Friday, July 3, 2015

Friday Links: Dieter Laser, Gun Girls, and Rotten Bodies

As we ease into the weekend, ready to celebrate America's independence from King George's tyranny, let's pause a moment to look back on what's happened in the world of the strange and the horrific:
  • Ghost Hunting Theories took us to some of the scariest places on Earth, including Suicide Forest, Chernobyl, and Doll Island.
  • Nev Murray reviewed Rotten Bodies: A Zombie Short Story Collection by Steven Jenkins at Confessions of a Reviewer!!: "I’ve never read Steven Jenkins before. I thought this would be a good way to introduce myself to his writing. I wasn’t wrong.  This is a collection made up of six short stories all about zombies. A genre I haven’t really been keen on over the years but I am slowly getting to like it even more."
  • Anything Horror brought us some very exciting news.
  • Sean Eaton asked the pressing question of what happens when the Host is the Ghost at his invaluably incisive R'lyeh Tribune: "Lovecraft was also a noted teetotaler, and the story contains a veiled admonition about the consequences of drinking:  the narrator falls asleep after drinking a bottle of wine with his lunch, and his ordeal begins not long after he wakes up.  But aside from these influences, the work does seem to be primarily Eddy’s in style and content.  The Ghost-Eater and several other stories by Eddy constitute some of Lovecraft’s earliest revision work. (Muriel Eddy frequently assisted Lovecraft with the typing of his manuscripts.)"
  • Zombos' Closet of Horror opened up and threw out a must-see pressbook of 1957's Gun Girls.
  • At Ginger Nuts of Horror, Alex Davis interviewed actor Dieter Laser: "I got an e-mail from the producer Ilona Six with the request for a meeting with writer/director Mr. Tom Six in the lobby of the Berlin Hilton. The only further notice was that the subject would be of a role as a “scientist”. So I took my British double-breasted Glen Check summer suit out of the closet to resemble as close as possible a kind of a “scientist” and went under a cloudless sky to the Berlin Hilton expecting to meet a lot of my esteemed German colleagues waiting in the lobby for auditioning. The lobby was strangely empty - no other actors waiting. Only a beautiful couple in the sunny backlight through the huge windows: Tom and Ilona! Brother and sister as I learned. Tom had seen me in the German movie “Fuehrer Ex” and wanted to offer me the leading part in his film “The Human Centipede”."
  • John Kenneth Muir reviewed Chappie, a film I very much enjoyed: "Despite the film’s violence and dystopian imagery, there’s a strong element of hope underlining the often-violent Chappie. Too many science fiction films these days mindlessly accept the status quo, or cynically imagine that nothing will ever change, except for the worse. By contrast, Blomkamp’s Chappie reminds us that our everyday actions -- as parents and people -- can alter the shape of destiny, and make the world a better place for future generations."
  • Here, I pointed you to a review I wrote of Clive Barker's The Scarlet Gospels and wrote about the politicization of the 2015 Hugo Awards.
Illustration by Frank Brunner for Chaosium's Stormbringer 4th Edition Rulebook.

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