31 Days of Fright Returns Tomorrow!

With September all but over and the last grains of beach sand cleaned out from between my toes, that can only mean one thing – Halloween season kicks into high gear!

To celebrate everybody's favorite frightfully fun time of year we'll be returning to our 31 Days of Fright countdown, a daily dose of horror, terror, exploitation and more in the form of reviews, news stories, pop culture oddities and whatever other fear-inducing goodies we can dig up.

If you missed last year's countdown, be sure to check it out here.

Hey Amigos! You Got Tarantulas in My Coffee Beans!

There isn’t an abundance of movies with coffee as a plot device, so when I stumbled upon a DVD of the 1977 tv movie TARANTULAS: THE DEADLY CARGO (Frematle Media) I knew I had to give it a spin.

Filmed before he became a tv star via WKRP IN CINCINATTI, TARANTULAS briefly features Howard Hessman and dependable Tom Atkins (NIGHT OF THE CREEPS, THE FOG, HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH, MY BLOODY VALENTINE 3-D) as a couple of gringoes with heads full of get-rich-quick dreams. So when they pour out of a taxi at a South American airport looking drunk and hanging all over some slatterns the federales eye them up as easy marks for an “export tax” on their cargo of Ecuadorian coffee beans.

In an unfortunate turn of events, Detective Cameron listens to Johnny Fever and his plan to get the money they need to get back to the States. And that’s the first sign of trouble. Well, that and the tarantulas that have crawled into the bags of beans. Oh, and the three illegals who get on board and promptly fall ill and get bitten by the spiders that spring from the bags during a storm. Other than that it’s a great plan.

After the plane crash lands in a small town filled with orange groves, the tarantulas – actually the Wandering or Banana Spider – make life a living hell in very JAWS-esque fashion, threatening the local industry (oranges instead of tourism) and turning Pat Hingle into Roy Schieder’s character.

As slow moving as the titular characters, TARANTULAS is almost bad enough to be entertaining. Almost.

There’s minor moments of hilarity like the woman who mistakes a tarantula for her boyfriend (in her defense his chest was pretty hairy) and lines like “hey you punk kid, get away from there” but most of the 96-minute running time is devoted to watching 70s tv stars wander around a warehouse shoveling up spiders – did I mention they’re motionless spiders? – while wasp sounds buzz through the speakers.

If that sounds like your idea of a good flick then by all means run out and grab TARANTULAS from the cheapie DVD rack at your local supermarket. If not, then consider yourself warned.

Review originally appeared in The Hungover Gourmet #11: The Coffee Issue.

War is Hell!

Did you love Quentin Tarantino's INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS? Then check out our six-pack of WWII shenanigans and Naziploitation including Sinferno's all-new review of the SS Hell Pack triple-bill.

Captive Women SS (aka SS Experiment Love Camp)
Churchill's Leopards (with Klaus Kinski)
Five for Hell (with Klaus Kinski)
The Liberators (aka Salt in The Wound... with Klaus Kinski)
Slave Girls of the SS
SS Hell Pack

Who Knew? Bill Hader Loves Klaus Kinski!

One of my favorite listens each week is The BS Report podcast with Bill Simmons on ESPN.com. I know what you're thinking, "Sports? Really?". Well, if my obsessions were strictly limited to Klaus Kinski, trash cinema and food I wouldn't be very well-rounded, would I?

And Simmons is hardly your typical sports talking head. Just a couple years younger than yours truly, Simmons doesn't work the sports beat or have the kind of unfettered access to players an coaches that broadcasters like to rub in our faces during games. Instead, Simmons is just as likely to interview an actor or comedian (like this week's great Patton Oswalt episode) as he is a fellow ESPN member, sports GM or athlete.

But you could have knocked me over with a feather during this week's interview with Saturday Night Live star and popular comic actor Bill Hader. While talking about their dinner the night before recording the podcast Simmons and Hader had the following exchange:

SIMMONS: "I didn't realize till dinner last night what a gigantic Klaus Kinski fan you are."
HADER: "Oh yeah, Klaus Kinski is amazing. MY BEST FIEND... I can watch that movie any time. It's like the ultimate..."

After that the conversation moves towards Hader's love for the autobiography of Roman Polanski and his Polanski impression, probably because Simmons doesn't know enough about Kinski to keep the conversation rolling.

But, so what? Between this and Anthony Bourdain's recent Kinski namecheck on an episode of No Reservations (which prompted one commentator on Bourdain's blog to write "My sides are still aching from laughing after the Klaus Kinski reference. Watching the monkeys I was thinking exactly that!") can we be entering a mainstream embrace of the German Olivier?

September Update at ER

The cool weather means things are just heating up at ER HQ. Check out the latest new reviews from the staff at Exploitation Retrospect including:

PLAGUE TOWN: David Gregory's nightmarish tale of backwoods Irish horrors

HORRIBLE: A near classic from George Eastman and Joe D'Amato

SLIME CITY GRINDHOUSE COLLECTION: Sinferno's look at a quartet of low-budget madness

STONE: The influential Aussie biker flick that helped inspire MAD MAX and THE ROAD WARRIOR

SACRED FLESH: historically questionable UK nunsploitation

GOTH KILL: tongue-in-cheek Satanic mayhem

And, not one, not two, but three Klaus Kinski Klassics (THAT MAN IN ISTANBUL, I AM SARTANA... YOUR GRAVEDIGGER and THERE'S A NOOSE WAITING FOR YOU... TRINITY).

Check 'em all out, not to mention hundreds more trash, horror and exploitation faves at Exploitation Retrospect: The Journal of Junk Culture and Fringe Media.

August Watches

My August watches were all over the place (and I'm not even including the various Disney stuff watched with my daughter) with a few old faves making my eyes rain...

HORRIBLE/MONSTER HUNTER -- fun early 80s flick that just misses out on greatness
PIECES -- the best, just the best; it actually gets more entertaining every time I see it
THE MUTILATOR -- quintessentially stupid but awesome 80s trash flick
I LOVE YOU, MAN -- not nearly as entertaining as ROLE MODELS
JULIE & JULIA -- surprised how much I enjoyed this; Streep is awesome
FAST & FURIOUS -- they should make one of these every year
DEVIL'S NIGHTMARE -- sexy and fun
PLAGUE TOWN -- skin-crawlingly enjoyable
MURDER ROCK -- FAME + FLASHDANCE + giallo = MURDER ROCK!
TROPIC THUNDER -- another one I brushed off when it came out but ended up really enjoying; a nice skewering of Hollywood... never go full retard