Reviews, cheeky views, and kicker interviews on the popular culture we love to fear: horror movies, horror comics, horror books, horror toys, and Halloween. Zombos' Closet is where the cultured horror heads roll!
The League of Tana Tea Drinkers turn their thoughts to spring and their favorite villainesses...here's mine.
An evil fairy, proudly proclaiming she's "The Mistress of All Evil," she relishes her dark charms and heart-curdling magical surprises like fire-breathing dragons and lingering curses.
She may be a cartoon, but she's a sexy, bewitching one at that. Those alluring sinister eyes, that dominatrix outfit, ruby red lips against pale green skin, and an attitude for graceful wickedness make Maleficent a formidable villainess.
Tim Burton thinks so, too, which is why he's been working on a movie to call all her own.
The League of Tana Tea Drinkers sips a little tana tea, eats a few crumpets, and gossips all about their favorite 2010 movies in the following categories...
Best English Language Horror Movie
Best Foreign Language Horror Movie
Best Independent Horror Movie With a Limited Theatrical Release or STDVD
Best New DVD Release Of An Older Horror Movie
...and not surprising, the voting reveals a slew of movie favorites. So the winners are...
For Best English Language Horror Movie the Winner is...
Let Me In
The runner-ups: Black Swan, The Wolfman.
For Best Foreign Language Horror Movie, the Winner is tied...
[REC] 2 and The Human Centipede (First Sequence)
For Best Indie Horror Movie With a Limited Theatrical Release or STDVD, the winner is...
Lake Mungo
The runner-up: Buried
For Best New DVD Release of an Older Horror Movie, the winner is...
Not sure
But these received one vote each: Night of the Creeps, Psycho, Dark Night of the Scarecrow, The Slumber Party Massacre Collection.
Movies receiving one vote each in Best English, Best Foreign and Best Indie categories: Enter the Void, A Serbian Film, Big Tits Zombies, Mother, Atomic Brain Invasion, Pornography: A Thriller, Make Out With Violence, Primal, Survival of the Dead.
There's more than horror lurking through the darkened hallways of The League of Tana Tea Drinkers. Science fiction terror prowls and snarls its way along the floorboards, too. So here's a sampling of those terrors that came from sci fi to give you unpleasant dreams.
TheoFantastique warns us to Keep Watching the Skies!:Through its various printings Warren’s book has become something of a classic among science fiction film fans and scholars, and in a big way.
Classic-Horror faces The Incredible Shrinking Man!:The Incredible Shrinking Man is considered one of science fiction's best films. Its strengths, however, lurk more in the horrific implications it presents than its science fiction.
Uranium Cafe treats us to a double feature of Cat Women of the Moon and Missile to the Moon!:The theme is a familiar one for the 50s and 60s. A group of men, with maybe one female in the gang, are stranded somewhere, an island, lost civilization on the far side of a secret mountain or a planet like Venus or even the earth’s moon, and there they encounter an all female race of something similar to Amazons.
Igloo of the Uncanny wonders how I Married a Monster From Outer Space!: One of the many great things about watching American Sci-Fi from the 50s is that it gives you a rare glimpse of a bygone era, where things were very much different. IMAMFOS (short for 'I Married A Monster From Outer Space'. Very handy. Saves me writing out 'I Married A Monster From Outer Space' for no good reason) has a wonderful example of this.
Strange Kids Club runs amok with Xtro, Eat and Run, and My Teacher Is An Alien!: If you've ever wondered what really happened to Al Capone, chances are he was eaten alive by a 400 lb. alien named Murray.
Mad Mad Mad Mad Movies finds a Galaxy of Terror with Inseminoid!:Of course creative people are always drawn toward the medium in which they can express themselves most freely, and thus once the freedom offered by the science fiction of the 70s became clear--from gravity, from Earth, from the need for basic storytelling logic--it might have been predicted that the vacuum of space would suck a few intrepid horror filmmakers through the hull of their genre and out into the horrible, terrifying void.
Kindertrauma admires the voluptuous horror of Alien!:I once facetiously said that horror heroine Ellen Ripley officially belonged to the world of sci-fi because she broke bread with robots and drove a spaceship to work. The truth is, no amount of blinking computer lights or sparkling stars can keep ALIEN from being one of the purest examples of a horror film in existence.
Necrotic Cinema takes a refreshing breadth of space madness in Pandorum!: I certainly felt the look of the film was influenced by Event Horizon, Outland and Alien and that school of thought in regards a space ship. That a rusted and dark and a smoky, ill-lit space ship looks cooler than a brand spanking new craft where everything is spit polished and working.
And here's Dr. Gangrene's recommended movie of the week #25: Tarantula!:
Godforsaken zombies benefit a lot from religion in horror movies and fiction. Ironic, isn't it? Or is it? Perhaps playing the damnation game makes them more attune to that infinite something that lingers over all of us, commands us, delivers us, curses us, or simply ignores us.
The members of the League of Tana Tea Drinkers ponder that old time zombie religion. No collection box money necessary and you won't need to light any candles or bend a knee.
Monster Land glorifies the undead: Beyond the rotting veneer of your everyday reanimated corpse, there lies a host of archaic religious meanings stretching from Christianity to mythology of Ancient Sumer.
TheoFantastique explores infection versus resurrection: Where once they shuffled, now they run. Initially born of forbidden voodoo rituals or the sign of a religious apocalypse, for the past decade zombies have slowly metamorphosed into the by-products of something else entirely.
Groovy Age of Horror resurrects the Final Judgment:Zombies, vampires, Frankenstein monsters, beneficiaries of monkey paw wishes, etc. are generally thought to embody our fears of returning to life from the dead in some wrong way. But is there a right way?
Gospel of the Living Dead preaches zombies and religion:Zombies are probably the most human monsters.
Dr. Gangrene looks at all that flesh eating: The eating of flesh and drinking of blood are staples of horror movies, yet when you think about it they’re also both major themes of Christian theology, as ghoulish as that sounds.
Vault of Horror gobbles up transubstantiation:Just as Christians yearn to take in the power of Christ, and eat his flesh to do so, so does the zombie yearn to absorb the living.
Uranium Cafe wisely ignores religion altogether in The Invisible Invaders: The story, like many of the period, centers around the evils of atomic power and research. Almost anything evil found in the films of this period could find their origins in atomic research gone awry. And how much awry can an experiment go than to have a hand held test tube suddenly erupt into an atomic explosion.
Lost Highway makes sure to include one token rotten zombie movie for our pleasure:A local witch doctor’s daughter dies from some unnamed cancer and so he opens the door to hell for vengeance on the scientists. Usually Hell is only open weekends and Fridays.
The members of LOTT D remember when horror came in a VHS box, all lurid and gamy, just waiting to be eagerly plucked from the local video store's shelves like a ravenous zombie ripping out a fresh, red-dripping, still-beating heart from a cracked rib-cage. Often promising more than they would deliver, and sometimes delivering more than they dared promised, their rectangular sleeve covers beguiled us with garish text and images so outrageous and impertinent, we couldn't resist the temptation. We cherish them. And we cherish the stores that gave us this world to explore: all the nightmares, all the terrors, and all the fun that crammed those shelves, waiting to be taken home.
Yes, we remember.
Dr. Gangrene remembers the sweet horrors delivered by mom and pop video stores: I tell you what I miss… I miss mom and pop video stores. They are all too quickly becoming a thing of the past...
Lost Highway does a last rewind for Video Vault:Well, yesterday I learned about one business closing, a cult video store named “Video Vault” that really hit close to home for all of us here at Lost Highway...
Dinner With Max Jenke got it all on video:watching these stores and the VHS format vanish from the face of the earth in the wake of DVDs and Netflix makes me feel like my past is in the process of being gobbled up by those hell-spawned Pac-Man things from Stephen King’s The Langoliers...
Cinema Suicide reflects on the boss box art for really bad movies: Video box art became the stuff of legend and lured a lot of people into renting some obnoxious crap based entirely on cool pictures...
Cinema Fromage fondly remembers the Video Place:As we walked into the Video Place, the first thing to hit you was the smell. A peculiar smell indeed, however not necessarily foul. My foggy recollection seems to think it was a mixture of particle board, must, and popcorn...
Talk about nightmares! The members of the League of Tana Tea Drinkers gang up on good ol' classic Freddy and give him the business. Elm Street will never be the same.
Day of the Woman gossips about the Women of Freddy:Whether it's a woman who knows exactly how to stop him, the victim he can't seem to catch hold of, or even his daughter, Freddy Krueger just doesn't have the best luck when it comes to girls.
Freddy In Space remembers the people who made Freddy so memorable (and frightful):Let's take a moment to remember those Elm Street residents who are no longer with us - but who will live on forever through the magic of film.
Vault of Horror joins in to discuss Freddy's unforgettable franchise of fear:Just in time for the much-anticipated Platinum Dunes remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street, Count Vardulon and The Divemistress, and Vault of Horror take an in-depth look at the NOES franchise. And VOH goes even further by presenting a quarter-century of Freddy goodness, too!
Evil On Two Legs gives us their top 10 pointless and irrelevant observations corey made while rewatching a nightmare on elm street earlier this week:at number 2, throughout the entire movie, heather langenkamp has a distracting pimple on her forehead.
The Lightning Bug's Lair shares the shining moment when Freddy encounters the Dream Warriors:Nightmare III plays out more like a direct sequel to the first. Well, except this time Freddy’s got jokes, and boy, does he ever have jokes.
Moon Is a Dead World speculates on the quality of the Freddy remake:I've come to the conclusion that, if written properly, this speculation may be able to give a complete, factual representation of what we might expect from A Nightmare on Elm Street.
Lost Highway detours around Freddy as the Dream Master:In this made for MTV style movie nothing is going to stop Freddy from taking out the remaining survivors from the previous Nightmare sequels.
Reflections on Film and TV discovers the Tao of Freddy: In William Schoell and James Spencer's superlative companion, The Nightmare Never Ends: The Official History of Freddy Krueger and the Nightmare on Elm Street Films, director and horror icon Wes Craven briefly recounts the youthful experience that led him to create cinematic dream-killer Freddy Krueger.
There, that should help keep you up tonight. If not, sweet dreams! Don't let the Freddy bugs bite.
Beware! The members of the League of Tana Tea Drinkers return to wreak nuclear havoc with their take on atomic age movies that glow in the dark.
The Moon is a Dead World takes on the Beast of Yucca Flats:Only hardcore B-movie buffs will even want to attempt to watch this movie, since it's extremely hard to get through and even when you do, you're not left with anything meaningful to contemplate.
Cinema Suicide ponders the bizarre cult-trash of Atlantis Interceptors:There are exploitation movies and there is Atlantis Interceptors. It sets out to be everything to everyone. In 1983 there were several waves of action movies that were popular to ape and this one tried to do them all.
Uranium Cafe panics along with Ray Milland in Panic In the Year Zero:Certainly there are flaws to the film if you want to sit back and pick it apart but over all the film works well as a cold war period vision of how an everyday suburban family out for a weekend of tranquil fishing and camping has to deal with the sudden reality of a nuclear war in their backyard.
Cinema Fromage rocks with the Six-String Samurai:The year is 1957, and Russia has nuked the US. The survivors have rebuilt in the form of Lost Vegas. Elvis is the king of the last bastion of hope for the US, and sadly he has passed on. In order to find a successor to the throne, the Wolfman hits the airwaves and puts out a call to all the rock & roll cowboys across the land to come and take the throne.
And to round things up, Dr. Gangrene recommends a visit with his eight-legged friend from Tarantula...
The Bloody Bloggers Award Nominations are now open, and will continue until the end of February. There are 13 categories and nominees can appear in more than one category.
To be considered for nomination a League of Tana Tea Drinkers member must recommend you. (You can also email me with your URL and which category, or categories you feel your blog falls under, and I will consider your blog for recommendation to the League, too). My email address is available through the About page.
In March, the Bloody Bloggers Award Nominees will be announced and voting will begin. Even if you don't make it as a nominee, I will compile a directory listing of every participating horror blog and do my best to promote it.
The Bloody Bloggers Awards are the first multi-category, peer-reviewed, and community-based recognition of those bloggers who toil away the extra midnight hour to present the best in horror blogging to reach the heights of horrifying excellence.
When voting opens in March, every horror blogger (and their readers) will be invited to email votes in for their favorite nominee in each category.
So get cracking!
The 13 award categories are:
Best All-Around Horror Blog (includes blogs that cover a range of horror-related topics)
Best Horror Sub-Genre Blog (includes genre-specific blogs like slasher, gore, zombie, etc)
Best Horror Author Blog (includes blogs written by authors)
Best Horror Art Blog (includes graphic designers/artists of horror, and coverage of horror-centric illustration and photography)
Best Spooky Blog (includes blogs with a Halloween-centric or paranormal (ghost/folklore) scope)
Best Queer Horror Blog (includes blogs with a homosexual-centric approach to covering horror)
Best Classic Horror Blog (includes blogs covering classic horror up to 1970)
Best Horror Comics Blog (includes blogs that are horror comic-centric in their coverage)
Best Feminine Perspective In Horror Blog (includes blogs with a female-centric approach in their coverage of horror)
Best Sounds of Horror Blog (includes blogs that focus on covering the music and sounds of horror)
Best Horror Podcast Blog (includes blogs which primarily podcast their horror coverage)
Best Monsterkid Blog (includes bloggers who express their horror passion through their experiences, and who are not necessarily movie-centric. This category also includes blogs that focus on memorabilia and toys related to horror).
Beware, the League of Tana Tea Drinkers is brewing a special blend just for horror bloggers to sip. It is time we stopped howling at the moon over misnamed and nominee-mismatched Best Horror Blog awards, done with little understanding of what we do and why we do it.
The Bloody Bloggers Awards are coming. Not all will win, but all can participate in 13 frightful categories guaranteed to make your blood run cold.
Beware! The members of the League of Tana Tea Drinkers open their bomb shelters to reveal a never-ending parade of pre and post apocalyptic movies. You are warned! And pack a light lunch.
I wasn't sure what to expect from Doomsday, coming from director Neil Marshall who also worked on the very popular film The Descent from 2005. It looks like a zombie film but it's technically not about zombies; it feels like a comic book but it's not that either. But though Doomsday looks a lot like The Descent's gritty, dirty world, it's lacking in the scares and the intensity that drove it.
TheoFantastique Ponders the Apocalyptic In Three Movies
In the history of the Western world the Judeo-Christian apocalyptic has been the most influential. In that religio-cultural context one of the key apocalyptic texts has been St. John’s Book of Revelation.
A couple of weeks ago my wife found a copy of Hitchcock’s The Birds at the library and she checked it out for me. We watched it later that day, and later I then watched the bonus materials that went behind the scenes. I was struck by two things...
2012 taps into the long undercurrent of millenarianism and apocalyptic thought in Western culture. This overlaps with environmental concerns, prophets and prophecy, ancient civilizations (with the Mayans being of special interest as 2012 and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull indicate), and especially the Mayan calendar.
The bells strike the midnight horror. Dare you enter the comic crypt with The League of Tana Tea Drinkers to dig up the dirt on horrifying comics (and those others)? Who knows what you may discover buried deep between the covers. Make sure your flashlight's batteries are strong, pack a good midnight snack, and mind the rats. Now let's go.
Myron Fass was to magazine publishing what Ron Ormond and Al Adamson were to film making, only consistently lacking their sometimes dubious scruples and ethics. His best remembered for his wild assortment of magazines published from the 60’s to 70’s by the company called Countrywide Publications that he partnered with Stanley R. Harris.
This is probably my favorite comic book that I ever bought. I picked it up in late March of 1972, when I was 13 years old, at my regular haunt for comics and books; Chichester's drugstore on Vineville Ave. in Macon GA.
Before Halloween I posted a list of "Six Deeply Creepy Alt-Horror Cartoonists" as part of Robot 666's week-long reign of terror. Well, these avatars of alternative comics' dark side have been up to some interesting things lately.
I recently got my grubby hands on House of Mystery's first-ever Halloween Annual, and can honestly say it made my Halloween just a little more festive. In some ways, the issue does a better job of recapturing the old Creepy Magazine feel than Dark Horse's actual Creepy revival book--albeit in a more mature, Vertigo style.
Horror has recently found a fascination in remaking the Victorian age of literature. We've seen novels parodying Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, and now we have a creation from Ian Edginton and Davide Fabbri pitting Sherlock Holmes and Watson against mindless zombies. Do we have a fascination in debauching (in a good way) the classics?
In this installment, those party-hardy members of The League of Tana Tea Drinkers ponder the vagaries of the future with a simple question: "What are you most looking forward to in 2010?" After they finish the chip and dip of course.
In considering what the future holds, it's worth remembering that some of 2009's most exciting films - like District 9 and Paranormal Activity - were completely off the radar right up to prior their releases. So who knows what (hopefully pleasant) surprises 2010 might deliver?
My first thought was what movie i'm most looking forward to this year but this is a pretty broad question and so i'm not gonna go that route. What i'm most looking forward to this year, in terms of the world of horror, is pretty much the same thing I look forward to the most every year - the conventions.
Well, I thought long and hard about it, and lo and behold, it turns out that the one thing in horror I'm most looking forward to is not a movie, but a TV show.
I am most looking forward to the remake of the Wolfman with Benicio del Toro and Anthony Hopkins. For me, the original Wolfman is a touchstone of the horror genre--not to suggest that it achieved cinematic excellence, but it did achieve far-reaching influence.
I'd like to see more supernatural horror in the movie theater. Stories like Paranormal Activity and Drag Me to Hell were a welcome sight in 2009; especially after too many Torture Horror entries were given screen time.
The bells strike the midnight horror. Dare you enter the comic crypt with The League of Tana Tea Drinkers to dig up the dirt on horrifying comics (and those others)? Who knows what you may discover buried deep between the covers. Make sure your flashlight's batteries are strong, pack a good midnight snack, and mind the rats. Now let's go.
You see, everyone thinks that just because I’m a horror fan and I run a website where the bulk of the writing is dedicated to the genre that I am automatically a drooling zombie fanboy because they happen to be the monster of the moment.
With permission from Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert, writer Mark Verheiden set out to do what seemed like the impossible, and recreate the celebrated 80s cult film hit Evil Dead as a comic book.
For my money, the most reliably disturbing and disquieting work in the genre over recent years has come from artists who produce what you'd consider to be "alternative comics."
I'd like to think I'd make a really kickass vampire hunter. I've got a low tolerance for weepy Anne Rice melodrama and an array of fabulous hats that make me an ideal candidate for that role.
MAJESTIC-XII is the story of a team of superheroes charged with fighting a secret war against alien invaders. One has to wonder how these aliens–who already control most of the universe–can possibly be held off by a handful of superhumans, who seem to do nothing but engage in chaotic fist-fights with other superhumans, and moon over each other in constant, maudlin interior monologues.
His love of the dissolute images and outrageous stories that spring from the unsavory pages of horror comics, to linger in our minds long after those pages have yellowed with age, makes him the kind of person we like to be interred with...for a little chat.
You're stuffed more than the turkey was, the parade is over, and your relatives are still picking, just not on the food. Fear not. The League of Tana Tea Drinkers delivers some cinematic gobblers to make you smile even as Uncle Lloyd tells that same old story that same old way yet again, and everybody leaves with leftovers, leaving you with the bones and the bill.
Reflections On Film and TV takes us Home Sweet Home, where the horror isn't:
Conveniently, it's both Thanksgiving-themed and a turkey. Advertised with the ad-line "The Bradleys won't be leaving home. Ever," Home Sweet Home(1981) is the not-so-riveting story of a deranged serial killer and his holiday rampage.
Evil On Two Legs dares Twilighters' rage with his roasting of Twilight:
my apologies to any twi-hards or hard-lights or whatever twilight fans are called… but wow, this movie is bad. in my mind, it’s so horribly silly and overdone that it actually pushes the dial all the way around on the quality meter, breaking through to the other side… this is truly a movie deserving of the description “so bad, it’s good.”
Igloo of the Uncanny saves the drumstick and gives us The Giant Claw instead:
We don't have Thanksgiving in the UK ( or in Igloo Land) so I'd probably just nominate The Giant Claw as my Golden Turkey, which is rather apt because it's a big bird. I seem to recall that last Thanksgiving the classic Horror Film board had a banner of the Giant Claw served up as part of the feast.
Many fans of horror, amateur and professional alike, have devoted themselves to
blogging about the thrills, chills, and no-frills side of the genre as seen in cinema and print. In this ongoing series that highlights the writers behind the blogs, we meet the unique personalities and talents that make the online horror scene so engaging. Up close and personal.
In this installment, Max Cheney of the Drunken Severed Head proves he's more than just a pretty face when it comes to horror.
I am a Siamese, or conjoined twin. My other half, separate--and certainly unequal--but seamlessly connected to my self via an e-thereal broad band, is a drunken severed head named Max. We share that first name--I am Max Cheney, Jr., and I love the weird and macabre.
My love for horror started when in 1964, when I was three. I was given the 5-inch high monster figures "Pop Top Horrors" to play with. Cast in Halloween-orange plastic, they were different from other solid figures, as they had detachable heads that could be popped on and off. I had great fun switching the heads! Making an impression on me that same year was being taken to see The Evil of Frankenstein
which featured a toy-like makeup design for its Frankenstein Monster. I learned from watching that film that being scared could be fun. Being born (prematurely) into a blended family, with parents whose marriage was always filled with problems, I was always an anxious kid. Finding a form of anxiety that was thrilling was a revelation!
The following year, I was watching the programs "Milton the Monster" and "The Munsters," both featuring Frankensteinian monsters, and I adored both shows. As a present for my birthday in 1965, I was given a Herman Munster talking puppet. That set me for life as a fan of monsters, but of the classic Universal Frankenstein's Monster especially.
