The Grue Crew members behind the Horror News Radio family of podcasts and Gruesome Magazine are proud to announce that we are launching a quarterly print magazine focusing on independent horror movies, the filmmakers behind them, and fright-fare film festivals. We are currently running an Indiegogo campaign to help us get things up and running. Please visit our page at https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/gruesome-magazine and consider helping us out. Plenty of cool perks await you! Whether or not you contribute, if you could help us spread the word on your sites, podcasts, blogs, social media, and so on, we would greatly appreciate it. Thanks so much for your support!
For Gruesome Magazine, I have reviewed, along with other titles, the fantastic eighties supernatural horror homage The Barn, filmmaker Isaac (The Similars)Ezban's debut film The Incident, and the clever horror short Creatures of Whitechapel, in which Victor Frankenstein and Jack the Ripper cross paths.
My recent output for That's Not Current includes an interview with artist and musician Joe Badon and a review of The Giant Spider, Christopher R. Mihm's low-budget valentine to 1950s creature features.
Diabolique Magazine has published two items of mine this month: an article about Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill and how it influenced me as a teenaged film fan, and a review of the recent Australian chiller Observance.
Finally, I kicked the new year off at When It Was Cool with a review of the classic Gold Key Comics one-shot King Kong.
I wrote well over 100 articles last year these and other sites and publications. Join me in 2017 as I am currently on track to meet or surpass last year's amount. I hope you'll find that the quality exceeds the quantity, as well.
With the final week of 2016 underway, several of the magazines and websites for which I write are beginning to publish their year-end lists of "best ofs" and favorite pop culture highlights for the year. The first of my lists is "My Top Recommendations from 2016 for When It Was Cool Readers" for the fun retro site When It Was Cool. Check out some of my favorite films, comic books, television shows, and rock albums that were released during the past year. Have fun!
Writer/director Fin Edquist's Australian thriller Bad Girl instantly became one of my 10 favorite genre films of 2016 when I saw it recently. Check out my first review for Diabolique Magazine to find out why! You can read it here.
Leonard Cohen has been such an important figure in my life since I first learned about him in December 1984, when his seventh studio album, Various Positions, was released, that my son is named after him. It was only fitting that my son was the one who first told me about Leonard Cohen's passing. I was teaching the third of my four classes today and had to process the news more slowly than if I wasn't working.
I was fortunate enough to see Leonard Cohen in concert a few times on different tours, and got to meet him before one of those shows. He stepped off the tour bus in front of the Fillmore in San Francisco on October 28, 1988 (11 months to the day before my son would be born), and walked right over to greet the five of us who were in line waiting for the doors to open several hours later so we could get front row seats. Hoping that something like this might happen, I had brought along a copy of his first novel, The Favorite Game, and he signed it for me. I told him how important he and his poetry, novels, and songs were to me, and in that deep voice of his, he replied, "Thank you so much for your kind, gracious words" and shook my hand. The only thought about Leonard Cohen performances that makes me happier than that one is that my son saw him in concert on more than one occasion, too. My son called me in Korea from Portland's Rose Garden on December 8, 2010 (the first time Leonard played there) as he waited for the concert to start. I got to hear the moment that the lights went down and the crowd responding accordingly.
Leonard Cohen's work has been with me through some of my darkest hours and some of my brightest, and a great number of times between those two absolutes. I'm sad but sadness passes, and I will celebrate all of the joy that Leonard Cohen has brought to my life today and always.
The first song that came to mind when my son broke the news to me was "Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye." I always thought that the world would be a much better place if all relationships could end the way Leonard sings about in this song. I think some lyrics from this song are appropriate for Leonard's passing, as well: "But let's not talk of love or chains and things we can't untie/You eyes are soft with sorrow/Hey, that's no way to say goodbye." Thank you for everything, Mr. Cohen. You are missed.
I'm proud to announce that I am now a member of the Scream Team at the UK-based Scream horror magazine! For my first piece, I have reviewed the 2015 Korean exorcism movie The Priests. Have a gander at http://www.screamhorrormag.com/priests-film-review/.
For my second piece for the ultra-fun When It Was Cool website, I review my two favorite albums from seventies hard rockers Angel, "On Earth as It Is in Heaven" and "White Hot." Have a look and feel free to crank up the video links in the article. Thanks, as always, for reading!
