Trailer #2 for 'Ms Green & Other Lovely Beasts'...

Check out the new trailer for our short film "Ms Green & Other Lovely Beasts" below...

This trailer takes on a more quirky, romantic vibe, angling towards some of the other shades to the complex protagonist Elnora Green, played by Lauren Koster.

You can follow the film's progress on Facebook and visit the Oakhill Productions website.

Take 2 Indie Review of 'Ms Green & Other Lovely Beasts'...

Check out the first review of Ms Green & Other Lovely Beasts (watch the trailer) from Mark Lakatos of Take 2 Indie Review HERE.

"Taking the grim compulsions of its titular taxidermist to entertaining heights, Ms. Green and Other Lovely Beasts is a potent one-two punch of wacky and lurid storytelling."

You can follow the film's progress on Facebook and visit the Oakhill Productions website.

Space Cop (Jay Bauman & Mike Stoklasa, 2016) Review

Find more movie reviews here.

“Ugh, he'll be fine. I accidentally set my gun to stun.” Years in-the-making by a band of fan favourite B-movie reviewers from the Internet, sci-fi comedy Space Cop has turned into something of a punching bag by its own creators, but is that a fair assessment?...

Click “READ MORE” below to continue the review and see more screenshots…

In A Violent Nature (Chris Nash, 2024) Review

Find more horror reviews here.

“Animals don't get too hung-up on reason.” Taking the typical story of a slasher movie and inverting the POV to instead focus on the monstrous killer, debut feature writer/director Chris Nash sets out with a bold hook, but can it be sustained over 90 minutes?...

Click “READ MORE” below to continue the review and see more screenshots…

Sleaze Fiend Magazine #5 pre-order now!

The brand new issue of Sleaze Fiend Magazine has arrived and is available to pre-order now from the SFM Store Envy page. My contribution for this issue was the "Sleaze Fiend's European Vacation" article.

Sleaze Fiend Magazine returns for 2021 with another massive issue! We're bringing you a sleaze drenched mag with articles such as:

El Topo: A Mythological Acid Trip
Sleaze Fiend's European Vacation
The Mysterious Life Of 40DD Superstar Uschi Digard
The Astrological Connection and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun with Brooke & Taylor Young
Danny Steinmann Interview
Loopty Loop: My Early Life As A Smut Peddler
The Legend of the Spider Pool
The First Porn Star From Down Under: Kristine Heller
Bo Arne Vibenius Interview
Remembering the Fallen
+Packed with new Reviews!

154 pages B&W

You can pick up SFM #5 HERE or you can grab the SFM Bundle (issues 3, 3.5, 4, and 5) HERE.

Sleaze Fiend Magazine Issue 3.5

The latest issue of Sleaze Fiend Magazine is here! This time around it's a combination of new material (100 pages worth) and a selection of the best bits from the now sold out 1^st and 2^nd issues. You can pick up a copy of SFM 3.5 as well as Issue #3 by visiting Weird World Publishing's online store HERE.

New bonus material for this issue includes: “XXX Drive-In: From The First To The Last”, an examination of the curious oddity that were open air drive-in movie theatres that specialised in showing adult movies (even curiouser is that there are still two that are operational, both in Texas)! There is also a look into G&A Books, a notorious adult book store that was a fixture of the 42^nd Street of old, a review of Hard Ticket To Hawaii by yours truly, and “Archie's Satanic A Go-Go”, which is an article about a bizarre sideline in Archie comics between 1972 and 1975 that featured stories filled with gore, horror, and Satanism...

Click “READ MORE” below to continue...

Sleaze Fiend Magazine - Issue 3 is here...

It's been a bit of a while since our bumper size Issue #2, but finally - after finding a new print company - we're ready to put the new issue out there!

The long awaited Issue #3 has finally arrived! This issue is filled with BIKES, HIPPIES, LSD, SAVAGERY BEYOND YOUR WILDEST IMAGINATION & MUCH MUCH MORE!

You can pre-order it HERE.

Francesca (Luciano Onetti, 2015) DVD Review

Find more giallo reviews here.

“Through me you pass into the city of woe, through me you pass into eternal pain.” In recent years the 'neo-giallo' movement has grown, moving hand-in-hand with the re-evaluation of gialli from the 1960s, 70s, 80s, as well as the few that were released in the 1990s. Through DVD and now Blu-Ray – distributed by high quality and dedicated labels such as Arrow Video, 88 Films, Shameless Screen Entertainment (plus many more in various markets around the globe) – the genre has gained a whole new audience, with the films afforded lavish restoration and supplemental packages for unparallelled home viewing experiences. With the love spreading for these movies – made by filmmakers such as Dario Argento, Mario Bava, and Sergio Martino (among many others) – it was only natural that new examples of the genre would begin to appear. Masks, Amer, The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears, and Yellow are all examples of this 'new old school' of highly stylised murder mystery – and the Argentinian Francesca (from the director of Sonno Profondo) is perhaps the one which nails the classic style closest of all...

Click “READ MORE” below to continue the review and see more screenshots…

The Void - a quick review...

What's it about?
A police officer encounters an injured and delirious man out in the woods, and rushes him to the nearest hospital - which happens to be in the process of closing down after a fire gutted its basement levels. However, upon arrival, the officer - with a few staff and patients - finds himself surrounded by strange figures dressed in all white with black triangles where their faces should be. Soon things get out of control as hideous monstrosities erupt from dead bodies, unleashing something worse than hell upon the Earth.
Who would I recognise in it?
Ellen Wong, Kenneth Welsh, Kathleen Munroe, and others.
Great/Good/Alright/Shite?
Written and Directed by Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski, who have worked in various capacities on some of the Astron-6 projects (such as Manborg and Father's Day), The Void wears its metaphysical body horror influences on its sleeve...

Click "READ MORE" below to continue...

"Celebrityville" and "Sleb: Tigress of Celebrityville" now on Smashwords!

Good news - Celebrityville and Sleb: Tigress of Celebrityville are now both available through Smashwords! Follow this link - http://www.smashwords.com/books/byseries/19591 - to check them out for yourself. What's more, you can download "Celebrityville" to your preferred device for FREE!

They're both available via Smashwords' Premium Catalog, which means you can get your copy from Apple iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Scribd, Oyster, Kobo, OverDrive, Flipkart, Baker & Taylor (Blio, Axis360), Page Foundry (e.g. Inktera.com, Versent.com, Android eBook Store).

Additionally, via Kobo, you can access this book at WH Smith (UK), FNAC (France, Portugal), Livraria Cultura (Brazil), Angus & Robertson (Australia), Bookworld (Australia), Indigo (Canada), Collins (Australia), Feltrinelli (Italy), Paper Plus (New Zealand), Play (UK), Rakuten (Japan), as well as Buy.com (now Rakuten, US).

N.B. If you don't see them on one of these services yet then please give it time as it can take a little while before they'll find their way into their respective systems.

"Celebrityville" is OUT NOW!

MY NEW BOOK IS AVAILABLE NOW!!!

Kindle eBook, Paperback, and Kindle App editions can be bought worldwide via Amazon - click here for more information - also coming soon to Smashwords!

Murder, mayhem, revenge, and a painfully public celebrity divorce - "Celebrityville" is a crime thriller with a humorous bite - won't you help a buddy out and spread the word?

Sleaze Fiend Magazine Issue #2 now available!

The second issue of Sleaze Fiend Magazine (for which I'm one of the staff writers) is now available to buy!

From the deliciously dirty minds who bring you the Exploited Cinema podcast, Sleaze Fiend Magazine is all about exploitation cinema and is most definitely not for sensitive souls or the easily offended. However, if you dig grindhouse cinema, out-there entertainment, bizarre curiosities, and independent zines, then you'll want to check it out.

Click HERE for more info.

"Celebrityville" is getting there...

Planning out "Celebrityville" (my second book) is coming along very nicely indeed. Today, after a few weeks away due to another project I was working on, I finalised the layout of the story. The break was good though, as I could spread out the index cards for all the major beats of the story (something I talked about in an earlier post) and see it all with a fresh pair of eyes. I plugged a few plot holes and motivation gaps, so the events and pacing of the story is locked-in. Next up I'll be doing a rough map of each chapter (where it starts, where it ends, the basic beats of what happens when, and who says what to whom and why) ... and then it'll be time to getting my fingertips waggling.

Click "READ MORE" below for a teasy little tease...

"Sleb" eBook FREE for a limited time offer!

Got a Kindle? Dig thrillers set in the absurd world of celebrity? Like FREE stuff? - well for the duration of Friday 14th & Saturday 15th November 2014, visit your local Amazon website and you can get my book "Sleb" for FREE and download it onto your Kindle anywhere in the world!

Don't have a Kindle? Download the Kindle App (which is also FREE) to your phone, tablet, or computer, and enjoy yourself some crazy celebrity chaos!

Sleb on Amazon US
Sleb on Amazon UK

Want to know more about "Sleb" - click HERE for info galore!

New short film coming soon...

Last week I shot a new short film with Sean ("Trapped", "Signing Off", "Skinner") and his brother Ben ("Trapped", "I Am Zombie Man 2") - editing is underway, and so here's a couple of preview screenshots.

The film will be posted up on my YouTube Channel as soon as it's done, which won't be too long.

Dead Genesis (Reese Eveneshen, 2011) DVD Review...

Indie filmmaker and zombie fan Reese Eveneshen (Writer/Director/Cinematographer) previously made waves on the low budget indie zombie flick scene with his 2007 remake of Night of the Living Dead, and with the follow-up film – Dead Genesis – Eveneshen seeks to tread familiar ground with a serious approach and bloody-minded ambition.

“It's not a war, it's us kickin' ass!” Beginning on Day 1 of the zombie apocalypse, we are quickly whisked through to Day 231, with the crumbling of society, and a push-back by the living, scanned-over with highlights. Families are literally torn apart (in an eye-widening first five minutes that separates the men from the boys), lawlessness takes over, and the 'War on Dead' begins with local militias becoming heroes of a resurrected New Media Corporation. Stories of hope and survival are transmitted to survivors as mankind sets about taking back what's theirs – but at what cost to their humanity?

Click “READ MORE” below to continue reading, and see more screenshots...

Obscura (2012)...

This experimental short, about someone who may, or may not be, a Crime Scene Photographer, was inspired in-part by Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 film Blow-Up, as well as the book Another Way of Telling by John Berger and Jean Mohr.

The main theme of the short is the idea – as proferred by Berger and Mohr – of the clash between the photograph, and the memory of the moment that the photograph resembles, as well as the connection between the camera lens and the human eye.

 

 

The film is pieced together from a variety of disparate fragments of footage and photographs that I have gathered over many years on different formats. In addition to newly shot footage and images, there are pieces of footage originally shot for other projects from years passed by, as well as photographs (and light-sensitive photographs) dating back to 1999. Stylistically the film is a sort of 'visual collage', that combines the new with the re appropriated old, which speaks to further themes of the short – namely the idea of fragmented memory, how a picture is not viewed in the mind's eye as a whole, but rather in individual elements that make up that whole picture. For example – an alleyway is broken down into key images: the height and close proximity of the surrounding buildings which created the alleyway, the old exterior light on one wall, and the tangle of steel and barbed wire atop the locked entrance to the alleyway.

 

 

The idea for the film initially came about when I dug out from a drawer, an old stills camera that belonged to an uncle – a Zeiss Ikon Contina I from the 1950s. I drew intrigue from the classic styling of the device, as well as the mechanical consistency of the lens, shutter, and winding operations, which ultimately fed not only into the editing of this strange little experimental short, but also the underlying ethereal plot.

 

 

View the film embedded below, or directly via my YouTubeChannel HERE.

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All In The Game (Gary Ugarek, 2011) - Review

Gary Ugarek, who has previously given us indie zombie flicks Deadlands: The Rising, and Deadlands 2: Trapped, switches gears entirely with his third outing as Writer/Director/Producer: moving from the undead to the mean streets of Baltimore’s drug-pushing gangs. As a fan of HBO’s The Wire, Ugarek’s inspiration is clear, and indeed he pulls an Ace out of his sleeve by snagging members of that cast for this truly independent feature – where the extremely tight budget works triple overtime in delivering a sense of scale and scope that is usually missing from similarly low budget flicks.

Once upon a time in charm city, we’re introduced to our main cast: Vince (Chris Clanton), Ontario (Nelson Irizarry), Littles (Kelvin Page) and Lucky (a terrifyingly charming Micaiah Jones), and they’re all looking to climb the ladder. As the gritty narration informs us, you’ve got 5 to 8 years ‘in the game’ with many falling foul of the law sooner or later – it’s a tough business, but evidently in the toughest areas of Baltimore there’s little in the way of options. However all is not well in the present day, as Ontario mocks “I have a dream: money, ho’s, and clothes” – the young up-and-coming ‘welfare babies’ are in need of a reality check – they’re not invincible and they aren’t worth a damn if they’re not willing to push back against the tide.

 

Sick of getting screwed over when plying their criminal trade, Vince, Ontario, Littles, and Lucky hit the pavement to find out who is cramping their style and stealing their business. Working their way up the chain, we come to one of the high points for the film – a brutal interrogation of Raymond, a lowly money launderer, who lays out the list of guys who’ll soon be entering the crosshairs of our boys. Clouded by smoke, step forward Lucky (the scene-stealing Micaiah Jones), who makes exceptionally dark comedy from beating the truth out of rivals.

 

So begins an audacious and bloody ascent up the business ladder for these guys as they set their sights on the Caprisci crew, which feels like a meeting of worlds – The Wire versus The Sopranos. It is in these later stages of the film that we really get to see the fierce determination of Irizarry’s Ontario, the considered calculations of Clanton’s Vince, and the ever-ready eagerness of Page’s Littles … and of course, more of Lucky’s dangerous magnetism.

 

Being an indie production, naturally there are some technical issues – the audio needs work in places, and there’s a few rough edges and slow focus pulls here and there – but the ‘deep shadows and brilliant highlights’ look to the stark black & white cinematography (presented in 2.35:1) blends well with the chosen documentary aesthetic.

 

Bolstered by a hip hop soundtrack and an efficient running time (74 minutes, including credits), Ugarek’s latest outing proves to be a fresh change of direction that offers new opportunities both in the looks (thanks to Habib Awan and Seann Ikon) and the substance (thanks to a dramatic genre shift). There may be a few points in the script that don’t quite convince, but with a gritty and determined approach, and an arresting cast, fans of indie productions and The Wire should be well served here.

For more information, please visit the film's Facebook page.

Quadruple Bill Mini Musings: December 2011...

Little Fockers:
With some of the cast having almost all of their scenes completely away from the actors, the dynamic that worked quite well in the previous film (Meet The Fockers) is mostly lost. It's no thinker by any stretch of the imagination, with some rather basic plot progression and even dunderheaded moments of character development/comedy ... it's all a bit underwhelming. There are some chuckles to be had for those familiar with the series, but if they plan on doing a fourth flick they'd better buck up their ideas after this.


Black Swan:
Darren Aronofsky's warped ballet flick is a wonderful mix of his over-the-shoulder style with the more strained psychological moments of films like Dario Argento's career-defining Suspiria, and David Cronenberg's entries into his own sub-category of 'body horror'. It wisely doesn't become ponderous and instead gets on with following Natalie Portman doing her absolute best to bring her ballerina crashing down into a pit of paranoia and perversion.


The Horseman:
This Australian indie horror makes for assuredly grim viewing, but intriguingly many of the worst moments of violence are left off-screen. More often than not we're witnesses to the brutal beginnings and creepy closings of violent sequences - it's a nice stylistic twist in this dark tale of a father who seeks to track down every last man who was involved in the porno production that preceded his daughter's untimely death. Disturbing and tense, but also shot with confidence, it makes for good genre viewing ... mind you, you might not be rushing back to see it any time too soon.


Dark Floors:
Otherwise known as 'The Lordi Movie' (aye, the horror rockers who are most widely known among the general populace for winning Eurovision a few years back), this is a turgid load of old cobblers. Missing the 'so bad it's good' mark by a country mile, it's just bad. The script is dull, the dialogue is cliched and boring, the plot makes absolutely no sense, there's a total lack of tension or suspense, and the inclusions of members of Lordi prove to be perfunctory and uninspired. For a flick as short as this, it doesn't half drag ... a bunch of people you don't give a stuff about randomly end up in some sort of hospital-bound hell, and all they do is traipse around all-too familiar corridors, briefly meet a member of Lordi, then run down to the next level to repeat the whole tedious exercise all over again. Unless you're a hardcore Lordi fan, don't even bother.

Deadlands 2 - limited edition Blu-Ray...

http://diabolikdvd.com/category/Browse-All-Titles/Deadlands-2-~-Trapped-Limited-Edition-%28Blu~Rayr-and-DVDr-Combo%29.html

Make your way over yonder if you want to snap up one of the remaining Blu-Rays for Deadlands 2: Trapped. It's a limited release done by the director, Gary Ugarek, himself.

The special features are as follows:

Region Free Blu-Ray (BD-r) and Region Free DVD-r (2 Disc Set)

1. Extended and Unrated Version of Deadlands 2: Trapped with over 2 minutes of additional never before seen footage
2. 5.1 Dolby Digital Audio
3. Director's Commentary
4. Introduction by film star Jim Krut
5. Introduction by Helena, Hussy of Horror
6. Composing Deadlands Featurette (10 Mins)
7. Weapons and Tactics Featurette (20 Minutes)
8. I am Zombie Man Short film Series - Includes I am Zombie Man 1, 2, & 3 w/ intro by UK writer/director Nick Thomson (35 Minutes)
9. Deadlands: The Rising - Work Print w/ Alternate and original ending (73 Minutes)
10. Trailers (4 Deadlands 2: Trapped trailers, 1 Deadlands: The Rising Trailer) (12 Minutes)
11. DEADLANDS: The Rising DVD-r (A DVD-R of the ORIGINAL and NOW out of print DVD release for Deadlands 1, now you get both versions of Deadlands 1)

Since each disc is manufactured, and printed by the director himself quantities of this 2 DISC SET will be limited.FUTURE RELEASE OF DEADLANDS 2 BLU-RAY will have different special features, so this is a COLLECTOR'S ITEM

Price: $29.99