Nick Cato's Blog, page 45

Halfway There...Still No Clue Where it's Headed

The 3rd installment of Vertigo's 5-issue IZOMBIE series, while satisfying, still leaves little clues as to where it's all headed. For those new to this inventive tale, Gwen is a zombie who must eat a human brain once a month. If she fails to, she loses her memory...but there's another catch. The brains she consumes fill her own mind with the memories of (said) dead person. Gwen and her friends are getting slightly closer to solving the mystery of "Dead Fred" (the owner of the brain she most r...

A Thought on John Waters' PINK FLAMINGOS

A few weeks ago, when I learned John Waters' sleazeball classic PINK FLAMINGOS was going to do a couple of midnight screenings at the Landmark Sunshine Theater in NYC, I became quite excited. It seems the past year or so, there's been a lot of retro midnight movies being shown in my city, and I've been happy to see quite a few that I've always wanted to see on the big screen since I was a kid (most notably were Jodorowsky's EL TOPO and THE HOLY MOUNTAIN). And while I've seen FLAMINGOS...

Pic Keeps Kickin'

THE LAST DEEP BREATH by Tom Piccirilli (2010 Tasmaniac Publications / 124 pp. / tp)

Ellie shows up at the apartment of her brother Grey with a knife sticking from her side. Grey gets his friend T.S. to fix her up, then she vanishes without a trace. Grey then learns that his (foster) sister had become a porn actress trying to make it in small-time regular films and TV shows when she became a full-blown heroin addict. He then heads out to LA (then back to NY) in a quest to find out what happe...

Krall Unleashed

KING SCRATCH by Jordan Krall (2010 Black Rainbows Press / 102 pp. / tp)

From living sex dolls to squid/donkey hybrids to foot-fetish Westerns, Jordan Krall has quickly become a force to reckon with in the bizarro genre. Now you can add a redneck-golden-shower-squid-rape-crime drama to his ever-growing roster.

Easily one of Krall's strangest tales to date, KING SCRATCH is a demented trip through the seedy underworld of southern New Jersey. By the third chapter you'll feel like you're in a biza...

Liquid Sky (The Novel)

LIQUID SKY by Anne Carlisle (1987 Dolphin Doubleday / 186 pp. / tp)

Author Carlisle (who also stars in the 1982 cult film of the same title) delivers this solid novelization that sheds a lot more light on the nature of the heroin-seeking aliens as well as the host of strange, night-club dwelling fashion models and artists.

Margaret is a fixture on the downtown nightlife scene of New York City. Her days are spent working as a fashion model (when she's not sleeping) and her nights are a non-stop...

(Arguably) the BEST of the Exorcist's Children

Released theatrically in the United States in 1974 in an edited version titled THE TEMPTER (see poster below), the fine folks at Anchor Bay deliver this fully restored version as THE ANTICHRIST. And unlike nearly every-other film that was inspired by THE EXORCIST, Director Alberto De Martino took his version seriously, and the final result is a very well made possession epic that owes as much to HORROR HOTEL (1960) as it does to Linda Blair's pea-soup-spewing classic.

A wheel chair-bound woma...

Toenails and Robots

MY FAKE WAR by Andersen Prunty (2010 Eraserhead Press / 112 pp. / tp)

Loner Saul Dressing is interrupted one night by a knock at his door. A stranger wearing military fatigues forcibly drafts him into the Army of the United States of Everything. He soon parachutes (also forcibly) into an unknown country known as Grisnos with one objective: to get one of its citizens to start with him so the U.S.E. can declare war on them. The only problem is Saul becomes friends with the first person he mee...

Suburban Grindhouse Memories Vol. 6

The latest installment of my trash-film column is now LIVE over at CINEMA KNIFE FIGHT:

http://cinemaknifefight.com/2010/06/24/suburban-grindhouse-memories-hitch-hike-to-hell/

Wait till you see who popped up in this seldom-seen epic!

Girls, Guns, and Robo-Cats!

Cop-on-the-run Rook is back in this second installment of Christopher Rowley's "Heavy Metal Pulp" series. This time we find out (slightly) more about what makes Rook's Pleasure Model, Plesur, tick, and like any good scifi pulp novel this one's packed with non-stop action, violence, and a couple of intense fight scenes when Rook is captured by a New Jersey gang lord. Add a plus here for a wickedly cool 8-foot long robo-cat sent to collect our...

Gut-Munching with Brains...

THE NEW DEAD edited by Christopher Golden (2010 St. Martin's Griffin / 384 pp. / tp)

When I first heard about this book, the first thing I thought was, "Just what the world needs...another zombie anthology." And in case you've been on another planet for the past 5 years or so, zombie anthologies seem to come out every other month from both the small and large press. So I read editor Chris Golden's short & sweet introduction then began my journey through yet another collection of reanimated h...