Poundslayers (?)

I’ve spent the past couple of days in London on M+D business – meeting up with our casting agent, production designer, sfx designer and others. Because everything’s up in the air – we don’t have a definite cast, location or half the crew yet – there’s a limited amount I can actually say about what went on. At the moment, clouds of possibilities are swirling, mingling and dividing above mine and Lisa’s heads, and we really need to start nailing things down. Lisa’s working really hard to stick to our (terrifyingly tight) schedule, and we’re both having to zip back and forth between London and Nottingham (I might as well just give Midland Mainline my bank account details at the moment – despite hovering over the edge of starting production, we still haven’t actually been given any money by the funders (story of my fucking life, apparently…) so everything’s coming out of our pockets…)

To distract myself from having to think about things that terrify me (like how to shoot the film and who to get in it), and to leave Lisa in peace for a while, I scouted round Camden for an hour or two – and managed to pick up some bargains. First off, for £1.99, I got a DVD copy of Don Coscarelli’s ‘Phantasm’, which I’ve never actually seen before (and which means that sometime in the future, I can actually get to watch ‘Phantasm II, which I bought a few years ago, and which I’ve held off from watching due to a kind of geek OCD which demands that you don’t’ watcht the sequel before the orginal), then, in a discount and remainder bookstore, I picked up a digest-sized compiliation of early Stan Lee/Jack Kirby ‘Fantastic Four’ issues for 99p. Featuring not only the FF themselves, but early appearances by the Black Panther, the Inhumans, the Silver Surfer and Doctor Doom, it’s great stuff, filled with classic Kirby panels like this:

BOK! Indeed.

Finally, in a charity shop, I found this:

Yup, a big box Hong Kong VHS copy of Stuart ‘Re-animator’ Gordon’s H.P. Lovecraft adaptation ‘From Beyond’, complete with HK Chinese subtitles, for 99p.

The discovery of 'Street Trash" – again in classic big box VHS style – has led me to try and seek out more retro thrills (unlike Cooke, who seems to have spent the Eighties locked in a flat watching ‘video nasties’ over and over again until they became permanently etched onto the craggy terrain of his psyche, I feel like I missed out on a lot of stuff, through being at university and reading loads of books which I now can’t remember.) Maybe I’ll try and make it a regular feature – ‘99p reviews’ or ‘Poundslayers’ or something.

It means I might finally get round to watching another BBVHS which I bought years ago and which has been decorating my office ever since – a reminder that David Cronenberg wasn’t always sold as the cerebral, arty, thinking-person’s horror director.

It's like someone described the film to the artist using semaphore across a foggy lake or something. What I especially like is the appearance, in the bottom left hand corner, of a bayonet. Just in case the rifles, shotgun and flamethrower fail to do the job, I guess...