Columns

Blood Red: Hooptober 8.0: Week One

ChrisLeave a comment

I’ll say this for 2021: it’s a lot easier to access new releases, so week one of Hooptober is especially heavy on new films. And it works out pretty well: we have one bonafide WTF homage to giallo in James Wan’s Malignant that I adored, a Lucio Fulci pictures I can finally say I outright liked in The Black Cat, and with Kandisha it’s another successful left turn from Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, most known for their French New Wave of Horror classic Inside. On the other side of the coin I’m sorry to say that Stan Winston’s Pumpkinhead, long considered a cult horror classic left a lot to be desired, and the action/horror hybrid of Blood Red Sky was extremely compentent in that it was a film, but pretty forgettable except for how much better it could have been.

I’m already two films deep into week 2, and there’s a lot to talk about so let’s jump into those quick summaries and see if anything grabs you and drags you under the bed. This year you can read the full reviews over on Cinema Dual, the site I share with my buddy Jon…In the meantime, smoke ’em if you got ’em… 

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Blood Red: Hooptober 8.0 is Here to Pull You Out of The Pumpkin(head) Patch

ChrisLeave a comment

Hey, we all thought we’d be in a better place after the shitbucket year that was 2020, amiright? Well, looks like delta variants and Taliban takeovers and our previous president spending 9/11 doing PPV boxing commentary, 2021 ain’t shaping up to be much better. Good thing we have another year of mayhem and carnage in the shape of horror movies to slack your thirst for blood, vengeance, ghouls and goblins.

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RETROCUTION: Perturbator returns with new album, “Lustful Sacraments”

DanLeave a comment
Perturbator - Lustful Sacraments

I’m not gonna lie, it feels kinda weird to resurrect my Retrocution column for the first time in more than a year… with an artist who, by his own account, has been actively trying to move away from “conventional” synthwave for a while now. But for James Kent, I’ll make an exception.

After all, Kent’s work as Perturbator was one of my earliest exposures to synthwave. I wouldn’t be anywhere near as big a fan of this music — maybe a fan at all — if not for Dangerous Days. So even though my tastes within the genre have since shifted a bit more toward the pop end of the spectrum, I tend to listen whenever Kent drops something new — conventional or otherwise. And in the case of his latest effort, Lustful Sacraments, the listen proved to be quite an excellent one.

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CURSED IMAGERY: The Month in Album Art (May 2021)

DanLeave a comment
cursed imagery

Another month down, another mess of ridiculous new album titles to cover in Cursed Imagery. May was interesting in that there were a number of different reasons for inclusion in this months column. We’ve got some of your standard “just bad” album covers, but then we’ve also got some that I decided to throw in because I liked the band name. Or because I liked the album name. Hell, there’s even a bonafide good album cover in here — albeit one that merited a bit of fun-poking via a highly appropriate Parks and Rec gif.

Anyway, we’ll get to all that in due time. Or in other words, “right now.” Let’s jump in!

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The Path to Paradise Begins in Hell — Avant-Garde Metal

HeraLeave a comment
The Path to Paradise Begins In Hell

Surprise! Thought you had seen the last of me, huh?

Well, joke’s on you.

I am not dead. I have just been incredibly busy and now I return to bestow upon you more stories about listening to different genres. The story will soon end, but I have such sights to show you in the meantime.

Now that I have graduated and have more free time, I can talk about the more important things in life: the weirdness of music. Granted, my journey coming into this genre has been an interesting one, and while I aim to show you things that most people aren’t familiar with, I also want people to listen to these albums. Thus, I started with albums that have less barriers to cross than others that I will mention for the sake of the story.

It’s time we talk about Avant-Garde Metal.

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