A possession tale financed by mobsters and featuring crucified nuns, so you know it has to be great!

See you on Monday! YOU WILL LIVE IN FEAR!

We’re always excited when a new Drive-In Asylum comes out! The new issue — due in December — is all about The Incredible Melting Man. Sam contributed an article about how this movie scarred his childhood (building on his podcast revelation that he lived in terror of some movie trailers), as well as a painting!

As a kid, I could care less about Superman and Batman. I wanted to know about the superheroes people forgot. Ones I learned about in Don Thompson’s The Comic Book Book — characters like Airboy, Plastic Man, the Heap and more. The DC characters I loved didn’t even live on the main Earth, but were folks like the Freedom Fighters who battled World War 2 into the 70s on Earth X, the Justice Society of Earth 2 and the Crime Syndicate of Earth 3. I cared more about Steve Ditko’s characters like Peacemaker, Hawk and Dove, The Creeper, Mr. A, Starman and Blue Beetle than Spider-Man. Man, I can even go on and on about the Mighty Crusaders and T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents and the Marvel Family and…this is where Becca leaves the room.

After I left Guardians of the Galaxy 2 this summer, I heard someone complaining about the story and how they wanted more. I instantly got enraged, because before Tim Burton did Batman and even afterward, superhero movies were just plain horrible. We’re living in a golden age where actual great movies just happen to be about comic books.

That’s why next week is all about the movies that people have forgotten.

Doc Savage: Think Superman is the first superhero? Maybe you should sit down and have a word with this guy.

Megaforce: Deeds. Not words. And spandex. And glitter. And colored smoke.

3 Giant Men: Did you know that Spider-Man is a drug lord who kills women with motorboats?

The Return of Captain Invincible: An Australian musical about a flawed superhero with Christopher Lee as a bad guy who might be Satan? More, please.

Spawn: Not all heroes are from DC and Marvel.

See you Monday, true believer!

I cried while I watched the end of Fahrenheit 451.

Sure, every generation has its doomsday, but I feel like mine was hit pretty hard. From the constant worry of nuclear war — oh hey, that one is back again — and movies like The Day After to AIDS, serial killers, Satanic panic, fires, floods and killer bees, the kids of the 70’s saw the end of the world…fuck, we lived through the end of the world.

We took the end of the world and made it our culture, through films as diverse as Westworld to Mad Max, Brazil and so many more. We embraced the end of the world. And then, we thought ourselves past it.

We don’t get into political commentary here on this site. Suffice to say that Becca and Sam are sometimes on the opposite side of the left/right equation and other times, right on the same page. We’re respectful and empathetic of one another’s views, in marked contrast to the rest of the world.

But the reason for exploring these films is to see what people saw the future would be like, because the future we got? It’s not looking too good.

Starting Monday, we’ll explore five films that look at the future from several perspectives. This is but the first in a series of these, because there are so many films to watch, contemplate and comment on.

Logan’s Run: The future is perfect. Every pleasure can be yours. You just have to die when you turn thirty, that’s all.

A Boy and His Dog: Don Johnson. Harlan Ellison. A telekinetic dog. Yes, please.

1990: The Bronx Warriors: An Italian ripoff mixture of The Warriors, Mad Max and Bob Fosse. You read that right.

Idaho Transfer: Peter Fonda directed this amateur starring production about teenagers traveling to the end of time.

Gas-s-s: Country Joe and the Fish, hippies and God show up to watch everyone over the age of 25 die in this Roger Corman movie.

See you on Monday!

(The image here comes from the old fallout shelter signage. When I was a kid, I would stare at it all day while other kids were playing in the playground, assured that soon, the world would be ash and that I’d soon be exploring the wastelands, avoiding Lord Humongous.)

Paperbacks from Hell by Grady Hendrix is THE book of 2017. An exploration of some of the strangest mass market fiction ever printed, it features books where “no plot was too ludicrous, no cover art too appalling, no evil too despicable.”

If you love the horror genre, you owe it to yourself to purchase this book. It goes a long way toward explaining how The Exorcist and The Omen took over pop culture. From The Sentinel to The Legacy to The Manitou, I was surprised how many movies came from these books.

And I was excited to learn of other books that totally should have been made into films, like The Omen 4 and The Omen 5, which seem 666% better than any of the filmed sequels. Or Russ Martin’s Satanic Organization series of books. Or Jere Cunningham’s The Abyss, where Appalachian miners drill into hell. Or Guy N. Smith’s series of books that depict evil crabs attacking the world. My apologies for the run-on sentence, but there are so many books to get excited about inside this tome!

Even better, the artwork of the covers is explored, celebrated and shared.

From http://www.miskatonic-nyc.com/

What I loved most was that you can tell that Hendrix has a true love for this fiction. Where a lesser author would simply take the piss out of these modern penny dreadfuls, his pokes and jabs come from a warm place.

From satanic shockers to evil babies, inhumanoids, vampires and more, just about every topic gets covered. Plus, there’s some great background on the artists whose covers draw us right into these books.

The great art for Pin by Andrew Neiderman, a book where a brother and sister fall in love and learn about sex from a CPR dummy robot.

Not only does this book have my highest recommendation, but we’re featuring three of the movies that were inspired by Paperbacks from Hell: Burnt Offerings, The Dark Secret of Harvest Home and Orca, this week!

I’m also beyond excited that I got the chance to interview Grady Hendrix about his book, how horror movies were shaped by these books and the future of the genre. Look for that interview — and one with Will Errickson from Too Much Horror Fiction tomorrow!

You can learn more at Grady Hendrix’s site, or purchase it at Quirk Books or Amazon.

And do horror a favor and write in the book for every category you can in the Great Reads Best Books Awards!

If you haven’t read Grady Hendrix’s Paperbacks from Hell, get off this site now, get the book and get down with the best book of 2017!

Then come back Monday, because we have a review of the book (spoiler warning: we loved it). Even better, Grady did an awesome interview with us and gave some suggestions for films made from some of the Paperbacks from Hell!

Pin: Quite literally the movie find of the year, even if it came out in 1988! This movie will quite literally rip your mind apart and you’ll ask for more.

The Dark Secret of Harvest Home: The Connecticut town of Cornwall Coombe is a paradise, as long as you follow the rules and don’t use a modern tractor.

Burnt Offerings: When a new home is too good to be true, you better believe there’s evil inside.

Get ready! This week is going to be great! We’re so excited about it!

I was super excited to be part of Horror and Sons’ “Fiends, Freaks, and Final Girls” series. There’s nothing I love better than trying to get more people to watch Trick or Treat. You can find the article right here at Horror and Sons!

The new issue of Drive-In Asylum is available right here!

Do you love Messiah of Evil? Good news. There are interviews with Anitra Ford and Marianna Hill, plus two paintings from me. And there’s info on Son of Dracula, Berserk, Hell Night, Human Remains, Bert I. Gordon, ads from the past and a story from me about 1991’s Popcorn!

ORDER IT NOW!

Sure, It is in theaters, but over the next week, we’re going to be watching some of the Stephen King movies that we really love — the ones that most people ignore. After all, isn’t that what we do best?

Here’s what’s in store, starting Monday:

Cat’s Eye – Three tales, all connected by one heroic cat, featuring tons of references to other King tales.

Maximum Overdrive – The only King adaption that he directed himself, where machines come to life and kill humans as AC/DC music plays.

Sleepwalkers – Aliens. Gore. Cats. Incest. This one has it all.

Needful Things – King doing what King does — small town secrets dooming a New England town.

Silver Bullet – The movie that contains the answer to that age old question: Who would win, a souped up wheelchair or a werewolf?

See you on Monday!

I’m not ready to say goodbye to Yor just yet. Not when there’s one more thing left to share — the inspiration behind the film!

Yor was adapted from an Argentine comic known as Henga el Cazador, which was republished in Italy as Yor. It was based on an original idea by the artist Juan Zanotto, with scripts from Eugenio Zappietro and Alfredo Julio Grassi. I’ve grabbed a few of the pages of the book to share. Interestingly, the movie is pretty faithful to the comic, minus the tripped out sequences that would cost tons of money to film. But the story beats are the same.

In this page, Yor and Kala make sweet, sweet love in a page that looks to be inspired by Steranko’s famous love scene between Nick Fury and La Contessa Valentina Allegra de la Fontaine in Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. #2.

Here’s a great shot of the entire cast with the Overlord looming behind them. It’s pretty amazing how close the film gets to some of the comic art, especially Yor himself.

These two pages, with Kala battling Roa and Roa’s death, are amazing. You can really see the difference between the low budget movie and the lyrical nature of the comic, which would not be out of place in Heavy Metal, Creepy, Eerie or 1984.

Thanks for sticking with a week of Yor. It’s seriously one of my favorite films ever, despite its many flaws. It’s a way of returning to the past — not the prehistoric one — but a time of summer vacation and not having any adult problems. A crazy barbarian battling dinosaurs while women throw themselves at him, Yor was as far away from 12 year old me as it got. Which is probably where my fascination comes from. You should see it for yourself.