🎬🕯️ Morning Double Feature from the Tombs 🕯️🎬

A curated psychotronic pairing of dread, delirium, and doom.

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1. Dungeon of Harrow (1962)

🕸️ "Where death waits… and sanity frays!"

Painted in the blood-red brushstrokes of gothic pulp, Dungeon of Harrow traps you in a decaying castle filled with chained heroines, leering villains, and budget-driven madness. Imagine if a high school theater group adapted The Pit and the Pendulum on a stormy night with one working candelabra and a fever dream. Shot in murky shadows and whispered menace, it oozes with the charm of regional horror on 16mm — a haunted oil painting in motion.

🩸 Vibes: Poverty Row Gothic / Southern-fried Poe / Phantom echoes in fog-drenched corridors
📼 Perfect for: Lovers of Carnival of Souls, The Terror, and public domain macabre
💀 Best watched with: Candlelight, instant coffee, and a slightly warped brain

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2. The Fool Killer (1965)

🪓 "Woe to the fool, for the axe knows no mercy."

Anthony Perkins, fresh from the psycho shadows, roams Civil War-ravaged America in this forgotten existential nightmare cloaked as a Southern Gothic drama. With a young runaway boy as his only companion, Perkins mutters eerie parables and swings his axe through morality’s decaying frame. The Fool Killer is like Of Mice and Men after being left too long in the grave—slow, stark, and disturbingly poetic.

🩸 Vibes: Hushed horror / Southern twilight / Axes and allegories
📼 Perfect for: Fans of Night of the Hunter, Wise Blood, and Flannery O’Connor fever dreams
💀 Best watched with: Cold cornbread, creaking porch boards, and ghosts of American guilt

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☠️ SPECIAL PROGRAM NOTE ☠️
Presented as part of the "Celluloid Coffin Club", this double bill reminds us that horror isn’t always loud—it can whisper, flicker, and stare.

🎯 TODAY’S VIRTUAL 45: The United States of America – “Hard Coming Love” / “Osamu’s Birthday”

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🎵 SIDE A – Hard Coming Love
A fuzz bass heartbeat, a fluttering electric harpsichord, and Dorothy Moskowitz crooning like Nico if she fronted Silver Apples.
It’s romantic, jagged, and somehow melancholy even when it’s surging forward.

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🎵 SIDE B – Osamu’s Birthday
An instrumental trip down a carnival midway wired to a military computer.
You can almost see the counterculture falling apart in real time—like the balloons are popping themselves.

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💫 Recorded in 1968
📀 Reissued to remind you how visionary it was
📻 Filed under: Avant-Pop, Psychedelic Manifestos, Library Music for Utopias

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DOWN THE TUBIS: Unearthing the VHS-Valley Horror Oddities of Tubi

Welcome to Down The Tubis, your dive bar zine for the dollar-bin horror vaults of Tubi, where public domain gothic and slasher sleaze coexist in glorious, scratchy harmony. This issue: a triple-feature of bargain basement brilliance that shouldn’t exist—but thankfully does.

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🕸️ The Dungeon of Harrow (1964)
🦇 Gothic Echoes in American Backyard Horror
Think: The Fall of the House of Usher if it were shot on borrowed 16mm, drenched in cobwebs and lit by a single lamp. A shipwreck survivor winds up in a castle ruled by a mad count, giving off serious Carnival of Souls meets Dementia 13 vibes. It’s a Texas-shot fever dream of baroque decay, with audio so murky it feels like the house itself is whispering. This one belongs in the Incompetence Canon, not because it’s bad—because it’s haunted by amateur sincerity.

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🎞️ Drive-In Massacre (1976)
🔪 Slashers Before the Boom
A perfect example of ineptitude as art, this film is both blood-soaked and baffling. The kills are abrupt, the pacing broken, and the final twist feels like the editor got bored and left. But the real star? The grimy Southern California summer night ambiance. You can smell the popcorn and car exhaust. As regional as a chili dog stand, this proto-slasher is low on logic, high on vibe. It’s practically an anti-narrative with a machete.

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🧛 Gallery of Horror (1967)
📼 William Shatner’s Dollar Store Anthology Hour
A cut-rate Tales from the Crypt featuring Frankenstein, Dracula, and a distinctly confused Scotland Yard—all narrated by John Carradine trying his best to elevate nothing. If you grew up on public access reruns of horror host shows, this will hit like a moldy blanket. Watch it for the cardboard gravestones, stay for the editing that seems performed with gardening shears.

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📼 CREASEx Pull Quote Highlights

“It's like watching your uncle try to remake The Pit and the Pendulum using lawn tools and a fog machine.” — on Dungeon of Harrow

“Drive-In Massacre feels like someone filmed a true crime reenactment without knowing the crime.”

“Gallery of Horror is a haunted slideshow narrated by the ghost of failed pilots.”

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Tubi Tip:
Watch these with the captions on and a scratchy mono Bluetooth speaker for maximum authenticity.

👁‍🗨 Long live the free stream. Long live the shlock.

Dream in terminal green,
🪦 Buzz Drainpipe, Horror Host at Large

Metal Messiahs #6: Blackhorse – Blackhorse

METAL MESSIAHS #6: BLACKHORSE – BLACKHORSE (1979, Georgia, USA)
Buzz Drainpipe, The Discarded I
“This is outlaw proto-doom dipped in diesel and baptized in swampwater. You don’t listen to Blackhorse. You survive it.”

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By the time Blackhorse dropped their lone, self-titled LP in 1979, the New South was still choking on tear gas, burnout, and the psychic shrapnel of the Vietnam War. Disco was in cocaine bloom. Rock was getting silkier by the second. And then—from some murky backroad bar in Georgia—came Blackhorse, a band so heavy and so cursed they sounded like they’d fought their amplifiers before recording with them.

Forget record deals. Forget radio play.
Blackhorse was released independently, barely advertised, and seemingly whispered into existence.
And it. Is. Perfect.

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🛠️ The Sound:

Take the blown-out biker fuzz of early Grand Funk, the menace of Sabbath, and the chaos of a bar fight during a tornado. Songs like “Fox Huntin’” and “Born to Rock” don’t just rock—they rattle chains in hell.

The riffs are molasses-thick and rusted out, like they’ve been fermenting in a junkyard oil drum. Vocals? Somewhere between a Southern preacher mid-sermon and a wounded dog with a grudge.

And the rhythm section doesn’t just keep time—it marches toward judgment day. Listen to “Junkie”—it’s a biker dirge, a Vietnam ghost story, and a proto-sludge odyssey all at once.

🗣️ Buzz notes in the margins: “You can hear the meth in the mix.”

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🐴 The Myth:

No major label. No tour. No second chance. The band members? Shadows.
Blackhorse appeared, kicked in the speakers, and vanished like a ghost regiment.

Their only album? Privately pressed, cover art a photocopied skull with a horse head, distribution limited to gas stations, head shops, and that one cousin who used to roadie for Molly Hatchet. For decades, it was considered lost media until collectors started passing the LP around like some biker Rosetta Stone.

This is the kind of record that ruins families and heals bones.

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☠️ Why It’s Metal Messiah #6:

Because Blackhorse wasn’t trying to “make it.” They were trying to survive the night.

Because it’s an honest-to-God, post-Vietnam scream from the American underworld, untouched by marketing, ego, or irony.

Because it proves the realest metal doesn’t rise—it haunts.

And because when Buzz Drainpipe found an original LP at a flea market outside Tuscaloosa, the old man behind the table just said, “Be careful with that one, son.”

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🔥BASIL POLEDOURIS: THE HEARTBEAT OF HEROES🔥

A tribute in three movements, by those who still believe in fanfares, steel, and soft synths

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I. 🎓 Making the Grade (1984)

“Somewhere between a Top 40 mixtape and the echo of a marching band playing in the gym after midnight…”

This is where the journey begins—not in battle, but in blazers.
Basil didn’t look down on the teen comedy; he dignified it.
He gave prep school pranks a romantic overture.
Synth pads shimmer like saxophones seen through steam,
bass lines strutted with the awkward confidence of a boy
pretending to be a man,
and somewhere, behind it all, was a piano
that knew the joke was on all of us.

This wasn’t just a paycheck.
It was prelude.

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II. 🤖 RoboCop (1987)

“A man made into a weapon… but the music remembered his soul.”

Detroit fell, but the drums kept rising.
Brass hit like concrete dropped from a rooftop—
mechanical, martial, undeniable.
But Basil found the tragedy in the tech.

The score wasn't just cyberpunk steel,
it was Greek tragedy in chrome.
Between the explosions: sorrow.
Between the sirens: a theme,
as lonely and noble as a dying man’s memory
of holding his son’s hand.

No composer made machines feel
more human.

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III. 🗡️ Conan the Barbarian (1982)

“Before the dialogue, before the swords: there was the drumbeat of destiny.”

There are soundtracks.
And then there are scriptures.
Anvil of Crom isn’t a cue. It’s a summoning.
It’s every gym rat’s battle cry,
every outsider’s power fantasy,
every dreamer’s ride into the sunset.

The wind blows. The gods are silent.
But the horns?
The horns are singing.
Basil turned a barbarian into a myth,
a silent warrior into an opera.
When the orchestra swells, it’s not for a king—
it’s for the orphan who survived.

Because he believed in the story.

And so do we.

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Coda:

Basil Poledouris didn’t score movies—he sculpted memory.
He saw past the genre. He found the truth in pulp,
the grandeur in junk,
the poetry in muscle.

And in every underdog, underling, outcast, or warrior,
he whispered,

"You are more than the sum of your parts.
You are the sound of something becoming."

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NO ARC, NO MASTER: The Class of Cinematic Drift 1990–1996

By Buzz Drainpipe, broadcasting from the Echo Floor Archives

Let’s get one thing clear:
These films didn’t end—they just stopped.
Not with a bang, not with a lesson. Just a door half-closed, a light still flickering, a song trailing off mid-fade.

Between 1990 and 1996, a wave of American indie films dared to embrace the Great Drift:
Aimless post-adolescents talking big, doing little, and resisting the “plot points” the grown-up world kept trying to assign them. These weren’t hero’s journeys. They were holding patterns with soul.

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Your Cinematic Core Sample:

• Metropolitan (1990): Preppies at the edge of cultural extinction, dancing in tuxedos while Rome burns in pastels. Whit Stillman’s polite panic attack in a drawing room.

• Slacker (1990): The master blueprint. No main character, no real story, just a game of philosophical telephone in early-90s Austin.

• Kicking and Screaming (1995): The Ivy League hangover. Baumbach’s cocktail of nostalgia, regret, and overthinking your ex into oblivion.

• Glory Daze (1995): The scuzzy side of the same coin. Art punks, house parties, and a Ben Affleck still allergic to purpose. Spray-paint your feelings on the wall and call it closure.

• SubUrbia (1996): Linklater comes full circle. These kids aren’t going anywhere—and they know it. Gas station wisdom and parking lot breakdowns.

• The Last Days of Disco (1998): Stillman again. Same class warfare, now with basslines. People growing up too late, clinging to scenes that died years before they arrived.

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Why It Mattered (Still Does):

These weren’t movies afraid of nothing happening—they worshipped it. They knew that the scariest time of your life isn’t when everything goes wrong, but when nothing at all goes anywhere.
They whispered a sacred heresy:

“Maybe you don’t have to be someone.”

In an era now drunk on hustle and personal branding, these films feel like transmissions from a freer, weirder, more honest timeline. One where it was okay to sit on the porch, quote Camus, and get older without knowing why.

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Buzz’s Fade-Out Note:

These films are your mixtapes for the void.
Put them on. Drift.
Let the future worry about itself.

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Buzz Drainpipe’s Tune-In Tuesday Review:Combat Shock (Two-Disc Uncut 25th Anniversary Edition)Originally aired: 1986. Reissued: 2009. Reviewed: Right Now.

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"The American Dream is in the gutter, twitching."

Forget your glossy synthwave nostalgia and VHS glow-up TikToks. Combat Shock is not here to be your aesthetic. It’s here to gut you, to scrape your eyeballs with reverb-soaked screams and visions of fetal mutations. This is Troma’s bleakest orphan, a movie that fell down the stairs of cinema history, cracked its skull, and kept bleeding—artistically.

Directed by Buddy Giovinazzo like he just got back from the last war of the soul, Combat Shock is Taxi Driver if Travis Bickle didn’t have a mirror to talk to. It’s Eraserhead if Henry lived in Staten Island with a bottle of Comet and a half-eaten can of beans. It’s nihilism with a camcorder, and somehow, it's still beautiful.

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🎬 The Plot (Or: The Descent)

Vietnam vet Frankie returns to a decaying homefront: no jobs, a screaming wife, a melting mutant baby. His trauma isn't abstract—it’s literal. A slow rot. Every subway station is purgatory, every alley a hallucination. You watch Frankie walk, shiver, sob, sweat, and sink. There's no salvation. Just the click of a revolver and the long, cold fade.

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💿 The 25th Anniversary Edition

This two-disc set isn’t just for collectors—it’s for the devout. The uncut version (“American Nightmares”) adds more bruises to an already battered film, including grainier VHS aesthetics and unflinching finality. Bonus features include:

• Giovinazzo interviews where you can see the pain still in his eyes

• Audio commentary like a confession booth on fire

• Short films, photo galleries, liner notes from people who didn’t look away

It’s a film school in hell, packed into 190 minutes of existential rot and street-level despair.

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📼 Final Thoughts

Combat Shock doesn’t play nice. It doesn’t entertain. It indicts. It's not the midnight movie you laugh through—it's the one you stare into long enough to see yourself dissolve.

“You want a hero? You get a father feeding his baby death in a bottle.”

This isn’t exploitation. It’s expressionism dragged through Reagan-era slums and shot with the last battery on a dying camcorder. It’s cinema for those who’ve seen the cracks in the American sidewalk and heard them whisper.

5 out of 5 melted cribs.

—Buzz Drainpipe, CREASE Magazine: Tune-In Tuesday, April 2009 (Reprint 2025)

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