Schlock-Optic Donald Guarisco Schlock-Optic Donald Guarisco

TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD: A Sacred Knight Of Spanish Terror

If you ask a Euro-horror fanatic about the key titles of Spanish horror cinema, the Blind Dead film series will inevitably be mentioned. This quartet of films directed by talented journeyman Amando De Ossorio rank up there with the work of Paul Naschy and Jesus Franco, spinning out a fascinating mythology connected to Spain's history and using their distinctive ghostly villains, the Knights Templar, as a vehicle for commentary on the real-lifes horrors of Spanish life under the reign of General Franco.

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Donald Guarisco Donald Guarisco

QUICK SCHLOCK: BOLLYWOOD HORROR COLLECTION

Those DVD's are long out of print and go for a pretty penny now but thankfully Mondo Macabro has revived five of the six titles (*) they released in that series via a blu-ray box set also entitled Bollywood Horror Collection. All but one of the titles in this box has gotten a fresh HD transfer and there are plentiful new extras for this set, including exclusive interviews on each disc plus an epic squarebound booklet with an in-depth essay on the history of Indian horror filmmaking.

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Schlock-Optic Donald Guarisco Schlock-Optic Donald Guarisco

Digi-Schlock: TENEBRAE (Synapse UHD/Blu-Ray Standard Edition)

Back in 2016, Synapse released a blu-ray of Tenebrae in deluxe and standard editions that was impressive. More recently, they've taken this Dario Argento favorite into the ultra high definition realm and created a version that offers impressive upgrades both in transfer quality and in terms of bonus features, collecting a bevy of material from multiple versions to create a monster of a set that will tantalize the director's fans.

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Donald Guarisco Donald Guarisco

THE HAUNTED SAMURAI: Slashing Into The Seventies

It boasts a time-honored sense of discipline in its filmmaking, bringing in a rather complex plot in at just 83 minutes and setting it against a historical setting with a mixture of villages and towns a la the Zatoichi movies. However, the violence is a few notches more aggressive than what you'd see in Zatoichi film, including bursts of arterial spray that act as an exclamation point at the end of a sword duel and the occasional shock like a severed limb or a bit of eye trauma. There's also a memorable ninja trap for the hero where he is attacked by a squad of topless female ninjas posing as fishing girls.

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Schlock-Optic Donald Guarisco Schlock-Optic Donald Guarisco

BLACK CIRCLE: High-Concept Horror In An Indie Vein

The resulting film evokes a lot of genre touchstones that fans of '70s/'80s horror will love - Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, scientific-minded ghost stories like The Haunting and Hell House, a very distinct influence of David Cronenberg circa The Brood and Scanners - yet it never resorts to simple imitation of those influences. Instead, it mixes them in interesting ways to come up with a fresh hybrid.

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Schlock-U-Ments Donald Guarisco Schlock-U-Ments Donald Guarisco

CELLULOID WARS: The Hidden Costs Of Low-Budget Filmmaking

…in Celluloid Wars, Allan Holzman's gripping autobiographical account of his time as the editor of Battle Beyond The Stars, we learn how certain doom was narrowly avoided for both the film and himself at several points along the way. Its creation was a perilous, often grueling journey for everyone involved and Celluloid Wars puts all the riveting details on the page.

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Schlock-Optic Donald Guarisco Schlock-Optic Donald Guarisco

Digi-Schlock: INVALUABLE (Synapse Blu-Ray)

Nearly a decade after its production, Invaluable has finally made it to home video courtesy of Synapse Films in a blu-ray special edition. To their credit, they've put together a really impressive package for the fans that delivers an entire additional feature-length documentary as well as scads of other extras. Read on for all the Deadite-delighting details...

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Schlock-Optic Donald Guarisco Schlock-Optic Donald Guarisco

INVALUABLE: The Joys And Sorrows Of The Monster Kid Life

All of those wild special effects were largely the work of one Tom Sullivan: he never became a household name like Tom Savini or Dick Smith but his strange wizardry lives on with gorehounds. He's become a regular on the horror convention circuit, where Deadites of all ages give him a hero's welcome every time. His story is told in Invaluable: The True Story Of An Epic Artist and the result covers his career in-depth as well as providing insight into Sam Raimi, Bruce Campbell and their group of friends/collaborators from a novel angle.

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Schlock-U-Ments Donald Guarisco Schlock-U-Ments Donald Guarisco

CELLULOID WARS 2: Dispatches From The Belly Of The B-Movie Beast

The bulk of the book is taken from journals that Holzman meticulously kept all the way from pre-production through the final phase of editing. Those entries make an eye-opening read for b-movie buffs: there's a big difference between having a theoretical understanding that exploitation filmmaking is a struggle and actually seeing how the day-to-day grind of it plays out.

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Donald Guarisco Donald Guarisco

CATALOG CRAWL: THE STRAWBS, Part 5 (1978-1979)

The Strawbs' original era drew to a close alongside the end of the '70s. They managed to consistently produce inspired material despite an array of personnel changes, not to mention a few record label changes and all the music biz politics that come with record labels. Somehow, Dave Cousins managed to keep the band going as both a recording and touring outfit, providing great songs and a sense of creative focus that sustained the group until the challenges of management and finances became insurmountable.

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Schlock-Optic Donald Guarisco Schlock-Optic Donald Guarisco

MCBAIN: A Last Action Hurrah For A True Independent

Simply put, this is the kind of action flick that you'd never see at a theater today, one more concerned with the filmmaker's interests than pleasing a test screening audience and also a film that pulls off some impressive spectacle through analog means. If you're a fan of Glickenhaus' other films, it's a must-watch - and don't be surprised if its 'end of an era' quality makes you feel wistful.

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Schlock-O-Phonic Donald Guarisco Schlock-O-Phonic Donald Guarisco

CATALOG CRAWL: GENESIS, Part 5 (1981-1983)

As Genesis entered the '80s, they stepped confidently into mainstream rock and downplayed most of the progressive rock trappings they had been known for (though they kept a little more prog mindset than diehard genre fans would give them credit for). Duke kickstarted this trend but the three albums covered below in this Catalog Crawl are the ones that completed that changeover.

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Schlock-Wire Donald Guarisco Schlock-Wire Donald Guarisco

Schlock-Wire: Specs For Grindhouse Releasing's 2 Blu-Ray Set Of IMPULSE

Grindhouse Releasing has announced their latest release - and if you love '70s regional horror, it's a real corker. They're releasing Impulse, a colorful, Florida-set psycho killer tale built around a hothouse performance from William Shatner. They're doing a 2000 unit limited run with some unique goodies that fans of this cult favorite will be intrigued by.

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Donald Guarisco Donald Guarisco

CATALOG CRAWL: HUDSON-FORD (1973-1977)

The Hudson-Ford catalog is great fun to explore if your '70s music tastes roam in a variety of directions and this Catalog Crawl is designed to give you an idea of the many winding paths it offers.

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Schlock-O-Phonic Donald Guarisco Schlock-O-Phonic Donald Guarisco

CATALOG CRAWL: GENESIS, Part 4 (1977-1980)

This installment of Catalog Crawl covers the creative regrouping that Genesis did at the end of the '70s through a double-live album that captured the last of the Hackett era and two studio albums that found them reworking their sound in a way that prepared them for a level of international success that they probably couldn't even conceive of…

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