I was born a poor white child in the waning winter days of 1979. Never was I able to step foot inside a grindhouse theater, and the only time I ever went to a drive-in theater that wasn’t doubling as a flea market was to see Fletch when I was barely old enough to remember going in the first place. VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, and spending a lot of time at the houses of friends and relatives with access to pay cable movie channels helped fill me in on the deranged cinematic greatness I was too young to catch first run in its proper theatrical venue. Being born in the wrong place at the seriously wrong time was no excuse for me to not become a fervent admirer of the finest exploitation movies ever made.

B-movies, C-movies, Z-movies, I’ve seen a lot. If I lived a few extra lifetimes after my first ran out I could never be able to see all of the movies I ever wanted to see. My DVD and Blu-ray collection isn’t massive (getting there though) and yet there are still a few titles I have yet to sit down and watch. Sue me, I stay pretty busy most of the time. Once upon a time there were theaters from the largest metropolises to the smallest one-horse burgs that specialized in playing the kinds of offbeat, occasionally undefinable, made-for-a-quick-buck flicks that were too gonzo to show its grimy celluloid visage in mainstream cinemas that primarily attracted bored suburbanites and their spoiled, hateful children. You could see a lot of these schlocky gems in double or triple feature bills or “dusk ’till dawn” marathons that cost substantially less for a ticket than a IMAX 3D screening, even with inflation taken into account. You definitely got your money’s worth, that could not be denied.

Skull-Face Island Movie Podcast presented by Geeks Of Doom
Episode 04: Champagne With My Campaign

Hello! It’s Adam Frazier aka FamousMonster and it’s time for another transmission from Skull-Face Island. David Allen, Tim Grant and myself haven’t slept in days – we’re too busy watching the 25th Anniversary of Discovery Channel’s Shark Week. I mean seriously, how can you afford to sleep knowing there’s Grade-A programming like this being broadcast over the airwaves? Hey, speaking of sharks…

Carlo Rambaldi, the three-time Academy Award-winning Italian-born visual effects artist responsible for creating the alien E.T. in Steven Spielberg’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, died today in Lamezia Terme, Italy after a long illness, according to the Washington Post. He was 86 years old.

Born on September 15, 1925 in Vigarano Mainarda, Emilia-Romagna, Italy, Rambaldi got his start in the Italian film industry providing visual effects for films such as Bloody Pit of Horror and Mario Bava’s highly influential sci-fi chiller Planet of the Vampires. He would later reunite with Bava to execute the gory murder sequences for one of the acclaimed filmmaker’s finest films, Twitch of the Death Nerve (a.k.a. A Bay of Blood). In 1971, Rambaldi’s mutilated dog effects for Lucio Fulci’s psychedelic giallo Lizard in a Woman’s Skin were deemed so realistic that the director was prosecuted in Italian court on charges of animal cruelty. Only after Rambaldi presented the fake dog effects in court was Fulci exonerated.