Mocata's Den of Horror

If you grew up in the '80s as I did, Freddy Krueger is bound to be as recognizable to you as the Trix rabbit, or, more appropriately, Count Chocula.  Most people automatically think of Freddy's glove and his wisecracks, but there was more to the A Nightmare on Elm Street movies.  One major aspect that is memorable, although still somewhat overlooked, is the music.  The scores for these movies were excellent (some more than others, of course).  Varèse Sarabande put together a beautiful package for those of us who love the music as well as the movies. This is a collection of the scores for each movie, from Wes Craven's classic original film to the misguided Freddy Vs. Jason .  Each CD includes the original soundtrack album, then additional material not included on those original releases.  There is a whole hell of a lot of music included in this box, with the CDs ranging from about 55 minutes to around 75. Varèse Sarabande really did a wonderful job with ...

2017 has been quite a year for death metal, particularly older death metal bands.  To date, this year has seen new releases from Immolation, Incantation, Obituary, Broken Hope, Origin, Suffocation, and others, with upcoming releases from Cannibal Corpse and Morbid Angel.  And these haven't just been new releases, but good ones, too.  Time will tell for the Cannibal Corpse and Morbid Angel releases, as those are due out in November and December, respectively. One of the most recent of this batch of death metal is the newest release from one of my favorite death/grind bands, Exhumed, entitled Death Revenge. Death Revenge LP with lyric sheet/poster and Death Revenge CD    Exhumed has been around for quite a long time at this point, starting its career with demos and multiple split releases before moving into full-length releases with the now-classic Gore Metal in 1998.  This was followed up by the superb Slaughtercult, then the more mature and melod...

It has now been a decade since the Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino double feature, Grindhouse , hit theaters.  Despite the fact that it did not perform as well as expected at the box office, I still believe, to this day, that this was one of the best movie-going experiences in my lifetime.  For me, personally, most movies don't seem to warrant going to the theater these days.  I think it is a combination of modern home viewing technology and the movies that are made today.  There are plenty of good movies that come out today, but they don't grab my attention quite the way movies used to and are on DVD and Blu-Ray just a few short months later, playing theaters for just a few brief weeks, so there is only a small window to go see them in the theaters now. With Grindhouse , it was different.  This was something I waited for and looked forward to for some time before the release.  It was one that I knew would be best to see in the theater.  This ...

Okay, so this isn't exactly horror, but it certainly has an old exploitation cinema appeal to it, which I love.  I am talking about the 1989 film adaptation of the Marvel Comics character, The Punisher, featuring Dolph Lundgren in the title role.  This movie was made by New World Pictures in Australia, although it still takes place in the U.S.  Due to the financial situation with the studio at the time, it was not released theatrically in the U.S. (although it was in much of the rest of the world), but instead was released straight-to-video in 1991 or so. I remember reading some pretty negative reactions to this movie in the letters section of some Punisher comics back in those days, which I never really understood.  Sure, it isn't exactly super faithful to the source material, but I think the basic idea is still intact and let's be honest, having Castle running around in the same outfit he wears in the comics would have looked really kooky, although the fact that ...

My two most recent Blu Ray purchases just arrived in the mail a couple days ago:  from Vinegar Syndrome, there is Count Dracula's Great Love, directed by Javier Aguirre and starring the late-great Paul Naschy.  And then, from Severin, the Italian madness known as Burial Ground , from director Andrea Bianchi. Paul Naschy is most remembered for his Hombre Lobo movies, playing the ever-doomed Waldemar Daninsky, but he made so many movies in his life that it is doing the man a disservice to overlook his other roles, such as Alaric de Marnac in one of my personal favorite Naschy movies, Horror Rises from the Tomb, Gotho (aka the Hunchback) of Hunchback of the Morgue (which deserves a good Blu Ray release as well), and, of course, Count Dracula himself from Count Dracula's Great Love . Naschy was heavily influenced by the classics of the golden age of horror and it shows in this movie, from the moody sets and locations to the look of Dracula.  Naschy took thes...

Back in the 20th century, primarily the first half, there were various magazines known as pulp magazines.  They were predominately short fiction-based (although there were also some longer stories that would be serialized over multiple issues) and got the pulp name from the cheap, pulpy (and highly acidic) paper they were printed on and more or less replaced the penny dreadful of the 19th century.  These magazines featured fiction in genres that are often snubbed by many: crime, science fiction, fantasy, and, of course, horror. One of the most important and well-known of the pulp magazines is Weird Tales .  This magazine featured the first publications of numerous now-classic stories by the likes of Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, and H. P. Lovecraft in addition to some quality material from now-lesser-known writers such as Seabury Quinn, Nictzin Dyalhis, and many others. Weird Tales originally ran from 1923 until 1954, but has since been revived ...

Back in the 1950s, horror comics were quite popular, with numerous titles from various publishers, all ranging in quality, of course, popping up at newsstands.  However, after some concern from some adults (parents always seem to need something to point to as the thing corrupting their children's minds-- in my day it was Garbage Pail Kids ), along came something called the Comic Books Code which basically killed the horror comic.  Sort of. EC, publisher of the top titles of horror and crime comics in those days, attempted to continue publishing its horror and crime titles, just without the seal of approval.  Apparently, sellers would return the comics to the publisher unsold.  EC soon got out of the horror comic game. There was, however, a loophole it seems.  The code only applied to regular-sized comic books.  If you had a larger format comic book, one the size of a regular magazine, then the code no longer applied, as it was now considered a magazine ...