Live NaschyCast at Black Raven Emporium!

In a strange but wonderful turn of events (and I do mean Events) your humble Podcasters are going to be conducting a public Naschy related gig! The proprietors of Nashville's coolest lounge and hippest theater - Logue's Black Raven Emporium - have asked Troy and I to host two nights of screenings in their Cult Fiction Underground film series. Friday January 25th we will introduce HORROR RISES FROM THE TOMB to a stunned Southern crowd and on Saturday the 26th we will do the honors for NIGHT OF THE WEREWOLF. We couldn't be more excited to be bringing these two Spanish Horror classics to unsuspecting Nashville film fans and we hope to sell the place out. We plan to present a little information about the movies each night and maybe even take questions after the screenings to encourage the curious to explore this corner of Euro-Trash a bit more.

If you live in the Middle Tennessee area or can get to Nashville on one of these nights we'd be glad to have you join us for either film. Black Raven serves beer so we promise it will be interesting to be hanging out with the hosts of the NaschyCast while admiring one of Paul Naschy's best movies. A good time should be had by all! 

DJANGO UNCHAINED Italian Poster Art!

Yvette and I caught the new Tarantino film the other night and we both loved it. Yvette actually rated it higher than I did giving it the same 10 out of 10 she gave THE ARTIST last year! It is damned good even if you don't get all the in-jokes that are there for hard-core Spaghetti Western fans. And the re-purposed music used to score the picture is wonderful and brilliantly placed. Why can no one produce this kind of music for the films today? Has our idea of what a movie should sound like changed that much?

NaschyCast #34 - SCHOOL KILLER (2001)

The new NaschyCast is a little late but well worth the wait! We once again venture into the 21st century to check out a film in which Paul was merely an actor for hire in a Spanish movie. By this time in his career he was the Grand Old Man of Spanish horror but that didn't always garner him much respect in his home country. At least the producers of SCHOOL KILLER realized there was great potential in having an iconic horror star play the movie's boogeyman role. Whether that potential was tapped is a matter for much discussion. As usual the podcast veers all over the place as Troy and I run through this funhouse tale of mirrors. We look for Scooby Snacks, attempt to diagram timelines, admire a few interesting ideas and ask pertinent questions that the film may or may not have any desire to answer. Check it out to see what we get up to!

The mailbag section of this episode is very exciting because we have a voicemail from author Stephen Sullivan. He took it upon himself to record his comments as an MP3 and send it off to us. This allows us to almost engage in a dialog with him on NIGHT OF THE WEREWOLF and the Daninsky films as well as a few other topics. As a fiction writer he has more than a few good insights into what can make these beloved pieces of Euro-horror work or not work. Good stuff! If anyone else wants to join the show in this way please feel free to send your MP3s to naschycast@gmail.com and we will gladly respond to your thoughts. You can also reach us over on the NaschyCast Facebook page where fans of the show occasionally post some fun Spanish Horror related things. The show can be downloaded from the link below or is available in iTunes. Enjoy and have a Happy New Year! 

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Buck Rogers pilot film (1979)

I have just finished watching the pilot film for the 1979-1981 BUCK ROGERS show and my feelings are mixed to say the least. This is the first time I've watched it since my childhood and as I feared it did not come off well. Indeed, it came off as overly silly and rather half-assed. Not that I expected to find hidden depths of quality in the film or in the series that it spawned on American TV but I did wonder if it might be better than my dim memories lead me to believe. Even as a kid I knew the show wasn't the best piece of science fiction around but at the time it was one of a very few SF offerings available and in those days you didn't complain. You took any genre morsels that came your way, smiled and asked for more- all the time hoping that the next dish would be taster and have fewer calories.

I suspect I'll eventually watch some of he regular series episodes just for fun and to see if there are any surprises beyond playing spot the guest star. The pilot had Henry Silva as bad guy Kane which means that this is probably the first place I ever saw that scary thespian! I know Roddy McDowell, Vera Miles and Jamie Lee Curtis show up somewhere down the line so maybe that will entice me to watch more. Maybe.

Oh! And one more thing- I was shocked at the credit sequence for the pilot film. I was used to the TV show opening scene and was wholly unprepared for the soft-core bikini-pose-a-rama/make-out session that is presented here. Wowsa! I have no idea what a younger version of myself would have thought of this but as an adult it made me slightly uncomfortable. Go here to check it out on YouTube. 

1982 - Year of Summer Awesome!

I turned fourteen in 1982 and was just becoming a movie fanatic so the stunning films of that year made a major impression on me. I'm not going to say things used to be better than they are now at the multiplex but when you look at these offerings it is hard to think of a year in which more exciting adventure science fiction hit the screen.

In Praise of Quatermass

In the 1950s Nigel Kneale wrote three science fiction stories revolving around his character Professor Bernard Quatermass. They were written as multi-part television plays and when broadcast on the BBC they were so popular that England's Hammer Studio adapted them into films. The first two were paired down by director Val Guest into the SF classics The Quatermass Xperiment(a.k.a. The Creeping Unknown) and Quatermass 2 (a.k.a. Enemy From Space) both of which were huge box office hits at home and in the US. Kneale was unhappy with many things about the Hammer productions, not the least of which was the choice of American Brian Donlevy to play Professor Quatermass. When Hammer finally got around to filming the third Quatermass story in 1967 Kneale was allowed to adapt his own story and luckily the fantastic Andrew Kier was cast as the Professor. All of the Quatermass stories are among the best of intelligent filmed science fiction, weaving scientific theories and speculation into a scenario that seems both plausible and frightening. Kneale creates very recognizably human characters, throws them into outlandish SF plots and manages to make the stories believable. In 1980 Kneale wrote one last Quatermass story for TV that has yet to be transferred to the big screen but with it's extremely downbeat ending I doubt it would survive the process intact. It's a shame because there are few better examples of smart SF then Kneale's clever Quatermass stories.

SANTA CLAUS CONQUERS THE MARTIANS (1964)

For those folks who have never been subjected......... I mean, have never seen this 'classic' Christmas tale here it is on Youtube! The whole thing for free viewing! And that IS the right price!