The contents of the marathon are supposed to be secret til Friday, so as not to ruin the surprise for anyone in Wellington who’s going to see a similar lineup, so if you think you might fall under this category, don’t read it:

1. LADY TERMINATOR – 80’s Thai (?) TERMINATOR knockoff, so naturally it features (RASA SPOILER FOR SOMETHING YOU LEARN IN THE FIRST TWO MINUTES) a woman with a snake in her vagina that kills men by biting their cocks off. Also a shitload of guns. Anyway, this fucking rules. Never a dull moment, plenty of batshit insane ones. Fans of THE STABILIZER should check this out.

2. STREETS OF FIRE – never saw this before, actually not just a nostalgia trip but pretty fucking cool despite the 80’sisms and Meat Loaf tunes, sure I appreciated it a lot more than I would’ve at 10. What’s up with Willem Dafoe’s hair?

3. BURIAL GROUND – turgid but wildly entertaining in its ineptitude, and astonishingly perverse to boot. Plus the only film I’ve seen where zombies make extensive use of tools, which puts them one up on the human protagonists in this film.

4. CRANK – the 2006 film, the only new film, and one fucking twisted and relentlessly entertaining piece of work.

5. TROLL 2 – everyone knows that Nilbog is goblin spelled backwards, right? A hard sit insofar as I’ve watched it once already this year, and it plays much better fresh, but seeing it with a room of unwitting people was a treat. Even better, afterwards we had a call from the father in the film, who’s now a dentist in Alabama, and only recently discovered the burgeoning cult following. Apparently the Italians who directed the film spoke no English, so everybody was pretty much freewheeling their performances, and most of them hadn’t done much acting beyond high school theater. Gee, go figure.

6. TOP SECRET! – holds up surprisingly well.

7. BEHIND LOCKED DOORS – unreedemably tedious and unpleasant without actually being transgressively interesting. Although the male protagonist who locks the doors is very similar looking to Henry Kissinger, so there’s that.

8. LISZTOMANIA – I’ve loved this film from my only viewing on a pan and scan VHS eight years ago, and seeing a near-pristine 35mm print of it was pretty much a religious experience. (I think just about everyone else there hated it.) What makes the film is the audacity of the direction it goes with the ending, which is apart from LISA AND THE DEVIL the least predictable ending ever.

9. THUNDERBIRDS ARE GO! – I didn’t grow up with the thunderbirds, but this movie is really fucking boring. I swear it opens with a ten minute spaceship getting ready to launch sequence.

10. TO LIVE AND DIE IN LA – Had never seen it before. A bit slow in pace to play this late in the ‘Thon, and the cliched opening meant it took a while to get into it, but still really fucking good.

11. HOLY MOUNTAIN – Not sure if it’s mean or brilliant to play this after 18 hours of consecutive movie watching. I’d never seen any Jodorowsky before, and was shocked that despite it being very easy to argue it’s a load of crap it sort of seemed like a masterpiece. (*TINY LITTLE SPOILER*) It says something when you’re watching a movie where suddenly a guy’s breasts turn into tigers and he’s shooting milk into another guy’s mouth, and you don’t even *react* because it’s just par for the course.

12. BLACK AGENT LUCKY KING – Never heard of this blaxploitation film before? There’s a reason. Pretty much the lamest crimefighter of all time. Also a crap print, so it’s possible that all the action scenes have disappeared over the years.

13. INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1978) – Never saw this before. Fanbloodytastic. Go, Donald Sutherland’s hair!

Then it turned out that the disc itself contained the music of QUEEN ELVIS, not the “Madonna of the Wasps” single. Which makes it some kind of rarity, I suppose. Still have never seen the CD-single for sale.

Anyway – I didn’t get to see him til the late 90’s, due to various streaks of bad timing, so perhaps there’s less storytelling than the EYE era, but there was more than enough to feel I’d gotten my money’s worth – more than enough, I think, for even somebody who disliked the music to think they got their money’s worth.

Happy almost birthday, Kilian! “Uncorrected Personality Traits” was another track I played a lot in my later years – I think KTRU didn’t have a copy til the Rhino reissues.

I’ve been putting Hitchcock’s Uncorrected Personality on cd comps for my friend’s with kids. <– there it is linked on youtube but the recording is something he did by himself with a four track.

“Take you this, prawn, onion,
bicycle cap?”

Actually, you can find the whole text of it here. Magic, magic internet.