Saturday the 14th!

...means that it was Friday the 13th yesterday, lol. I watched two horror movies, Carpenter's PRINCE OF DARKNESS and FRIDAY 13, PART 2. I hadn't watched Prince of Darkness since I caught it on TV sometime in the '90s and I must have been tired or something cos I remembered it as a so-so film.

I found an ex-rental VHS release a while back and decided to pay the film a revisit last night. Glad I did! (despite having been of the opinion it was a mediocre film for the past nearly 20 years!). It turned out to be fucken brilliant and I loved it.

Even despite the fullscreen VHS presentation, the washed-out colours, and the soft picture. I was sucked into that creepy story like a motherfucker. Wauw! Just wauw!! I'm gonna get the DVD asap (I haven't upgraded to blue rays yet, or whatever you kids call it).



In contradiction to Prince of Darkness I hadn't actually watched Friday the 13th, Part 3 prior to my viewing yesterday. You might find it a little odd that a seasoned horror movie fan like yours truly hasn't watched a film like one of the well-known Friday the 13th movies. But the thing is, when I started out as a horror movie fan in the late '80s, American horror franchises like Friday, Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Steet seemed just too ordinary to my liking.

These were the kind of films that every little "mainstream" horror movie fan would dool over. Certainly not the stuff that *real* splatter movie fans in the underground were into. And I lived and breathed underground. Those other fans would get their info from Fangoria. Pfft! We got our info from fanzines such as In the Flesh, Ohh My Brain Hurts, Grim Humour, European Trash Cinema, Damon Foster's Oriental Cinema, etc.

Well, that was my attitude back then anyway. Hollywood backed horror films seemed too mellow and too "ordinary". Too commercial. Sometimes when you're a bit younger you think you can only choose o-n-e way. Not both ways. At least that's how it used to be. If you listened to punk you hated heavy metal, and visa-versa. If you were into thrash metal you hated glam rock. It was a black and white world. I wanted the alternative, the good stuff. The Evil Deads of this world! The wild stuff. The Italian gore meistros like Ar gento and Fulci. So I avoided all these horror classics for a couple of decades (mind you we're ONLY talking about the franchises, i.e. the sequels, here. I've watched all the original films years ago!).

But now it's time to discover the films that most of you know so well (does this mean that in return you are going to check out "unknown" wild horror films like the ones I festered on in those days? Films such as BLACK MAGIC WITH BUDDHA, THE BEASTS or SEEDING OF A GHOST. Those are some of the films I watched back in the day INSTEAD of the Friday the 13th films. Check them out. Excitement guaranteed).

Finally, I mentioned not having watched the Friday films in a comment to one of Aaron Pynn's posts and he suggested I do a video when I get through the films. I might just do that!