Really Awful Movies: Ep 60 – City of the Living Dead

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Lucio Fulci’s City of the Living Dead.

Italian horror has some awesome music. This one is by Fabio Frizzi.

City of the Living Dead features otherworldly evil. We don’t like supernatural movies, but love the Italian sub-genre. In The Beyond, there was a portal to the Gates of Hell in a basement in Louisiana. Here, it’s in the town of Dunwich. Of course, this city is best known to fans of HP Lovecraft.

The town was built over the infamous Salem, haunted by witches put to death.

The movie starts with a scream and we’re in hyper Gothic territory with a priest who’s committed suicide. As this is happening, there’s a coven happening in New Yorker. “Mary” is taking part in a seance and has a seizure simultaneously. And there’s much, much more to it, including trademark Fulci delicious gore and an iconic death of everyone’s favorite Italian-horror whipping boy Giovanni Lombardo Radice. Check it out.

Really Awful Movies: Ep 59b – The Devil’s Rain and Kingdom of the Spiders

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A special episode of the podcast, featuring Scott Drebit. He’s a writer with The Daily Dead and has a column, Drive In Dust-Offs.

He’s a fan of retro drive-in classics, specifically horror. He talked about his personal connection to drive-ins, which he started seeing from the age of 5. We also chat about the indelible impact of Phantasm on our young psyches.

Scott approached us with two movies to chat about, both very much in line with the kind of thing we do on the Really Awful Movies Podcast: two curiosities which both star the great Canadian export, William Shatner.

The first, The Devil’s Rain, is is a slow moving incoherent desert devil cult worship movie, inexplicably featuring Ernest Borgnine (!) The second, is Kingdom of the Spiders, a pretty taut yet goofy nature run amok movie featuring killer tarantulas.

Really Awful Movies: Ep 59 – Freeway Killer

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Freeway Killer is a take on the life and times of notorious serial killer William Bonin, who plied his trade in the late 70s in Southern California. Michael Rooker (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer) plays a cop on the hunt for the mad man.

We are fans of realism in horror but can it ever go too far? Should you do horror biopics? Texas Chainsaw was a composite of various killers, Ed Gein and several others not solely based on one person. It’s pretty bad for the families of the victims. Can we be too close to the material? How much distance is required to shoot a film like this?

We talk about the influence of people like Charles Manson and his continued presence in pop culture.