“Demon Cop” Takes A Bite Out Of Crime — And Your Brain

I don’t know who Rocco Karega is. I assume he’s from Colorado Springs — or at least that he lived there in 1990, which was  when he got the bright idea to write, direct, and star in a little number he called Demon Cop. He never made another movie, and he’s probably bagging groceries somewhere now, but we all should be in awe of the factl that, at one point, he had the decidedly poor judgment to chase his dream and make this lower-than-lower-than-low-grade straight-to-VHS Maniac Cop cash-in quickie, because it’s really quite unlike anything else you’ll ever see.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that it’s good — you know that. Nor does it mean it’s “so bad it’s good,” a la the cinematic works of Ed Wood, Ron Ormond, Coleman Francis, or — I dunno — Steven Spielberg. Sorry, our guy Rocco lacks the earnestness and tunnel vision of these blind-to-their-own-weaknesses auteurs. Simply put,  he had to know he was churning out absolute crap here, there’s just no other way of looking at this thing. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t create a piece of must-see viewing here (actually, you could fairly call it a “piece of” many other things, as well) — or,  at least, he did  if you’re either brave, bored, or reckless enough to be willing to gamble your  perception of reality itself  all for under 90 minutes of “entertainment” that is, in all honesty, anything but.

By this point you’re probably quite confused, as well you should be, but trust me when I say anything I write here won’t be nearly as baffling as is Demon Cop itself. You or I — with no experience, no money, no equipment, and no fucking clue — could hit the streets with a camera tomorrow and come up with something better than this. And therein lies this film’s mystifying power.

A slumming Cameron Mitchell turns up as a psychiatrist of some sort at the outset (and again at the end, but by then, well — just keep reading), apparently relating a “true-life case” of one of his patients, a cop who suffered from a rare blood disorder that turned him into a vaguely lycanthropic creature with a thirst for human blood. He’s talking, needless to say, about Karega himself, the titular Demon Cop this story’s ostensibly about. He’s generally offing slimeball “gang- banger” types, but the Colorado Springs PD want to catch him anyway even though some of their more hard-assed members — and many in the community at large — feel he’s doing folks a favor. There’s a quack scientist everybody ignores (of course) who’s trying to convince humankind at large about the dangers of this rare blood disorder he’s discovered that has turned a former cop into a vaguely lycanthropic creature that might just  exhibit a propensity for killing slimeball “gang- banger” types, but — oh, shit, I’m repeating myself already. And quite a bit, at that.

Notice, though, I did give myself a bit of an “out” when it came to that wretchedly-worded (on purpose, your honor, I swear it!) plot recap — I said this movie was really only ostensibly about the story it presented. And if you’re watching Demon Cop for its dramatic value, trust me — you’re making a huge mistake. Not just because it has none, but because even if it did , that’s not where the real action is to be found here. Not that it has any action. Not that — oh, dear God, I really am hopelessly out of my depth here already, aren’t I?

In any case, friends what I think I’m trying to say is that this is a flick that you should be watching solely for its naked-for-all-to-see incompetence. Actors flub their lines with alarming regularity and keep going. Edits that make no logical sense become a matter of course. Poor camera angles are elevated to an accidental art form. Laugh-out-loud special makeup and creature effects (supposedly from the “creators” of Terminator 2 and Leviathan — yeah, right!) lurk around every corner, while impenetrably lousy lighting does its best to hide all the proceedings from view. Dialogue that would earn an “F” on a third-grade creative writing assignment assaults your eardrums and brain cells. And then, about an hour in, you slowly begin to realize something truly extraordinary —

Don’t ask me how it happens. Definitely don’t ask me why. Shit, don’t ask me anything at this point, because I’ve seen this thing twice and am therefore no longer qualified to comment on any subject whatsoever. What the hell am I on about here? Just this, dear readers — Demon Cop has the power to make you a dumber human being simply for subjecting yourself to it (that’s the “extraordinary” thing I was talking about — whoops, you probably had that figured out already, I shouldn’t assume that everyone — or even anyone — reading this review is nearly as stupid as I am at this point).

Call that what you will — unintentional genius? Nah. There’s nothing within even remote sniffing distance of “genius” going on here. The universe exacting karmic revenge on those lacking the good sense to turn this thing off within the first ten minutes? Possibly — we certainly deserve to be punished on some level. Occult power? Absolutely — Demon Cop is a full frontal assault on all things competent, and a relentless one at that, and that definitely qualifies it as a magickal working of some sort in my book.

So let’s go with that, shall we? Let’s give Karega and producer Hal Miles the credit (such as it is) they’ve earned — this is a singular piece of rancid celluloid garbage so profound that it taps into the very forces of creation itself and causes them to revolt against our entire species in disgust. After all, no life form capable of creating the likes of Demon Cop can survive for long — nor, frankly, does it (and by “it” I mean “we”) deserve to. The die has been cast. We’ve gone too fucking far. We’re doomed. And it’s all Rocco Karega’s fault.

Fortunately, no other members of our fallen lot have ever been foolish enough to release Demon Cop on DVD, apart from a Region 2 bootleg that’s floating around out there somewhere. Some careless souls, however, have uploaded it on various locations around the internet. I’ll let you figure out exactly where for yourself, since I have no desire to be an accomplice in your spiritual and mental demise. Just know that if and when you do find it, you’ll never be the same. You’ll have crossed a threshold you immediately know, in your heart, you never should have. If you still possess any faith in your fellow man, please — I beg you! — leave this thing alone. Quit reading my shell-shocked ramblings right now and forget you ever heard about Demon Cop.  But if you absolutely must play with fire — if you’re willing to play a kind of warped Russian roulette where your very sanity is at stake  — well, I’ll see you, here, on the other side of madness.

“Psycho Cop” Pulls You Over — And Reels You In

There’s a question that’s been tugging at the back of my mind lately (and, I hope, yours too) — just who the hell are they, anyway?

You know who I’m talking about — the shadowy, faceless, nameless cabal who issue pronouncements from on high intended to influence the average person’s view of, well, just about everything : they say this is a good place to eat; they feel that so-and-so’s last book was better than his new one ; they don’t care much for some artist’s latest exhibit or installation; they can’t stop talking about Mad Men (even though nobody you talk to actually seems to watch it).

Yessir, whoever they are, they  seem to have an opinion on everything. As if that weren’t bad enough, though, they also seem to have obtained a pretty solid hold on the levers of political and economic decision-making : they say that tax cuts for the rich will stimulate the economy; they believe that throwing Wall Street crooks in jail where they belong will dampen our so-called “recovery”; they tell us that we need to compromise our civil liberties in order to fight the so-called “war on terrorism” ; they have decided that the “high” salaries of teachers, cops, firefighters, and public works employees are the cause of state budget shortfalls.

But hey — maybe I’m being too hard on them. After all, maybe they deserve all this power and authority, because, as it turns out, they also have a direct pipeline into the very mysteries of creation and the universe itself, from the most momentous to the most mundane : they tell us there’s an invisible God who loves us (as long as we do what he says); they say he created everything in just six short days (of course, they don’t tell us which kind of “days” they’re talking about here — a day on Mars is different to a day on Mercury is different to a day on Neptune is different to a day on Earth); they promise us that we’ll live forever — after we’re dead (go figure that one out); they say it’s going to rain on Thursday.

No doubt about it, whoever they  are they’ve done their homework. Maybe we don’t really have much reason to be suspicious of them, even if we have no idea who they are.

The thing is, though — what if they’re wrong?

Case in point : writer/director Wallace Potts’ 1989 straight-to-video efforts Psycho Cop. Whoever they are, they don’t seem to like this one very much. They  say it’s a low-rent Maniac Cop rip-off with hammy acting, a predictable, story, no intelligence, and that it’s loaded with obvious, sophomoric humor.

Okay, so they’re right about all that. But then they go and tell us that means it’s a bad film. And that, my friends, is the point at which we need to tell them to fuck right off, because Psycho Cop is some seriously awesome shit.

Bobby Ray Shafer (or Robert R. Shafer, as he bills himself in his more recent, supposedly “respectable” work) plays Office Joe Vickers, a Satan-worshipping, homicidal nutjob who just so happens to be a duly-sworn officer of the law in some po-dunk country town. Six supposed teenagers, played by “actors” you’ve never heard of, are heading out to the sticks to booze it up and get laid. The kids cross paths with Vickers and he proceeds to torture, humiliate, and kill them all in turn, often snapping groaningly-bad one-liners along the way, such as when he rips one of the youthful good-timers’ hearts out and says “have a heart.”

This may not sound like much — and they will certainly concur with that — but I’m here to tell you that it’s a blast, and it’s all down to Shafer quite obviously having the time of his life from word “go” to word “stop.” Sometimes a movie doesn’t really need much more than a star giving it his or her all to elevate it far beyond what its means would suggest are possible — and yeah, okay, maybe that’s all Psycho Cop really has going for it — but trust me, if you think that Z-grade films come any better than this, well — maybe you’re one of them. The rest of us? We’re  just out for a good time, kinda like Shafer probably was here, and his infectious performance pretty much guarantees that our simple desires will be fulfilled.

Just to spite us, though, they have seen to it that Psycho Cop has yet to receive even a bare-bones DVD release, so if you want to see it, you’ve either gotta hunt down a tattered old VHS copy, or find it online somewhere.Fortunately, a good number of anti-authoritarian souls have, indeed, posted it for public consumption on various locales around the web, but hey — I  had better leave it to you to find out exactly where, since I  don’t want to get into trouble with them. Just rest assured that finding it takes a very minimal amount of effort, and you’ll be glad you did.

Still, for all the trouble they’ve  gone to in terms of bad-mouthing this flick, maybe they’re finally coming around to our way of thinking, at least after a fashion : a few days ago,   a bunch of real-life Psycho Cops in the Boston area were kicking in doors, holding innocent people at gunpoint, rifling through homes, and destroying people’s property — all to find some 19-year-old kid they think might be the same one seen in some half-assed, grainy surveillance video footage.  Once the police (“supported” by a military that’s not supposed to be operating on domestic soil) found him, slowly bleeding to death in some boat in a family’s backyard, it was decided that it would be too much effort to even bother to take five seconds to read him his rights — and they  are telling us these cops are heroes.

Nick Millard Round-Up : “Death Nurse 2″

Not content to rest on his laurels after the “success” of 1987′s SOV non-classic Death Nurse, our good buddy Nick Millard was back the very next year to grace our unworthy screens with Death Nurse 2, and while this, as you’d expect, doesn’t even rise to the level of being a “bad” movie in any conventional definition of the term, never mind a “good” one, it does showcase Millard’s uncanny ability to wring a very little something out of absolutely less than nothing perhaps more than any other of his other productions, which is really saying something if you’ve seen either the first DN flick and/or Criminally Insane 2. I mean, consider the pickle ol’ Nick had left himself in — he  only cast his friends and family in his movies since he either couldn’t or didn’t want to actually pay anybody, yet psycho nurse Edith Mortley (Priscilla Alden) had killed everybody except her brother and the cop who shows up at the end in her first go-round as the titular Death Nurse. What’s a no-budget auteur to do, I ask you?

Well, friends, never underestimate the penny-pinching genius of Mr. Millard (or should I say Philips, since he’s working under the “Nick Philips” pseudonym here yet again because he’s recycled the opening credits sequence from the first Criminally Insane flick yet again). He just does what any sixth-grader with a super-8 camera or consumer-grade camcorder would do in his situation — he puts a hat on his wife and gets a new hairstyle for his mom, and presto! They’re both back in the sequel as brand-new characters! And since he covered his face up the whole time he was on screen himself in the original Death Nurse, he can play another character as well and no one’ll be any the wiser. So I have to ask you, my friends — isn’t DN2 worth seeing for the sake of these less-than-convincing switcheroos alone?

If you answered that last question with an “of course it is,” then I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that you’re still here reading this, and if your response was “are you kidding? I’m outta here!,” then you’re probably not, so it’s safe to assume at this point that I’ve successfully thinned out my blog “audience” to Millard die-hards only and I can now get down to the business of preaching to an admittedly damn small choir. Our story this time around picks up exactly where the first Death Nurse left off, with a plainclothes detective played by Millard’s step-dad stumbling across — something (we assume it’s Edith’s man-eating rats, but we’re never actually shown this for a fact) in the Shady Palms Clinic’s garage and moving in to bust up the Mortley siblings’ cozy little kill-the-patients-and-keep-collecting-their-Medicare-checks scheme. He’s immediately met at the door by the portly (okay, rotund) figure of the Death Nurse herself wielding a knife, some fake-ass blood gushes out of him, and that’s one less pesky cop to worry about.

Enter one John Sawyer, the new guy down at the county social services office who’s taken the place of Millard’s mom and steers some new clients Gordon (again played by Albert Eskinazi, not that he’s around much this time, about which more in a moment) and Edith’s way, most notably a homeless “bag lady” type named “Brownie” (Millard’s wife Irmi, who played the alcoholic patient last time around and plays an alcoholic patient this time around, as well, albeit in a hat and grungy clothes) and, later, a ranting right-wing lunatic who goes by the name of Mischa (I don’t know the actor’s name since it’s not in the fucking credits !!! — the same goes for the guy playing Sawyer, too, by the way). Edith ends up killing ‘em both and feeding them to her stock-footage rats, of course, but it’s worth noting that Mischa’s death is especially entertaining because he takes a meat cleaver to the neck right after screaming “capitalism is goooooooood!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” at the top of his lungs. Incidentally, when we first meet Mischa we’re informed that he opposes the income tax and that he believes America is becoming a socialist hellhole , so he’s kind of a prototypical Tea Partier in that respect. Nick Millard, you were 20 years ahead of your time with this guy.

Apart from that, not too much of interest happens during the barely-60 minutes that Death Nurse 2 plays out before our undeserving eyes, and that’s really the beauty of it, of course. Priscilla/Edith sleeps on the couch and has flashbacks and/or dreams about the murders in Criminally  Insane and Satan’s Black Wedding, thus ensuring that once again we get that totally incongruous break (and it’s most definitely a break — Millard once again just inserts the old footage using no sort of “dissolving” technique whatsoever) from videotape to film and back again and that over a quarter of this movie is nothing but pure, unadulterated run-time padding. We learn explicitly (it was only hinted at last time) that Gordon (who’s laid up in bed “injured”  for most of this movie, giving Millard the chance to use the exact same shot of him over and over again) and Edith aren’t real practitioners of medicine at all but med school and nurse’s training dropouts, respectively, and that Edith is most definitely feeding rat meat to the patients in her care after the rats have done their duty and gobbled up the evidence of previous, and now deceased, Shady Palms “guests” (again, this was only vaguely alluded to in the original). About the only “surprise” that transpires is when Millard’s mother, Frances, pops back up as the identical twin sister  of the Faith Chandler character who was murdered in the previous Death Nurse flick  (spoting that different hairstyle I mentioned earlier to prevent too much confusion, as if there would be any — oh, and her name here’s Hope, so all that’s missing is Charity) — insert a couple minutes’ worth of “flashback” footage  re-showing sis number one’s demise — and is determined to get to the bottom of her sibling’s untimely disappearance. She conducts a half-assed stakeout senior-citizen style and is, of course, eventually murdered for her troubles.

The entire Mortley family enterprise is brought to a screeching halt, though, when one detective Gallagher (Millard himself) shows up at the door with a search warrant and informs Edith that a couple of her beloved pet rats escaped from the garage of Nick’s Pacifica, California condo — I mean, Shady Palms Clinic — and were dragging human remains of some sort with them. Gordon stays upstairs in bed, where he’s spent more or less the rest of the movie, and Edith calmly plops down on the couch and nonchalantly awaits her fate. So basically it ends just like the first Death Nurse did, only this time our murder-for-cash protagonists are in separate rooms rather than sitting next to each other on the same sofa. You’ve gotta appreciate the subtle little differences to fully grasp the awesomeness that is Death Nurse 2, friends (and for the time being you’ve gotta have a VCR, as well, since this isn’t available on DVD yet — I’m hoping Jesus Teran over at Slasher Video will change that sometime in the not-too-distant future, but for now it’s the Video City Productions VHS tape or bust).

We all know that there really is nothing new under the sun, but few movies drive that point home as relentlessly as Death Nurse 2. It might have been made a full year down the road after the first one, but it feels for all the world like it was shot the very next day — hell, maybe even later the same day. And I guess that’s what I love most about it. This is quite likely the most blatant, no-bones-about-it, complete waste of time every put together by anyone for any reason, yet it never manages to be outright boring even though any rational analysis dictates that it certainly should be. Granted, the story isn’t at all involving, the “acting” is atrocious (even the usually-reliable-in-her-own-singular-way Alden seems to be sleepwalking through this one), the blood and gore are laughably amateurish in the extreme, and the very notion “production values” is flat-out alien to the proceedings. But that’s not why you watch movies from Nick Millard’s late-80s SOV period. No, you watch them for one reason and one reason alone — to see just how deeply into his bag of tricks he can reach in his quest to fill up 60 minutes of Sony Betacam tape with only his wife, his mom, his stepdad, and a couple of friends to help him out.

You might call that a pointless exercise,  but I call it a display of sheer, bloody-minded determination. Mr. Millard, again, I salute you.

 

“Breeders” Marks A Movie Landmark — But So What?

"Breeders" Movie Poster

Reviewing Vice Squad yesterday, I got to thinking about the straight-to-VHS  boom of the mid-80s to late-90s, and the straight-to-DVD industry that of course still persists today, given that the main baddie of that film was portrayed by the one and only Wings Hauser, who absolutely made his living from that point on in direct-to-VHS B-movies, and your inquiring host simply had to find out — what was the first film to be released exclusively on VHS?

It wasn’t an easy thing to find out (and I should make it clear that I’m talking exclusively about movies shot on film here, so the early-years shot-on-video horror “classics” don’t count in this case), and in fact when it comes to haggling over actual release dates and what have you, the jury’s still out on what came first. One thing’s for sure, though — the first movie made specifically for the direct-to-video market, as opposed to films that were made with the intention of being released theatrically only to have those hopes dashed when the DTV boom started was writer-director Tim Kincaid (Bad Girls Dormitory, Riot on 42nd Street)‘s 1986 low-rent sorta-Alien-knockoff sci-fi shlockfest Breeders. In fact, one of the advertising taglines that appeared on the original Breeders VHS box, and in related in-store promos, was “A World Premiere Right In Your Living Room!” Hope you remembered to roll out the red carpet and rent a spotlight.

All in all, Breeders isn’t too bad for what it is — it’s got that cheesy-fun sorta feel to it that so many of the movies we cover here do. And maybe it’s just the New York locations combined with the goofy-ass subject matter, but the whole thing kind of feels like a seriously under-budgeted Larry Cohen production (not that Cohen’s films ever had much of a budget themselves, but they were positively lavish spending sprees compared to this thing). There’s lots of wooden-as-a 2×4 acting, a plethora of less-than-attractive women getting totally naked, some pretty effective, all things considered, creature effects, tons of perfectly serviceable gore, and the story itself is simple yet solid. Nothing much to bitch about, then, right? Aside from the fact that it would be better if the chicks taking off their clothes were actually, you know, hot. But seasoned exploitation veterans know that can be a asking for a bit much sometimes.

We start with a couple of scenes of damsels in distress who are attacked by what appear to be perfectly normal human beings, until slimy tendrils wrap around them, and the screaming starts. Pretty standard Mars Needs Women-type stuff. Later on they start turning up at the hospital in pretty bad shape and suffering from selective amnesia when it comes to — ummm — the “events” in question themselves.

Not to worry, though, Dr. Gamble Price (Teresa Farley, the best-looking woman in the picture by far — but don’t get your hopes up, she remains fully clothed throughout — and check out her ’80s bigger-than-big hair) and police detective Dale Andriotti (Lance Lewman) are on the case. Their ace medical examinations soon discover a few interesting pieces of information —

1) The women who have been raped were all virgins prior to — you know;

2) They’ve all  had a strange black substance — ummm — deposited inside them;

and 3) They’ve all been covered in a fine reddish-brown dust that turns out to be — get this — brick dust, and not just any old brick dust at that — we’re talking about some very specific brick dust, the kind found in the bricks that were used in the construction of the city’s sewer systems over a century earlier, only they ran out of the those bricks and switched to another kind.

Now, when the movie you’re making is only an hour and 17 minutes long and at least half that run time is dedicated to various scenes of helpless young virgins being stalked and attacked in the middle of the night, your investigators are going to come to some very quick conclusions, and in this case that means that their first working hypothesis turns out to be correct — namely that alien creatures are living in the sewers and coming up to the surface to take over “host” human bodies and then attack and impregnate human females in order to propagate their species. Little questions like, you know, why they don;t just fuck the opposite-sexed members of their own kind are best not dwelled on for too long.

The trouble really starts, though, when the women who are hospitalized after being alien-raped start to wake up, and head for the old sewer tunnels themselves! Gotta keep things moving, right, and the best way to do that is to have our doctor-and-detective crack investigation team simply follow them and take on the aliens face -to-gross-face.

I've seen the future, and it's ugly

Since you can pretty well guess how things are going to play out here, or at least you  damn well should be able to, I’ll get back to the overall “vibe” of the film itself here for a minute : all dialogue in Breeders is essentially delivered in a flat, unemotive monotone,  it’s nearly all disarmingly matter-of-fact, and the acting ability of each and every cast member is — ummm — limited, to put it kindly. We’re pretty much firmly in “so-bad-it’s-good” territory here. The only thing Kincaid and his cohorts seem to have actively given a shit about is coming up with decently-executed creatures, and decently executed gore, given the ultra-tight budget they had to work with, and they certainly did a competent enough job with that.

What’s more than just a bit jarring, though, is to see this type of competent (I won’t go so far as to actually call it good, we’ll just leave it at good enough) effects work sandwiched into such a thoroughly incompetent-in-all-other-respects film. But hey, give them credit for laser-like focus on what really mattered, I guess.

The ultra-’80s hairstyles, clothes, computers and all that cement the “ambiance,” for lack of a better term, and as a super-cheap period piece, Breeders certainly works. It’s not terribly memorable in any respect, and some of the more direct Alien knock-offs (I’m thinking specifically here of Creature and Contamination)  were better, but it’s a solidly entertaining enough waste of barely over an hour of your life.

Still, you’d think that, given how ubiquitous the whole DTV industry became, that it would have started off with some a little bit more — I dunno — monumental, I guess, than this — wouldn’t you?

Hell, maybe not.

"Breeders" DVD from MGM

For whatever reason, MGM ended up with the distribution rights to Breeders here in the DVD age, and have released it in a very apropos bare-bones package. The picture is presented full-frame and I doubt it’s even been remastered, although it looks more or less just fine. The same fgoes for the sound — probably in no way touched up for DVD, but it’s perfectly serviceable enough. The only extra is the inclusion of the (non-theatrical) trailer.

While none of the actors in this flick went on to do much of anything, writer-director Tim Kincaid, who  started off his career as an actor, appearing in the blaxploitation quasi-historical flick Quadroon before quickly moving behind the camera and helming the aforementioned Bad Girls Dormitory and Riot on 42nd Street (which is awesome, by the way), also directed a couple of other straight-to-VHS sci-fi cheapies (Mutant Hunt and Robot Holocaust, if you absolutely must know).

Then his resume went strangely blank for just over a decade until he turned up again under the pseudonym of “Joe Gage,” directing a slew of gay porno flicks (and even occsionally starring in them). Rather ironic, I suppose, for a guy who made a movie called Breeders, but hey, whatever pays the rent. I guess Hollywood wasn’t exactly banging down his door in the wake of Breeders - – - even if it is a slice of movie history.

Great News For Grindhouse Fans : Volume Two Of Robin Bougie’s “Cinema Sewer” Is Here!

Cover for Volume Two of Robin Bougie's "Cinema Sewer" from FAB Press

Okay, in fairness this book came out in August, but I just got around to finally finishing it and can safely say that Volume Two of Robin Bougie’s “Cinema Sewer,” billed (quite correctly, as it turns out) as “The Adults Only Guide To History’s Sickest and Sexiest Movies,”  from FAB Press, is even better than the first and is the must-have movie book of 2009.

As with the first volume, this is a collection of stuff largely reprinted from Mr. Bougie’s magazine of the same name (this new collection highlighting work from more recent issues within the past couple of years), with some important new material included for good measure, and is the same great combination of semi-pro film history criticism and underground cartooning that made the previous book such a goddamn joy to read.

Topics and films covered this time around include ultra-sleazy 70s porn staple “A Climax of Blue Power,”  second-rate biker flick “Chrome and Hot Leather,” John Carpenter’s all-time horror classic “The Thing,” the deservedly notorious “Emanuelle in America,” a history of  the rather more unbelievable episodes of TV’s “Diff’rent Strokes,” including the two-part story “The Bicycle Man” featuring Gordon Jump as a pedophile after Arnold and Dudley, a look at one-of-a-kind cable access show “Industrial Television,” a detailed examination of the history of MST3K favorite “Manos : The Hands of Fate,” a solid overview of the career of the one and only John Holmes and a great review of  the criminally underappreciated Wonderland Murders-centered flick “Wonderland” starring Val Kilmer as Johnny Wadd himself, and waaaaayyy too much more to mention.

Whether your interests lie in classic grindhouse and exploitation B-movie fare,  overlooked Hollywood gems, great horror, old-school, shot-on-film-like-it-should-be pornography, 1980s teen sex flicks, extreme modern porn, underground alternative cinema, weird TV, or any combination thereof, you’ll find hours of reading that’s right up your alley in this splendidly sordid collection.

Get it — now! That’s an order!

Not that I’ve got the right to order you around or anything.