March Odds and Ends

The return of the Bleeding Skull; farewell to porn star Jamie Gillis; God's Bloody Acre on DVD; and more surprising news and updates!

Hard to believe it's almost Easter (and time for my annual viewing of the killer bunny flick Night of the Lepus). I've been hard at work on the book and gathering material for the blog, but I somehow managed to not get around to posting any of this stuff:

* I was surprised and delighted to see that one of my favorite Web sites, The Bleeding Skull, had been reactivated, ending creator Joe Ziemba's two-year hiatus. The site (where we first learned about the obscuro shot-on-video horror flick The Hackers) now has a new look, a new mission, and a new review of Death Brings Roses, a previously unheard-of film by Crypt of Dark Secrets auteur Jack Weis.

* Porn star Jamie Gillis, 66, died in February. The Columbia University grad was a fixture of the New York-based adult film scene in the 1970s, but also appeared in a number of horror and horror-themed adult films, including Dracula Sucks (1979), Dracula Exotica (1980), Joel M. Reed's Night of the Zombies (1981), and the more recent Die You Zombie Bastards! (2005).

* The Brooklyn Academy of Music is having a Bill Gunn retrospective this week that includes screenings of Personal Problems (1980) on April 1; the arty New York-lensed vampire film Ganja & Hess (1973) on April 2; The Landlord (1970) on April 3; and the extremely rare Stop (1970) on April 4 followed by The Angel Levine (1970).

*Word on the street is that Code Red will be releasing Harry Kerwin and Wayne Crawford's made-in-Florida redneck revenge flick God's Bloody Acre. The company has also announced a DVD for the too-long-out-of-print Slithis.

* And finally, we just found out one of our favorite writers, UK-based Kim Newman, is updating one of our favorite books, the 1985 (released in the U.S. in 1989) tome Nightmare Movies. The entirely revised and updated is coming out through Bloomsbury Publishing.

That's all for now, but I've got a lot of good stuff planned for April: A chat with Track of the Moonbeast co-writer Charles Sinclair; the wacky story behind the making of Island Claws; and a look at the rarest regional horror films ever made.