You guys ever seen this one called PSYCHO? It’s Alfred Hitchcock’s take on PEEPING TOM. Good shit. Check it out.
The weird thing about watching PSYCHO is that after you’ve already seen it (which in my opinion you have) the biggest trick is already given away. I’m not talking about the ending, the solution to the mystery. I’m talking about the fact that about half of the movie is all mis-direction… Marion Crane is unhappy, so she takes off with $40,000 of her boss’s money. Is the cop onto her? Will her boss know where she went? Will she decide to give it back? In a normal Hitchcock movie it might be about the money, but we know it’s not about the money. The money is not even the mcmuffin, it’s the red herring. We know not to really get invested in this because there is a little matter of something that happens in a motel shower that makes the money irrelevant. We know that and we still watch it again and again.
But with this hindsight we can also notice other things going on: the talk of Marion having to turn her mother’s picture around when her boyfriend is there, her co-worker (played by Hitchcock’s daughter) talking about her mother calling to check up on her… everyone has a mother lingering in their life from afar, overseeing things. But not quite like Norman does. (read the rest of this shit…)
In the building that used to be The Adidas Store they now have a bunch of plastinated Chinese corpses posed as if they’re playing chess and football and shit. This is one of two very popular travelling exhibits. It’s been through here before, I’m sure most of you have heard of it (or even seen it), and they even had James Bond run through one of these type of exhibits in QUANTUM OF SOLACE. 
As a Michael Jackson fan who stuck with him in the later years, I was always dreaming about the comeback he could have some day. I never really believed in my heart that I’d get a chance to see him live, but maybe on DVD. I was so excited for those 50 shows he was gonna do in London, and nervous about what would happen if he wasn’t feeling up to it. There are still a million lingering frustrations about all the possibilities that were cut off when Michael died four months ago. But one of the more dramatic ones was this series of shows he called This Is It. He was so close. And we’ll never get to see the exclamation point on the end of that sentence.
Man, I knew everybody loved NIGHT OF THE CREEPS, but the way people talked about it I always figured it was some nostalgic grew-up-in-the-80s thing like GOONIES or heavy metal. No, it turns out NIGHT OF THE CREEPS is truly fucking great! You guys should’ve been more clear!
Man, if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck… oh wait, this guy doesn’t walk like a duck. But the title slasher of NEW YORK RIPPER is a guy who makes quacking noises while killing, and in taunting phone calls.
I tell ya, I’m as shocked as you are that a movie called THE NIGHT BRINGS CHARLIE doesn’t turn out to be the great unknown slasher gem I’ve been searching for. I mean, people love a killer they can call by his first name, like Jason or Freddy. Informality = terror. And that’s what they got here, they got Charlie. It seemed like they thought of everything, but for some reason the world gave them the cold shoulder. I’m sure around ’88 they were kicking themselves that they didn’t call him Chucky and make him a killer doll and do a way better job.
There was once a promising new director on the scene named Anthony Waller. This was the ’90s, the Miramax Dynasty, when Hollywood executives searched for promising young directors like prospectors looking for gold, and here’s this Lebanese born British guy who independently made a well reviewed thriller called MUTE WITNESS. Not too arty either, real energetic, funny, violent. Pretty commercial. They scooped him up, signed him on to direct AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN PARIS, and for some reason nobody ever talked about him again. Weird.
THE HILLS RUN RED probly isn’t a new classic, but I think it’s a solid DTV horror and a good take on the “meta-slasher” sub-subgenre that includes SCREAM and my unfavorite BEHIND THE MASK: THE RISE OF etc. etc. This is another one about people making a documentary, but thank the Lord Christ it’s not presented as a documentary. Tyler (Tad Hilgenbrink, some guy from DISASTER MOVIE) is a film school nerd obsessed with a 1982 slasher movie called THE HILLS RUN RED (wait a minute… that’s what this movie is called! what on earth is going on here?). It was supposedly so horrifying it was pulled from release. The director and all prints of the movie have been missing for over 20 years. 
Attention New Yorkers, Los Angelenos, Philadelphiacs, Atlantians, Chicagoians and Seattleors:
In other BLACK DYNAMITE news, the soundtrack and score albums finally came out this week. They didn’t get them at my local record store though, so I have them on order. But 
