Some things I hadn’t room to mention elsewhere. ‘Zines seen.

• Creeping Unknown 11 ( 32 A5 pages, 50p + SAE from Nick & Cath, 29 Westland Ave, Hucknall, Notts NG15 6PW) is more legible than last time, and as literate as ever.
• Imaginator 5 (36 A4, 1.25, Unit 1, Hawk House, Peregrine Park, Gomm Road, High Wycombe, Bucks) is getting better with each issue, tho’ Ken Miller’s fascination with castration is slightly worrying!
• Dagon 26 (60 A5, 1.40, Dagon Press, 11 Warwick Rd, Twickenham Middx, TW2 6SW) is a D.F.Lewis special – he’s responsible for ‘Dreamaholic’ elsewhere in TC4, so if you liked that, you know what to do.
• Green Goblin 12 (32 pages A5, 50p + SAE, John Breakwell, 170 Caversham Rd, Reading, RG1 8AZ) is a computer/fantasy/chat ‘zine, that’s pretty AND interesting at the same time.
• And an error in the address for Prisoners of War in TC2. Wallace Nicoll, 48 Broughton ROAD, Edinburgh EH7 4EE.

On the book front, “Born to be Bad”, the follow up to “Lost, Lonely & Vicious” is out, containing 40 more postcards of posters from B-movies. 5.95, and I can see me having to buy TWO copies, one to use and one to keep. Cunning swines, these authors.

A well-informed source (James Furman, chairman of the BBFC) says that “The Exorcist” will not be out on video in the foreseeable future, contrary to popular rumour: “We don’t think the time is really right yet”. However, according to “Time Out”, “The Evil Dead” will shortly be available again, “albeit in a significantly cut form”. Meanwhile, for “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”, Furman said “several companies have asked us if there’s any point in submitting it on video and we’ve said no”.

TC5 should be out in April (I need the rest!). Contents: Sybil Danning, film reviews, Dangermouse, more European stuff, bits on Black Sunday & Splatterfest ’90 (if I’ve enough stamina for both of them) + how NOT to synthesize psilocybin.

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Alun Fairburn’s Film Hit & Sh*t Lists

SH*T LIST	HIT LIST
Alien Encounter	Flesh For Frankenstein
Blood Tracks	The Thing (Carpenter’s)
Body Count	The Terminator
Barfly	Street Trash
Cujo	Blood Feast
Conquest	Blade Runner
Demons 2	Dawn of the Dead
Frogs	Day of the Dead
Haunted Honeymoon	The Stepfather
Mutant Hunt	House by the Cemetery

**** 9. “Although we may run out of Pan-Am coffee, we’ll never run out of T.W.A tea”

Glyn Williams rolls up his sleeves and gets stuck in.

“I’m not sure about the rules of this, but I’m assuming that I can invite 12 guests (6 male and six female). I prefer to include guests who are still living – deceased guests have little to say and tend to leave their food. I will place myself at the head of the table and send my wife to her mother’s.”

“When choosing guests I have preferred to ask people who are capable of intelligent conversation and who may have conflicting opinions to their fellow guests but who can argue in a witty and civilised manner (thus Mr. Tyson is excluded). The guests are not chosen because they have big breasts or have spent their careers inducing cinema audiences to seek out the nearest barf bags. I retain the right, however, to ferring in a whole platoon of bimbos through the back door whilst my dinner guests are taking their leave through the front.”

“Guests are selected from a variety of areas of artistic life with representatives from cinema (3), politics (2), music (1), literature (2), paintings (1), TV & theatre (1), and 2 guests who I consider to be capable of talking about anything and everything (but without hogging the conversation).”

“I think the assembled group would be able to keep a dinner party going well into the early hours of the morning, but in order to do so they need to be backed up by a good set of staff behind the scenes. I have, therefore, also added some random thoughts about selection of these back-room staff but, unlike the choice of dinner guests, this group is not to be taken seriously.”

“One or two notable absentees from my dinner table: it would be a real coup to have Salman Rushdie but I can do without letterbox flambe half way through the evening and Clive Barker is not included because I have already read or heard just about every opinion he holds on anything. Margaret Thatcher would be welcome if she was actually ON the menu.

Males	Females
Michael Caine	Catherine Deneuve
Dennis Skinner	Edwina Currie
Randy Newman	Maureen Lipman
Evan Hunter (Ed McBain)	Julie Burchill
John Arlott	Jane Fonda
Peter Ustinov	Bridget Riley

Meanwhile in the kitchen:

• Waiter and general dogsbody: My boss
• Washing up: Nanette Newman

Food Preparation:

• H.G.Lewis: Meat dishes
• Chesty Morgan: Fruit dish (Melons, obviously)
• Royal Shakespeare Co: Fish dish (Cod pieces only)
• Arsenal F.C.: a variety of vegetables
• Man who sold Brooklyn Bridge: cons-some
• Next door’s dog: whines
• Kylie Minogue: tooth-pick
• Julian Clary: After Eight mince

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**** 8. “Don’t you fucking look at me!!”

Even if you can’t get all 10 (2 more in the supplement!), enter anyway – if last time is anything to go by, we may end up with more prizes than entrants and since I need the shelf space, it’s either you lot or the dustman! Closing date, round about March 1st, shall we say, and bribery isn’t against the rules…

And finally, the following piece. After reading it, I spent half an hour banging my head against blunt objects. You have been warned.

Once upon a time, there was a lazy old frog who sat in the middle of the pond and did nothing all day except catch gnats, All around him the other animals hurried and scurried, but the frog never moved. Eventually, the other animals got fed up and a deputation led by the lizard confronted the frog.

“Now, look here frog”, said the lizard. “All you do all day is sit in the middle of the pond catching gnats. It’s not good enough, animals should be active.”

“Actually”, said the frog, catching another gnat. “I have just been planning my skiing holiday. Would that be active enough for you?”

The other animals laughed in disbelief.

“You could never learn to ski”, said the dragonfly. “In fact, I’m willing to bet a six month supply of gnats that you couldn’t learn.”

“You’re on”, said the frog, and went to pack his bags.

Three weeks passed, and the frog eventually returned to the pond. The other animals were waiting and, once the frog had settled in and caught a few gnats for his tea, they demand proof of the frog’s skiing prowess.

Slowly, the frog unrolled a large certificate presented to him by the Skiing school, and across the top of the certificate it said in bright red letters:

GNAT CATCHER CAN SKI.

Thank you, and goodnight.

Start off with a story I read, but unfortunately didn’t clip. The rough details concerned a teenaged boy with a personality disorder which caused him to have periodic fits of depression. During one of these, he tried to commit suicide by shooting himself in the head with a gun – he didn’t kill himself but the bullet destroyed the area of brain responsible for his illness. He’s now leading a normal and happy life.

Technological cock-up of 1989, according to the Weekly World News – a computer that was supposed to issue fines for traffic citations went haywire and charged 41,000 people with murder, extortion and organised prostitution, reported police in Paris.

HUMAN BRAIN TRANSPLANTED INTO CHIMP – A team of surgeons at Humbolt University Medical Centre in East Berlin removed the brain of a clinically dead teenage boy and placed it into the skull of an adult female chimp. “To our great surprise, the chimp is not only alive…but she is already trying to talk like a human”. Apart from sounding not dissimilar to “Bad Taste”, the question uppermost in my mind is ‘which member of parliament got the chimp’s one?’

CYCLOPS SKULL FOUND – Japanese scientists claim to have found the skull of a Cyclops on an island in the South Pacific and there is evidence to suggest it didn’t die until WW II. This is accompanied by a photo of it, which I showed to a zoologist friend of mine – he thought it was probably two skulls cut and joined together, the lower half of a ‘normal’ skull with the upper half being another skull rotated so that the hole where the spinal column entered became the ‘eye’. Ingenious, huh? Though what a Cyclops was doing on a Pacific island is uncertain.

DINOSAUR WIPES OUT AFRICAN VILLAGE – The WWN works on the principle of if you can’t get a picture, draw it; the picture on the next page demonstrates this technique in action. The story tells how the village of Mokokou, in the north-east of the Congo, was almost wiped out by a creature that left foot-prints measuring nearly 12 feet across and ‘bigger than 10 elephants’. 175 people were slaughtered by the beast, according to a radio ham who’d just returned from the area. Meanwhile, whatever size feet the creature depicted might have, they certainly are nowhere near twelve foot across (unless the people fighting it are forty foot high or thereabouts – could this be a future story in the making? ) and the dinosaur itself looks very like a brontosaurus, or similar VEGETARIAN dinosaur, admittedly with a malevolent sneer on it’s face. The editor clearly chose the other accompanying picture (not shown ) at random from a box marked ‘African Natives’ as the background is desert, rather than the swamplands where this creature is said to live. Jeez, I don’t mind them making stories up – a little more consistency wouldn’t go amiss.

More evidence that drug-abuse screws you up comes from the imbecile in Alabama who went out to buy crack cocaine. He was well swindled and was sold soap instead – this lunkhead then went and complained about it to the police…

An idea to consider as a present for that special someone this Christmas, or to drop hints for perhaps, is the collection of stories from the Sunday Sport: ‘Bus Found at South Pole’. It’s only when you see the stories extracted from the sex adverts and presented in undiluted form that you realise just how nonsensical the entire paper is. Little wonder that other papers regard it as beneath contempt, since if people realise the “Sunday Sport” is quite capable of making stories up, they might start wondering what’s to stop the other newspapers from doing the same, in a slightly more subtle fashion? That would never do, though of course I realise that our papers are ALWAYS truthful and NEVER fabricate, lie or distort the facts. Except with respect to people rich enough to be able to sue them for libel…

SHOCKED COPS FIND CHILD’S MUMMY IN APARTMENT – Er, that’s mummy as in corpse…

A historical tale: Robert Liston was a 19th century surgeon renowned for being a lightning fast worker in the days before anaesthetics. Unfortunately, in his haste he was often a little careless. Once, he amputated a man’s leg at the thigh in just 2 1/2 minutes – it was only later he realised the patient’s testicles were gone too. On another occasion, he was even quicker, though the patient died of gangrene, his assistant also had three fingers sawn off causing his death too, and Liston cut through the coat and tails of a spectator, who was so worried his manhood had gone, that he dropped dead of fright. This operation thus became the only one in medical history with a 300% mortality rate.

I’ll finish with a WWN exclusive. I make no comment, & just print it as it appeared.

QUEEN FLIPS HER LID OVER FORGOTTEN POTTY SEAT – ‘Cranky old Queen Elizabeth was in a royal tizzy during a recent visit to Kenya, snapping and sniffing at everyone in sight – because some ignoramus forgot to pack her favorite goatskin toilet seat! “Her Majesty was a holy terror the whole time she was here” said an employee at Treetops, a ritzy game-viewing lodge in the African bush. “She snarled at the help, she grumbled at Prince Philip – she even growled at a buffalo. Everyone was shocked because all this ranting and raving was out of character for her. Then word leaked out that she was mad as hell because she didn’t have her Billy Goat.” Billy Goat is the name palace staffers have given the fancy white-kid toilet seat the Queen normally hauls with her on foreign trips. “Elizabeth has become very attached to the thing”, said one insider. “After all, a queen doesn’t want to plant her royal bottom on just any old throne. Somebody’s head is going to roll when they figure out who left the billy behind”…”That’s what happens”, said a royal escort, “when the Queen comes to town – and leaves the seat of power at home”‘.

Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel’s “Un Chien Andalou”, a short experimental film made in 1928, opens with a man sharpening a cut-throat razor. Finished, he walks out of the room onto a balcony where there is a woman already seated. Approaching her, he places his left hand over her face, stretches her left eyelid open and slices her eye with the razor. This is the first example of graphic eye violence on film.

In the years that followed there were few examples of eye violence, mainly due to what was or was not acceptable on screen. Something that didn’t prevent Roger Corman from making ‘X – The Man With X-Ray Eyes’, in 1963, in which Ray Milland takes a biblical quotation all too literally and scratches his eyes out because he can’t handle what he can see. Of course, it was Herschell Gordon Lewis in the 1970’s who showed what the intelligent movie-going public wanted to see and more than succeeded with both ‘The Wizard of Gore’ and ‘The Gore Gore Girls’ (on which, see later).

Apart from those, the 70’s were kinda quiet. ‘Massacre Mansion’ (aka Terror of Dr. Chaney; Mansion of the Doomed) and ‘Headless Eyes’ dealt with nutters removing people’s eyes. It even filtered through into a mainstream film – ‘The Omen II’; I’m sure many of you have a special place in your heart for the scene in which Joan Hart has her eye pecked out by a raven from hell and wanders into the path of an eighteen wheel Peterbilt truck.

In 1979, the whole show really kicked into action. An elderly, unknown Italian director named Lucio Fulci was hired to direct a rip-off of George Romero’s ‘Dawn of the Dead’ which had just been released. History was made – even those who think the rest of ‘Zombie Flesh Eaters’ is junk love the scene where a woman is pulled through a door by a zombie, with her eye meeting a nine-inch splinter of bamboo on the way. In many ways this is the best example one can produce of eye violence. The scene in question is slow, painful, graphic, you really feel for the actress; it is marred only by a dodgy effect. This scene gave Fulci’s career a new life – sure as shit is shit you wouldn’t have heard of him if he hadn’t filmed it.

So what is the appeal of seeing orbal punishment inflicted on someone else? Many can’t “see the point” to it, but there are still those who sit up in their seats when a sharp object comes into view, while all around them hide behind a cushion or place a hand over their face. Perhaps it’s because the eyes are one of the few organs visible on the outside of the body and are vulnerable to external forces, so when someone has their eyes poked out, you are thankful that yours are still safe in your head. This can be backed by considering the on-screen knee in the gonads. I’ve seen people double up and scream in pain when this has happened; the one difference between your eyes and your testicles (ladies excluded!) is that you can ALMOST carry on with your life as normal without your testicles.

What follows is a list of 20 great scenes of eye violence. Not all are violent, not all are graphic, but all should make you wince. Alas, it seems the golden age is over. But wait, someone HAS recognised the significance of losing your eyesight – stand forward Margaret Thatcher. Not content with having her own blind followers, she now attempts to make everyone else blind by unnecessary charges for eyetests…

1. ZOMBIE FLESH EATERS (below). ‘Nuff said.
2. UN CHIEN ANDALOU. What? You’ve forgotten already?
3. NIGHT OF THE BLOODY APES. Julio the bloody ape vents his anger by gouging an eye from a passer-by, who is so scared that his face turns into a latex mask.
4. EDGE OF SANITY. Eyeball scraping with scalpel. Not gory or violent, but YEEUUCH!
5. DEAD & BURIED. A burned photographer recovering in hospital has a syringe stuck in his one visible eye by the bitch who got him there in the first place.
6. EVIL DEAD. Ash takes NO MORE SHIT. Lifted up by his possessed pal, Ash does what any quick-thinking gorehound would do and pushes his thumbs DEEP in Scott’s eyes
7. MUTATIONS. A segment with freaks has one guy get on stage, utter total drivel & pop his eyes in and out of their sockets without using his hands.
8. CANNIBAL FEROX. John Morghen helps a cannibal native remove a particularly nasty foreign body from under his eyelid, with the use of a knife.
9. ZOMBIE CREEPING FLESH. The most original. A lady scientist has her tongue cut out and a zombie places its hand in her mouth and push her eyes out from inside.
10. DEMONS. Bugger what Jim says, at times it’s interesting, the main highlight : a blind geezer having his eyes scratched out by a demon with it’s priorites wrong.
11. NEW YORK RIPPER (above). The ‘Ripper’ drags a razor down a girl’s face via her eye which splits and lolls in the vitreous & aqueous. The BBFC didn’t see the humour (sic)
12. DESPERATE LIVING. John Waters’ film: Mole McHenry, shown in flashback battering an opponent to death with a stiletto and stamping on his handily fallen out eye.
13. GORE GORE GIRLS. One unfortunate victim has her eyes pulled out, pierced with a fork and SQUEEEEEEEZED at the camera.
14. ZOMBI 3 aka Burial Ground. Number 1, restaged with a glass splinter.
15. REVENGE OF THE LIVING DEAD. A stiletto clad zombie(?) pushes a victim to the ground and stamps on her eye with the heel. The systeme sanguine follows.
16. THE FOURTH MAN (See Film Blitz). Car drives into back of lorry carrying steel rods, one of which pierces a character’s head clean through.
17. SALO:120 DAYS OF SODOM. On the last day, one victim has an eye removed by knife. A low budget mean a loss of impact; spent the cash on fake shit, no doubt.
18. THE BEYOND. Chcok-a-block, this one. Gouged out, eaten by spiders and one head implaed on a nail in the wall, leaving an eye on it. All UK releases are cut…
19. OPERA. Apart from needles under the eyes and Daria Nicolodi getting shot im the eye, the best bit has ravens pecking their friends’ killer’s eye out.
20. ZOMBI HOLOCAUST aka Dr Butcher MD. Another gouging – tricks you by cutting away at the last possible moment and then immediately cutting back. Meaty.