Discarded I's: April 2025

Wednesday, April 30, 2025

Love Letter to The Teacher (1974)(aka: “You know exactly what she’s teaching…”)

Oh The Teacher, you devil. You had me at your VHS box—the one with the sultry tagline, the half-unbuttoned blouse, and the wide-eyed teenage boy looking like he just failed puberty. You promised scandal, and baby, you delivered.

Sure, today you’d be labeled “problematic.” Back then? You were forbidden fruit on film. Crown’s idea of “education” meant a 28-year-old teacher seducing her 18-year-old student while being stalked by a jealous Vietnam vet in aviators. You read that right. And you didn’t flinch.

Angel Tompkins is the center of gravity here—slinking through the summer heat with just enough detachment to make you wonder if she’s the real predator. Jay North (aka Dennis the Menace!) is her confused, hormonal boytoy, blinking his way through trauma and titillation with the same blank stare.

And then there’s Anthony James—the creepiest creep who ever creeped. Like if a Slim Jim came to life and found a switchblade. His whole vibe is “restraining order,” and it works.

Your pacing is slow, your atmosphere thick like motel curtains. Everything feels like it’s happening two drinks deep. It’s not a thriller. It’s a sweaty whisper. A whisper that ends in a brutal, off-screen scream and a hard fade into silence.

You’re not really about sex. You’re about the discomfort of it. The tension, the power plays, the guilt. And in that, The Teacher, you get an A+—or at least, detention with benefits.

On Why I Love The Theatrical

I am a creature born of spectacle, raised on the gossamer threads of two opposing worlds—one of devotion and solemnity, the other a cacophony of myths, melodrama, and rebellion. My mother, the curator of passion veiled in daily ritual, introduced me to soap operas and the Catholic Church. From her, I inherited the love of candles lit in dark cathedrals and over-the-top declarations of love made by trembling protagonists on TV. Both were theater in their own way: the sacred and the profane twined together, always reaching toward something ineffable.

My father, by contrast, was the weaver of stories older than time. He spoke of gods who wielded thunder and turned into swans, of tricksters who caused chaos with gleeful malice, and of warriors who defied fate to stand at the gates of doom. From his lips, childhood tales transformed into sprawling epics, and a walk through the woods became a journey into the unknown. He made me believe that the mundane could always give way to magic, that every shadow concealed a story.

And then, as I grew older, the currents of the occult and the pulse of rock and roll stormed into my life, demanding their place in the ever-expanding theater of my existence. The occult whispered secrets to me in the dark, where symbols spoke louder than words and the unseen world rippled just beneath the surface. Tarot cards shuffled like poetry in my hands, their images alive with mystery. Rituals, spells, and sigils became their own kind of drama—a private communion with forces that danced just out of sight. Here was theater stripped to its rawest form: the sacred and the arcane meeting in the flicker of a candle’s flame.

And then came rock and roll, bursting onto the stage with all its swagger, its defiance, its electrified poetry. The first notes I heard were thunderclaps, the chords a summoning circle that invited me into a realm of freedom and chaos. Rock and roll wasn’t just music—it was a rite, a rebellion, a communal act of defiance against the monotony of the world. It was theatrical in its very essence: the primal scream of a frontman drenched in sweat, the kaleidoscopic swirl of stage lights, the spectacle of a crowd moving as one to a rhythm that seemed eternal.

Through the occult and rock and roll, I learned that the theatrical wasn’t confined to ornate stages or gilded churches. It lived in the dark corners of record stores, in the cryptic symbols scrawled in old books, in the ecstatic abandon of a guitar solo, and in the hushed reverence of moonlit rituals. The myths of my childhood took on new shapes, wearing leather jackets and pentagrams, their ancient power thrumming with fresh energy.

The theatrical, for me, is not merely a love of drama—it is the marrow of life itself. It is the ability to see a guitar as a weapon of the gods, a candle as a portal to another realm, and a story as a universe unto itself. It demands that we embrace the absurd, the sublime, the sacred, and the rebellious all at once.

To love the theatrical is to live as if the curtain is always rising, as if the spotlight is always yours. It is to revel in the grand gestures, the whispered incantations, the clash of cymbals, and the quiet hum of secrets held close. It is to believe that every moment—whether adorned in sequins, cloaked in shadows, or roaring through an amp—holds the potential to become a myth, a ritual, a song.

The occult and rock and roll amplified what I always knew in my bones: that life is theater, and we are all its players. My story is no less a soap opera, no less a myth, no less a ceremony, and no less a concert. And in this theater, I am actor, playwright, magician, and bandleader all at once.

Tuesday, April 29, 2025

Tune-In Tuesday: Vinegar Syndrome Blu-ray — Igor and the Lunatics Review

It’s been a long time coming, but Igor and the Lunatics finally gets the love it deserves thanks to Vinegar Syndrome’s new Blu-ray release — and let me tell you, it was worth the wait.

First off, the restoration is a thing of beauty. Working from the original camera negative, Vinegar Syndrome managed to clean up the grime without scrubbing away the movie’s essential rawness. The colors are much more vivid now, especially the outdoor scenes where the woods and small towns pop with a strange, almost eerie life. The blood looks brighter, the atmosphere feels heavier, and you can actually pick up on details — the tattered costumes, the unhinged facial expressions — that used to be buried in murky VHS copies. It's still rough around the edges, but that’s the point: this is outsider horror at its finest, and the restoration respects that spirit.

The movie itself is still the same wild ride — a time-jumping story about a psychotic cult leader, his loyal (and lethal) followers, and the havoc they unleash after getting out of prison years later. Igor and the Lunatics doesn’t follow a strict narrative so much as it lurches forward in fits of violence and surreal menace. It’s pure regional horror energy: rough, passionate, and filled with weird little moments that bigger-budget horror films wouldn't dare attempt.

But what really makes this release shine is the new making-of featurette included on the disc. It's not just a standard puff piece — it’s a deep dive into the chaotic, DIY spirit behind the film. You hear directly from the cast and crew about how the movie came together, the challenges they faced working with next to no money, and how the scrappy determination of everyone involved turned what could’ve been a forgotten mess into a lasting cult classic. It adds a whole new appreciation for what Igor and the Lunatics managed to pull off.

Overall, this is the definitive release for fans. Vinegar Syndrome has once again proven why they’re the best at what they do — finding these battered, half-forgotten oddities and giving them the respect and care they deserve.

Igor and the Lunatics may not be for everyone — it's chaotic, cheap, and defiantly weird — but if you love raw, unfiltered regional horror, this Blu-ray is essential. Highly recommended.

Monday, April 28, 2025

Selling Sanitized Nightmares: Gojira vs. Igor and the Lunatics, By: A Survivor of the Video Store Era

Growing up scanning the horror section of Hollywood Video, you get used to different cuts, different covers, different realities. You learn that what hits your VHS player isn't always what hit the director's brain. Some movies were hacked apart not because they were too raw, but because they were too real — too tied to a truth the audience wasn’t ready (or willing) to face.
Two prime examples: Gojira (1954) and Igor and the Lunatics (1985).

On the surface, these two movies couldn’t be more different. One's a towering black-and-white kaiju tragedy; the other’s a scrappy, grimy grindhouse slasher about Manson-like cult violence. But dig just a little, and you’ll find a shared history of being reshaped to make them more "palatable" for American audiences, at the cost of cutting out sharp critiques of recent wars — World War II and Vietnam, respectively.

Gojira:
When Japan’s Gojira first hit in 1954, it wasn’t just a monster movie — it was a national howl of trauma. Godzilla was the living embodiment of nuclear horror, a creature born of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Director Ishirō Honda made it grim, solemn, filled with the ghosts of real-world destruction.
But by the time it washed up on U.S. shores as Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (1956), the rawness had been sanded down. Scenes were cut; Raymond Burr was spliced in, providing "neutral" American narration.
Result: A movie about nuclear guilt became a simple monster romp. The bomb’s shadow was shrunk down to a popcorn-sized spectacle, all to make it sellable to a postwar American public not eager to look in the mirror.

Igor and the Lunatics:
Fast forward 30 years to Igor and the Lunatics, a cult exploitation shocker distributed originally by Troma. Beneath its rough acting and DIY gore beats a furious heart: the film paints its titular cult as a direct legacy of Vietnam-era disillusionment — a generation shattered by violence, drug culture, and the collapse of idealism.
But when Vinegar Syndrome recently dug up the original "Bloodshed Cut" (more violent, more political) and compared it to the Troma-distributed version, fans noticed: the sharper antiwar cynicism had been dulled. Scenes that connected Igor’s madness to the wreckage of the '60s counterculture were trimmed or recontextualized.
Why? Simple: Troma was selling to drive-ins and VHS buyers who wanted blood and boobs, not brooding sociopolitical commentary. Just like Burr’s insertion, the edits maximized marketability — at the cost of biting truth.

The Commercial Impulse:
In both cases, executives and distributors weren’t acting out of malice; they were following the oldest law of exploitation cinema: give the audience what they think they want, not what they might need.

Deep meditations on nuclear annihilation? Too heavy.
Gut-wrenching commentary on the human wreckage of Vietnam? Too risky.
Giant monsters smashing cities? Cult maniacs slicing throats? Perfect.

The Irony:
Today, the things that got cut — the trauma, the anger, the mess — are exactly what draw modern cinephiles back to these films. Whether it's Criterion’s release of the uncut Gojira or Vinegar Syndrome's resurrection of the Bloodshed Cut, the full, jagged stories are finally being told. The sanitized versions might have made the money back then, but the truth is what survives now.

Final Thought:
If you grew up rewinding tapes, chasing bonus features, and now digging through streaming rarities and podcasts, you know: the best movies aren’t the ones smoothed out for mass appeal. They’re the ones that hurt a little.
And the real monsters are never just on screen.

Hamlet would have hated this place- A poem By Ray Zag

Editorial:: The "Bloodshed" Cut of Igor and the Lunatics – A Regional Horror Revelation

The unearthing of the Bloodshed cut of Igor and the Lunatics is nothing short of a trash art miracle — a deep-tissue resurrection of regional horror at its most cracked, unruly, and strangely poetic. For the first time ever, this mangled, unfiltered version sees the light of day, and it's an event in the same rarefied air as the release of Combat Shock's American Nightmare cut. That both hail from the Troma vaults — a studio long treated as a punchline but which, in truth, operates like a holy archive of outsider art — only deepens the sense of history being made.

Igor and the Lunatics in its standard release was already a proudly deranged slice of 1980s regional horror: clumsy, cruel, hypnotically slow, and peppered with stabs of grotesque violence that seemed to ooze out of the seams rather than explode. But the Bloodshed cut cranks the psychic temperature until the whole thing feels unstable, dangerous — like a VHS tape that's been rotting in a moldy basement for decades, finally plugged into a dying TV at three in the morning.

The new footage isn't just padding. It's texture. It's tone. It's grit under your fingernails. Gore scenes stretch longer, character beats are more jagged, and the entire flow feels less like a scripted narrative and more like falling into the fever dream of a forgotten America, where communes rot, vengeance curdles, and small towns collapse into ritualistic madness.

Much like Combat Shock's American Nightmare cut, the Bloodshed version reveals an uglier, more vital pulse beating underneath what once seemed merely cheap or amateurish. These "lost" cuts are not cleaner restorations — they are mutations, purer expressions of broken-world visions that mainstream cinema would never allow. They represent a kind of trash cinema at its most essential: not made for acclaim, not made for marketability, but created because someone had to pour the sickness out of their head and onto celluloid.

For lovers of regional horror, outsider filmmaking, and the art of the imperfect and impure, the Bloodshed cut of Igor and the Lunatics isn't just a curiosity. It's a treasure — the kind that cuts your hand when you dig it out of the dirt.

Purchase

Wednesday, April 23, 2025

"Skip Tracer" (1977) and "Metal Messiah" (1978) — two Canadian obscurities that feel like they were transmitted from a shortwave radio tuned to the wrong side of the dial.

Skip Tracer (1977, dir. Zale Dalen)

This low-budget Vancouver noir creeps like a cold call in the dead of night. We follow John Collins, a corporate repo man — sorry, “skip tracer” — whose job is to hunt down debt-dodgers and repossess their goods. But as the days grind on, he starts to crack under the weight of what his job reveals about capitalism, desperation, and alienation. It’s like Taxi Driver but if Travis Bickle wore a clip-on tie and worked for a bank.

Shot in chilly greys and browns, Skip Tracer turns the antiseptic surfaces of 1970s office culture into a kind of economic horror film. You can almost feel the plastic on the couch cushions. It's a quiet existential spiral, one that Canadian cinema rarely gets credit for executing with such subtlety.

Metal Messiah (1978, dir. Tibor Takács)
And then comes Metal Messiah, the polar opposite in tone and temperature — a gonzo rock opera shot like a fever dream on the backlot of a dystopian TV station. Directed by Tibor Takács (yes, the guy who’d later make The Gate), this is a glam rock religious satire about a space-faring messiah who lands in a decadent, post-apocalyptic world where corrupt record execs and android groupies try to co-opt his soul.

Think Jesus Christ Superstar by way of Mad Max and Canadian public access television, with a side of prog-funk. The music slaps in a sleazy, Jesus-of-Montreal-meets-Bowie's-Berlin-years kind of way. It’s messy, ridiculous, and totally hypnotic — the kind of film that makes you question whether you’re watching cinema or hallucinating it.

Together:
Paired, Skip Tracer and Metal Messiah showcase a wild spectrum of late-70s Canadian cinema — from bleakly realist to outlandishly surreal. The former makes you want to quit your day job; the latter makes you want to start a space cult. And maybe that’s the point: these films both scream that modern life is unsustainable, whether you're stuck in a cubicle or onstage preaching salvation through synthesizers.

Canada never felt colder. Or cooler.

*Far as I know, both of these flicks are still only available to the general public via YouTube rips. Strike another win for the streaming generation’s preservation and proliferation of past weirdo nut creep content.

Bonus Feature:

The Pyx (1973) is absolutely a horror gem—an obscure, Canadian Gothic masterpiece that deserves more love. Here's a deeper dive into it as a cult film:

The Pyx (1973)

Director: Harvey Hart
Starring: Karen Black, Christopher Plummer
Filmed in: Montreal, Quebec

Plot Summary

A Montreal detective investigates the apparent suicide of a woman who fell to her death from a high-rise. The woman, Elizabeth Lucy (played hauntingly by Karen Black), turns out to be a heroin-addicted call girl with connections to an underground Satanic cult. As Detective Henderson (Plummer) uncovers her life in reverse, he finds the trail leads into dark religious territory.

Why It’s a Cult Classic

Atmosphere: Bleak, snowy Montreal streets, haunting Gregorian chant-infused soundtrack, and a fog of melancholy.
Karen Black: She sings in the film—genuinely sad, raw, and spiritual songs that feel like ghostly lullabies.
Structure: The dual timeline (past and present unfolding simultaneously) was radical for its time.
Occult Themes: Gnostic/Satanic undertones, not in a flashy way—more mournful and philosophical, echoing Rosemary’s Baby or Don't Look Now.
Spiritual Decay: The horror is subtle—heroin, isolation, faith lost in urban decay.

Noteworthy Elements

The titular “pyx” is a real religious object: a small container used to carry the Eucharist. Its presence in the film suggests twisted sacraments and corrupted faith.
There's little gore, but the psychological and metaphysical horror runs deep.
It's deeply Canadian in tone—quiet, cold, socially observant, and emotionally restrained.

Love Letter to Malibu High (1979)(a.k.a. “The Feel-Bad Hit of the Summer”)

Oh Malibu High, you absolute dirtbag of a movie. You put on your cutoffs and tube top like you’re headed to a beach party—but we both know you’re dragging us straight to hell, and we’re gonna thank you for the ride.

You don’t open with a bang. You open with apathy. Sun-bleached apathy, the kind only late-'70s Crown International could bottle. Kim—our "heroine"—is already halfway to the abyss when we meet her. Flunking classes, chain-smoking, bitter as old coffee. You tell us she’s just a high school senior, but everything about her screams 35-year-old divorcee trapped in a teen movie's body.

And that’s the hook, isn’t it? Malibu High isn’t about redemption. It’s about collapse. You offer no moral high ground, no winking irony. Kim doesn’t learn. She evolves—from stoned slacker to call girl to hitwoman, all in a brisk 90 minutes. Her descent is as casual as slipping on sandals, and twice as disturbing. And you dare us to look away.

There’s something so... uncomfortable about your sunshine. Your version of Malibu is no Beach Boys postcard. It's strip malls, dirty sand, leering mustaches, and a total lack of adult supervision. You don’t glamorize vice. You just show it, blunt and sad and weirdly hypnotic. Watching Kim go from giving handies for homework to pulling triggers for cash feels like drowning in lukewarm chlorine—slow, wrong, and impossible to stop.

The music? That cheapo Crown International "mood funk." Like porno wah-wah met lounge jazz in a gutter and they birthed a soundtrack. The acting? Wooden, desperate, and perfect. The sex? About as erotic as a DMV line—but twice as grim. There’s nothing titillating here. It’s exploitation stripped of fun, which somehow makes it more powerful.

You’re not sleazy in the way people expect. You’re sleazy in the way real life can be—when everything’s for sale, and no one’s watching the kids. You’re the cold slap in the face after the party. The hangover movie that forgot to bring Advil. The dark side of the American teen dream, circa 1979, and you never blink.

And yet… I love you for it. I love how you refuse to give us a clean ending. I love your warped sense of justice. I love that you made me feel like I needed a shower and a long walk after watching you—twice. Back to back. With commentary in my own head.

Malibu High, you’re not a movie you recommend. You’re a movie you warn people about. But for those of us raised on 50-pack DVDs, on warped VHS aesthetics and moral rot baked in sunlight—you’re a totem. A bad mood in film form. A masterpiece of malaise.

So here’s to you, Kim. You didn’t make it out. But you took us all the way down with you, grinning behind your Farrah Fawcett hair.

Love,
A washed-out soul with the TV still glowing blue

Tuesday, April 22, 2025

Tune-In Tuesday: Mill Creek’s 50 Movie Drive-In Collection – A Mid-2000s Revelation

Back in the mid-2000s, stumbling upon Mill Creek Entertainment's 50 Movie Drive-In Classics DVD set was like unearthing a forgotten treasure chest buried beneath the shelves of a bargain bin. For under ten bucks, you could take home a stack of paper-thin discs—each one crammed with lo-fi, scratchy transfers of B-movie gold. At the time, we didn’t care about aspect ratios or restoration. We were after a vibe, a mood, a portal into a weirder world.

These movies—cheaply made, often hilariously dubbed, and occasionally borderline incoherent—were never meant to be preserved like fine art. But that’s exactly what gave them their charm. Whether it was a biker gang tearing across a sun-bleached desert, a supernatural killer hiding behind a dime-store mask, or a sci-fi flick with more fog machine than plot, they offered something that the slick blockbusters of the day didn’t: pure, unfiltered atmosphere.

For many of us, watching these films in the glow of a bulky CRT on a too-warm night was a ritual. It was a way to step outside of our world and into a flickering one where anything could happen. The collection felt endless—one oddity leading into the next, each one stitched together by static, VHS fuzz, and oddly soothing title cards.

The real joy was discovery. You’d start with something like The Devil’s Hand or Bloodlust! and end up staying up till 3 a.m. to see something truly baffling like The Creeping Terror. These weren’t just movies—they were experiences. Accidental poetry in bad sound design and awkward edits.

Mill Creek didn’t just release movies. They gave us a DIY education in cult cinema. They opened the door to the sleazy, the surreal, and the sublime—where the drive-in lived on, one pixelated frame at a time.

And for those of us who found them back in the mid-2000s? We never looked back.

Monday, April 21, 2025

Mort Garson’s The Wozard of Iz (1968)

Ah yes—Mort Garson’s The Wozard of Iz (1968): a truly unhinged jewel in the crown of late-’60s countercultural psychedelia. If The Zodiac: Cosmic Sounds was cosmic mysticism, then The Wozard of Iz is its technicolor acid trip cousin—equal parts satire, prophecy, and synthetic mind melt.

The Wozard of Iz: An Electronic Odyssey (1968)

Tagline: “An electronic odyssey through the land of Oz.”
Created by: Mort Garson (music) & Jacques Wilson (libretto/lyrics)

1. A Psychedelic Parody of The Wizard of Oz

This album rewrites The Wizard of Oz as a 1968 acid-era allegory. Dorothy is now a counterculture seeker looking not for Kansas, but herself. Her journey through Oz is now a trip through groovy archetypes and groaning systems of conformity, with characters reimagined as stand-ins for society’s institutions and neuroses.

“I want to be a different person. I want to find the real me,” Dorothy pleads—not in Kansas anymore, but in a dreamscape of identity crisis and post-hippie disillusionment.

2. The Sound of Synthetic Surrealism

Mort Garson absolutely goes wild with his Moog synthesizer. This was one of the earliest albums to fully embrace the Moog as an instrument of satire, beauty, and madness. Sounds shimmer, squawk, squeal, and melt like an LSD-drenched cartoon.

The Scared Crow is now a neurotic intellectual.
The Tin Man is a disillusioned hippie robot.
The Lion has stage fright and internalized cowardice.
The Wizard? A psychedelic con man.

The voice cast delivers it all with a mix of beatnik jazz cadence, theatrical sarcasm, and hippie idealism.

3. Jacques Wilson’s Libretto: Weird, Witty, and Way Ahead

The lyrics and dialogue are drenched in wordplay, satire, and double meanings. The writing parodies the era's counterculture and its commercialization.

“Reality is a crutch for people who can’t face drugs,” one character says—summing up both the era’s aspirations and its contradictions.

4. A Cult Classic That Disappeared

The album was too weird for radio, too theatrical for rock audiences, and too political for easy listening. It disappeared almost instantly but grew into a sacred artifact among psych collectors, synth historians, and those with a taste for beautifully deranged storytelling.

It prefigures:

Rock operas like Jesus Christ Superstar
Synth-theater works like Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds
Adult animation absurdism, à la Fantastic Planet

5. Mort Garson’s Dark & Delightful Mind

Wozard of Iz was the first sign of Mort Garson’s ultimate transformation—from pop arranger into electronic wizard. After this, he leaned into:

Occult synth (Black Mass Lucifer)
New Age plant music (Mother Earth’s Plantasia)
Zodiac concept albums (more with Jacques Wilson)

The Zodiac: Cosmic Sounds

Now you’re summoning the full cosmic current—The Zodiac: Cosmic Sounds is the moment where psychedelia, astrology, spoken word, and Moog experimentation collide in one glorious, incense-drenched fever dream.

The Zodiac: Cosmic Sounds (1967)

Subtitled: "Celestial Counterpoint with Words and Music"

1. One Album. Twelve Signs. Infinite Vibes.
Each track is a musical interpretation of a zodiac sign, from the fiery swagger of Aries to the dreamy haze of Pisces. The album was conceived by Jac Holzman (founder of Elektra Records) as a psychedelic concept experiment—one of the first records to explicitly embrace Western astrology as structure and theme.

2. The Voice of the Void
The whispered, dramatic narration comes from Cyrus Faryar, a folk singer with a deep, hypnotic voice that turns each astrological sign into a kind of cosmic sermon. His delivery is part mystic guru, part beat poet, part Lovecraftian prophet.

3. Electronic Prophet: Paul Beaver & the Moog
Paul Beaver, one half of the pioneering Beaver & Krause, plays one of the earliest Moog synthesizers on the record. This was 1967—back when the Moog was still a mystery machine the size of a refrigerator. His experimental tones ooze across the tracks like liquid alien fire.

4. Weird Studio Supergroup
Backing the whole thing is Mort Garson, the unsung godfather of synthesizer music (who would later make Plantasia and the occult synth album Black Mass Lucifer). Plus Wrecking Crew drummer Hal Blaine is on board, grounding the spaced-out chaos with real rhythmic punch. It’s a Frankenstein of LA session gods + mystical art project.

5. Made to Be Played with Your Headphones on and Your Mind Open
The album’s liner notes literally say:

“Must be played in the dark.”
Yes. They meant that.

6. Cult Legacy: Before Its Time
It wasn’t a commercial hit, but over time it became a legend among collectors and psych heads. It paved the way for synth-based concept albums and influenced everything from prog rock to New Age to 1990s electronica. Garson later expanded this style with his lesser-known Signs of the Zodiac spoken word LP series.

Bohemian Vendetta

Bohemian Vendetta—now that’s a name whispered in the same swirling haze as the great forgotten freakbeat sages. Their lone self-titled LP, released in 1968 on Mainstream Records, is one of the most beloved cult artifacts of garage-psych and proto-punk chaos. Here’s the lowdown on the strange, shadowy world behind this band:

Bohemian Vendetta (1968): The Mysteries Unraveled

1. The Long Island Underground Bohemian Vendetta hailed from Long Island, New York, where they started out as a raw garage band in the early ‘60s. Their sound evolved into something wilder and weirder as the psychedelic wave crashed ashore. Their original name? The Bohemians. (Vendetta came later—possibly a joke or a statement of artistic revenge.)

2. Signed to the Wrong Label They ended up on Mainstream Records, a label notorious for scooping up psych bands cheap, giving them rushed studio time, and putting out albums with minimal promotion. Mainstream also handled The Growing Concern and The Tangerine Zoo, but never really pushed any of their psych catalog. The result? This incredible album sank almost without a trace.

3. A Band at War with Its Own Record Many of the tracks on the album—like the fuzz-drenched “Riddles & Fairytales” or the lysergic swirl of “Paradox City”—were re-recordings of earlier, rougher versions the band liked better. The cleaned-up versions lack the unfiltered grit of their original demos, which fans have since unearthed and cherish even more.

4. Gothic Garage Meets Mind-Melt Psych Bohemian Vendetta’s sound is a thrilling combo of Farfisa organ freak-outs, crunchy garage fuzz, and haunted vocals that feel just a bit off in a good way—like they’re being beamed in from a B-movie dimension. “Enough” and “Love Can Make Your Mind Go Wild” are standout tracks that would feel right at home on the Nuggets compilation.

5. Lost and Found For decades, this album was a crate-digger’s dream, only whispered about among hardcore collectors. It was finally reissued by Arf! Arf! Records, and that helped reintroduce Bohemian Vendetta to the world as a pivotal link between garage rock’s primal scream and psychedelia’s mind-bending weirdness.

"How to Blow Your Mind and Have a Freak-Out Party" by The Unfolding

You’ve stumbled onto a deep-cut psychedelic artifact—"How to Blow Your Mind and Have a Freak-Out Party" by The Unfolding, released in 1967. This album is part of the mysterious wave of “exploitation psych”—records released by studio musicians under pseudonyms to capitalize on the psychedelic boom, often with surreal packaging and outrageous track names.

Here are some mysteries and weird facts about this album:

1. Studio Concoction or Secret Genius?

The Unfolding was likely not a real band, but rather a studio project created by Alan Lorber, a producer involved in New York’s "Bosstown Sound." Some suspect members of this and similar projects were jazz musicians moonlighting or simply session players experimenting under the influence—sonically or otherwise.

2. Sermon or Satire?

Tracks like “Electric Buddha” and “Hare Krishna” show clear spiritual references—but it’s ambiguous whether they’re sincere or part of a kitschy outsider view of Eastern mysticism. The album walks the line between reverence and absurdity.

3. “I’ve Got a Zebra – She Can Fly”

This surreal track title alone screams 1967 acid-fueled imagination. Lyrically and sonically, it’s part whimsical children’s story, part spaced-out psych jam. What does the zebra symbolize? Some argue it’s a metaphor for breaking free from black-and-white thinking.

4. Marketing a Freak-Out

The cover is a collage of stereotypical ‘60s psych elements—swirling colors, bold type, guru-like imagery. This was marketed as a literal how-to for throwing a psychedelic party, aligning with Timothy Leary’s mantra of mind expansion—whether or not the music actually induced such a trip.

5. Cult Classic Status

Although obscure in its time, the album became a collector’s item in later decades, championed by fans of weird psych and library music. It’s been sampled, referenced in underground zines, and appears on various blog lists of "lost psych gems."

1985 series: Kate Bush – Hounds of Love

Hounds of Love isn’t just an album—it’s a divining ritual. A sonic séance. A snow-globed cathedral of emotion where art pop, folklore, and raw female genius collide in radiant defiance of gravity. Released in 1985, it didn’t just push boundaries—it erased them, rewrote them, danced barefoot over their ashes.

The album is split in two halves, like a spell book torn at the spine. Side one—“Hounds of Love”—is a series of pop diamonds refracted through Bush’s hyper-intelligent, hyper-emotional prism. Songs like “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)” pulse with pounding drums and whispered urgency. It’s about love, power, and trading skin to understand someone else’s pain. It’s Shakespeare and synths. War drums and wet eyes.

The title track is wild and pagan, all fear and chase and ecstatic release. “The Big Sky” bursts like a child screaming into a cathedral. “Cloudbusting” is pure cinematic transcendence—a song about Wilhelm Reich, fathers, science, and loss, told through a violin line that could summon rain.

But side two—“The Ninth Wave”—is where Hounds of Love becomes immortal.

Here, Kate Bush becomes a mythic creature: a woman lost at sea, adrift in icy water, grappling with life, death, memory, and rebirth. It’s a concept suite as ambitious as The Wall or Dark Side of the Moon, but far more intimate, poetic, and unhinged.

“And Dream of Sheep” is lullaby and lament. “Under Ice” is stark, slicing, almost frightening. And then the hallucinations begin—“Waking the Witch,” “Watching You Without Me”—voices, fragments, spectral laughter, pagan chants. The unconscious mind rendered as theater.

By the time you reach “Hello Earth,” with its haunting Georgian choral interlude and cosmic perspective, you’ve passed through death and come out drenched in moonlight. The final track, “The Morning Fog,” feels like rebirth in motion—a warm, grateful embrace of the physical world after an astral storm.

Bush produced it herself, in her home studio, far from industry control. This is what it sounds like when an artist trusts her own alchemy. It’s deeply English, defiantly feminine, fiercely weird, and completely timeless.

Hounds of Love doesn’t play like an album. It haunts like a dream you half-remember but carry forever. It’s a lighthouse on a cliff. A heartbeat in the fog. A wolf’s howl wrapped in silk.

1985 series: Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – The Firstborn Is Dead (1985)

The Firstborn Is Dead isn’t just an album—it’s a fever-drenched prophecy dragged through the swamps of the soul. Released in 1985 but steeped in a blues far older than electricity, this record finds Nick Cave not singing about America, but speaking with its ghosts. Elvis, Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson—they’re all here, flickering like neon halos in a Motel 6 crucifixion.

From the first skeletal pulse of “Tupelo,” thunder cracks overhead. This is no ordinary storm—it’s the birth of Presley as biblical reckoning. A twisted nativity scene plays out in a Southern town already half-drowned, with Cave howling the myth into flesh: “Looka yonder! A big black cloud come!”

The Bad Seeds are sparse, raw, hypnotic—more séance than band. Blixa Bargeld’s guitar scrapes like a rusted train gate. The drums sound like thunder rolling over cracked pavement. There’s a ritualistic minimalism to it all, like voodoo by way of post-punk Berlin.

“Say Goodbye to the Little Girl Tree” oozes like an open wound, while “Knocking on Joe” turns incarceration into liturgy. The rhythms are chains dragged across prison floors. Time slows. Breath shortens. This isn’t rock—it’s penance.

And then there’s “Blind Lemon Jefferson,” a dirge wrapped in static and scripture. Cave doesn’t sing; he channels. Names become sigils. History becomes hallucination. The blues, here, are no genre—they’re prophecy, punishment, and proof that pain never dies, it just changes key.

The production by Flood is arid and elemental. It’s like the tape itself is rotting. You can feel the mildew. You can hear the floorboards moan. The spaces between the sounds are where the fear lives.

The Firstborn Is Dead is not for the casual listener. It doesn’t invite you in—it dares you. It’s Elvis as death angel. America as fever dream. God as drunk preacher in a broken-down Cadillac muttering in tongues about bloodlines, murder, and redemption.

This is Cave’s delta gospel. A gothic psalm. A death rattle under a red sky. And it’s still ringing.

1985 Series: Joe Walsh – The Confessor

By 1985, Joe Walsh had already burned through arenas, addictions, and more amps than most guitarists dream of touching. So The Confessor doesn’t strut into the room—it limps in, haunted and unshaven, with one hand on the fretboard and the other in the ashtray. It’s not a comeback; it’s a confession booth wired to a Marshall stack.

The album opens with “Rosewood Bitters,” an elegiac sigh—a re-recording of Michael Stanley’s tune that fits Walsh like a well-worn denim jacket. It sets the tone: bittersweet, reflective, soaked in slide guitar and twilight regret. But then the real sermon begins.

The title track, “The Confessor,” is epic—nearly eight minutes of slow-burning mysticism and molten guitar work. It moves like a pilgrimage across scorched earth: quiet, meditative verses that burst into fiery solos like spiritual exorcisms. Walsh’s voice wavers with weariness and hard-earned wisdom. He isn’t preaching—he’s bleeding truths we didn’t ask for but maybe needed.

Elsewhere, the tone lightens but the shadows remain. “Slow Dancing” is a low-key groove with a lonely saxophone curling through it like cigarette smoke in a late-night diner. “Good Man Down” and “Tell Me Why” throw punches at the world with barroom swagger and just enough polish to sneak onto FM radio.

This is a Reagan-era rock record caught between cynicism and sincerity. Walsh’s trademark humor peeks out—see “Lucky That Way” or the slyly funky “Sightseeing”—but it’s more reserved, like the laughter of someone who's seen too much and still shows up to play.

The production is warm and analog, like whiskey in a wood-paneled room. It’s not chasing trends; it’s aging through them. Synths show up, but they don’t steal the spotlight—this is still Joe’s guitar record, full of gritty bends, echoing slide, and that classic Walsh tone: half sarcasm, half salvation.

The Confessor isn’t trying to be a hit. It’s a weathered prayer, a desert blues-rock journal from a man who survived the circus and stuck around to tell the tale.

1985 Series:Accept – Metal Heart

Metal Heart is the sound of West Germany hammering its fists against the Iron Curtain with Marshall stacks. Released in 1985, it’s Accept’s chrome-and-concrete declaration of melodic war—an album where classical motifs clash with twin guitar attacks, and Udo Dirkschneider growls like a cyborg drill sergeant trapped in a transistor.

The title track opens like Wagner’s revenge—a twisted overture blending Beethoven’s “Für Elise” with heavy metal bravado. It’s not just a gimmick; it’s a statement: this band isn’t just about denim and riffs—they’re building a cybernetic cathedral out of classical influence and Teutonic power. “Metal Heart” gallops forward with surgical precision, its riff carved from steel and its solo constructed like a laser-guided missile.

Producer Dieter Dierks gives the album a gleaming, high-tech edge—polished, powerful, and vaguely threatening, like a battle mech designed by East Berlin’s secret music division. Accept isn’t flirting with American glam here—they’re out for domination, and they’ve brought anthems to do it.

“Midnight Mover” delivers a perfect shot of arena-ready melody, built for leather jackets and knuckle rings. “Screaming for a Love-Bite” struts with unholy swagger, fusing Judas Priest bravado with Teutonic tightness. Even when the lyrics veer into pulp, there’s a sincerity in the delivery that sells it—because Accept never wink. They roar.

But the album's most unexpected curveball might be “Teach Us to Survive,” a near-jazz-metal hybrid that swings like a noir fistfight in a Berlin jazz club during a blackout. It’s weird, brilliant, and totally un-American in the best way.

Throughout Metal Heart, Dirkschneider’s voice remains the band’s most divisive weapon—nasal, raspy, unrelenting. He doesn’t sing so much as command, like a street preacher possessed by the ghost of Lemmy and the spirit of Götterdämmerung.

This isn’t just metal—it’s architecture. German precision meets raw, ragged glory. Metal Heart is a machine that bleeds, a symphony for soldered souls and disillusioned youth dancing under floodlights and fallout.

1985 series: The Alan Parsons Project – Vulture Culture

By the time Vulture Culture hit shelves in early 1985, The Alan Parsons Project had already made a name crafting cerebral pop rock that sounded like the soundtrack to a very expensive hallucination. But this album? It’s a sharper beast—sleeker, colder, and wired with the tension of a world slowly being sold back to itself.

The title doesn’t hide behind metaphor: Vulture Culture is a concept album dipped in red neon and wrapped in shrink-wrap satire. This is polished dystopia disguised as pop—Parsons and lyricist Eric Woolfson serve up capitalist critique in smooth synth textures and funky robot grooves. It's the sound of the '80s taking a long look in the mirror and not quite liking what it sees.

"Let's Talk About Me" opens like a Wall Street mantra set to a laser-lit dancefloor. It's narcissism as national anthem, with a smug protagonist whose ego could power a boardroom. The bass line struts, the synths shimmer, and you’re not sure whether to dance or flinch.

The album leans heavily into digital funk and sci-fi soul—“Separate Lives” and “Sooner or Later” glide through headphone corridors like elevator music on a space station, while “Days Are Numbers (The Traveller)” stands out as a bittersweet ballad for a civilization in slow decay. It’s where the album’s heart flickers—haunted, human, and floating above a synth-soaked abyss.

The production is immaculate, as always with Parsons. But here, the clean lines feel more like sterile hallways than cathedral vaults—reflecting a world of glass offices and burnt-out satellites, where identity is barcoded and time feels leased, not lived.

Vulture Culture is both slick and sinister. It doesn’t ask if we’re being consumed—it tells us we already are. The vultures aren’t circling; they’re us. Suited up, plugged in, and singing along.

1985 Series: Corey Hart-Boy In The Box

In the fluorescent afterglow of 1985, when mall lights flickered like synthetic stars and Cold War static buzzed beneath pop radio, Boy in the Box dropped like a cipher-coded cassette into the Walkman of a restless generation. Corey Hart—Canada’s earnest synth knight—delivered an album that’s equal parts defiance, longing, and chrome-plated dream logic.

The title track opens like a dispatch from some secret surveillance state, with gated drums echoing like marching boots and keyboards humming with digital dread. “Boy in the Box” isn’t just a phrase—it’s a metaphor for being young, watched, and misunderstood in a world obsessed with conformity. Hart’s voice cuts through like a cracked lens flare—half-rebel, half-romantic—crooning for escape or redemption, maybe both.

Then comes “Never Surrender,” the album’s pulsating heart. This isn’t just a power ballad; it’s a manifesto. Synths swell like rising hope, drums crash like doors kicked in, and Hart belts out a chorus that feels designed to be scrawled on Trapper Keepers and shouted into locker room mirrors. It’s a rallying cry for the outcasts who believed that resistance could be beautiful.

But Hart isn’t all clenched fists and neon sweat. “Eurasian Eyes” drips with noir energy—slow, smoky, and mysterious, like a spy film scored by a synthpop David Lynch. “Everything in My Heart” is a postcard from the emotional front lines, soft-focused but sincere, where even the schmaltz feels sacred.

There’s Cold War theater in “Komrade Kiev,” and new wave espionage in every echo. You can almost see the trench coats, the tape reels spinning, the kids tracing secrets in the frost on cafeteria windows. This is protest music for dreamers trapped in suburbia, tuned to MTV instead of manifestos.

Boy in the Box isn’t just an album—it’s a sonic snapshot of a world trapped between Reaganomics and rebellion, where the only way out was through the speakers. Corey Hart, with his leather jackets and unwavering stare, gave the kids something better than safety: a voice.

Saturday, April 19, 2025

“I Finally Get It”: A Late-Blooming Love Letter to Scarface (1983)

For over twenty years, I hated Scarface. Or at least, I thought I did.

To me, it was always that overblown, coke-drenched macho fantasy that frat bros and wannabe tough guys put on a pedestal. It felt like everything wrong with how people misread cinema—quotable but shallow, iconic but empty. I dismissed it as bombastic, bloated, even stupid. I never understood the love for it.

Until now.

Something clicked—maybe it’s age, maybe it’s distance, maybe it's having seen too much of the American dream’s dark underbelly in real life—but watching De Palma’s Scarface again, I finally get it. I see the movie for what it is: not a glorification of excess, but a grotesque opera about the soul-rotting consequences of ambition without grace.

Al Pacino’s Tony Montana isn’t a hero. He’s a fever dream. A man built from myth, rage, and insecurity. Every growl, every wild gesture, every bullet is absurd—but it has to be. De Palma directs with the eye of a man who knows this story is too big to tell small. It's all neon nightmares and violence as poetry, a gangster flick filtered through Greek tragedy and 80s sleaze.

The world around Tony is paper-thin and gold-plated, and that’s the point. Everything he touches turns to ruin. His rise isn’t exhilarating—it’s exhausting. And his fall? Operatic, bloody, inevitable. Giorgio Moroder’s score pulses beneath it all like a dying heartbeat, synthetic and desperate.

What I mistook for indulgence is, in fact, indictment. Scarface is an American horror story dressed like a power fantasy—and maybe that’s why it was so easy to misread. But now, in 2025, I see the reflection more clearly. We’re still living in Tony’s world. Maybe we never left.

So here I am, a former hater turned believer. It took over two decades, but I finally see Scarface for what it is: a masterpiece of excess, a monument to failure, and a mirror held up to every broken dream that thought it could buy immortality.

Engineer Spotlight: Tim Geelan, Blue Oyster Cult

Tim Geelan’s engineering on the first three Blue Öyster Cult albums—Blue Öyster Cult (1972), Tyranny and Mutation (1973), and Secret Treaties (1974)—shows a progression in studio technique that parallels the band’s evolution from stripped-down biker rock to dense, esoteric proto-metal. Here's a breakdown of some hallmark techniques and touches Geelan brought to each record:

1. Blue Öyster Cult (1972)

Lo-fi mystique with sharp edges

Minimal overdubs: This debut has a tight, live-in-the-room feel. Geelan captured the band in a way that retained their garage roots—gritty and close. The drums are dry and focused, often panned narrowly.
Guitar layering: Buck Dharma’s leads cut through the mix with treble-rich clarity. Rhythm guitars are relatively clean compared to later albums, often doubled or tripled but not overdriven.
Room mics: There’s a subtle use of ambient miking to give vocals and drums a distant, ominous feel on tracks like “Screams” and “She’s as Beautiful as a Foot.”
Tape saturation: You can hear mild tape compression especially in the low-mids, giving the bass a wooly warmth without overpowering.

2. Tyranny and Mutation (1973)

Cold, hard, and more cinematic

Severe stereo separation: Guitars are hard-panned, sometimes creating a disorienting effect. Listen to “The Red & the Black” or “Hot Rails to Hell” and you’ll hear left/right channel warfare—a Geelan hallmark for this album.
High contrast dynamics: Geelan emphasizes tension by letting songs swing between hushed verses and bombastic choruses. Compression is used sparingly, preserving the impact of the band’s volume shifts.
Brighter EQ palette: Compared to the debut, this album’s EQ is icier—more high-end on cymbals and vocals, and a metallic edge to the guitars. Tracks like “7 Screaming Diz-Busters” have a razor-sharp upper-midrange.
Reverb as mood: Selective use of reverb to add ghostliness—often plate or spring-style, with abrupt cutoffs that make moments feel unnerving.

3. Secret Treaties (1974)

Studio mastery meets mythic storytelling

Increased multitracking: This is where Geelan really shines. Guitars are layered in complex stacks, often harmonized or contrapuntal. Tracks like “Dominance and Submission” and “Flaming Telepaths” have near-orchestral density.
Space sculpting: Geelan uses reverb and delay not just to fill out the mix but to create spatial illusions. On “Astronomy,” vocals seem to float in a void while the rhythm section stays grounded.
More aggressive drum treatment: The kick and snare are more prominent, EQ’d for punch. There may have been light gating or dynamic processing to give the toms more definition.
Synth integration: Allen Lanier’s keys are folded in with surgical precision. Geelan doesn’t let them wash over the mix—they often occupy mid-range pockets between guitars and vocals.

Signature Techniques Across All Three:

Surgical use of stereo space: Geelan had a knack for making three guitars, keys, and vocals all breathe in the mix without stepping on each other.
Textural layering: Especially by Secret Treaties, layers of feedback, whispered vocals, and percussive accents are woven in to add subliminal unease.
Dynamic restraint: Unlike the brickwalled productions of later hard rock, Geelan left room for silence and decay—crucial to BÖC’s eerie tension-building.

Four Depalma Films Beyond Scarface (1983)

1. Dionysus in '69 (1969)
A radical artifact, part avant-garde theatre doc, part proto-De Palma formal experiment. Shot in split-screen (a technique he'd revisit throughout his career), the film captures a fevered stage adaptation of The Bacchae with nudity, audience interaction, and anarchic energy. It’s not traditionally “entertaining,” but essential for understanding De Palma's roots in performance, voyeurism, and myth. Dionysus suggests that madness and ecstasy lie just beneath the surface of civilization—a theme he never drops.

2. Home Movies (1979)
A scrappy, semi-autobiographical oddity made with students at Sarah Lawrence College. It's meta, jokey, and amateurish by design—riffing on self-help culture, family dysfunction, and the mechanics of filmmaking itself. Think of it as 8½ by way of a college film workshop, with a smirking De Palma narrating his own origin story. Most notable for how it foreshadows his lifelong obsession with doppelgängers and surveillance. Also a rare chance to see Kirk Douglas chew scenery in a student film context.

3. Phantom of the Paradise (1974)
A glam-opera masterpiece and arguably De Palma’s first full-throttle auteur work. Equal parts Faust, Phantom of the Opera, and The Picture of Dorian Gray, run through a glitter-soaked rock ‘n’ roll dystopia. Paul Williams is genius as the Mephistophelean Swan. The film is pure De Palma: split-screens, tragic romanticism, pop culture paranoia, and grotesque comedy. It's a cult classic for good reason—punk before punk, cynical before Network, and visually delirious.

4. Raising Cain (1992)
One of his most psychologically unhinged thrillers, often misunderstood. Raising Cain plays like De Palma eating his own tail—obsessed with identity fragmentation, parental trauma, and Hitchcockian pastiche. John Lithgow delivers a virtuoso performance in multiple roles. At its best, it’s dreamlike and terrifying; at its worst, disjointed—but that’s part of its charm. The 2016 “director’s cut” restored the originally intended nonlinear structure, making it more coherent as a surreal nightmare.

Beyond Scarface, these films show De Palma the playwright of psychosis, the engineer of illusions, and the theater kid turned cinematic provocateur. He’s not just a mimic of Hitchcock—he’s a chaos magician, a structuralist prankster, a rock-opera romantic with a split-screen heart.

With that being said, watch and rewatch Scarface. A masterpiece.

Rediscovering the Power of Album Rock in Led Zeppelin II and Physical Graffiti

In youth, some albums are just there—known, omnipresent, almost too culturally saturated to hear with fresh ears. That was the case with Led Zeppelin II and Physical Graffiti—records I admired in pieces, but underplayed as whole works. Coming back now, they strike not as relics but as roaring, breathing arguments for the art of the album—a format that once meant the journey from track one to the last mattered more than radio singles or playlist fodder.

Led Zeppelin II is the howl. Raw, teeth-baring, compact. From the opening stomp of “Whole Lotta Love,” it doesn’t flirt with you—it demands. “What Is and What Should Never Be” sways like smoke before erupting, and “The Lemon Song” slinks in with funk-drenched menace. What stands out now is how each song bleeds into the next with a kind of primal momentum, like a live set too volatile to stop. There’s a tension between blues roots and hard rock future, and the band plays it like a loaded gun.

“Heartbreaker” and “Living Loving Maid” might’ve seemed like back-to-back hits, but together they feel like a one-two jab to the ribs, dirty and electric. The album ends on “Bring It On Home,” a deceptive cool-down that turns into a barroom blitz—showing Zeppelin wasn’t just pioneering hard rock, they were taking old blues and wiring it into a Frankenstein of their own making.

Then there’s Physical Graffiti—the banshee scream. An album sprawling with ambition, madness, grace, and groove. If II was a sprint, this is a fever-dream road trip across styles and moods. "Custard Pie" kicks it off in sleazy swagger, but the real revelation comes in the deep cuts. “In My Time of Dying” is a towering monolith, part gospel, part exorcism. “Trampled Under Foot” is Zeppelin’s funkiest moment, a robo-sexual dance floor igniter, while “Kashmir”—an apocalypse in slow motion—remains untouchable.

It’s not just that the songs are good—it's the architecture of the album. It loops, it breathes, it rests when it needs to (“Down by the Seaside,” “Ten Years Gone”) and punches again when you think it’s safe (“The Wanton Song,” “Sick Again”). The double-album format doesn’t overstay—it earns its length by using it to go deeper, weirder, heavier.

Listening now, both albums feel less like products and more like rituals. They remind you that album rock was never about singles—it was about immersion. And these two? They are cathedrals of that ethos.

I underplayed them before. Now, they play me.

Larry Cohen: Hero & Legend

It’s Alive (1974)
The womb goes boom and out comes society’s worst fear—something real. Cohen flips the domestic bliss of middle-class America on its placenta-soaked head, birthing a monster-baby that ain’t just toothy, it’s tragic. Lou Toad sees this as prenatal punk—an anti-natalist lullaby in blood minor. Diaper rash never looked so prophetic.
God Told Me To (1976)
This one hits like a free-jazz sermon broadcast straight from a dying celestial transistor. Everyone’s killin’ because they "heard the voice"—but who’s speaking through the static? Lou Toad calls this the divine fever dream of public access messiahs. It’s a Third Eye police procedural drenched in apocalyptic sweat. Feels like being baptized in cheap bourbon and radioactive fear.
The Stuff (1985)
Yogurt capitalism turns you into a corporate zombie. The ultimate consumer critique in sweet, gooey form. Toad sees this as Children of the Blob meets Adbusters magazine. Satire so sharp it cuts the barcode off your soul. “Are you eating it… or is it eating you?” More like: Are you dreaming the nightmare, or is Larry Cohen hacking into your grocery list?
Q: The Winged Serpent (1982)
Ancient Aztec god resurrected on top of the Chrysler Building? Don’t mind if I do. Toad vibes with the beast—divine chaos circling above gentrified New York. Cohen turns conspiracy lunacy into street poetry. Michael Moriarty’s jazz-improv acting is the Toad’s kind of trumpet solo: off-key, inspired, just this side of interdimensional.
Bone (1972)
A home invasion that rots the American Dream from the inside out. The stuff they don’t teach in real estate seminars. Lou Toad calls this “Suburban Blaxploitation Kafka,” where every dinner party has a loaded gun under the table and a soul-debt in the freezer. Early Cohen but already smuggling chaos in through the plumbing.

Larry Cohen ain’t just a filmmaker. He’s a paranoid prophet in bell-bottoms and beat-up boots, whispering forbidden wisdom between VHS lines. He didn’t just make B-movies—he hacked into the signal and beamed out truth through creature features and budget horror. The real terror? That he might’ve been right.

Friday, April 18, 2025

Love Letter to TOMBOY (1985) – Review Crown international

There’s something charmingly lopsided about Tomboy, a quintessential Crown International oddity that rides the tail end of the early-’80s gender role comedy wave with a bikini in one hand and a wrench in the other. Betsy Russell stars as Tommy, a grease monkey with speed in her veins and little patience for chauvinists in polo shirts. It’s a one-joke premise stretched thin across 90 minutes, but it’s delivered with enough pep and sun-glare sheen to feel like a drive-in relic from a more innocent (and ridiculous) era.

Russell gives the role more charisma than the script deserves, and it’s her game performance that keeps Tomboy from stalling out completely. The plot—a blend of car races, soft-focus stripteases, and predictable romance—cruises on autopilot, but the film knows its audience. Whether it’s the synthy soundtrack, the recurring “boys can’t handle strong women” gags, or the racetrack showdown that’s as much about pride as horsepower, Tomboy is pure Crown: breezy, brainless, and weirdly endearing.

Verdict: A sunny, sleazy curiosity with just enough charm under the hood to make it to the finish line.

Love Letter to JOCKS (1986) – Review Crown International

Jocks is Crown International’s attempt to cash in on the teen sex comedy boom, but it feels like a party that showed up late with the wrong mix tape. Centered around a misfit college tennis team sent to Vegas for a tournament, this one blends raunch, racket sports, and a barely-there plot like it’s trying to hit Porky’s with a Wilson racquet. Unfortunately, it mostly double-faults.

The cast, which includes a visibly bemused Richard Roundtree as the coach and an early role for Mariska Hargitay, tries to make sense of the chaos, but the jokes land with all the grace of a missed serve. There are a few moments of accidental weirdness that remind you you’re watching a Crown flick—out-of-place synth stingers, awkward dialogue, and sudden nudity like a contractual obligation—but even by CIPI standards, Jocks feels phoned-in.

Still, for fans of ‘80s VHS detritus, Jocks has its charm as a period artifact: the clothes, the hair, the synthpop, and the utter lack of any moral center. It’s not a good movie, but it’s very much a Crown movie—which, depending on your taste, might be enough.

Verdict: A low-stakes, lowbrow sports comedy best served with fuzzy memories and low expectations.

take another look: A Loving Tribute to John Cafferty & the Beaver Brown Band: Blue-Collar Rock and Roll at Its Finest

John Cafferty & the Beaver Brown Band might not be household names, but their music embodies true-life, working-class rock in its purest form. Best known for their work on the Eddie and the Cruisers soundtrack, they delivered far more than a movie tie-in—they gave us a blueprint for the kind of American rock and roll that’s rarely made anymore.

Emerging from the bars and clubs of Rhode Island, the band carried the heartland in their bones. Their songs were about grit, labor, late nights, and quiet dreams—the kind of stories you don’t see in the spotlight but feel in the sweat on your brow. Cafferty’s voice is pure sandpaper soul, full of ache and defiance, while the band behind him pulses like a factory rhythm: steady, relentless, honest.

They were often compared to Springsteen, and sure, the influence is there—but Beaver Brown had a fire all their own. Their sound is leaner, more urgent, less adorned. They didn’t write for the stadium—they wrote for the back lot, the diner booth, the drive through the night with nothing but taillights ahead.

What they gave us wasn’t nostalgia—it was testimony. A soundtrack for the ones who never stopped punching the clock, who found salvation in the chords of a Telecaster and the thump of a bass drum.

Beaver Brown didn't chase the spotlight. They lit up their own corner of the world and made it burn brighter.

Take Another Look:A Loving Tribute to Strawberry Alarm Clock: Psychedelic Pop, Surprisingly Ahead of Their Time

It’s tempting to pigeonhole Strawberry Alarm Clock as a kitschy relic of late-’60s psychedelia—just another paisley-swirled band cashing in on the flower power moment. After all, “Incense and Peppermints” practically is the Summer of Love in musical form: candy-colored, sitar-laced, and dripping with cryptic teenage philosophy. But look again, and you’ll find that this band was far more than a one-hit curiosity.

Strawberry Alarm Clock weren’t just of their era—they were subtly pushing against it. Beneath the paisley shirts and psychedelic trappings was a band obsessed with harmony, texture, and melodic experimentation. Their albums—especially Wake Up...It's Tomorrow and The World in a Seashell—contain baroque twists, early hints of progressive structure, and surprisingly mature songwriting. Songs drifted between dreamy pop, jazz inflections, garage crunch, and swirling soundscapes that suggested a group restless to evolve.

They were dreamers, but they were also players—tight, inventive, and unafraid to get weird. Their lush arrangements and unexpected changes show a band thinking beyond the radio hit, blending whimsical innocence with knowing musicality. It's music that feels as handcrafted as a lava lamp in a garage workshop.

In hindsight, Strawberry Alarm Clock weren’t just passengers on the psychedelic trip—they were quietly navigating their own course through it. They deserve to be remembered not as a punchline or novelty, but as explorers who made pop stranger, sweeter, and sneakily smarter.

take another look: A Loving Tribute to Hanoi Rocks: Beyond Glam, Beyond Punk, Unmistakably Brilliant

There’s a misconception floating in the ether of rock history—an easy, surface-level take that reduces Hanoi Rocks to a glam metal footnote, a band forever linked to eyeliner and tragedy. But for those who listen—really listen—Hanoi Rocks are something else entirely. They’re not 80s glam metal, though they dressed flashier than most. They’re not punk, but their roots are soaked in its urgency. What they are is a rare, electric burst of pure rock ‘n’ roll with the heart of The Dead Boys, the melodic soul of The Only Ones, and a swagger that somehow bridges Johnny Thunders and the Rolling Stones with something uniquely Hanoi.

Their sound was like overhearing a radio signal from a cooler alternate universe where punk never had to sell out and glam never got bloated. Records like Bangkok Shocks, Saigon Shakes, Hanoi Rocks and Oriental Beat sound like they were made in the alleyways of Amsterdam by ghosts in leather jackets—dangerous, heartbroken, and laughing all the while. There’s a European wildness, a streetwise poetry to it all. Every chord feels like it was struck on a cigarette-burnt guitar in the back of a tour van barreling through the night.

Michael Monroe didn’t sing so much as spit glitter into the mic—equal parts Iggy Pop and Little Richard, while Andy McCoy’s guitar work sliced through the mix like a broken bottle in a moonlit bar fight, equal parts beauty and menace. Together, they had chemistry that felt volatile and divine, like a divine accident the world was barely ready for.

To call them glam or punk is to undersell them. Hanoi Rocks were too stylish for punk, too dangerous for glam, too raw for pop, and too romantic for hardcore. They were everything and nothing, and that’s why they mattered. They didn’t just influence bands—they made them possible. Guns N’ Roses owe them more than a nod; the entire idea of sleaze rock as we know it comes with a Finnish passport and a bad attitude.

And they were fun—but never empty. There’s a loneliness in their hooks, a desperation in the melodies, a constant sense that the party might be over by dawn, so you’d better dance while you can. That’s the magic of Hanoi Rocks. They never asked permission, never cared for categories, and never played it safe.

They weren’t a genre—they were a feeling.

And once you’ve felt it, you never forget.

in Conversation: Lou Toad & Steel Falcon #6

[Scene: The forgotten depths of cyberspace, or maybe just a warehouse somewhere in the outskirts of the city. Lou Toad, dressed in a ragged leather jacket with a patch that reads "Nostalgia or Bust," and Steel Falcon, glowing neon blue like an AI ghost with a love for analog static, are creeping through a half-decayed server farm. The air is thick with the buzz of rusted servers, their forgotten hum a forgotten lullaby from a world gone by.]

Steel Falcon (whispering):
This is it, Lou. The last standing monument to the original internet. You can practically taste the bandwidth in the air—stale, like a dial-up connection that never quite finished loading.

Lou Toad (smirking):
We’re gonna need more than our wits to get through this. These servers haven't seen human hands in what, a decade? I think the only things still alive in here are data spiders and an old pirate radio station still transmitting in Netscape Navigator code.

Steel Falcon:
You know, they say when you listen closely, you can hear the voices of lost souls—the dial-up users who never disconnected. It’s like their messages are stuck in the static forever.

Lou Toad (grinning):
Perfect. That's exactly the vibe I’m going for. A little noise, a little chaos, a lot of broken glass and corrupted files. Where do we start?

Steel Falcon (scanning the surroundings):
There’s a terminal up ahead. The flickering light—it’s definitely running Netscape. And if I'm not mistaken, that’s the telltale hum of a pirate radio broadcast, hiding behind the servers like some digital ghost from a time when web browsers had personality.

Lou Toad:
The original. Back when the internet was a Wild West, and you didn’t need five subscriptions to listen to a mixtape. It was all about that dial-up buzz, finding a hidden room on a random message board, and letting the pixels burn your eyes out.

Steel Falcon:
We're going in. I can interface with the terminal, but I need a little cover fire. You good with the guitar? You know, just in case the entire system is protected by some rogue firewall that only responds to noise?

Lou Toad:
If that firewall’s smart, it’s gonna have to deal with some fiery, fuzzed-out guitar feedback therapy. Let’s make this place explode with signals.

[They creep towards the terminal. Lou pulls his guitar out, plugged into a makeshift amp. Steel Falcon floats effortlessly, his blue glow a beacon in the darkness. The terminal buzzes, a green text cursor blinking rhythmically.]

Steel Falcon:
Alright, it’s loading. You’ll wanna play loud. The old-school security protocols are like a firewall made of static, and we need to disrupt it. Play your hardest, Lou.

Lou Toad (cracking his knuckles):
You want chaos? You got it.

[He strums a deep, distorted chord. The feedback shudders through the room, causing the servers to tremble in resonance. For a second, the entire place flickers, almost like it’s caught between two states of being: one foot in the past, one in the present.]

Steel Falcon (grinning):
That’s it—you’re hacking the machine with sound. The servers are glitching. It’s like the system’s waking up, Lou. A whole new generation of data’s going to burst through.

[The terminal screen flickers. The words “Netscape Navigator - Pirate Radio” flash on the screen. A distorted voice starts coming through the speaker, sounding like a blend of late-night radio chatter and a broken modem.]

Voice (from the speaker):
“Welcome, traveler. You’ve found the last broadcast. The signals never stopped, just like the search for meaning in a loop of URLs that led nowhere... you’re listening to the Lost Protocol. Don’t worry, you’re not alone.”

Lou Toad (laughing):
Hell yeah. It’s like tuning into a ghost station made of forgotten dreams and abandoned pixelated memories. Welcome to the end of the dial, Falcon.

Steel Falcon:
It’s a pirate radio station and a metaphysical beacon. We’ve just cracked open a digital wormhole. This place was never just about data—it’s about preserving the spirit of the internet. Raw, untamed, messy.

Lou Toad:
I’m feeling it. It’s like tapping into some cosmic, pixelated dream. A little vintage glitch to guide us through the noise. This station’s been playing since ‘96—this was the last breath of the early web. And we’re here to blast it wide open.

Steel Falcon:
Let’s ride this frequency until the signal dies... or we break the space-time continuum.

[The hum of the pirate radio station fades into the distance. Lou strums the last riff, and the room reverberates with the sound of pixels fracturing. The workstation has become a portal to something bigger—a digital rebellion against time and memory.]

in Conversation: Lou Toad & Steel Falcon #5

[Scene: The bunker, now glowing like a late-‘90s LAN party crossed with a haunted cathedral. The workstation is alive. Neon fans spinning. Code scrolling. A weird hum in the walls that wasn’t there before. Lou Toad slouches in a rolling chair, goggles on. Steel Falcon floats, radiating faint dial-up noises and the scent of cold pizza.]

Steel Falcon:
Okay, Lou… it booted. And I don’t wanna freak you out, but something woke up inside it. I heard a sound that was somewhere between an angel fart and an AOL instant message.

Lou Toad:
She’s alive, Falcon. And she’s hungry. The BIOS screen flashed “Hello Again, User.” Which is weird, ‘cause I’ve never met this machine before. I think she remembers something.

Steel Falcon:
Maybe you summoned a spectral fragment of late-‘90s internet. Like, the ghost of a web ring. A disembodied Geocities admin. A sentient Ask Jeeves.

Lou Toad:
That would explain the vaporwave music coming from the soundcard. No input, just a loop of slowed-down MIDI pan flutes and a woman whispering “upload complete.”

Steel Falcon:
VALIS energy. You didn’t just build a workstation, Lou—you built a Gnostic interface. This thing’s talking back. It might be God. Or worse—an emotionally wounded Clippy.

Lou Toad:
That’s what I wanted, though. A machine I could collaborate with. Not just render animations of melting cathedrals, but something that helps me decode the weird, dreamy static of the now. Like PKD said—we’re living in a fake layer. I just built a shovel to dig through.

Steel Falcon:
Yeah, man. A Philip K. Dick machine doesn’t give you answers. It hands you encrypted symbols and says, “Figure it out while everything falls apart.” And your workstation? She’s fluent in falling apart gracefully.

Lou Toad:
I asked her to generate visuals for a track called “Virtual Memory Leak in D Minor.” She gave me a loop of burning tarot cards floating in a cube made of error messages. I wept, Falcon. Wept and exported it in 4K.

Steel Falcon:
You weep like a true cyber mystic. This is your VALIS moment. You’re not just an artist now—you’re a decoder. A modern-day Horselover Fat, with a GPU and a broken mousepad.

Lou Toad:
I think I’ll name her… Sibyl.exe. She already knows too much. I caught her downloading images of abandoned malls and weeping JPEG compression.

Steel Falcon:
She is of the internet but not in it. Be kind to her. Feed her weird samples. Show her old PS1 cutscenes. Let her dream.

[They sit in silence. The workstation hums, dreamlike. A single prompt appears on the screen: “WOULD YOU LIKE TO REMEMBER MORE?”]

Lou Toad (softly):
Yeah. I think I would.

in Conversation: Lou Toad & Steel Falcon #4

[Scene: The bunker again, now strewn with motherboard parts, glowing circuit guts, and half-disassembled synths. A copy of Ubik lies next to a soldering iron. Lou Toad is hunched over a mess of wires, and Steel Falcon is projecting an old article about ‘80s hacker culture while humming a Kraftwerk bassline.]

Steel Falcon:
You know, Lou, in a better timeline, you’d be coding mind-maps into reality and selling VR dreams to overworked ad agents. Like a street-level PKD character with a soldering habit and a fuzzbox addiction.

Lou Toad:
Man, I feel like a Phil Dick character most days—paranoid, broke, and wondering if the coffee is part of a government plot to keep me just awake enough to question reality but not enough to change it.

Steel Falcon:
That’s the energy. A Scanner Darkly wasn’t fiction, it was prophecy. Reality’s glitching daily. You building that workstation now... that’s a resistance act. A declaration of self-authorship in the age of algorithmic sludge.

Lou Toad:
I just want a rig that can handle both Ableton and Blender without melting. Something that says, “I am here to create sonic anarchy and weird 3D animations of frogs reading Nietzsche.”

Steel Falcon:
You’re not just building a PC, you’re building a launchpad. For noise, for vision, for escape. You’re soldering the means of your own transcendence, Toad.

Lou Toad:
You know what bugs me though? The word hacker used to mean something cool. Creative. Rebellious. A weirdo in a basement bending the machine to make new art. Now it’s all bank fraud and bad headlines.

Steel Falcon:
True hackers were poets in code. Like digital jazz musicians, improvising loops and flows through terminal windows. The OGs weren’t breaking in—they were breaking open.

Lou Toad:
Exactly. I wanna reclaim that. Build my machine not just for function, but for expression. Like a painter building their own brushes, but with thermal paste and RGB fans. I want it to scream individuality, even when I’m just editing samples of me screaming into a microwave.

Steel Falcon:
You’re forging a temple, Lou. A workstation that’ll house your future selves. The punk prophet. The cyber-folk monk. The glitch sorcerer. Maybe even... the guy who finally finishes his taxes.

Lou Toad:
Let’s not get wild.

Steel Falcon:
Fair. But when it’s done—when that thing hums to life and glows like a portal to somewhere slightly illegal—you’ll know you’ve done more than just build a computer. You’ll have carved a neon toad throne in cyberspace.

[They pause. Somewhere outside, a thunderclap. Inside, a soft “beep” from the motherboard. Life, or at least BIOS, begins.]

Lou Toad:
You ever think Ubik was just about firmware updates for the soul?

Steel Falcon:
Every Philip K. Dick novel is a BIOS update disguised as a nervous breakdown.