Archive for the ‘Tasty Scraps’ Category

Fans of H.P. Lovecraft can now enjoy a new book discovered recently by Lovecraft archivists. This work was not even known to exist since no references to it were found in any of the author’s many published and unpublished works, including articles and personal letters.

With the blessings of the Lovecraft estate, various pages, notes, and instructions have been painstakingly compiled into a new finished volume and will be first new work by H.P. Lovecraft to be published in many years.

What is the new book about?

It’s a cookbook.

“We know Lovecraft wasn’t known for his culinary skills,” said head archivist Lou DeReada, “but once we read though these manuscripts we realized what might have led to the author’s sensitive stomach.” Indeed, Lovecraft wrote about habitually eating only 2 meals per day “since my digestion raises hell if I try to eat oftener than once in 7 hours”, and spending only three dollars a week on food.

The recipes contained in this newly discovered book are thought to be earlier writings and may help to explain how the author might have developed digestive difficulties later in his life.

The new tome entitled “The 50 Delicious Recipes of Unknown Kadath” contains complete instructions and lists of ingredients for creating assorted dishes like Uncouth Black Oozed Filet Mignon, Sweet and Sour Sothoth, and Fungi from Yuggoth au gratin.

However, DeReada cautions against actually trying to create any of the meals from the cookbook.

“We sent sample recipes to a test kitchen in New York’s famous Le Jirque restaurant”, he said. “Within the first hour, 6 chefs went mad and ran from the building tearing at their faces and screaming something like ‘the stars will soon be in the right positions to revive Them’. One of them also screamed about a ‘doom of a cycle of eternity without cloves or crushed red pepper’. We recommend that the readers at least use caution, especially when preparing for dinner parties.”

Below is a sample recipe from the new book. This excerpt is edited to reduce the risk of insanity.

Many-Tentacled Forbidden Blasphemies in White Wine Sauce

Ingredients

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon minced onion
1 teaspoon minced celery
8 (6 ounce) scaly greenish tentacles (can substitute grey antennae)
1 teaspoon minced garlic
1 teaspoon minced green bell pepper
2 tablespoons blue-litten K’n-yan, diced
1 colossal and nameless blasphemy with glaring red pimentos
1 ounce white wine

Slice a pocket into the side of each tentacle, and stuff generously with blue-litten K’n-yan, set aside. Heat olive oil in a large cast iron skillet over medium heat. Saute garlic and onion for 1 minute. Stir in bell pepper and colossal and nameless blasphemy with glaring red pimentos, and saute until tender. Scream to the heavens of the horror of staring into the face of forever, season to taste with salt and pepper. Place tentacles in skillet, and cook until a shapeless protoplasm forms or until done. Reduce heat, stir in white wine and prepare for the arrival of the Old Ones. Top with the souls of the dead or bacon.

The 50 Delicious Recipes of Unknown Kadath will be available in bookstores everywhere for a limited time. The printing itself won’t be limited, just the amount of time to purchase before the arrival of the mindless Other Gods covers the earth in fetid rot and the screams of the dying, but in time for the holidays.

This week’s Ghoultoon is pre-empted so we can bring you the following special entertainment report:

Highlights from the Dead Lantern Splattercast 3rd Annual Splatcademy Awards show.

An event recap by Hollywood correspondent Fakeland J. Laurence.

Dead Lantern recently released its annual Splatcademy Awards podcast. This podcast apes the Academy Awards by presenting nonexistant statues to horror related movies and podcasts. In other words, like the actual Oscars, it’s just an excuse for people to dress up and get drunk.

In case you missed it, here is a recap of what I felt were the highlights from the show.

• Vaughn from Motion Picture Massacre presented Best Foreign Horror Film. Vaughn is sure to make podcast history with his unique ability to make the act of podcasting sound like the biggest pain in the ass ever.

 

• The achievement in Visual Effects category was presented by Mat and Borp who announced a new podcast they will be hosting called The Blackfoot Lounge. The show will feature reviews and discussions of 19th century North American Indian tribes.

 

• Another great presentation was given by the guys from It Came From The Basement, who after all this time still act like they just woke up and don’t know they’re being recorded.

 

• Another enjoyable moment was provided by Desmond Reddick of Dread Media who recorded future courtroom evidence for his inevitable separation from his wife Megan. Best of luck on your next podcast show, Divorced from the Movies!

 

• Another great highlight to the Splatcademy Awards was fast-forwarding through everything Frank and Ronin said. I’ve personally fast-forwarded through several of their Sleepycast shows, and I recommend doing this whenever they record anything because it makes their jokes much funnier than if you actually listened to them.

 

• A fine presentation for Best Horror Video Game was made by Snackers Ate My Podcast Notes, the podcast hosted entirely by 13 year olds with Attention Deficit Disorder. They are also well known for acting like they aren’t aware that they’re being recorded, but that’s probably a side effect of high doses of Ritalin.

 

• In the Best Horror Blog or Website category, The Dark Hours Podcast gave a short presentation and used a script. We can all learn a lesson in good podcasting from these guys. In and out before anyone realizes you’re not funny and can’t act! But not before shoehorning in as many plugs as possible.

 

• Congratulations to Arrow in the Head for winning Horror Blog Or Website With The Most Ads And Crap All Over It. It’s about time.

 

• Steven of JAFMP announced the award for Fairly Decent But Not Nearly As Good As Our Horror Podcast, then called everyone “bitches” and used a bunch of big words I didn’t understand.

 

• The Zombiegrrlz podcast finally received well-deserved recognition for their achievements by winning the award for Podcast With Most Frequent Use Of The Words “Like” and “Oh My God”.

 

• On a related note, kudos to Dead Lantern’s idiot-savant DeeJay for pointing out that Zombiegrrlz won by hypnotizing the voters with their vaginas. It needed to be said.

 

• The Graveyard Show did a presentation for Best Television Series, which took only a small fraction of the time they spent plugging their own podcast and website. Is there an award for that? There should be, because the nominees are legion.

 

• The Horrorphilia podcast presented the award for Podcast Least Likely To Do Any Show Prep. I’m kidding, they didn’t really present that award. They WON it.

   

• Horror Etc was on the show to offer their familiar brand of eventually getting around to talking about what they were there to talk about, and occasionally remembering that other people just might be listening to them. In what I assume was a change in style for Tony and Ted, they didn’t record any sounds of a car motor.

 

• The Best Death Scene was presented to Rob Zombie’s career as a director. Sorry, but if I didn’t say it someone else would have.

 

• The Best Breasts category was presented by Zombiegrrlz (because they’re all chicks, get it?!) who kept the pace going by stealing the old talking computer gag from Corey at the Midnight Podcast.

 

• Next, the Drunken Zombie podcast showed up to talk amongst themselves at length about God-knows-what. They might have presented something too, I’m not sure, but whatever it was it was probably all about Uncle Randy.

 

• Next up, for the Scariest Scene or Moment award, the Blood Bullets and Broads podcast appeared and tried to break the record for saying “fuckin’” more times during a presentation than any other podcast. This record is currently held by Just Another Fucking Movie Podcast, so better luck next year guys.

 

• Illustrious actress and newest fanboy wank fodder Katie Featherston took home numerous awards including Best High-Pitched Screaming, Best Cleavage, Best Actress Standing Still For a Long Time, and Best Cleavage. Yes, I know I said it twice, but come on, LOOK AT THEM.

 

• Actress Julianna Guill of last year’s blatant cash-in Friday the 13th won the award for Actress Most Likely To Wear Out Your Pause Button.







• Then, the Cheap and Dirty Podcast was on hand to test the volume setting on your mp3 player. Bet you turned it way up then got blasted by Mat’s voice at top volume. Ha ha!

 

• The Lifetime Achievement Ass Kiss went to none other than Joe Bob Briggs. As you know, Briggs is the one whose movie reviews are ripped off and posted on Dead Lantern’s review section. Joe Bob gave a fine acceptance speech and reminded the rest of us of just how much we suck at this.

 

• Afterwards we heard a couple of parody commercials of fake movies that would have been much more entertaining than the rest of the show combined.

 

• Audio drama actress and podcaster Julie from 19 Knock Knock Something Or Other presented the award for Best Actress. Julie entertained the crowd by performing her famous character Strange Annoying Woman Talking To Herself.

 

• Then, Brother D and Miss Bren of Mail Order Zombie presented the Best Actor award. In an obvious step up in quality, they did not once turn their presentation into a plug for their own podcast and website. Some guy named Steven won, I didn’t see the movie so I don’t know who that was.

 

• The Best Director award was presented by Corey from the late lamented Midnight Fuck You Podcast. Instead of making the presentation he regaled the audience with interesting anecdotes about transvestites and drug deals then apologized for doing it. Corey can currently be heard as an announcer for the new television game show That’s Not A Fucking Zombie Dammit.

 

• The shows pace slowed briefly when director Sam Raimi appeared onstage and had his nuts slurped by the entire crowd. Participants described them as “a little salty”, but this reporter witnessed several members of the event going back for seconds.

 

• Next, Night of the Living Podcast was on the show doing one of the most annoying music performances ever, causing the listeners to ask just what the hell they did to deserve such punishment. Rumors of a version the Splatcademy Awards podcast with this section edited out are unconfirmed, at least until after I save the file in Audacity.

 

• Host Jeff of the Splattercast presented his annual I Liked Every Movie I Saw This Year award to every movie he saw this year. Nobody was the least bit surprised.

The show wrapped up with the hosts thanking all the participants for mailing them free alcohol to “grease the wheels” and spending so much time helping to send more traffic away from their own podcasts and toward DeadLantern.com.

All things considered, this year’s Splatcademy Awards show sucked a little less than previous shows, particularly if you drank heavily before listening. Come to think of it, that improves all the Splattercasts. Try it at home!

The content of the show and this website will focus on retro horror. It’s what I like best, and since I have a list of horror websites I check out I discovered that there’s no way to compete.

Besides, there’s a lot of overlap; how many sites and podcasts covered Zombieland this week alone? All of them, that’s how many. I like to get everyone’s take on something, but it gets dull after the fourth or fifth review, and so many of them come at you at once. That’s the downside to being hip, everyone ends up talking about the same things at the same time.

I’m not hip, never have been. Some people are leaders, others are followers. I’m neither, I’m busy looking for the perfect microbrewery.

So I’m going to poke around through history and dig up the obscure.

Did you know we technically have almost an entire century worth of genre movies available to us right now?

A film version of the story of Frankenstein was first made in 1910 as a silent picture. Film, or “moving pictures”, had only been created as a medium about a decade and a half earlier.

Although the film is only about 15 minutes long, and has all the limits of a silent era film, it still marks a kind of genesis of genre filmmaking. Even at this early stage in the development of the film medium, monsters, fantasy, good and evil, all had their birth in popular culture at the same time.

Today, this film is available on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcLxsOJK9bs

Could the people involved in this film even begin to imagine the technology we have today, various digital mediums from DVDs to downloadable movies? And yet, we enjoy an availability of entertainment unmatched in decades previous. Films from the silent era though the decades that followed, where we see the birth of technicolor, stero sound, video tapes and beyond are all ready to be discovered.

It’s 2009, almost 2010. That’s one hundred years of genre films.

In this sense the contemporary hardly exists at all. All of us, from 16 to 60 years old, will most likely have one thing in common: most of the films we will ever see were either made before our time or seen well after the time they were first released to theaters (those that made it into theaters).

It’s like the old saying, an old joke you haven’t heard yet is a new joke to you. Thanks to the technology of video, the past is just as accessible to us as the present.

So who needs to be topical? Who needs to be trendy or current? Why “live in the now”?

The past IS now.

I have the PC game Spore, which is about the only game I own and play that can be called current. I really like making creatures with it, it’s still the best part if the game for me.

I picked up the Galactic Adventures expansion pack and I’ve been having a blast with it. It’s used for making adventures with the creatures, buildings and objects you make in the game, and playing them as a mission for your space captain to beam down to a planet and engage in.

I had to spring for this expansion because I’ve been waiting since I was 14 and playing D&D for a good RPG creator on computer. I’m putting the stories I make online, so if you have the game you can download them and play them. There’s one uploaded so far. Just search for fakelarry on the Spore network and you’ll come up with a crapload of stuff I made this year. I like this, creative fun keeps me sane.

Recently, the company Maxim that makes the game made a patch that allows you to make creatures asymmetrically. Before this they had to be symmetrical; if you put an arm on your creature it had to have either two on each side or one in the middle. Now you can have one on one side, two of different sizes. or a whole mess of stuff sticking out at all angles. This is awesome, it allows for much greater freedom.

Here is the first thing I made after installing the new patch. His name is Eyegore for obvious reasons. I’m thinking he’d make a good mascot for this website. I should probably get some clothes on him, but here you can see the colors you can choose for creatures, which includes some ugly textures like stitches, scars, and patches of exposed muscle.

Making monsters that come to life is this horror fan’s idea of big fun, and I would have shat myself empty if I had this as a kid.

Phantasm 2 DVD News

This coming in from Dread Central and others, the Region 1 DVD of Phantasm 2 is due to be released in September.

This is most awesome indeed. When I went to buy the disks for Phantasms 1 and 3 in Best Buy last year, the cashier dude said that it was “like, so stupid” that they put out those two but not the second. I tried to briefly explain that the rights to the second film were controlled by a different company than the other two films and thus this one had no control, after which he said he never watched any of them anyway because they “looked stupid”.

One of us will be at Best Buy in September. Guess who.

Here’s a Wiki you probably haven’t seen, but you know it needed to exist.

You’ll be amazed at all the names you recognize in the Dickipedia.