I better watch it with my diary shit - plus the proto-giallo

This post has been sitting around in draft form for a few days now. I think I out-nerded a kid at school today and scared him with my knowledge of CED Selectavision Discs. Awesome. I was sick when I started the post and I'm getting worse day by day and running on no sleep.

horror: I skipped the Haunt X convention in Los Angeles. I could not figure out their schedule for shit and it looked like I would only be paying $25 for access to dealers' tables and stars eager to sell me $25 signed glossies.

One of the most shocking moments in TV history: El Duce on Jerry Springer. I saw this when it first aired so I've seen the bits that are not included. Duce came out and told the crowd that he and The Mentors rape underage girls on stage at their shows. Obviously he is so full of shit, but the Springer crowd are falling for every word in this "Rape Rock" expose. This tape shows the most tense moments as a woman confronts El Duce. Later on Gwar comes out and the show becomes very PG as they feed Springer to the Ragnarok monster on video. Don't let that take away from the heavy shit that goes down in this clip. Note: the clip seems to get cutoff, well you can watch a little.

Later Duce asks the lady when exactly she was raped. She cites the date and he says "because I think you look kind of familiar". The crowd is too disgusted to even boo this one.

Says a commentor on You Tube, "That is fucking sick and so are you for watching it !!!!"

record shopping: It's been some holiday weekend, Flag Day, or something. I started it off by going to Disneyland in the rain and getting sick which sucks because I always say that vegans don't get sick. My mom is in town and I showed her Laguna Beach today which is by far the most attractive part of Orange County, at least that I have seen. I dragged her into the little punk rock record shop on the PCH and bought some bargain bin stuff cause I can't afford rare punk records. Can you? I tried to make small talk with the clerk, but it not go to well. He did not know anything about the CDs I was buying so I mistakenly tried tell him a little bit about them and I'm sure he did not give a fuck. Plus I mentioned the words "straight edge band" when I was talking about music so I surely became the subject of shit talk between him and the two fashionable dirty rockers who were shopping. I'm saying that they would or did probably talk shit right after I was out the door and just about any other kid talking about straight edge hardcore would be deserving of shit talk - so who can blame them? My mom talked the clerk up quite a bit, she is the master of small talk.

Back in the 90's we would boycott any record store that sold racist records and this store did have Skrewdriver shirts (and not from the "pre-racist" period for any of you record dorks wondering) and some white power record label t-shirts. I'd really like to ask what the fuck they are thinking carrying and displaying those, but you can't bring that stuff up when your near-60 year old mom is with you. She would probably worried that I would get shot, though I doubt I would be in any immediate danger. It's true though, everyone should put as must distance between themselves as possible between them and the white power movement, as if that is not a given. A lot of people in California have grown up with nazi classmates in their schools, but as a transplant to the area, that stuff is more shocking to me, but I digress. I would really like to know the history of that store. I think I should start by learning the name of it.

It all so fascinating because Laguna Beach is an extremely affluent town.

On to another subject: scene teens - spoken word douche bag video brought to you by The Coalition.

I got a hold of the Sav-On Drugs version of Dario Argento's Cat o' Nine Tails, that is a big drug store chain where they often have bins of two dollar budget DVDs. It's not made by Sav-On, but it sure has some budget-looking packaging, perhaps the crappiest I've seen - from Vina Distributor who also sell a lot of Spanish DVDs which cost a dollar more! I gotta find their version of Death Race 2000! Over at their site I saw all the DVDs that those guys put out and most were familiar since I've looked through the bin at many a Sav-On.

So how does this look? Ok. I've seen the Anchor Bay version and obviously that blows this away. Some of the dark scenes from the killer's p.o.v. at the beginning are hard to see on this Vina version and the DVD in general has a fuzzy look to it, reminding me of some of my oldest VHS tapes. The brutal train killing appears to be completely intact, but (spoiler) at the end when the killer slides down the elevator shaft with his hands on the cable, I guess that was to disturbing and got cut from this print some where along the way. I'm sure more is missing, but it's pretty funny to find Cat o' Nine Tails at the drug store.

Have you seen The Thorn Birds mini-series from 1983? Oh wow, I saw a lot of it this weekend lying sick in bed, but that's not all I watched. Werewolf in a Girls' Dormitory (1962) sounds like a crappy movie, but the title is deceiving. It's actually a bit of a proto-giallo originally called Lycanthropus in Italy. I'm not wild about sanitary horror with no blood or sexuality, and that's what it looks like you are gonna get here with the campy "Ghoul in the School" theme song (probably added for the U.S. version) that starts this movie off, but put that out of mind because you can't take all the Euro-horror out of this movie. There is a lecherous professor who pays students for sex, a black gloved killer, and suicides. The movie is written by Ernesto Gastaldi who later wrote Torso, The Whip and The Body, and Blade of the Ripper. He wrote movies for Mario Bava, Antonio Margheriti, Umberto Lenzi, and Sergio Martino.

You can usually get this movie pretty cheaply. I think it's fallen into the public domain which makes the loud pirating warnings on that start off the Killer Creature disc seem pretty hypocritical since I doubt they pay the filmmakers anything.