Hello, perverts! How the fuck are you? Me, I'm wonderful. Just got back from Chicago after seeing Motorhead and Megadeth and my wonderful girlfriends from grad school. It was epic and cold and drunken and amazing and I wish I never had to come back. Except that the snow is not for me. Can't stand it. I like it cold, but not that cold. I just don't look as cute under twenty million layers of clothes.

I've been watching and reading all kinds of crap and non-crap. It has all been making me pretty happy. I read Adam Blomquist's novel, TRIBESMEN, and loved that shit exponentially. If you love Umberto Lenzi's cannibal movies, you will love the hell out of this. Murder and mayhem and cannibalism and hot chicks (use your imagination, as it is a novel), and blood and all sorts of horror in-stuff, you'll fucking love it.

Bizzaro fiction is the shit and I've recently read Andersen Prunty's HI, I'M A SOCIAL DISEASE, which aside from having an amazing cover, is a great fucking collection. I'm also mid-way through D. Harlan Wilson's THEY HAD GOAT HEADS, which is freaking me out because it's so on point and in tune with everything that I deem awesome, so word.

Movie-wise, just as good, non-good. TUCKER AND DALE VS. EVIL was charming, my second viewing of FRANKENFISH was everything I hoped for, and I'm patiently awaiting the arrival of HUMAN CENTIPEDE 2.

I changed all the cats' names to Todd and I need more wine. I love you all, you perverted fuckers. Look for my reviews of some Jean Rollin and some stupid SyFy stuff coming up in the next couple of days.

It's an alien! It's a breach birth!

Attack of the Hand

My hand. On Deniro's head/face!

Happy Fangs-giving!

I'm thankful for cats, wine, Sam, horror movies, scooters, Danzig I, and cats.

I can't keep October out of the leftovers (the cats have had more turkey than I have) and I've already taken two naps but the wine is still flowing and a weirdo foreign Christmas movie brought to us by Rene Cardona (!) is being watched. I might just tote out the turkey monster classic BLOOD FREAK for a little more strange movie fun after dessert (when Sam wakes up from his second nap). Hope you guys are eating lots, drinking more, and having a lazy drunken day of movie marathons. Happy Fangs-giving, y'all.

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween from all of us here at the Cavalcade. We spent the day at the DMW utterly hating our lives and now we are home for wine and pumpkin carving and wine and dinner and wine and horror movie watching and wine. We don't get trick or treaters because you have to be buzzed into our building, but that's fine because I hate kids any way. Although it would be fun to scare them...

Enjoy these attempts at costuming the felines. The mere presence of the pumpkin suit has made all the cats extra sassy. Better photos possibly forthcoming.

October Horror Movie Challenge - Final Week

Day 22 - THE KEEP (1983) directed by Michael Mann. Nazis guard a citadel in the middle of nowhere Romania that harbors a demonic force. Said demonic force runs into a Jewish scholar that can likely stop it. Good, scary stuff, if not a little on the predictable side. Ian Mcclellan and Gabriel Byrne star, giving this a little bit of a cult edge.



Day 23 - NIGHTWISH (1990). After much birthday carousing (drinks, brunch, more drinks, a bacon martini, a haunted hayride, and drinks), NIGHTWISH ensued. Although it has a 1990 date, it feels more eighties and stars a 'oh, that guy!' (Brian Thompson). Ghosts, aliens, a crumbling mansion, some grad students. If only this was made about eight years before it's time.



Day 24 - BURN, WITCH, BURN (1962). There used to be a band here in Richmond called Burn, Witch, Burn, and I always thought that was a good band name. A professor discovers his wife has been practicing witchcraft to advance his career, gets pissed, and destroys her occult supplies and unleashing terrible evil in the process. Without her help, he's fucked. Way above average and easily this week's highlight, I'm sorry I waiting so long knowing this existed and I never watched it.

Day 25 - PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 3 (2011). The only film I watched in the theatre for the Challenge thus far, I had a blast watching this with two friends not used to watching horror movies. I am not gonna lie - I was a little scared to come home to a dark house all by myself at night after my girl dropped me off. I had to turn on every light in the house. Including a few nightlights. And four candles.



Day 26 - THE NESTING (1981). An agoraphobic mystery novelist takes residence in an old haunted brothel in the middle of nowhere. Decent, if not a little boring and predictable, this chiller seems a bit removed from its time. Not at all bad, but not at all good, either. The lead gets on my nerves a bit but I don't feel at all guilty when she inadvertantly kills her shrink. Not what I was expecting in a movie called THE NESTING. I was thinking killer wasps or roaches in somebody's weave or something not nearly as understated as this.



Day 27 - PUMPKINHEAD: ASHES TO ASHES (2006). Doug Bradley and Lance Henricksen in the same fucking movie? Yeah, maybe if the year was 1987 and this wasn't this. Still, how can I resist a vengeance demon movie with Doug Bradley and Lance Henricksen in it? I can't. So there. I enjoyed this shit show thoroughly, even though I was only a little wasted at the time. And is this the fucking third or the fifth? Do I care? Only a little.



Day 28 - BRAIN DEAD (2010). Oh, I love you, Kevin Tenney. You gave us NIGHT OF THE DEMONS and fucking WITCHBOARD, so I expect great things from you. Too bad you did not deliver with this cheap-ass crap-fest with the WORST lighting ever (hey, don't film a zombie/horror/captive people movie in BROAD FUCKING DAYLIGHT (the FINAL DESTINATION movies are guilty of this a great deal, as well) and expect it to be great.) There's a little something called atmosphere, which you should know. But hey, everyone needs a paycheck, so whatever. This is crap. I just wanted the zombie monsters to show up and eat all the losers that populated this movie so they would stop getting on my nerves. So much for that. By the time the zombies got around to it, my pizza was here and I had better things to do, like EAT PIZZA.

Day 29 - CHILD'S PLAY (1988). Duh. Only the second movie of the Challenge I had really seen before. Like really, really seen and know all about. Chris Sarandon! Brad Dourif! Give me the power, I beg of you!



Day 30 - GOOD NEIGHBORS (2010). The presence of two beautiful cats practically from the first frame made me very, very anxious. Any time you see cats in a horror movie, especially this early on, means they'll meet a very untimely death. And they figure so prominently I got very very nervous. Almost to the point where I stopped paying attention and started cooking dinner while only half paying attention. And of course I'm right, the cats do meet an untimely end and there is revenge taken, which is the only thing I find redeeming about this predictable piece of annoyingness. You care about no one, except the cats, of course, and the presence of Scott Speedman alone makes me want to kill myself. Not particularly recommended but partially because I'm a crazy cat lady. This was also NOT what I was in the mood for and I should have just netflixed a monster movie of yore. Or watched something from the archives. And oh, how I hate that outdated SCREAM style cover with the disembodied heads floating above or below the title. Oh, how I loathe it.

There's week four, y'all. Neighbors and witches and vengeance demons and Nazis and citadels and ghosts and nestings and zombies and killer dolls and cat murder (the horror!) and who knows what's in store for tomorrow! We're both off all day and it is THE actual day so we will decidedly stay in and drink wine and watch tons of classics. Halloween is much like New Year's to us, in that it's a total amateur night and we'd much rather be at home with cats and Bela and Boris and Vincent and Basil and the rest.

Until tomorrow....

Razor Mouth Cat Eats October

Pumpkins! And Maybe a Cat or Two....

Behold! It's time to pick pumpkins!



Moochie wants to go pick pumpkins. Too bad for Moochie.



Upon arrival. Screaming kids everywhere! Yay!



The hayride. More screaming kids! But some of them were kinda funny!



Casey and me.



The smallest pumpkin EVAR! AHHHHH! It's about to meet its DOOM!




Partial haul.



The loading of the full haul. Twenty bucks. All you can carry. We had two casualties.



The Pumpkin Inspector a.k.a Soap Sud.

Moochie As Shark

Moochie might be a shark for Halloween. He hasn't decided. He might be a banana. An evil, chow-eating, vomiting-all-over-the-house, being-really-noisy-in-the-mornings banana. It's a toss up.

CATS

Sometimes you just have to put a giant fat cat in a tiny pink dress. Especially when you're bored and there's a hurricane bearing down on your ass and you're about to loose power and there's nothing left to do except dress cats and drink wine. A DEATH WISH marathon might be on the horizon, power outages permitting.

Cats - THE SENTINEL

Easily the best appearance by a cat in a horror movie EVAR, we have this one. A cat, in a high chair, wearing a red velvet bib and a gold lame party hat, at his own damn birthday party thrown by a coven of witches. Yes. I hope to have a birthday party for Soap Sud this year of equal grandeur. Which is more or less an excuse to drink champagne and eat cake during daylight hours more than anything else. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Cat Birthday Party, Sentinel style.

The Count

We had Dracula auditions here at the Cavalcade this afternoon, for the all-cat rendition. It will be a musical, of course. Who wore it better?


Tuna


Deniro



Or Moochie

You decide!

Cats! Cats! and a Graph About Cats!

The Black Cat

We expect Lucio Fulci to give us films like THE BEYOND or CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD or ZOMBIE. He's most famous for these and rightfully so. They're gory, frightening, visceral film experiences that have given us death by seeing eye dog and a zombie vs. shark throwdown. He's earned his right as a master of horror in pretty much every gorehound's mind. But I'm not that much of a gorehound, although I do like a bit of splatter, and there's more to the man that the living dead and seven doors to Hell. Enter 1981's THE BLACK CAT, loosely based on the Poe story of the same name.

Now Argento gave us his version with TWO EVIL EYES and Corman did a hell of job with his retelling, but this ain't that. Rather, it's a stalwartly paced mystery about some village folk who come to inexplicably nasty ends, with suspicion falling on a local medium whose penchant is to record his conversations with the dead and has a sinister bond with a black feline companion. The tone and the mood are there and the film almost feels two decades removed from its early eighties date. There's plenty of foggy cemeteries, bat attacks, and investigation of dusty crypts, but that's sort of the fun.

But what was really, really fun for me was all the stuff that suspicious black cat is capable of. Allow me to recap for you.

1. The cat has the urge to kill. The old psychic is right to be scared of the bastard. He scratches and bites and yowls constantly. You should be wary of this cat, that is for sure. Even our Maine Coon, October, sat and watched this movie as that cat commands fucking attention when he's on screen.

2. He can appear and disappear at will. Not like he just turns a corner or something. It truly seems like he's teleporting.

3. He can multiply. In one particularly gruesome attack, he's about eight cats at once. You don't know which way to look, or where to hide. This cat will find your ass.

4. He can hypnotize. Say you're driving in your car and you notice there's a cat in the backseat. Suddenly, you just want to take your hands off the wheel, press the gas, and run headlong into the nearest parked van in broad daylight, throwing yourself through the windshield. Yeah, this cat can make that happen for you.

5. He can set fires. Not with laser beam eyes or anything. He's got the smarts to topple an oil lamp into a lit fireplace if he wants to set your ass on fire.

6. He can lock you in a shed, turn off the ac, and suffocate you to death while you try to tryst with your lover. That, and he can remove the key you had with you and deposit it outside the shed, baffling Scotland Yard.

7. He can open barred doors, then hypnotize your drunk ass into impalement.

8. He can channel spirits, natch. That's probably where that motherfucker gets all his powers.

9. He frames his human for kidnapping and maiming, looking innocent all the while.

10. Oh, and he can destroy wills. Obviously.

I know it might come as a shock to you that I love cats. This only solidified my love for the creatures even more. This cat is a badass. I didn't even mention he can come back from the dead after eating poisoned food, a hanging, and then a burial under six feet of earth! And although I do not like to watch violence against animals of any kind, especially to our furry feline friends, this didn't bother me, because I knew that asshole was going to come back and get his revenge. Go, cat, go!

Recommended for lovers of vengeful cats and Fulci completists.

VHS Additions SCORE

Here are the new additions to our VHS collection:

THE NIGHT AFTER HALLOWEEN from Magnum Entertainment. Big box. I haven't seen this one, but I'm hoping it's the Ozsploitation cash in on HALLOWEEN, which is much sought after.

DR. FRANKENSTEIN'S CASTLE OF FREAKS. Another big box, but in a clamshell.

ALIEN PREDATOR from TransWorld. I know I've heard of this one, but I need more research.

THE RIPPER. Directed by Tom Savini. United World Home Video. Another big box. Can't turn down the big boxes.

THE PACK. Warner Home Video. Clamshell. Still beautiful even in that Warner Home Video packaging. Think I know of this one as well. It's gotta be werewolves. And I love me some werewolves.

KING KONG. A gatefold! From Paramount. We have ever version of any KING KONG movie known to man due an obsession of Sam's so this is extra special!

BAD GIRL'S DORMITORY. Active Home Video (?) It's a big box and it's uncut and it has bad girls and a dorm, so it's gotta be gold, right?

MASTER CLASSICS (Kung fu). Big box. USA Home Video.

SNAKE AND CRANE: ARTS OF SHAOLIN. All Seasons Entertainment. Big box.

SEVEN BLOWS OF THE DRAGON. Warner Home Video. Big box

DUEL OF THE SEVEN TIGERS. TransWorld. Big box.

SONNY CHIBA'S DRAGON PRINCESS. A&H Home Video.

SCORE, motherfuckers! It was the perfect night. We had some amazing Thai food and then went to the old school video store. It smells all gross and good like an old school video store should. And since they ain't doing so hot business-wise, they'll sell me their VHS for cheap. And it used to not be this way. I used to have to haggle and pretend I didn't know what the hell I was talking abut. I think we got all the aforementioned for like twenty bucks plus tax. Some horror for me and some Kung Fu and KONG for Sam. It's a beautiful thing! I don't even care about Kung Fu movies but if they're in a big box, I'm salivating!

And no Cavalcade post would be complete without a cat. Here's Moochie choosing his favorite of the new additions. He's going for THE RIPPER, the Tom Savini creation, because he's heard Tom's name before and wants to go for something he can talk about later and sound like he knows what he's talking about.




Moochie's like that.

Deniro

I wanted to take some cute pictures of Deniro and myself. Nir, as we call her, doesn't get much airplay on the blog because Moochie and Soap Sud always usurp her here, as they do in real life. Poor Nir - she always is the last to eat, get treats, and the catnip is always finished by the time she gets there. The photo shoot did not go so well and she tried to jump over my head. She then proceeded to get back up on the table and cleanse the human stink from her clawless paws. I love this cat. She doesn't meow - she says 'Nyang!'

Night of 1000 Cats

It's no secret I love cats. And it's no secret I love horror movies. Hell, I even love Hugo Stiglitz just a little bit. He's like a one-note low-rent Mexican Paul Naschy, and he still gets the hot chicks. And he looks bad ass in big sunglasses. So if this one of those Venn diagram thingies, I would, by default, have to love the 1972 Rene Cardona, Jr. flick, NIGHT OF 1000 CATS. And I'm in luck, because I do!

Simple premise as far as out-there movies go. Mysteriously wealthy, monastery-inheriting, psychopathic playboy (Stiglitz) flies around all day in his helicopter peeping on beautiful women in their backyards in order to lure them back to his crumbling compound for sexy times, horseback riding, water skiing, swimming, and murder most foul. The purpose of murdering these lovelies is two-fold - one - Hugo is quite the collector (a trait, he explains, spans generations in his family) and he needs their heads for his collection. Second, ever the collector, he also has about a thousand felines, give or take, who enjoy eating human meat. And those cats are hungry. Hugo gets his (in more ways than one) and the cats get to eat. Win, win.

Things get going right away with the introduction of the lovely Krista, a blond Hugo has been wining and dining. Hugo woos her back round to his to meet Dorgo, his Tor Johnson-like assistant and groundskeeper of the monastery and show us his 'collection.' After a strange dinner of Dorgo's special 'meat' - Krista is led to the room where the jars are kept. He kisses her, assures her, 'don't worry, they're made of wax', and then brutally strangles her. He then dons a bathrobe, grinds her body up, feeds it to the cats, tastes a little himself, and calls it a day.

With Krista a permanent fixture in the collection, Hugo begins courting a young mother, Cathy. He flits around in his copter all day, dropping dolls from parachutes out of the whirlybird for Cathy's little girl and basically winning her over this way. Cathy's married, but her husband is out of town on business frequently, so she gives into Hugo's advances. Cathy and Hugo engage is some sex in the taxidermy room - 'he enjoyed stuffing them more than killing them!' Prophetic, non? (Oh, I wish I had a monastery I could outfit with a taxidermy room!) Then Hugo decides to show Cathy his collection. The couple is interrupted by a knock on the door. A doctor has broken down on his way to see a patient, can he use the phone? Cathy's gotta go anyway, and so Hugo is forced to make do with the doctor for his collection.

Now, I have an army of cats and I know how they can be, especially during feeding times. Sometimes you just have to take what's available or they will get out of control. I know Hugo would personally rather dispatch of Cathy because something about the combination of sex and killing is appealing, but in this case, I guess it's not entirely about Hugo. And it's not all for naught, because Dorgo gets to keep the doctor's stethoscope to play with.

Hugo decides to forget about Cathy for a few moments, and focus on some other women. Seriously, this dude has so many chicks lined up, it's unreal. They appear in such numbers and are such non-actresses in many occasions, it's often hard to keep up. It makes the head hurt. But if you really want something to make your head hurt, how about the editing of the scene where Hugo remembers his first piece of his collection?

He begins by stroking his polar bear (an actual stuffed polar bear in the taxidermy room, pervs) and gazing longingly at a particular head in a jar. Flashback to a horse and buggy ride and some skeet shooting with another blond. Hugo likes this one and warns Dorgo away from her. He's going to give her a ring that has been in his family for centuries. We get to see this twice. The polar bear petting, the longing gaze, the horse and buggy, the skeet, the everything. And this movie is only an hour and five minutes long! It just adds to the fun for me. Sam got up after that and went to make tea.

The flashback ends badly, obviously, with Dorgo frightening the girl and as she runs away in painful slow-motion with plenty of up-skirt shots, Dorgo ends up spearing her with a giant pair of garden shears. What's a heartbroken young lover like Hugo to do? Why, put her head in a pickling jar and begin murdering other beauties, all in the name of misbegotten love, I'm assuming.

Still worried about Cathy, the one that got away, Hugo is plagued with nightmares of Cathy's little girl sleeping and cats creeping around in the night. He drowns his sorrows with a shapely brunette and when he's about to ask her back to the monastery, she gets a call from her sugar daddy and has to run.

Those cats ain't going to feed themselves. so Hugo challenges Dorgo to a chess game and when Dorgo gets check mate, into the cat pit he goes. It's a shame really, because Dorgo seems to be having a lot of fun and I was sorry to see him go. But even a deadpan killing of a loyal servant doesn't sate our anti-hero and he's still having headaches about Cathy. To kills his sorrow, he tries harpooning a scantily clad young thing, but then winds up drowning her after a quick jungle chase.

I must interject here that Hugo doesn't really seem to enjoy the killing so much. He is so stoic in all his actions, it's hard to tell if he's enjoying it, doing it out of some sort of compulsion, or merely as a way a life. And where the fuck did he get all those cats? And how will he care for them all since he killed Dorgo? Also, he doesn't particularly fear getting caught either. He's persistent and creepy, flying that helicopter all over town, spying on women as they exit their showers and creepily rubbing his beard. It's all very unsettling.

Cathy decides to give him another shot and goes back to the monastery. Hugo insists on showing her the collection again and upon seeing it, she's not very impressed, and smashes a large brandy snifter into Hugo's handsome face. Then she grabs a spear in an attempt to kill her would-be captor, but the cats begin to escape! Sensing Hugo's facial wound, they attack in a swarm, in a scene straight out of a Hoarders episode from Hell. The cats keep a'comin', but Cathy has enough time to reach her car and escape!

Pan back inside where there's one empty jar. For Hugo! Or perhaps.....for you! The End.

I love this fucking movie. I have the tshirt and the poster and the clamshell VHS copy. I watch it five to six times a year and it never gets old. It's ludicrous enough to elicit laughter, yet everyone plays it stalk straight, with perhaps the exception of Dorgo. Hugo Stiglitz is even kinda sexy, although I wouldn't be climbing aboard his helicopter any time soon. It's from the seventies, has cats, and not really all that much violence towards cats, which is something I'm usually worried about in my horror watching and otherwise, especially in a movie called NIGHT OF 1000 CATS. You have to figure one or two gets the hook. I do kinda worry about them at the end, though. With Hugo and Dorgo dead, how are they going to get their dead person meat?

At one hour and five minutes, it ain't gonna waste too much of your precious time and it's silly enough to make your head hurt. I like that in movie. Make my frontal lobes ache, movie! And be from the seventies! And feature cats! That is all.

New Addition!

Meet the newest addition to our family! I would love to formally introduce her, but Sam and I can't decide on a name. She's a kitler, so I was thinking Eva, but it might be unwise to name her after Hitler's lady. Secondly, I was thinking about Glenn, after Danzig, but also after the Ed Wood title GLEN OR GLENDA. But Glenn isn't really sticking. Then there's Lily, like Lily Munster, but Sam doesn't like that at all. Bruce's cats are named Lydia and Leona, which I like a LOT, but his cats are already named that. And while I suggested Adrienne and Linnea after two of my favorite scream queens, Sam's not sold. We can't agree on anything! Help me out, guys!

She was named Shioban when we got her this morning, but that isn't 'horror' enough! She deserves a 'horror' name, or a 'punk' name! I know, I have a Moochie, which is neither, but then, he's totally a Moochie.

Thanks for your help!

Meet the Cats

Meet all the cats! Moochie, Tuna, Bela, October, and Deniro. They're a good group. Oh, and Sam's in there too! And my gnarly old couch. Damn I need a new couch!

Cool Stuff, Where I've Been, What's Going On

Not necessarily in that order. And as much as I normally don't like posts like 'oh I've been so busy, I can't blog, blah, blah' I still figured I'd be obligatory and post one of those junks.

As I posted last week, Sam and I headed to NYC for the Specials 30th anniversary tour and our first few consecutive days off in a long time. Fun was had, money was spent in copious amounts on food, wine, a sweet jacket, some Misfits sneakers, some Ben Sherman stuff, and the aforementioned fifty dollar tshirts (they were actually like 30, but I had to have all three). Headed home and immediately went off to work. Worked like the living dead (no makeup, for crying out loud!), did another brunch shift today (again, with no makeup, can you tell I'm tired?) and decided that if I don't post something about movies I've been watching, I should be brought to justice by an angry mob. There's just no kind of justice as angry mob justice.

There's always time for a good old fashioned movie watch. Before we left, I got all classic and shit with Fritz Lang's 'M' and a chilling performance by Conrad Veidt in THE MAN WHO LAUGHS. I also watched the newer CARRIERS, and of course, wasn't impressed. Not just because it was new, but because it belied the point to where I was exhausted and also because it was quite boring. Get thee back to the seventies, I know, I know. I was born too soon.

I have lots of stuff in the queue for the coming weeks, BORN OF FIRE being one (which is that weird Indian Freddy Krueger movie if I'm not mistaken), and THE PENALTY, kind of the lower torso version of THE UNKNOWN, as well as some crazy stuff I've picked up on VHS along the way that even I'm not really all that familiar with that looks interesting. DREAM NO EVIL, anyone? That's what I thought.

I miss everyone and the whole blogging scene, but sometimes, in order to be fresh and new and fun, we, as in I, needs to take a break. I feel like I've been really struggling lately to come up with good titles and reviews for everyone and that's not what it should be about. I should do this because I love it, which I do, but apparently I've become a bit burnt out, but hopefully this hiatus won't be too much longer. I love you all. Keep watching movies, keep it weird and wonderful. Keep the horror blogging scene strange. If we don't, who will?

But before I go, a couple of cool things I've run across in my interweb travels recently:

Behold, from the BBC - a two headed lizard who's head's sometime attack each other. You best believe if I had another head, I would fight with that thing all the time. Click the link to read the article; it's pretty cool and I like two-headed stuff.



Secondly, if I liked kids in the slightest (which sucks because Sam has three, wah wah) and wanted to have some, I would get the little aspiring mad scientists these blocks from Xylocopa:



Cool, huh? Enjoy this final pic of Moochie being super cute, posing like he's in chair jail. Note the paw up on the slat of the chair. I can almost hear him singling 'nobody knows...the trouble I'm in', while raking a tin coffee cup up and down the slats of the chair. Forlorn? Yes. A-dor-a-bul? Yes, please.