Adjust Your Tracking: Interview with Director Dan Kinem!

Posted on Apr 28, 2013 in 80's Horror, Interviews & Guest Posts | 0 comments

Old VHS boxes.

Does it make you warmly nostalgic to think about them? You’re not alone. VHS is in the midst of a huge comeback thanks to sentimental collectors. I myself have fond memories of roaming the dusty horror shelf in the back of the old Mom and Pop video store my family frequented in the 80s’. Then, in the 90’s, I ended up working as a video store clerk. Luckily I left this profession, seeing how things turned out for them.

As a nostalgic videovore myself, I couldn’t help but get excited to hear about the new documentary Adjust Your Tracking, a renegade film about obsessive VHS collecting. Documenting the country’s most impressive collections and including interviews with VHS hunters and hoarders, this documentary puts the spotlight on the VHS craze and hopes to spark a little of that sentimental flair that’s in all of us.

I sat down at the bar with the director, Dan Kinem, to discuss the blood, sweat and gasoline that went into this passion project.

WEEKLY HORRORSPHERE ROUND-UP: APRIL 21st, 2013

Posted on Apr 21, 2013 in Lists & Countdowns | 0 comments

As someone who lived right outside of Watertown, MA for six years, this has been a crazy week. Yesterday the wife and I watched this whole manhunt unfurl via my Boston friends’ Facebook posts; including photos of SWAT teams searching my old neighborhood and videos of shootouts taken on my friends' cellphones. I'm so glad that this lockdown is over, this suspect is in custody, and most of all that my friends are safe.

In an effort to lighten the mood and get my mind off of all this, here’s a quick roundup of what’s cookin’ in the sphere.

BoardingHouse Deluxe Edition: An Interview with Jesus Teran, Founder of Slasher//Video!!

Posted on Apr 19, 2013 in 80's Horror, Interviews & Guest Posts | 0 comments

Part psychic horror film, part dark comedy, part sexy pool party footage, Boardinghouse is one of the most beloved shot-on-video films of the 1980’s.  Filled with bizarre meditations, cheap masks, bikini-clad girls, this Horrorvision-filmed flick is considered a video age classic by genre fans and VHS collectors alike. But finding a copy can be a difficult task, with the Code Red DVD long out of print and the old VHS tape selling for astronomical prices on ebay.

But now, thanks to Slasher//Video, fans will not only be able to obtain a copy, but, for the first time, they will be able to get a copy of the extended director’s cut.

We sat down at the bar with the company’s founder, Jesus Teran, and asked him to fill us in on this deluxe edition.

WEEKLY HORRORSPHERE ROUNDUP: APRIL 7th, 2013

Posted on Apr 7, 2013 in Lists & Countdowns | 1 comment

The sun is coming out and the trees are beginning to bud. Sounds like the perfect time to board up the windows, throw on an 80’s horror flick, and nuzzle your ass into the sofa. Actually, winter has been a long one and we’re just as excited as you to get outside and flip some burgers. But before I pop the top of my first Shiner Bock of the day, I need to wrangle all these horror tidbits for this week’s roundup!

WEEKLY HORRORSPHERE ROUNDUP: MARCH 31st MAD MONSTER PARTY EDITION

Posted on Mar 31, 2013 in Horror for the Holidays, Lists & Countdowns | 0 comments

Yes, we know. This is supposed to be a ‘weekly” roundup and last Sunday we didn’t have one. Well, last weekend was a busy blast for us as we attended Charlotte’s second annual Mad Monster Party, one of the biggest and best horror cons in the south.

Featuring celebrity guests, crazed vendors, haunted houses, a film festival, panels and even scaraoke, this was the horror event of the season and you know the Tavern was there, representin’!

So this weekend’s roundup is going to highlight all of the horror scoops we unearthed in our adventures there. However, I must first confess my lameness in missing two key events: the photo-op with Bruce Campbell and the exclusive screening of Maniac on Friday (sadly, I have a life outside of loving horror, and it got in the way). Still, I came back from this con with a lot of info and artifacts that I can’t wait to share with all you Tavernities. So why wait?

SHOCK YOU LIKE A HURRICANE

Posted on Mar 27, 2013 in 80's Horror, All Reviews, Surprisingly Good | 0 comments

Much like Pat Boone was in 1997, I have been in a metal mood, and recently meeting Lita Ford just turned it up to 11.

Followers of my insane ramblings will surely know by now that I was self-fed a steady audio diet of hair metal as a young teen. That germinated into a death metal phase in my late teens, which then transformed into Nick Cave worship in my twenties. Now that I am in my mid-thirties I find myself drawn back to the music I loved as a thirteen-year-old aspiring vandal. There is something so fantastic about the 80’s hair metal era and the stadium-packing mania that came with it. It was rock n’ roll at its most decadent: filled with sex, drugs and hairspray. It was the most fun music has ever been, and it’s sad to me that the one long suicide note of alternative rock came in and ruined everything by September of 1991.

All we have now are the golden records of yesteryear: the pounding anthems of Def Leppard, the sex-crazed rollercoaster of Motley Crue’s hits, and the untouchable awesomeness juggernaut we call Judas Priest. Sure, we’ve still got our Bullet Boys and Danger Danger cassettes, but now they’re played on the “classic” rock station. But we still have the memories, still have the songs that our wives have helped us convert to MP3s (in my case, anyway), and we still have the occasional B-movie from that bygone era that aptly showcases all the liquid eyeliner, dry ice, and topless babes that made hair metal the rainbow in the dark we so fondly remember.