SLUGS

22 Acacia Avenue.

I can only assume that English horror novelist Shaun Hutson is – or at least, was at some point - a fan of Iron Maiden, since this address is mentioned in the text of his 1982 novel Slugs (as any Maiden fan should know, 22 Acacia Avenue was the name of a song about a prostitute that appeared on the band’s classic Number of the Beast album, released earlier the same year). Slugs is the first Hutson book I have read, and it was certainly an enjoyable pulp yarn in the Guy N. Smith and James Herbert tradition, with an army of slimy super-slugs, ravenous for human flesh, on the rampage through a new estate in the small UK borough of Merton during a particularly hot and humid summer. Fast-paced and gruesome, with the usual smattering of sex to spice it up, the novel conjures up the same sort of revulsion which Jeff Lieberman’s classic 1976 eco-horror film Squirm did when I first saw it. Will definitely be reading more of Hutson’s work in the future. I believe there was a film adaptation of Slugs produced in 1988, which Hutson himself advises people to avoid like the plague on his website, but considering it was directed by Juan Piquer Simón , the man who gave us the notorious 1982 Spanish splatter film Pieces, I want to check it out asap!

DO THE HUSTLE

Finally got the chance to check-out American Hustle yesterday, in what must be it's final days in local cinemas. I didn't find the story (based on the true events behind the FBI's ABSCAM operation of the late-70s) to be all that intriguing or exciting, but what drew me into the movie were the terrific characterisations and performances, particularly from an Oscar-worthy Amy Adams (she seems much more comfortable here than as Lois Lane), Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, Jeremy Renner (his huge combed-back bouffant making him look like Snake from The Simpsons) and Jennifer Lawrence (who provides a good deal of the film's humour). Nice to hear a Danny Elfman score that didn't instantly sound like a Danny Elfman score. Worth checking out if you want to enjoy a great ensemble piece set amongst the polyester smoothness of the late-70s. 

EXHIBITION OF LOST SOULS

While I'm not all that excited about the actual film, it's still great to see a piece of William Castle style promotion come along every now and then. To coincide with the local release of the Australian horror sequel Wolf Creek 2 this week, Roadshow Films has set up an Exhibition of Lost Souls at the Southern Cross train station in Melbourne. 

The experience lasts about five minutes and is designed like two metal shipping containers, which you get led into before having the door locked. Between moments of pitch darkness, you can see bloodstained photos lining the walls, which I'm guessing is a display of all the victims of Mick Taylor, the outback killer featured in the movie (played by John Jarratt). Ambient noises and sound effects build atmosphere as a slideshow starts playing on the ceiling of the container, showing passports of missing backpackers as we hear their voices describing their final moments. The whole thing ends with a bit of shadowy violence and gore happening up on the ceiling projection, before you are led out the back exit and presented with a photo of yourself standing inside the exhibition. 

The Exhibition of Lost Souls will be there in Melbourne until Feb 19. I'm not sure if there are others set-up across the country. 

WHEN YOU COMIN’ BACK, RED RYDER

1979/USA/Directed by Milton Katselas

Based on a stage play by Mark Medoff (who also penned the screenplay for this cinematic adaptation), When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder is a hard film to categorise. Social commentary, psychological thriller, dark character study, seedy grindhouse exploitation film - all of these are applicable, yet none of them seem wholly suitable. I first stumbled across the film on late-night television in the mid-1980s and was instantly captivated and seduced by it, sparking off a fascination with that only increased with time and multiple viewings (when I didn’t have a VCR, I’d book a media booth at Swinburne University and watch it there with headphones instead of going to class).

Set amongst the grim, depressing surroundings of a small New Mexico border town during the dying days of the 1960s, When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder casts Marjoe Gortner as Teddy, a Vietnam vet who takes out his violent frustrations, and unleashes all of his inner demons, on virtually anyone who crosses his path. Accompanied by his hippy chick girlfriend Cheryl (cult favourite Candy Clark), who is always being driven to her wits’ end by Teddy’s disturbing behaviour, he rips off a quantity of cocaine from two Mexican drug dealers and hightails it back over the border, where he seeks refuge in a greasy roadside diner.

Holed up while he waits for his broken down VW van to be repaired, Teddy decides to amuse himself by torturing - first psychologically, then physically - the inhabitants of the diner: Angel (the plump, naive waitress), Stephen ‘Red’ Ryder (the sour, angry night cook desperate to escape his stifling world), Lyle (the stroke-addled owner of the motel/gas station next to the diner) and Richard and Clarisse Ethridge (the repressed upper middle class couple who are passing through on their way to a concerto).

At first little more than an annoying, insensitive nuisance, Teddy’s behaviour becomes increasingly more mean spirited and violent, until he finally holds his unwitting audience in a grip of sheer terror and pleading for their lives. By the end of the film, however, Teddy emerges almost as some kind of cathartic angel (though this interpretation is certainly open to debate, and there is an element of ambiguity to the ending). Prior to his arrival, all of the characters at the diner are portrayed as either lost, weak or tired souls, all unhappy and yearning for something else but lacking the courage to break out and reach for it. By Teddy breaking down their will and forcing them to face their own frailties and self-truths, they (at least, Angel and Red) ultimately emerge stronger for their ordeal, and ready to face the future with renewed confidence and honesty.

Despite its theatrical elements (the film’s stage origins are certainly reflected here), When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder is full of memorable moments and passages of protracted tension and suspense, with director Milton Katselas (Butterflies are Free, Report to the Commissioner) making great use of the confined diner setting - where the majority of the film takes place - to create an effectively stifling and claustrophobic ambience. (Trivia - Milton Katselas was played by James Franco in Sal, the 2011 biopic of murdered actor Sal Mineo, which Franco also directed).

Without doubt, the strongest element of When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder, and the glue which holds the whole film together, is the galvanising performance of Marjoe Gortner as Teddy. Gortner (who also served as producer on the film) was one of the more interesting exploitation personalities of the 1970s, a former child evangelist and, at age four, the youngest-known ordained minister. After spending his teenage and young adult years living the typical counterculture lifestyle of the day, he returned to the revival tent circuit in the late-sixties, modelling his new flamboyant stage routines on Mick Jagger. In 1972, Gortner and his pioneer preaching ways became the subject of the rivetting, Oscar-winning documentary Marjoe, in which Gortner, supposedly feeling remorse over his manipulation and swindling of vulnerable people in the past, allowed the filmmakers to utilise hidden cameras to expose the oft-suspected truth about evangelism, the tricks and cons used to whip people up and get them to gladly empty their pockets, and the feeling of emptiness he’d have inside him afterwards (though he admits that the guilt faded whenever his wallet grew lighter).

Whether his motives were genuine or not, Gortner used the success and controversy generated by Marjoe (many theatres in the Bible Belt refused to screen it, fearing the outrage it might cause) to launch both an acting and singing career. While his singing career stalled after one album (1972's Bad But Not Evil), Marjoe’s thick shock of curly, dirty-blonde hair, muscular physique and piercing blue eyes, made him a strong and charismatic screen presence, which was put to good use in films like Earthquake (1974), Food of the Gods and Bobby Joe & the Outlaw (both from 1976, and the later being infamous as the film in which TV’s Wonder Woman, Lynda Carter, revealed her impressive assets). Gortner was also in the tacky Evel Knieval biopic Viva Knieval! (1977, starring Evel as his Christ-like self) and Luigi Cozzi’s psychedelic Italian space opera Star Crash (1979, also starring David Hasselhoff and Caroline Munro, another famous 1970s glamour gal).

Unfortunately, Marjoe never got another opportunity to display the sort of raw intensity and sheer dominance which he showed in When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder, with his subsequent career confined to roles in mostly low-budget and direct-to-video fare like Mausoleum (1983), Jungle Warriors (1984), American Ninja III: Bloodhunt (1989), and on television shows like Circus of the Stars. His most recent performance was a brief turn (appropriately enough, as a preacher) in Walter Hill’s 1995 western Wild Bill. There can be little doubt that Marjoe utilised many of the tricks of body language, voice projection and eye contact that he employed as a preacher to bring Teddy to life with the depth that he does.      

While it is Gortner who clearly dominates the film, When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder also boasts a very fine supporting cast, including the previously noted Candy Clark (The Man Who Fell to Earth and the 1988 remake of The Blob), Hal Linden (best known as the lead on the long-running sit-com Barney Miller) and a magnificent Lee Grant (familiar to fans of 1970s studio genre films through her work in Airport ‘77, The Swarm and Damien: Omen II). There’s also Pat Hingle (a veteran of several Clint Eastwood films and Commissioner Gordon in the 1990s Batman movies) and Bill McKinney (so good in 1967's She-Freak but best known as the creepy hillbilly who rode poor Ned Beatty into the mud and made him “Squeal like a pig” in 1972's Deliverance). Relative unknowns Stephanie Faracy and Peter Firth hold their own amongst this strong ensemble, and as Angel and Red Ryder respectively have some strong scenes and a great chemistry together.

Filmed in El Paso, cinematographer Jules Brenner really catches the grimy roadside diner ambience, as well as the heat and barren dustiness of the external locations, and a genuine feel of Small Town, USA (Brenner also photographed the 1970s TV mini-series Helter Skelter and Salem's Lot, as well as the classic 1984 horror/comedy The Return of the Living Dead). The film also has a terrific soundtrack featuring cuts by The Doors, Tammy Wynette, B.B. King, Hugo Montenegro and others. Soundtrack licensing issues are supposedly the reason why When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder has never seen release on DVD or Blu-ray. The film did appear on home video in the 1980s in some countries (including a rare release in Australia on the Roadshow label), and DVD-R burns of these VHS releases can be found for sale or in trading circles, but hopefully one day the film will be given the treatment and respect which it deserves. Along with Stanley Kramer’s Bless the Beasts & Children (1971), it’s one of the great unsung - and currently unavailable - pieces of American cinema of the 1970s.

(Note: the above piece was previously published, in a slightly different version, in the Is it...Uncut Special Edition #2, published in the UK in 2003).

CRIME FACTORY #15

Hard copies of the new volume of Crime Factory showed up a few days ago, featuring the latest installment in my 'Hip Pocket Sleaze Files' column, a look at the Pre-Code crime comic books of the 1940s and early-50s, and the effect which the Code had on the genre and the industry in general.

220 pages of corrupt goodness.

www.thecrimefactory.com

GIRLVERT

Have finished reading Girlvert, Oriana Small’s memoir of her life in porn, where under the name Ashley Blue she performed in hundreds of XXX films, starting in 2002 at the age of 21. Most of Small’s appearances were in extreme ‘gonzo’ and POV titles like Gutter Mouths, Gag Factor, and the popular series of Girlvert films, from which the book derives its name. 

I have to admit this type of porn does nothing for me, apart from having a certain carnival freak show fascination to them. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be fascinating and engrossing to read about, and that’s certainly what Small accomplishes with this book. It’s no great literary work, but it’s a engrossing page-turner that’s as compulsive as it is repulsive. Small writes with a matter-of-fact honesty and even a degree of naive innocence which really pulls you into her world of bad relationships, dysfunctional family, drug abuse, STDs, all-night partying and one-day porno film shoots in every location from backwoods trailers (for White Trash Whore ), to a tiny room at the Jolly Roger Motel, to cavernous Hollywood mansions (which are invariably described as dirty, smelly, characterless and usually empty, save for a bed). 

Small also doesn’t shy away from discussing and describing the many extreme things which she has done with, and to, her body in front of the cameras. Some of her descriptions of the sights, sounds, tastes and smells she has had to endure while performing on film will make you gag, and a lot of the men she works and hangs-out with seem pretty vile (of course, this is only Small’s side of the story). Yet despite this, Small remains open and appreciative of the career that garnered her a lot of attention and success within the industry for a few years (like most girls in porn, Oriana Small had to face the reality of being considered old and used-up by the age of 26). 

Certainly not for everyone, Girlvert takes you on a tour through a strange netherworld that seems to exist totally within itself, and brings you out the other side exhausted, horrified, illuminated, and in need of a cold drink and a nice hot bath.

THE WOLF OF WALL STREET

It takes a certain type of person - and a fair degree of ruthlessness and emotional unattachment - to work and succeed on Wall St and in the stock market. The chaos, stress, greed, exhilaration and deceit of that world is brought to life with a ton of great humour in Martin Scorcsese's adaptation of Jordan Belfort's memoir The Wolf of Wall Street. I didn't find it as debauched as many people have made it out to be (a lifetime devouring scuzzy 70s & 80s exploitation films kinda sets your expectations high when it comes to onscreen perversion) but it was wildly entertaining and involving for the most part, structurally rather similar to Goodfellas. Nice soundtrack selection, impossibly beautiful women and strong performances across the board, but particularly by an almost emaciated-looking Matthew McConaughey, Rob Reiner, and scene-stealer Jonah Hill. A treat to see Joanna Lumley back on the big screen, as well. Scorsese shows once again he still has a lot to say as a filmmaker. It didn't sound to me like there was an excessive overuse of it, but apparently the word 'fuck' is spoken 569 times in The Wolf of Wall Street, the second-most uses of the word in a non-pornographic, English language film (the current record, with a count of 857, belongs to - not surprisingly - the 2005 documentary Fuck).

LOVELACE: TWO SIDES OF THE STORY

I passed on seeing Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s 2013 biopic Lovelace at the cinema (I might have made the effort if they did a special screening at the Crazy Horse), but caught up with it on Blu-ray earlier today. It’s an uneven work from the co-directors of The Celluloid Closet and Howl, but I still found a lot to like about it. Amanda Seyfried certainly delivers a strong and pretty brave performance, even if I didn’t buy her as Linda Lovelace most of the time. But she gets very strong support from Peter Sarsgaard as her flakey yet domineering and abusive husband/manager Chuck Traynor, an unrecognisable (and brilliant) Sharon Stone as Linda’s mother, and the great Debi Mazar as Dolly Sharp, Lovelace’s more mature co-star in Deep Throat. In his bright pastel blue suit with flared collars, Chris Noth is also terrific as Anthony Romano, the mob figure who financed the infamous 1972 porn film. 

The film has a strange structure to it, it’s basically divided up as two 45 minute films, each one telling the same story from two different angles - firstly, from the sunny surface perspective, where everything and everyone seems happy and content for the most part, and then from a more intimate and much darker point of view, where all the physical and emotional abuse, as well as Linda's enforced coercion into a life of porn and prostitution, is revealed. In retrospect, it’s an intriguing way to structure the film, and the filmmakers do it quite cleverly and engagingly, but on initial viewing I think the film suffers a little because of it, as I started feeling a little detached from the story twenty minutes into it, thinking the film was just playing it safe by avoiding a lot of the uglier material that the Lovelace story contains. The film takes the viewer up to the point where her 1980 autobiography, Ordeal, is published, culminating in her famous appearance on The Donohue Show.

SLEAZE FIEND

The first issue of the new A5 digest zine Sleaze Fiend showed up in my mailbox yesterday, and having had a chance to go through it I found it quite an enjoyable and entertaining read, written with genuine enthusiasm and appreciation for the topics at hand. Featuring some original art by Mischka Ann and lots of great old exploitation ad mats and poster art, the debut issue of Sleaze Fiend traverses such subjects as the birth of VHS, a tribute to David (Last House on the Left) Hess, a six-page review of the 2012 Maniac remake, kung-fu grindhouse cinema, David Cronenberg, Brazillian XXX films, a look at the films of Charles Manson follower Bobby Beausoleil, and the infamous 1976 sex/horror roughie Hardgore.

It’s always nice to see a new old-school print zine appear, and with John Walter Szpunar’s recent tome Xerox Ferox rekindling an interest in the subject amongst many, Sleaze Fiend should hopefully find enough of an audience to keep it going for a while. If you like Robin Bougie’s Cinema Sewer you will probably dig this.

For ordering details visit the Sleaze Fiend Facebook page at:

https://www.facebook.com/SleazeFiendMagazine

THE TOY BOX

Had forgotten what a strange piece of surreal sexploitation Ron Garcia’s The Toy Box (1971) is. It’s one of the most (deliberately) mind-bending films to emerge from the skin flick genre at the time, with it’s mix of classic Old Dark House horror elements with late-sixties psychedelia, a couple of wacky sci-fi angles that seem to just jump up out of nowhere, and the aesthetic of a really creative underground student film. The movie is genuinely unnerving in a couple of spots (including one hallucinatory sequence that hints at necrophilia), and the sex scenes don’t drag on endlessly like they do in many softcore films from this era (although for a softcore film The Toy Box  certainly pushes the limit into very hard R-rated territory). 

The plot, coming on like an adults-only episode of The Twilight Zone, has a young couple heading to a swingers’ orgy at the large home of a mysterious figure they call ‘Uncle’, who appears to be dead and rewards his visitors with items from his magic toy box whenever they share their erotic fantasies with him. Some of the women who arrive to pay their respects to Uncle include Russ Meyer fave Uschi Digart (who gets seduced by her own bedsheets) and Marsha Jordan (a buxom blonde with great hair and a full but curvy figure who was slightly older than most of her contemporaries, which often saw her cast in the role of the bored and frustrated housewife). 

Writer/director Ron Garcia later went on to have a prolific career as a cinematographer, mostly in television and highlighted by his work as the photographer of the Twin Peaks pilot movie from 1990, as well as the 1992 cinematic offshoot Fire Walk With Me. Interestingly, The Toy Box  is the sort of film you could imagine Twin Peaks creator David Lynch making, had he been cutting his cinematic teeth in the sexploitation genre at the time.

One of the best movies that was ever picked up for distribution by low-budget movie mogul Harry Novak and his Boxoffice International company, The Toy Box was released on VHS in the 1990s by Something Weird Video, and on DVD in 2006 (where it was paired with another Novak acquisition, the bleak 1973 Freudian exploitation thriller Toys Are Not for Children).

SANGSTER DOUBLE

Spent the afternoon watching this double-bill of vintage UK genre cinema, both of which I have read about over the years but had never actually had the chance to sit down and watch. Blood of the Vampire (1958) was often mistaken for a Hammer production, chiefly because it’s a gothic, colour UK horror film from that period, has a screenplay by veteran Hammer scribe Jimmy Sangster, and stars Barbara Shelly, one of Hammer’s favourite leading ladies. Despite it’s title, it’s not your usual vampire yarn, but rather the strange tale of a prison warden in the 1880's (played by Donald Wolfit, who reminded me of a stockier Bela Lugosi) who is executed for being a vampire, but is kept alive through a primitive heart transplant while he experiments on his prisoners until he can discover a cure for his bizarre blood condition. It has a much seedier feel than the Hammer horror films of the day, and is very atmospheric with some nice sets. The angle of the disfigured assistant who falls in love with the photo of a beautiful woman kept in a locket, which has been confiscated from a prisoner (the male lead, played by Australian Vincent Ball), was later used by Anthony Hinds in his screenplay for Hammer’s Scars of Dracula (1970). 

The Hellfire Club (1961) features another Sangster screenplay, and is more of a swashbuckling adventure than a horror film or an expose of the notorious British society clubs that started sprouting up in the 1700's and preached a ‘do whatever pleases you’ philosophy that only the rich and influential were able to get away with at the time (the name was later used for several bondage and S&M clubs, including one here in Melbourne in the 1990s). Directed by Robert S. Baker and Monty Berman, The Hellfire Club is a tad long but rather entertaining, with some rousing sword fights (despite the unconvincing choreography), more nice sets and matte work, an almost comedic cameo role from Peter Cushing, the beautiful Adrienne Corri (later in A Clockwork Orange and the 1972 Hammer classic Vampire Circus), and lovely Czechoslovakian actress Kai Fischer.

Unfortunately, the prints of these films contained on Dark Sky’s 2006 DVD do not feature any of the additional nudity or gore that was apparently included in the continental versions of these films (though even as it is, the print of The Hellfire Club featured still contains some rather risque near-nudity scenes for its time). And the anamorphic widescreen print of  The Hellfire Club has some dizzying lens distortion at the sides, particularly during any panning shots.

Despite the prints being less than perfect, this was still a solidly entertaining double, and I’m keen to seek out better versions of both films now. The DVD is also nicely presented as an old-fashioned drive-in double feature, complete with vintage intermission snack food ads and trailers for several ‘coming attractions’ (including Del Tenney’s The Horror of Party Beach and Mario Bava’s Kill, Baby, Kill).

THE ORIGINAL GOTH GHOUL

R. H. Greene’s 2012 documentary Vampira and Me takes its subject a bit too self-importantly at times, with the narration occasionally veering off into psychobabble, and suffers visually from the lack of archival footage (sadly, only mere minutes of Vampira’s televised career has been preserved). But it’s still a lovely portrait of this icon of 1950s style and the woman who portrayed her, actress Maila Nurmi It’s a virtual love letter from writer/director/narrator Greene, a Vampira obsessive who befriended Nurmi in the mid-90s, and uses an extended interview he filmed with her as the basis for the documentary. 

Getting inspiration for her character from the illustrations of Charles Addams, Nurmi found instant fame in 1954 as Vampira, a television horror movie host with amazingly arched eyebrows and an impossibly thin waist. But her fame was fleeting and she spent the next several decades living in near destitution and often working in restaurants just to pay for her dinner, though in the few years prior to hear death in 2008 she seemed to have found a semblance of peace and security. Vampira and Me covers Nurmi’s early years, her time as Vampira, her relationship with James Dean, working with Ed Wood on Plan 9 from Outer Space, her frightening incidents with stalkers (and the comical way in which these events were often reported by the press), the resurgence of Vampira in the 80s as a goth style icon, and her long-running legal actions against the Elvira character played by Cassandra Peterson.

What old footage is included here is lovely to see, including old home movies and Maila/Vampira’s appearances on various American variety and game shows, and there’s lots of great promotional and candid photos included. It’s sad to hear Nurmi talk about how she fought to keep her waist rake-thin for twenty years after the Vampira show was cancelled, just in case she got the call that never came to resurrect her character on television, but her enduring contribution to mid-20th century style is beyond doubt, and the mystique and allure of her creation lives on...

Above: stunning piece of Vampira art by Melbourne (Australia) artist Robert Rechter.

VIDEO IN FOCUS

A blast from the past. During 1997/98 I was one of the reviewers for Video in Focus, a weekly 30 minute film review program that ran on the emerging Optus cable TV network in Melbourne. It was a fun show to do because we were still reviewing VHS titles and the video store culture was still relatively alive (though the warning signs were clearly there). We reviewed a lot of the newer releases and I had to sit through a fair bit of dreck but I also got to do a regular ‘one you may have missed’ segment, where I would review and discuss some older favourites. Some of the films I recall reviewing were Horror of Dracula, The Silent Partner, Mars Attacks!, Bloodsucking Freaks, Chopper Chicks in Zombie Town and Blue Sunshine. This would have been not long after I started shaving my head (I first shaved it just after my father had passed away earlier that year). One day I need to edit together a few selected highlights and get them uploaded...

THE BARON'S HORDE

Richard Raaphorst’s Frankenstein's Army (2013) is yet another in the long line of post-Blair With Project POV found footage/faux documentary horror films. Taking a different approach from the usual modern settings for this style of film, Frankenstein's Army takes place on the eastern front during the dying days of World War II in Germany, and has a Russian combat cameraman capturing the carnage as his unit is decimated by an assortment of bizarre man/machine-meld monsters, the nightmarish product of the crazed great-great-grandson of the famous Baron von. 

I struggled to get into it for the first 20 minutes or so, but Frankenstein's Army eventually won me over with its ambition and intriguing strangeness. While the film reflects its low budget in many ways, the make-up and various creature designs are terrific and effectively creepy (I guess I would describe the creatures as a mix of H. R. Giger and Clive Barker with an industrial/’steam punk’ overhaul). Thankfully there is very little reliance on cheap and obvious CGI, with most of the effects and stunts looking to have been done in-camera, and the set designers have done a decent enough job of bringing the period to life (though some of the hairstyles and mannerisms of the characters seem very un-1945).   Ultimately, I think the film would have worked much better if they had ditched the whole found-footage approach and just told the story as a straight narrative. It’s a bit hard to swallow the idea of some beat-up, hand-cranked 16mm camera being able to capture such hi-def images nearly seventy years ago!

VALE MIKE VRANEY

Was terribly saddened to hear the news that Mike Vraney has passed-away at the age of 56 following an 18 month battle with lung cancer. Through his Seattle-based Something Weird Video company, founded in 1990, Mike helped expose myself and countless others to the films of exploitation pioneers like David Friedman, Herschell Gordon Lewis, Joe Sarno, Harry Novak, Doris Wishman and so many, many others. Mike rescued literally hundreds of films (as well as shorts and trailers) from the scrapheap of obscurity, and I can honestly say that without Something Weird Video my knowledge, appreciation and enjoyment of cinema would be nowhere near as diverse, interesting and complete as it is today.

I started out as a customer of Something Weird Video, and in the late-90s I started writing for them, contributing reviews/synopsis' for their printed catalogues as well as their VHS sleeves, and then of course online and DVD-R covers. It was always exciting getting the latest lot of videos to review for them - usually they would turn up in lots of five and, apart from the odd occasion where I might have requested something specific, I had no idea what titles I was in store for. It was often just a random assortment of gloriously gaudy titles, some I may have heard of but many I had absolutely no idea about. One parcel might have had Shanty Tramp, The Seducers, Suburban Pagans, Campus Swingers and G.I. Scare Films, Vol. 4. That's what made Something Weird Video so much fun, and such a joy and privilege to work with - every time you slid one of their tapes into the VCR for the first time, it was always a new adventure in discovery (not always an entertaining or satisfying one, but usually at the very least unique).

I probably reviewed over 100 releases for Something Weird Video, and though I never worked with or talked directly to Mike (usually I would work with his incredibly lovely and wonderfully talented wife Lisa Petrucci), his vision and guidance and passion for what he was doing was always evident. Though he seemed to be somewhat of a private person, he provided some terrific interviews over the years, he was in documentaries like Hell's Highway (2002), and shows up on the special features of some of the Something Weird DVDs (including a great extended tour of Harry Novak's Hollywood office, screening room and film vaults).

I feel terribly saddened by the way-too-early passing of Mike Vraney, and my thoughts are with Lisa along with their family and friends and loved ones. As a respected and passionate archivist with a clear love for good old-fashioned carnival ballyhoo, his presence will be much missed, but his accomplishments always appreciated and celebrated by those who love to trawl that curious netherworld of vintage exploitation cinema.

MIKE VRANEY

December 29, 1957 to January 2, 2014

"I'm the only guy I know whose wife cheers every time I bring home a big box of men's magazines". A nice little profile on Mike Vraney, Lisa Petrucci and Something Weird Video, which aired in 2006 on Seattle's Evening Magazine program.