John Shelton's blog

The Cold War was the war that just kept on giving. The space race, Yakov Smirnoff, Invasion U.S.A.; none of these would exist without the paranoia and constant fear that with the press of a button the world would be reduced to a cinder and we'd all start wearing clothes made out of used tires and spikes, driving sweet tricked-out dune buggies and fighting in a gladiator ring for the pleasure of Tina Turner.

You know that old saying "never judge a book by its cover"? Well, I do it all the time. Hell, I judge people by the covers of the books they're reading. Sometimes, though, a publisher tries to cash in on a trend by slapping a misleading cover on a book and trying to draw in the wrong crowd. This phenomenon is certainly not limited to books - a while back there were reports of people walking out of Sweeney Todd in droves because the trailer never really made it clear that Johnny Depp was going to be singing all through it.

Reader Farkwit McFakename writes:

Dear John,

Richard Stanley, the South African director of cult favorites Hardware and Dust Devil, is slowly tunneling his way out of the movie jail he's been trapped in for over a decade after clashes with Val Kilmer led to him being fired four days into the shoot of the 1996 version of The Island of Dr. Moreau.

This is a very cool idea done incredibly well. It must have taken a ton of work and I'm especially amazed that even as the video kept going on and on the artist continued to come up with new ways to interact with the environment. Somehow the artwork reminds me of both Bill Plympton and Keith Haring. Excellent stuff.

In Apocalypse Mixtape we search out songs with themes that fit into the horror genre.

On today's very special episode of Apocalypse Mixtape, instead of single songs, we're going to look at some album-length horror based music.

Album: Fantomas - The Director's Cut
Song: Rosemary's Baby

John Phillip Law, the tall, steel-eyed star of numerous Italian sci-fi and action films, passed away this week at the age of 70. Law is probably best known for his role as Pygar, the blind angel love interest of Jane Fonda in "Barbarella", but cult film/Beastie Boys/MST3K fans will recognize him as the star of Mario Bava's psychedelic comic book film "Danger: Diabolik". Law also starred opposite Lee Van Cleef in the classic spaghetti western "Death Rides a Horse", a movie Quentin Tarantino liberally sto... er, borrowed from when making "Kill Bill".

This one's been around for a while, but it's still pretty awesome. It's weird to me that these guys have actual physical bodies and aren't just disembodied voices imprisoned by the studios in some sort of Lemarchand box, eternally damned to narrate the trailer for every movie Michael Bay shits outs.

Yep, guess so.

Man, I love me some Phantasm. I think a big part of my love for weird movies comes as a direct result of having my 10-year-old brain blown by Phantasm back in the 80s. At the end of that movie I didn't know what the hell I'd just seen but I knew I loved it and to this day I have a pretty high, possibly Phantasm-induced tolerance for movies that don't make a bit of narrative sense but are thick on the style and atmosphere.