Wow, a very insightful and frank message from the director there. Thanks for posting this.

Thank you for an honest and amazing insite, into the frustrations of movie making.

Sorry to hear that mate.

wash your hands of it Bringer, she ****ed you over, once, she'll probably do it again plus she's married to this jerk now and she's gonna have to go with what she chose, screw her mate, if she loves you so much why did she go off with this guy in the first place...

that's the problem we have you see, major movie studios do not want to take the risk with original films incase they put X amount of money into the production only for it to flop, which it most certainly will, that's why he have independent cinema, im not talking arty farty stuff, but films like Juno or Kick Ass. The only exception would be for Inception as it is a multi layered (literally) story that is told and handled in an original way that wasn't made to confuse people unlike the matrix and that brought in the box office because of the tag line....From The Director Of The Dark Knight. Look at avatar, the film is basically Fern Gully but made 'live action' and that became the highest grossing film of all time. Why do you think we keep getting shit like Date Movie, Epic Move and disaster Movie....it's because the average cinema Goer is attacted to stupid nonsence and they come from a major studio like FOX, then the same company will interfere in an original film and balls it up. So if you want to see an original film these days you need to look to the east or europe as they're the ones not pressured by big studio execs who wouldn't know a film if it ****ed them in the ass....

ive decided that they are not vampires in twilight but something else, unfortunately Stephanie Meyers is a horrible writer and doesn't understand what a vampire is, if they were true vampires ala True Blood, then they would obviously burt into flames in sunlight and it would take a stake or beheading to kill them (again). you are right about these films ruining the name of the vampire, but for every Twilight film we get films like Inception, Black Dynamite and Shutter Island so it's not all bad.

i remember prism when their site was called DVDSFORAFIVER.COM, they had a lot of crap but ventured into some better known titles such as The Dead Zone, Firestarter and some others. i still pick them up from time to time.

what an interesting post, i put off buying a blu ray player for so long and finally took the plunge about 2 weeks ago and believe me it makes a difference. I have Evil Dead 2 on blu and while only slightly better in HD its not that different. Sometimes you need a clearer picture. Shogun assassin has never had a decent release in the uk so a nice clear animorphic or whatever the ratio is on the blu is, is a welcome addition. but i see your point. good blog Bringer

Creepshow would've done okay I'd have thought. Mildly profitable on release and a host of home video releases should have kept that going. I don't think the newer Zombie films do make that much. I think he does them more for going back to his low budget independent roots. Just a shame they're not very good...

okay....wow, this is some serious Jeremy Kyle style problem, made all the more complicated by the fact that one of her kids could be yours. To be honest if it was just a case of a chav trying to get rise out of you, i would have just said ignore him, another thing would be that it might not have been a good idea to tell him to grow up. But if this andrew guy is causing problems, maybe you should try and speak to him on his own, with no mates around and with out your ex about. If you get him by himself, he'll have no need to act the hard man as he'll have no one to show off to. but dude, this is way more complicated than i thought.

very good film, Werner Herzog remade it in 1979, it's also referenced in The Fast Show.

COTLD's a great package Bringer.
In all honesty all ARROW films are worth buying IMHO mate.
HBTC blows the VIPCO version away. Street Trash is good crass fun and the PQ's amazing. Macarbe, Sleepless, DOTD, I could go on and on as all my ARROW DVD's / BD's I own have never failed to disapoint.
Buy with confidence my friend.

As mentioned elsewhere, Jimmy McDonough's "The Ghastly Ones" is truly fantastic and makes a brilliant companion piece to "Sleazoid Express". "Sleazoid" has a great chapter on Michael and Roberta Findlay my favourite directors of the cinema of scum.

I've posted a list of all the horror/exploitation books I own on the horror film books thread. If any of the titles take your fancy, I'm more than happy to expand on the contents and what I thought of the book.

Sam's essential reading list:

Sleazoid Express

This book is the 42nd St bible, looking not just at the films shown on The Deuce from the 50s to early 80s, but also the individual character of each grimy fleapit, the denizens who flocked to them and the large than life people who made and distributed the films.

Incidentily, for a full picture of New York in this period, it's worth picking up Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco. The same economic and social forces that led to the sleaze of Time Square are explained better in this book, alongside the history of a maligned but, once you start reading, fascinating musical form. The book is good even if you loathe the genre.

Nightmare USA

Pricey but huge tome on US independent horror of the 70s and 80s

Book of the Dead

Fabpress' Zombie bible. Wins points for not being overly focused on Romero movies (much as I love them...) with good chapters on the mildy racist poverty row voodoo flicks of the 30s and 40s, the Spanish Blind Dead flicks and many others, plus, pages of capsule reviews

DVD Delirium

Although the editions described in the three volumes of this series are now in many cases deleted, they were my guides when I started collecting on DVD and the reviews of the films still stand up, even if you'll never track down that early, super rare edition of Mario Bava's Rabid Dogs

Also work picking up from Fabpress is their book of Video Nasty Video art and their tomes on Japanese directoes Takashi Miike (Ichi the Killer, Audition) and Shinya Tsukamoto (Tetsuo, Haze)

Another stumbling block but at least we don't have James Ferman to put up with nowadays!

God only knows what state our DVD and BR releases would be in if he was still ruling the roost!

I shudder to think of the situation.

I do think things are improving. I'm finding there's a lot more available than when I left and a fair amount in better editions in the UK. The UK has been screwed in the past most definitely but you wouldn't believe how much from the major studios are being left to go OOP now here. More seems to be licensed off to smaller companies every week and a studio the size of Paramount seems to be virtually cutting out it's back cat altogether. You also have to consider that the UK is a small market, even compared to other European countries. There can be language licensing issues if we have to have English-speaking or original only so smaller companies in Germany and Italy etc can release English friendly versions of a lot of dubbed Italian films. Exporting to the U.S. is small because of PAL/NTSC issues. In the case of MGM, it can go both ways. The UK version of the original Rollerball kills the awful US version and we had an SE of Misery for about 5 years before it appeared in the States. There's no way I could have survived without multi-region but like I said, the UK is improving, especially thanks to the likes of the labels Splatterdragon mentioned

Then there's the BBFC...

Imo the U.K. DVD and BR industry will never,ever truly compete with their U.S. and European counterparts. Whereas we do get a better release every now and then this occurs way too few and far between for my liking. The major studios do tend to be the most guilty party when it comes to ripping-off the British consumer and i've had enough experience of this perpetual penny-pinching. Whereas indie outfits such as Shameless, Nucleus, Arrow, ABUK and HKL are the companys whose efforts seem to be the most buyable. If i can obtain the movie i want the way i want it from U.K. labels then i'll invest. But otherwise i'll always go the import route. If you ask me, true film fans always demand multi-region playability as standard. I know i do. We may live in rip-off Britain but at least when it comes to DVDs and BRs we can do something about it.

I find that MGM, while they have released some nice special editions here, tend to be the company most guilty of leaving special features off of UK dvds, Return Of The Living Dead and The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai being the worst offenders.

In the case of Blade, I also don't think it was advertised well over here. I'm not a big TV man but I didn't even know it was on until after the first episode had aired and I had Spike. It was also aired at a potentially suicidal time of the year in the U.S. so expectations can't have been high. The big shows generally begin their seasons in the autumn/fall because research seems to show that's the time when ratings potential is at a high. Blade aired in June.
I'm a big fan of the first two movies but Trinity really didn't help the franchise and certainly didn't do much for the Blade character itself so it also wasn't the best launching point in my eyes. He was almost reduced to a supporting role by then. I still haven't seen the series but will have to catch up on it some time.