Wednesday, October 11, 2017

Caltiki, The (Not So) Immortal Video Collection!

It's October, the month of Halloween, so what better time than to share some of the more macabre giant monster movies ever made, starting with tonight's featured film Caltiki The Immortal Monster (1959)

The story concerns a team of archaeologists investigating Mayan ruins who come across a deadly creature that is a shapeless amorphous blob. They manage to defeat it using fire while keeping a surviving sample of the creature which, ultimately, leads to more death and destruction when the archaeologists return to Mexico City.

You can read more about Caltiki through this well-written review from the blog-site Cool Ass Cinema.

Here's the trailer to wet your gooey appetites:



Alternative upload of the trailer, just in case:



Here's the feature-length film itself:



An alternate upload of the same film because, again, we're dealing with YouTube here:



If you enjoyed the film than I'd recommend the recent Blu-ray release from Arrow Video which, as you'll see in this ad, is teaming with bonus features:



And, lastly, a humorous second opinion from Dark Corners Reviews:



Thursday, May 18, 2017

Marc Tucker Reviews: Emerson, Lake, and Palmer - Once Upon a Time in South America

EMERSON, LAKE, & PALMER - Once Upon a Time in South America
4-CD Set, 2015 / Rock Beat
Review written by Marc Tucker - May 16th, 2017

ELP went through a number of phases. Essentially the New Nice, the threesome carried on Keith Emerson’s progressive and neoclassicalist visions much more thunderously, making the trio a byword for progrock, launching the group in the upper reaches of the prog stratosphere. One cannot even mention progressive music without referring to ELP and a couple dozen other bands. Keith was one of the three greatest keyboardists rock ever engendered, the others being Jon Lord and Rick Wakeman, all now sadly passed on. It was a shocking day when Emerson committed suicide, but this epic release, a four disc set of a nearly 25-year old reunion tour is one of the keys to his story. I’ll tackle that first.

ELP peaked with Brain Surgery Salad and then began a slow elegant quasi-neoclassicalist decline with Works, Vols. 1 & 2 (1977), bombing disastrously only a year later with Love Beach (1978), a wretched collection of opuses, followed a full 14 years later (1992) by Black Moon, an attempt to crawl back from the Beach and onto dry land. I know what happened, as do all sensible prog-hedz: the lads had tried to expand into the pop arena, where the real money was. Genesis, after all, was beginning to turn the trick (of the tail) into what would be a huge success, but Keith and the lads should’ve spoken to Gentle Giant, who’d tried and died on the same grounds. From Beach forward, ELP would never again attain to its erstwhile primacy.

What’s rarely mentioned, certainly not in this generous release’s weak liner notes nor anywhere else, is that, after this south-of-the-border tour, Keith was forced to take a year hiatus due to an unidentified form of arthritis similar to “writer’s cramp”. His bio, Pictures of an Exhibitionist, tells of a surgery that finally allowed him to, in 2002, regain full use of his hands, playing to strengths, once more. However, less than a decade later (2010), a colonoscopy revealed a dangerous lower-colon polyp. By the time of his death (2016), it was found he also suffered from a heart condition and depression aggravated by alcoholism.

The muses can be exceedingly kind to artists for a while…but they’re also notoriously fickle bitches, disdainful, vengeful, sociopathic.

That all said, we’re now prepared for the music on this sprawling nearly-5-hour previously unavailable diary of a too-brief three days (April 1, 5, & 16, 1993) in Santiago (Chile) and Buenos Aires, (Argentina). Think of Once Upon a Time as a very well recorded bootleg, something the group and label were refusing to issue for whatever odd reason until now but which you’re now suddenly slaveringly privy to. Think of it in line with Yes’ recent Progeny and King Crimson’s Road to Red and Starless box sets, but much later in time, as, like that trio of gems, it contains many repeated songs, and that’s precisely what we bootleg fanatix tremble for!

The 16:17 melange, “Fanfare for the Common Man / America / Rondo” (disc 4) is a long drink from the Nice’s fountain-of-youth apogee harking back to its incredible Elegy (released in ’71 but recorded in ’69) rendition of “America”, still one of the most riveting cover opuses prog can boast of, a cut I aver John Cage and Karlheinze Stockhausen must have heard and smiled upon (if not, I’m sending ‘em the YouTube extract via a couple of rogue angels I know). This carries into “Karn Evil 9, 1st Impression, Part 2” and then “Hoedown” with a completely different mutation of the Dick Hyman “Minotaur” lift that blew my mind on Welcome Back, My Friends, to the Show That Never Ends. The extract continues on “Lucky Man” as well.

Even the songs I’m not nuts about in the studio renditions (WAY too sugary!), that post-’78 period, come across nicely here, more refined, often with somewhat differing arrangement, as evidenced by “Paper Blood” (disc 1) with its flashy jazz-rock organ solos, and, yes, it and its brethren are frequently powerful but not as in days of olde, as with the original Tarkus LP (and the “Tarkus” track recurs 3X through this set). “Black Moon” plods a trifle, but “Close to Home”, a solo piano piece, is, if you want to look at it that way, a continuo on the Nice’s Five Bridges Suite and Pathetique explorations. “Creole Dance”, a solo work with a debt to Ginastera, just about Emerson’s fave composer if not the, continues his virtuosity, showing, though an absence was ominously impending, he still had highly impressive chops. Once again, we’re dancing on the golden bridge from the Nice to ELP’s inauguration. The crowd, by the way, goes NUTS!!

Greg Lake is his usual self, bass and guitar work more than satisfactory though his voice comes close to cracking many times. Was he suffering from a cold? Had his pompous haughtiness caught up with him? Carl Palmer of course has always demonstrated perfection in percussionistics and this gatherum is no exception. That guy is indefatigable and never makes wrong choices.

Now for something a tad different: on the back cover of Edward Macan’s behemoth and definitive volume on ELP, Endless Enigma, you’ll find a quote from my OpEdNews days: “The gargantuan Endless Enigma emerges as the first and last word on ELP while echoing the entire genre as a contextual backdrop; no music aficionado of any stripe should be without it”. That, however, was not the whole quote, which originally read this way:

“Despite the treacley gushing of progrock crtics, who tend exalt anything even vaguely progressive no matter its massive deficits, there are those who write with clearheaded and well-researched vigor, and Edward Macan is one of these rare individuals, so rest assured you’re in good hands. The gargantuan Endless Enigma emerges as the first and last word on ELP while echoing the entire genre as a contextual backdrop; no music aficionado of any stripe should be without it”.

Eddie and Open Court Books decided to delete that first passage because it was feared I’d render offense to other critics. Oh heavens!! Well, good grief, of course! I’m a critic, not a pom-pommette like 99% of my “compeers”. Regardless, I cite the incident to mention that the individual who penned the notes to Once Upon a Time is too frequently way off base, and I advise consumers to ignore it lest their sanity suffer irreparably. Progrock has first and foremost suffered from its critics, not its fans, and there are damned few truly comprehensive, very well-written, and exhaustive treatises in the genre, but, if you dig proglit, after listening to Once Upon a Time in South America, grab that mammoth museum of artifacts. Clear your calendar for a week or two, you’ll need it, and Once Upon will serve as soundtrack, so you’ll never even notice the time passing.

Sunday, May 14, 2017

Marc Tucker Reviews: Uzelli Psychedelic - Anadolu

UZELLI PSYCHEDELIC – Anadolu
2016 / Uzelli Stereo
Review written by Marc Tucker - May 16, 2017

An unabashed progrocker, I’m always on the hunt for new materials in the genre, whether recently issued or unearthed from exotic old archives. Back in the 70s, the radio music scene was pretty much as it is now when it came to rock idiomatics: 95% mainstream crap…with some good stuff leavened in…but then there were the very few and very hours-limited free-form dial positions like KPPC in Pasadena (Calif.). Me and my buddies would head out to Tuna Canyon, just off the Pacific coastline, a nice little wild spot with a stream running through. We’d settle in, drag out the alcohol and other intoxicants, get loaded (but we NEVER inhaled!!), and bliss out to the chiefly European nu-musics wafting through our pre-boombox boombox.

MUCH later, as exposure venues proliferated, came the discovery of old Pacific Rim psych and prog such as ignited Dengue Fever and other moderns, and thus new windows opened for those still adventurous enough to desire such materials…if, that is, no one else knew about it in order that one not be damned as a brainiac, that it didn’t damage career opportunities among the Republicans at work, and if such a level of aesthetics didn’t come across as some form of apostasy from groupthink. Well, that type of stuff is enjoying quite a bit of archaeological exhumation, and Anadolu opens wide the doors to a geography heretofore almost completely unrecognized in the West: the zone reaching from Istanbul to Frankfurt.



Brothers Yavuz and Muammer Uzelli in 1971 embarked on an epic project to document as much of the region’s psychedelic and other musics as possible. They succeeded magnificently, ending up with more than 1,000 albums from nearly 500 artists: psych, prog, folk, rock, etc. ‘Anadolu’ is the term for the psychedelic music emerging from the Anatolian peninsula/plateau in Turkey, and everything in this disc is 100% in-genre, featuring a good deal of stunning musics from way back when, and what few cuts there are which are not head-churning are extremely satisfying regardless. Psych fanatix and prog-hedz are going to be delighted with the array of bands and cuts.

Zor Beyler leads off the collection with “Intro” and “Gozundeki Yaslarina” (“The Tears in Your Eyes”), and aficionados will immediately recognize the Mythos-esque spoken lead-in (the late 60s / early 70s Mythos, not the New Age ensemble – doesn’t anyone do any research before they settle on band names any more??). Little is known of the Zor Beyler group, but it included electric baglama in their Arabesk, pop, fantezi, and Anatolian compositions. Skip forward to Asik Emrah’s “Bu Ellerdan Gocup” and treat yourself to an outrageous…um…well, honestly, I can’t tell if that’s a righteously distorted Ratledge-esque keyboard, a mutated guitar, an electrified oud, or what, but, Jesus!, is that guy wailing (though the 12-page booklet contains xlnt background data, not all bands are covered, this one of them, due to what is likely a complete absence of knowledge anywhere, so I cannot cite his name)! The plectrum sounds in portions of the attack phase of a number of envelopes there indicate a stringed instrument, but elsewhere, the axe appears also to morph into a ney or shenai. Excellent bass and percussive work provide a platform for the smooth and dizzying flight of the passage, and, had this appeared in Europe in its day, Nektar, Brainticket, and various other prog ensembles would've been sweating.

Anadolu is a treasure trove, a gift from the Earth goddess, a necklace of echoes from muses of decades past, a 10-cut antiquarian gift to the present lest we become too hubristic about the estate of modern exotica. Yes, we’ve much to beam about from Gen X forward, but CDs like this one remind us there were forebears, that the market was less than kind to most of them, and that technology and exposure platforms have now provided the means by which we can cast our nets backwards and become a tad humbler, remembering fresh springs existed in long forgotten valleys.

Wednesday, April 26, 2017

Cryptozoologicon Video Lectures

Despite my love for fictional giant monsters and the once VERY REAL prehistoric mega-fauna, I'm quite skeptical towards most Cryptids in my adulthood, especially since most modern examples of such conjectural creatures being blatant nonsense like the recent Slender Man and Ninjin phenomenon - Seriously, you're not even trying anymore, internet!

But as modern day culture and folklore, I find Cryptozoology infinitely fascinating and the 2013 new book entitled Cryptozoologicon, Volume I does a beautiful job of celebrating the myths while still keeping a critical eye towards it (not against it) and still being very educational in its concepts / theories - a balancing act that almost no one does anymore in science, in and out of the paranormal and realistic science fiction.

The following are two really entertaining video lectures from 2013 done for the Cryptozoologicon book launch, hosted by Darren Naish, the book's authors, and C. M. Kosemen, one of the book's two illustrators - Enjoy!




Wednesday, March 22, 2017

Mister Tucker Reviews: Steve Slagle – Alto Manhattan

The following music review comes courtesy of friend and writer Marc S. Tucker, carried over from his newsletter VERITAS VAMPIRUS and is NOT of my doing despite being featured on my blog - please keep this fact firmly in mind for future reference.

STEVE SLAGLE – Alto Manhattan
2016 / Panorama
Review written by Marc Tucker - February 6, 2017



Anything that alto saxist (and excellent flautist) Steve Slagle’s involved with, the moment you hear it, ya can’t help but blurt out “Now that, goddammit, is JAZZ!” The guy was born to the mode and gets better with each passing year; quite a feat considering he’s been top notch for decades. And when Joe Lovano teams up with him on tenor? Good God! Add the dynamic Bill Stewart on drums, Lawrence Fields on a piano switching between be-bop and Evans/Ellington picturesqueness, Gerald Cannon on a smokin’ hot bass, and then Roman Diaz’s congas tossed into three cuts, and you have a band so integrated they might as well have been welded together as a mobile of kinetic musos.

Slagle’s as pre-eminant a hornsman as any you can name, as is Lovano, and the appearance of one, the other, or both in any endeavor is a guarantor of quality, not to mention no respecters of boundaries, taking from many infra-styles while firmly positioned in the grand tradition. Steve’s work both reifies the sometimes elusive basic nature of jazz and then projects forward, not far, not 'fusion' as it’s commonly known, but enough past the studio doors to look to the stars while walking around the neighborhood.

Doesn’t matter if it’s his own work, as the lion’s share of comps here are, or someone else’s (three great covers splash in), everything carries the saxist’s sterling imprint. It’s one thing to ape the fare of the greats, as classical musicians do, but quite another to breath even more life into them via one’s own cognizances, aesthetics, and interpretations. Check out his take on Johnny Green’s “Body and Soul”, and you’ll see what I mean. That’s the solemnest section of the CD, everything else a blow fest, celebration, and seminar in what makes jazz jazz. But, man, that Stewart…a cross between Jack DeJohnette and Carl Palmer! No wonder a galaxy of jazz estimables have inducted the guy into a very impressive catalogue of releases. And if Steve Slagle’s a Samuel Johnson, Stewart’s his Boswell, setting everything on this disc firmly into indelible sonic quarto editions.

RELATED LINKS: Steve Slagle's Official Website

Wednesday, March 1, 2017

Brandon's Cult Movie Reviews: King Kong Escapes

Do you like giant apes? How about drop kicking dinosaurs & robot doppelgangers? Or hot blondes, hot brunettes, and Doctor Who (sort of)?

Well, you can see all this and more in Brandon Tenold's latest cult movie review, King Kong Escapes, with title card duties handled once again by yours truly!


RELATED LINKS OF INTEREST:

Toho Kingdom's Page For King Kong Escapes

Wikizilla's Page For King Kong Escapes

Thursday, February 16, 2017

GALAXY! GALAXY! GALAXY! GALAXY!

GALAXY! GALAXY! GALAXY! GALAXY! GALAXY! GALAXY! GAL...Just watch the video-podcast below, which I co-hosted with KaijuNoir, to find out what the heck I'm referencing here.


Wednesday, February 8, 2017

Mister Tucker Reviews: Cojones – Resonate

The following music review comes courtesy of friend and writer Marc S. Tucker, carried over from his newsletter VERITAS VAMPIRUS and is NOT of my doing despite being featured on my blog - please keep this fact firmly in mind for future reference.

COJONES – Resonate
2016 / PDV Records / Rough Trade
Review written by Marc Tucker - 01/26/2017

Croatian metalline progrock?!?!? Righteous!!! The promo lit extols Cojones (um, “Balls” in Spanish…and I don’t mean ‘beach balls’, y’all) in comparison to Monster Magnet, Soundgarden, the Melvins, Kyuss, stoner metal, and others, but, because I’m familiar with all those groups, I’ll say the more accurate RIYLs would be along the lines of Omega, Nektar, Fields of the Nephelim, and the Euro-Krautische-Balkan cross-connection of the 70s and 80s. Formed a decade ago, the four gents (Bojan Kocijan, Nenad Mandic, Gordan Tomic, Stanislav Muskinja) know the backstory and, despite the far distance of Zagreb from those antecedents, have obviously devoured a wide spectrum of sounds between The Great Era (progrock’s far too short zenith from the mid-60s to mid-to-late-70s) and everything up to the moment.

Yeah, I hear all the modern metalloids, but, being the upsetter of apple carts I am, let me heap even more appropriate praise on Cojones beyond the above analogues ‘cause this quartet has its shit down stone cold. Hawkwind circa Xenon Codex appears many times as well as Killing Joke, snatches of Killer / Love It to Death Alice Cooper, the more symphonic aspects of Type O Negative, and even a bit of Savatage, among others. This is the ensemble’s third outing, but I’m guessing they were this tight and pounding straight out of the starting gate on their debut, a few years ago; the sophistication of composition alone indicates that.

Despite the heavy nature of the disc, the engineers managed to work in in a rich satiny finish that elevates the 8-song enterprise into a more classic stratum complementing the many harmonic cohesivities in varying atmospheres cleaving closely to earthy textures before screaming into the stratisphere, “Build a Home” particularly notable in this. Trippy Alex Grey / Euro underground-comix artwork is showcased in a four panel transubstantiation of a spaced head (Timothy Leary and Terence McKenna would approve!) by Stipan Tadic in an aestheticallty pleasing presentation topping off the professionality of the enterprise. Resonate competes with the best in the field.

RELATED LINK: The Cojones Official Webpage

Monday, January 16, 2017

Mister Tucker Reviews: Andre Dinuth - Here With You

The following music review comes courtesy of friend and writer Marc S. Tucker, carried over from his newsletter VERITAS VAMPIRUS and is NOT of my doing despite being featured on my blog - please keep this fact firmly in mind for future reference.

ANDRE DINUTH - Here With You
2016 / no label cited
Review written by Marc Tucker - 01/15/2017

SHRED FEST ALERT!!! SHRED FEST ALERT!!! Of all the highly impressive World Fusion musicians who poured materials forth in 2016, Andre Dinuth stands shoulder to shoulder with the best. Loaded to the back teeth with outrageous chops, compositional ingenuity, and any number of ingenious approaches to playing, frequently backed by Jan Hammer-level keyboardist Marthin Siahaan, Here With You is peak-level Return to Forever, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Al DiMeola, Nova, etc. event. I do not speak lightly here.

I don't recognize any of the basic band's players, but they’re all top notch in keeping up with this super-clean speed demon. A decent percentage of personnel rotates as the cuts track their way through one's speakers, but everyone shines like starbursts all through the 10 songs in a release I have little doubt will get a hell of a lot of pass-around among the top dawgz in the industry. Steve Howe, for instance, will swoon when he hears Dinuth's Chet Atkinsy / Flatts 'n Scruggsy "Farm-O-Country", an adept Dixie Dregs-ish ditty that swings like crazy, and John Petrucci will be digging the rapid-fire lyricisms dripping from every corner of the release entire.

Indra Lesmana, a well-proven vet, sits in on one cut, Djitron Pah on another, Andi Rianto on a third, and then there's Eugen Bounty taking up the clarinet for a way cool duet, Andre switching to an acoustic axe. That number takes me back to the 70s when neo-Romantic compositions flourished in the nu-jazz and fusion fields, entranced by the manifold virtues found in all genres and unafraid to incorporate apposite materials with rare grace. In the arts, this is what constitutes evolution.

The opening cut, “Sahara”, the track carrying Lesmana on keyboards, also purveys a muy bitchin' Carnatic/Arabian vocal line by the mono-monikered Moh, who also plays saluang (mis-ID'ed here as "sulang", which actually means "thank you" in Palauan) and whose sung lines I wish they’d shoved more up front in the mix, and steamroller drum work by Yandi Andaputra underscored in tabla by another mononymed gent: Husein. A speedball rollercoasting white-knuckler, the track sets the scene but restricts nothing, as many flavors and tempi are found throughout, from the breakneck to the balladic, though, all prognutz and fusionoids will be happy to find, high drama and Saturn 5 ballistics dominate.

I always regret that I get so loaded down with submissions at the end of each year because its impossible to review everything in the timely manner I'd like, especially given I have no admin, V.V. being a one-man horse…BUT…had I gotten to this in Dec., it would DEFINITELY have gone on the 2016 Year's Best list. Dinuth is a vibrant player with the sort of energies and enthusiasm discerning ears are ever a-thirst for. It's evident he spent God-only-knows how many thousands of hours woodshedding and crafting. Here With You is the gent's second solo gig (the previous one emerged in 2015), though he’s played for a decade with some of the top Timorese/Indonesian musicians, including Tohpati and Dewa Budjana. This disc and its predecessor herald the arrival of an Instant Master well ensconced in the intricacies of the region's superlative styles well informed and re-shaped by a connoisseur's digestion of Western modes. It only remains, then, for you to join the feast.

RELATED LINK:

Andre Dinuth's Official YouTube