Here's a Troma release from NYU film school grad and award winning playwright Jocelyn Beard. Director Billy Parolini is producing a documentary, A Man Called God, about actor Christopher St. John and cult leader Sai Baba.
To answer the question, "Did Claude Akins ever appear in a regional horror film?" we present this Florida obscurity that was finally released on DVD in 2012 by Troma. Shot in Stuart, Fla., on 16mm as Trilogy of Fear, this horror anthology failed to find a distributor during the dark days of the early 1990s when the fright film market bottomed out.
You can read more about it here and here. Watch the original promo below, along with Troma's revamped trailer.
For regional horror fans, Lloyd Kaufman's Troma Entertainment is one of those companies you have a love-hate relationship with. You love that the company released some of the most off-the-wall titles during the heyday of East Coast independent horror/sci-fi, but you hate the slapdash treatment most of those titles have had on the company's DVD releases (not to mention the sometimes deliberately awful films the company has produced over the past couple of decades).
Imagine my excitement (really) when I saw that the company had begun posting full-length features on its YouTube channel. I haven't had a chance to check the quality or presentation of the films, but at least you now have a chance to view most of the company's regional horror titles online, including several that went out of print on DVD, or were only available in multi-film sets (usually saddled with one or two inferior titles).
Of course, they're holding back some choice titles like The Children, Mother's Day, and Class of Nuke 'Em High, but perhaps they'll add them later or make them available for a fee.
The Dead Next Door is a blog about regional or "backyard" horror and science fiction films made from the late 1950s to the earlyl 1990s (and beyond). These films were released during the peak years of independent film production, created by a motley crew of seasoned pros, gifted amateurs, and enthusiastic genre fans, along with dozens of eccentric dreamers -- doctors, lawyers, insurance salesmen, publishers, commercial filmmakers, TV production crews and moonlighting pornographers -- all looking for their big break or a fast buck or both.
