Oc's Christmas Sleaze-a-thon: We're starting, baby

Image by paulbr75 at Pixabay

Welcome, everyone, to a very special announcement.

It's no secret that I like good cinema and love great cinema, but absolutely adore bad cinema. There's just this unique charm to cinematic trash made with real passion that you can't get from entertainment made with skill and technique. I realize I'm not saying anything thousands of cinema nerds haven't said before, but that doesn't make this any less true. Every trash enthusiast has a favorite era of bad movies - some are into cheesy 50's and 60's monster flicks, others prefer crappy 80's horror, yet others are into grindhouse, or Asylum and SyFy wonders like Sharktopus vs. Whalewolf (yes, that's a real movie). Me, I have a real fondness for grindhouse, action and exploitation stuff, but I realize that a whole bunch of those movies are genuine crap, and unpleasant crap to boot, especially on the misogyny front. I'm always on the lookout for grindhouse and cult movies with real value to them - artistic value, novelty value, hell, even just accidental comedy, you name it. I've been collecting flaming garbage fires as well as genuine and deservedly beloved cinematic gems for a while, and because I've suddenly and inexplicably lost my mind a few days ago, I decided to go through them all. In one go.

Okay, not really - what I've had in mind is to assemble a list of 42 sleazy, schlocky and/or campy genre movies, with special attention to the grindhouse, exploitation and cult classic field, and have a movie marathon until Christmas where I watch a movie each day. (Why until Christmas? Well, because I'm pretty sure that if I spent His Son's birthday by watching something like Naked Vengeance the good Lord would smite me, and I don't even believe in Him. No, actually, I just want to spend the holidays with family rather than with Roger Corman.) Now, obviously my brain would fry and leak out through my ears if I actually did this, but the goal is to watch at least 30 movies out of the 42 on my list, with 12 days to either not watch something because I don't feel like it, or nope out because the movie is just that bad. I'm going to write a post with mini-reviews of each movie I've watched roughly every 5 to 10 movies (any longer than that and I'd end up with a bunch of Frankenposts nobody will read because they're lengthier than a Terms and Conditions page); and a year's end recap of the marathon as a whole, regardless of whether I fail or manage to watch at least 30 movies in the next month and a half.

As a bit of a sneak peek of what I'm about to subject myself to, here are a few titles from my list: TNT Jackson; Coffy; Planet Terror; Cradle of Fear; Plan 9 from Outer Space (ain't no true bad movie marathon without that one); Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!; The Bad Batch; Hobo With a Shotgun; The Beyond, and so on.

Pray for me to survive this. (Seriously though, I think it's gonna be fun.) See y'all soon with the first Frankenreview, folks.

Oculus Presents: More bookses!

 

Greetings, everyone!

 

As I said in my last book-collecting post, I had a couple more books relevant to this blog on the way, and they arrived a few weeks ago, I was just a bit busy (read: lazy) to properly introduce these beauties.

Not that the one on the left needs an introduction, I think: it's an original edition of the first book in legendary Scary Stories series, which has been scaring the living bejezus out of American kids for generations now. Like many people, I'm not a super great fan of the more recent editions with the new drawings; I perfectly understand wanting to make these books more kid-friendly than the gnarly nightmares concocted by Stephen Gammell were, but the horrifying black-and-white watercolors were at least half of the charm of these books for me when I first encountered excerpts from them on the internet. Especially the drawing for the story called The Dream - yeah, I mean her. Hats off for spicing up my nightmares, Mr. Gammell. I've had my eyes on this book for a while now; and when it arrived, it was to my great delight that I saw: yes, it does contain the drawings. I won't review this book on the blog, because it's not rare or obscure at all, quite the contrary - but I can definitely appreciate it on my own.

The book on the right with the gorgeous cover, meanwhile, is a short story collection by the esteemed former horror author (I say former because as far as I've heard, she's mostly moved on to other genres lately) Kathe Koja. If you know anything about American horror literature history you know her: she is the author of the groundbreaking, legendary horror novel The Cipher, kickstarting the famed Dell/Abyss line of boundary-pushing horror books. For a while The Cipher had fallen out of print and became a collector's item, going for tens if not hundreds of dollars on the book market; but just last year Meerkat Press fulfilled every broke horror fan's dream and released a brand-new paperback edition of it, which I'm so buying next year. Until then, Extremities will be my first book of hers I'm actually going to dive into - the reviews on the back cover liken it to Poe and Calvino, two authors I love, so I think we're in good hands here.

Apologies for the quiet on the blog lately, I'm especially sour about not doing a Halloween-themed post like I said I would, but I do have something very cool planned to finish this year with a bang, so keep your eyes peeled in the next few weeks for new posts. Cheers!