The Axons appeared in The Claws of Axos, a Doctor Who story made in 1971 starring Jon Pertwee as the Doctor. They featured only once in the classic series and have so far not been invited back in the revived version, although an Axon can be seen briefly in S01E02 of the unaffiliated Who spin-off K-9.

A strange, organically-formed spaceship arrives in Earth orbit, and the occupants, a quartet of golden-coloured humanoids called Axons, send a distress signal asking for assistance. In return, they offer Axonite, a substance able to mimic other molecules, with wide-ranging applications including the creation of unlimited food supplies for the Earth. However, the humanoids are not what they seem; they and their spaceship are actually part of the same single life-form, Axos, a galactic parasite intent on sucking the life out of planet Earth. When the Doctor uncovers their plan they drop their pretence and adopt a more threatening physical form, bipedal monsters covered in writhing root-like excrescences, and mount an attack on a nearby nuclear power station…

Voice of Axos: “Axonite is simply bait for human greed. Because of this greed Axonite will soon spread across this entire planet, and then the nutrition cycle will begin … Slowly we will consume every particle of energy,  every last cell of living matter. Earth will be sucked dry!”

The Claws of Axos was the first story written for Doctor Who by the team of Bob Baker (writer of the Wallace and Gromit films) and Dave Martin. Location shooting took place in the first week of January 1971 in Dungeness and other Kent locations, with the studio material shot between 22nd January and 5th of February. Transmitted over four weeks between 13th March and 3rd April 1971, it scored 7.3 million viewers for its first episode, rising to 8 million for the second, dropping to 6.4 million for the third and finishing on 7.8 million. The original colour materials were lost in the BBC’s purge of videotape and film prints in the 1970s; fortunately, prints sold abroad were found in Canada, and the story is now available in its entirety on DVD. Episodes One and Two were filmed as “The Vampires from Space”, and credits were completed with this name before being replaced with the final screen title. Prints bearing “The Vampires from Space” were accidentally circulated abroad and can be seen in the extras on the BBC DVD release.

Amid the spectrum of alien menaces in Doctor Who, the Axons fall into the category of monsters with no redeeming features, with whom there can be no dialogue or compromise. In this they embody an ‘old-school’ attitude to the monstrous; the creatures are designed purely to frighten young viewers. In later years such ‘one-dimensional’ threats fell gradually out of favour in Doctor Who (to the point where even the Daleks were deemed unfit for total destruction in stories such as 2005’s Dalek and 2008’s Journey’s End).

The Claws of Axos can perhaps best be summed up by the phrase “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts” (from the story of the Trojan horse in Virgil’s Aeneid, a pertinent reference given that the scripts were first commissioned under the title “Doctor Who and the Gift”). Initially, the Doctor is angry with UNIT (The United Nations Intelligence Taskforce) for firing on the Axon spaceship without making contact with the occupants: on seeing the golden humanoids for the first time he sarcastically remarks, “There’s your enemy” to the soldiers and politicians, as if the aliens’ attractive appearance says all there is to say about them. However even he changes his view, later on describing Axos as a “cosmic bacteria”.

In design and conception, the Axon monsters are among the most extravagantly weird creations of the Pertwee era. Coloured reddish-orange, spitting smoke and electrical sparks from their ‘hands’ and walking with a distinctive rolling gait, they cut a fearsome, fantastical sight. Combining aspects of Lovecraftian horror with a vibe redolent of the 1950s pulp scifi comics, they combine a high-concept backstory with a generous helping of the bizarre.

Also striking is the malleable, ever-changing manifestation of Axos: from the golden humanoids, to the tentacled monsters, with variations such as a golden humanoid with a tentacled head and an amorphous baglike creature, The Claws of Axos constantly startles the viewer with a parade of curious monstrosities.

Upon viewing Episodes One and Two after they were edited and scored, producer Barry Letts decided that two key scenes of horror were too upsetting for children and ordered that they be electronically obscured in post-production. The first, in Episode One, involves the discovery of a tramp’s desiccated corpse; when a soldier touches the body, the tramp’s face collapses like an empty sac. The second scene, in Episode Two, shows a golden humanoid Axon merging itself into the walls of the spaceship; during the absorption process the face bloats and then collapses, an effect which is authentically disturbing and grotesque. In both cases the effects can still be seen intermittently despite post-production masking.

The UK DVD (recently updated to this ‘Special Edition’ with improved picture quality and expanded extras)

The US Region 1 DVD

The original Target novelisation, published in April 1977 and penned by frequent Who writer / Pertwee-era script editor Terrance Dicks

A second imprint of the novelisation with new cover artwork 

The Fog is a horror novel by English writer James Herbert, published in 1975 by New English Library (NEL). It is about a deadly fog that drives its victims insane when they come into contact with it. Herbert’s second book, it is completely unrelated to the 1980 film of the same name by John Carpenter. Well before the infamous British ‘video nasties’ moral panic, Herbert’s The Fog was being passed around school playgrounds by hordes of stunned yet fascinated teenagers.

John Holman is a worker for the Department of the Environment investigating a Ministry of Defence base in a small rural village. An unexpectedearthquake swallows his car releasing a fog that had been trapped underground for many years. An insane Holman is pulled up from the crack, a product of the deadly fog.

Soon the fog shifts and travels as though it has a mind of its own, turning those unfortunate enough to come across it into homicidal/suicidal maniacs who kill without remorse, and often worse. Respectable figures including teachers and priests engage in crimes ranging from public urination to under age sex. A Boeing 747 pilot is also made insane and crashes the aircraft into the BT Tower in London.

Soon a bigger problem is discovered – the fog is multiplying in size and nothing seems to be able to stop it. Entire villages and cities are in danger and the only chance left is to use the treated and immunized John Holman to take on the fog from the inside where who knows what awaits him…

Thanks to H.P. Saucecraft at the Vault of Evil: British Horror Plus web board for the reprint cover image

The Mire Beasts, tentacled octopoid monstrosities tucked away in Episode One (“The Executioners”) and Episode Two (“The Death of Time”) of the 1965 Doctor Who story The Chase, are among the least exposed, least celebrated monsters in the Who pantheon. Indeed The Chase marks their sole appearance in the series, and thanks to the (some would say) questionable quality of the story in which they reside, little has been written about them.

This is a shame, because, as the The Chase’s excellent 2010 DVD transfer reveals, they are remarkably eerie and impressive. Even aside from the sterling efforts of the Doctor Who Restoration Team, who worked wonders on the DVD transfer, it should be said that the inherent graininess of the image, resulting from a combination of low studio lighting, black and white recording, and deteriorated film elements, bestows upon the Mire Beasts a mystery and magic that bright studio lighting and crystal clear video technology would only dispel.

In Episode One of The Chase, the TARDIS lands in a vast desert wilderness. Two of the Doctor’s companions, Ian Chesterton (William Russell) and Vicki (Maureen O’Brien) head off across the rolling dunes to explore. After a long climb up a steep gradient they find an ancient trap door hidden beneath the sand. Entering the shadowy space below they are menaced by a dimly seen tentacled creature. In Episode Two they are saved by a pair of fish-like humanoid creatures. They are Aridians; the time travellers have landed on the planet Aridius, which was once covered in giant oceans. When the twin suns of the planet began to grow in intensity the oceans boiled away and the amphibious Aridians were driven underground, where they now reside in vast catacombed cities …  Meanwhile, the Doctor (William Hartnell) and fellow companion Barbara Wright (Jacqueline Hill) get lost in a sandstorm whilst looking for their friends. The next morning, when the storm abates, the dunes look completely different and the TARDIS is lost beneath the sands. In addition, the Doctor’s mortal enemies the Daleks have tracked him to Aridius; keen to possess the TARDIS, they force a group of Aridians to dig it from the sand. Fleeing the Daleks, the Doctor and Barbara are reunited with Vicki and Ian in the catacombs. The Daleks demand that the Aridians hand over the time travellers, but before this can be done the Mire Beasts kill the Aridian responsible for the handover. The Doctor and his friends manage to evade a Dalek sentry, re-enter the TARDIS and make their escape into the Time Vortex, with the Daleks in hot pursuit.

We discover, during Episode Two, that the Mire Beasts are giant carnivorous octopi who originally lived in the slime at the bottom of Aridius’s oceans. When the planet began to dry up they evolved into a land-based form and began to invade the Aridians’ underground cities. One supposes that they eat Aridians, which is fair enough considering that the whole planet seems devoid of any sort of ecosystem except for the two races. The fact that the drippy Aridians are so quickly persuaded to hand over the TARDIS crew to the Daleks reduces their claim to our sympathy, and one therefore cannot help but wish the Mire Beasts every success in their efforts to winkle these whey-faced ninnies from their underground bolt-holes and gobble them up.

Any creature with tentacles and an amorphous, hard-to-delineate body shape cannot fail to remind horror fans of the eldritch monstrosities roaming the work of H.P. Lovecraft, and the Mire Beasts are no exception. Indeed the Lovecraftian deity Cthulhu himself is described as having octopoid characteristics. Likewise, swamps or mires are natural locations for horror: one is reminded of Lovecraft’s The Statement of Randolph Carter, in which an occultist disappears while exploring an underground crypt in Big Cypress Swamp. Were the Mire Beasts involved? Lovecraft himself refused to be drawn on what lurked beneath Big Cypress Swamp and there’s nothing in The Chase to disprove the theory.

Swamps are horrific because of a tendency in human thinking to regard anything wet and slimy as disgusting and abject; hence the Mire Beasts not only seem repugnant because they are gelatinous invertebrates but because they are associated, via their name, with mud, slime and goo. The word ‘mire’ comes from the old Norse mýrr, relating to moss, and the word moss itself can sometimes refer, in Scottish and Northern English, to a bog or swamp, which suggests that Mire Beasts may perhaps have brought the word ‘mire’ to Earth with them, along with their octopoid genes, when they crash-landed in the Northern lands. As Criswell so wisely put it in Ed Wood Jr.’s Plan 9 From Outer Space, “Can you prove that it didn’t happen?” (While there is no indication in The Chase that the Mire Beasts have a civilisation or a language, this may simply be an oversight on the part of the other characters, who do not seek to communicate with them but simply scream and run like idiots.)

The Chase was the fourth story written for Doctor Who by Terry Nation. Location filming for the long shots of Ian and Vicki exploring the planet Aridius was undertaken at the seaside resort of Camber Sands, East Sussex in April 1965. The story was transmitted over six weeks between 22nd May and 26th June 1965, and viewing figures hovered between nine and ten million throughout. The story was originally made on 405-line studio video with filmed inserts, but after the original videotapes were wiped the only surviving version was a 16mm film recording negative produced by BBC Enterprises for overseas sale.

The charm of low budget stories like The Chase is that they resemble a sort of (accidental) surrealist theatre production; the cramped sets and painted backcloths bear only a nodding resemblance to reality and instead seem like the products of Expressionist stage design or the early cinema of Georges Méliès. Of course, being a horror-scifi fantasy about alien worlds and mysterious monsters means that Doctor Who has a special dispensation to jettison realism in favour of flights of imagination. If the viewer is young enough not to care about failed trompe l’oeil, or generous enough with their frame of reference to find the shortfall between ambition and achievement aesthetically enjoyable in itself, stories like The Chase – along with others such as The Web Planet (1965) and The Underwater Menace (1967) – are awash with strange visual pleasures. It’s perhaps a sign that the series producers understood this that later stories introduced a more deliberate vein of surrealism, in stories such as The Celestial Toymaker (1966) and The Mind Robber (1968), both of which revel in artificiality and oblique visual constructions.

Note the recurrence in the script of writer Terry Nation’s penchant for nominative determinism, this time with an amusingly incoherent twist: a desert planet called Aridius (but of course) turns out to have been once a rich ocean world, which rather begs the question of why the natives named the planet as they did. Perhaps ‘arid’ is Aridian for ‘wet’, which would suit both the original climate and the characters of the Aridians themselves…

Stephen Thrower, Horrorpedia

Related: Bog | swamps

The Region 2 DVD cover

The Target novelisation, written by John Peel (not the DJ) and published in 1989 (quite late in the day, owing to difficulty securing agreement with Terry Nation).

The film world in Britain during the early 80s was grim. Most of the grand cinema palaces of yesteryear were, if not already transformed into Bingo halls, falling apart, offering a less-than-enticing combination of bad projection, uncomfortable, dirty seats and programmes which required the audience to sit through endless amounts of commercials and unwatchable travelogues before finally being allowed to see the main feature. With unemployment at an all-time high, people were more inclined to stay home and save their money, watching any of the three TV channels available until closedown before midnight.

Yet, as the decade began, an alternative appeared that would chance viewing habits forever. The video recorder. Although they’d been on the market for a few years, it was in 1980 that the VCR first began to be more than just a rich man’s toy. Although still relatively costly to buy, many electrical stores offered reasonable monthly rental schemes for VCR’s. Seemingly overnight, every household in the country had a video recorder next to the TV and an expensive family night out at the pictures suddenly seemed less attractive when you could choose from a multitude of feature films for the same price and watch in the comfort of your own home, as the number of films available to buy or rent exploded.

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Most major distributors looked upon home video with suspicion, and were reluctant to release their biggest titles onto this new format when there was still money to be made from theatrical reissues, and so the rental shops which began to spring up on the high street were, for the most part, filled with low budget, independent films from a multitude of small distributors who appeared to cash in on the video boom. And it quickly became clear that there was a substantial audience for the material which the British Board of Film Censors had long fought to protect us from.

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The more lurid the cover art, the more sex and violence promised by the blurb, the more the public wanted it. Labels like Go Video, Astra, Intervision and Vipco emerged to release films from all over the world, with horror being the most reliable genre. Big hits were made out of films which had barely ever seen the light of a movie screen in the UK and directors such as Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci became as bankable in the VHS world as Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorcese. The video rental top ten was regularly packed with movies like I Spit On Your Grave, The Driller Killer and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

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Some of these were films which the BBFC had banned outright, heavily cut or which stood little chance of being passed if submitted for approval. But there was no compulsory censorship of video, so images that were forbidden in the cinema could be enjoyed in their full gory glory at home. Fledgling video labels were buying up whatever salacious sounding titles that they could find and releasing them without even considering submitting them to the BBFC. And the British public could not get enough of it. Every street corner, it seemed, had a video shop. Even off-licenses, newsagents and petrol stations got in on the action.

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Unfortunately, this frivolous phase of viewing freedom would not last.

It wasn’t long before rumours started spreading about the open availability of films showing extreme, explicit violence, torture and mutilation. Films too extreme even for an ‘X’ certificate were openly available to anyone, even children. The public could use the slow motion and pause buttons to get maximum perverse pleasure from their video sadism. Worse still, it seemed that Cannibal Holocaust and SS Experiment Camp had replaced balloon benders and clowns as a staple of children’s parties. Not innocent mind was safe from the onslaught of the Video Nasties, a term first used in the trade that would be a household word by 1982.

Once the press had their teeth into the story, there was no stopping them. “Ban the Sadist Videos!” screamed The Daily Mail, outlining the dangers that the uncensored world of home entertainment presented to the country’s moral fabric. Various politicians and pressure groups (not least Mary Whitehouse’s National Viewers and Listeners Association) were quick to take up the cause. Teachers groups expressed concern about the effect on impressionable children, and church groups were quick to complain too. Faced with such pressure, the Director of Public Prosecutions agreed to the first obscenity charges to be brought against horror videos, and soon police forces up and down the country were carrying out random raids on shops, clearing the shelves of potentially obscene material.

As the whole concept of horror movies being obscene was so new, worried video shop owners had no idea which films they would be prosecuted for, so in an effort to clarify the situation the Department of Public Prosecutions issued a list of  “nasties”, based on titles which had been successfully prosecuted or which were awaiting trial. The list would vary in length over the next few years, before settling on 39 movies. In addition to the official Nasties list various local councils had their own selection of condemned videos to muddy the situation a little more. Shops found stocking the forbidden films during police raids – and police raids were a weekly occurrence – faced prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act.

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When their day in court came most video shop owners pleaded no contest to the charges of issuing obscene material for gain in order to avoid a lengthy prison sentence – this meant that many movies were condemned as “obscene” without ever going before a jury, or even being watched by magistrates. Some distributors stopped distributing their horror titles in order to avoid the wrath of the DPP. One distributor was sent to jail for marketing Nightmares in a Damaged Brain, despite the fact that it was not the uncut version he was distributing (as much as the retailers, the distributors often had no idea of which version of a film they’d released and, of course, had no way to know that horror films would suddenly fall foul of the Obscene Publications Act). London based Palace Pictures pointed out the absurdity of travelling up and down the country to defend The Evil Dead – which was released on video in the BBFC X-rated cut version – against various local charges of obscenity, so had the case centralised to a court in the East end of London — where the film was found not guilty. This, however, did not prevent other police forces from continuing to seize the film. An acquittal under the OPA did not necessarily set a national precedent, and local sensibilities would continue to come into play (though notably, a single conviction DID seem to set some sort of precedent, conveniently).

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The British Board of Film Censors, who had seen their income drop to rock bottom during the video boom, were quick to back up the dangers of an unregulated system of distribution. The BBFC were soon appointed by parliament to govern the classification of all films to be released on video in the UK. The 1984 Video Recordings Act ensured that Britain would never again fall prey to the immoral whims of smut peddling distributors hungry to make a quick buck. Over the course of the next few years, all unclassified videos would be removed from the shelves of British video stores. By 1988, it was illegal to sell or rent an unclassified VHS tape.

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Of course, it was not only horror and sex films that were released without BBFC certificates but films from all genres, including even children’s films. Many smaller, well established shops had to remove the majority of their stock, forcing a large number out of business. Many distributors could not afford the high price of BBFC classification for their films — particularly if the censors then demanded cuts, as was often the case. By this time, the major Hollywood producers had woken up to the money to be made from video, and the public increasingly had the chance to take home a recent blockbuster instead of an obscure 1970′s horror film. Most small labels simply vanished. The VRA ensured that it was no longer the little guy making the money from the video industry.

Amazingly, as the hysteria died down, BBFC head James Ferman still felt compelled to overprotect the public from the dangers of violent imagery. Even though they were never on any Video Nasties lists he refused to grant BBFC certificates to numerous films, including The Exorcist, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Straw Dogs. He had various forbidden images such as nunchakus (chain sticks) and blood on breasts, which he considered to be a trigger image for rapists. Although the Video Recordings Act was brought in to combat violent video, he was even stricter on sexual images – female genitalia was forbidden, as was any sex act involving more than two people. “Instructional” drug use and criminal activity would be cut, to prevent ‘copycat’ crime. And of course, most horror films had to be cut. As a result a strong black market grew throughout the UK for pirate videos of uncut horror or sex videos, and a huge underground fan base emerged, with fanzines, books and film festivals keeping the Nasties alive.

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Strangely, the British public didn’t seem to mind the nanny mentality, happy to believe that censorship of material freely available in the rest of Europe was for their own good. This belief was encouraged by the tabloids, who were only too keen to stoke up public hysteria by linking headline-grabbing crimes to video violence, be it the Hungerford massacre and Rambo, or the Jamie Bulger case and Child’s Play 3.

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However, times change, even in Britain, and with a new millennium came a new maturity. The public no longer seemed overly worried by horror videos – possibly because new bête noires like the internet and video games have taken their place. Once Ferman resigned from the BBFC at the end of 1998, UK film censorship turned over a new leaf.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Straw Dogs, The Exorcist and The Story of O – all considered threats to public safety by Ferman – quickly received uncut certificates. When challenged at appeal over their refusal to pass The Last House on the Left uncut, the BBFC were publicly forced to admit that there was no legal reason for them to arbitrarily cut films that were once banned as Video Nasties – something they had always claimed was a legal requirement they had no control over – and subsequently a lot of the Nasties have now been passed uncut… some with a 15 certificate! With one or two exceptions, Ferman’s immediate successor Robin Duval managed to erase the strict censorship regime which emanated from the Nasties scare and now it is relatively rare for a horror movie to be cut or banned to protect the impressionable minds of the British public.

There are, of course, still exceptions – most recently The Bunny Game has been banned outright, while The Human Centipede 2 was initially banned before finally being released with extensive cuts. But by and large, it is now acknowledged that horror films are not a threat to civilisation. We perhaps shouldn’t be too complacent, given British history and the current moral panic that is once again gripping the country (this time aimed at internet porn, but always likely to mutate as the moralists look to assert control), but it seems unlikely that we’ll ever see a return to the dark days of the 1980s again.

David Flint

Dracula: The Dark Prince is a 2013 American horror film directed by Pearry Reginald Teo (Necromenta, Dead Inside/The Evil Inside) from a screenplay co-written by him, Steven Paul and Nicole Jones-Dion. It stars Luke Roberts, Jon Voight (Anaconda), Kelly Wenham, Ben Robson, Holly Earl, Stephen Hogan, Richard Ashton, Poppy Corby-Tuech and Vasilescu Valentin.

Plot:

In his search for the Lightbringer, Dracula crosses paths with a beautiful crusader named Alina who bears a remarkable resemblance to his murdered bride. One look at her and Dracula is immediately smitten. Could Alina be the reincarnation of his long-dead love? Dracula has Alina kidnapped and brought to his castle…

Review:

When I was a kid, Dracula was the horror character. The king of the bad men – no ambiguity, no white-washing. Dracula was scary, whether he was Christopher Lee and any lesser version. Then things began to change. I’ll put the finger of blame on the influence of Anne Rice and the 1979 Dracula, which first began to reinvent him as the tortured romantic character (Love at First Bite did likewise the same year, but at least that was a comedy). Since then, it’s almost guaranteed that Dracula movies (and vampire movies in general) will follow the same pattern, retooling the character as swooning material for teenage goths.

This depressing state of affairs plummets to new depths in the truly appalling Dracula: The Dark Prince (not to be confused with Dark Prince: The Legend of Dracula or Dracula Prince of Darkness), a film with all the charm and finesse of a SyFy production, but with none of the eccentricity or charm of those films. The only saving grace this film has – and it’s no saving grace at all, given how ham-fistedly it is executed – is that it at least tries something different with the Dracula myth. However, no-one was really crying out for a Dracula film that is a low rent sword and sorcery tale.

The film opens with clumsy animation setting the scene (and, in retrospect, acting as warning) as we see the Coppola-inspired origin of Dracula in 15th century Wallachia. A hundred years later, Dracula (Luke Roberts) is the master of… what, exactly? He seems confined to a castle, recruiting a useless army of desperately-trying-to-be-sexy female vampires (a few gratuitous boob shots being the only clue that this isn’t s SyFy Original) and a handful of warriors, alongside creepy assistant Renfield (Stephen Hogan in one of a handful of Bram Stoker name nods) where he frets about nebulous enemies.

These include would-be slayers (attention, Buffy fans!) Alina (Kelly Wenham) and Esme (Holly Earl), who are transporting miraculous weapon The Lightbringer to Leonardo Van Helsing (Jon Voight), when they are set upon by a band of brigands led by Lucian (Ben Robson). Before you know it, Lucian has joined forces with Van Helsing, the two Slayerettes and an unlikely viking Andros (Richard Ashton) to defeat Dracula, though why they are bothering isn’t entirely clear, given how little he seems to do. Alina is captured, and wouldn’t you know it, she turns out to be the spitting image / reincarnation of Dracula’s long lost love. Yes, the most well worn and annoying of the Dracula movie cliches is shamelessly trotted out again. Soon, she is torn between the personality free Dracula and the unpleasant Lucian, as the remaining good guys storm the castle.

The central idea behind the film is that The Lightbringer – a sword with assorted attachments – was used by Cain to slay Abel! As such, only a descendent of Cain can use the weapon and only a descendent of Abel – which includes Dracula – can be killed by it. The film does it’s best to convince us that these are two rare groups of people, when surely they would make up the whole of humanity if we believe the Bible. A quick check reveals that this weapon is not included in the original Cain and Abel story.

Shot in Romania – though you’d never know it, as any opportunity for location authenticity is buried beneath CGI and the sort of murky lighting that crap films mistake for atmosphere – this is a real mess. The acting is generally pretty shocking, the accents are all over the place – most of the leads speak with the sort of wooden, middle-class English stage school flatness that you find littering British TV, while Andros is curiously Northern and Voight adopts a scenery-munching Eastern European accent that makes no sense at all. The performances are also at soap opera level, so it’s hardly a surprise to find that Roberts is a Holby City veteran. Here, decked out in an unconvincing long blonde wig, he displays all the personality of a log and the idea that he is either a seductive charmer or a threatening monster is frankly laughable. He’s almost certainly the weakest Dracula ever seen.

Worst of all though, the film is numbingly dull. Little actually happens, and the few action scenes are clumsily handled. For the most part, it’s a series of scenes of people spewing exposition, wandering through dimly-lit woods or Dracula mooning over Alina like a lovestruck teenager.

Of course, the film might have somehow pulled all this together in the final five minutes, miraculously turning into a masterpiece of cinema. As my screener had a fault that rendered these final moments unplayable, I’ll probably never know, but I’m willing to go out on a limb and suggest that it remained as awful as the preceding 90 minutes.

This is the nadir of the ‘romantic Dracula’ films. If nothing else, it should at least be used to show others why they should avoid going down that route ever again. Let’s get back to a Dracula who wants to tear the heroine’s throat out, not give her a bunch of flowers and promise to still respect her in the morning.

David Flint – The full version of this review is at Strange Things Are Happening

Buy Dracula: The Dark Prince on DVD from Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

“The Dark Prince shows very little blood, no gore, and were it not for a trio of breast pairs briefly exposed here and there, it would seem that the film might have been intended for teenagers or mature women with its romance novel overtones.  Given how many notes it tries to hit on the heartstring and fantasy adventure fronts, it is indeed questionable who the target audience is.  Even with brief nudity, the eroticism is toned down.  Swordfights occur, but they are few and far between.  In their place are scenes involving a lot of bobbing heads that talk, plot, and scheme, without too much else of sustaining interest taking place.” Culture Crypt

” … the tone of the movie is SyFy, as for the acting… The girls do what they can with what amounts to two pretty shoddily drawn warrior women. Luke Roberts works well as the misunderstood Dracula but pretty poorly as the monstrous creature. Stephen Hogan is literally channelling Wormtongue. A lot of the film is built in CGI, its ok but it does show. I kind of feel it wanted to be castlevania but didn’t quite work out how to be epic. Nude boobs on show, for titillation purposes, just seem gratuitous. The film wanted to do something different, kudos for that, but it seemed to throw a lot in the mix, gave it a quick shimmy and hoped for the best.” Taliesin Meets the Vampires

Wikipedia | IMDb

Bela Lugosi’s Dead is a 2014 cover version of Bauhaus’ gloomy yet mesmerising gothic anthem of the same title by Scottish synth pop band Chvrches. The group consists of Lauren Mayberry (lead vocals, additional synthesisers and samplers), Iain Cook (synthesisers, guitar, bass, vocals), and Martin Doherty (synthesisers, samplers, vocals).

Chvrches poppy synth re-interpretation was commissioned for the soundtrack of 2014 release Vampire Academy.

Bauhaus’ original (with vile vinyl crackles):

Bauhaus’ version live in 1982:

Jinn is an American action/horror film written and directed by Ajmal Zaheer Ahmad. It stars Ray Park, Serinda Swan, Faran Tahir,William Atherton, Milica Govich, Walter Phelan, Dominic Rains, Ele Bardha. The film is released at US theatres on April 4, 2014.

A car known as the Firebreather was created for the film. The car was unveiled to the public at the Autorama in Detroit on February 26, 2010. The car was designed by the film’s director Ajmal Zaheer Ahmad. It is a modified 5th generation Chevrolet Camaro.

Plot:

Shawn, an automotive designer, enjoys an idyllic life with his new wife Jasmine until it is interrupted a cryptic message. The message warns of imminent danger and a curse that has afflicted his family for generations. Having lost his parents as a child, Shawn doesn’t believe this unsettling revelation of his past….until strange things start to happen. Unable to explain the threats and fearing for his life, Shawn turns to Gabriel and Father Westhoff, a mysterious duo claiming to have answers. With their help, and the aid of Ali, a shackled mental patient, Shawn discovers that there is far more to this world than he ever imagined. These revelations set Shawn on a collision course with the unknown, and he alone must find the strength protect his family and confront the ancient evil that is hunting them.

Wikipedia | IMDb | Official website

Slaughter Daughter is a 2012 horror film co-written and directed by Travis Campbell (Mr. Bricks: A Heavy Metal Murder Musical). Lauren Miler was the co-writer and producer for Slaughtered Heart Productions. It stars Nicola Fiore, Leesa Rowland, Tim Dax and Ruby Larocca. Troma producer/director Lloyd Kaufman makes a cameo appearance as a minister.

Plot:

A former beauty queen plots the death of her overbearing mother with the help of her pen-pal, a serial killer on death row.

“Face it, any film entitled “Slaughter Daughter” isn’t out to delight you with creative narrative.  It’s Campbell’s execution of this escalating descent into madness that keeps the piece above water when the sometimes questionable performances and generic quality of the screenplay threaten to sink it.  He weaves fantasy sequences and hallucinations seamlessly into the story’s flimsy fabric, creating another world out of the New Jersey location on a mere $15,000 budget. That’s no small feat.” Robert Getz, HorrorNews.net

Buy Slaughter Daughter on Instant Video | DVD from Amazon.com

“The film hinges on the decision as to whether Farrah decides to go through with her master plan to annihilate her family or not. The decision is as dark as the rest of Farrah’s fantasies and maintains the darkly comic tone which takes place from the start. The use of old Italian giallo music makes this film utterly unique, making everything seem overly operatic and serious, yet typical for a young schoolgirl’s idealistic viewpoint of the world. If you’re a John Waters and Greg Araki fan, SLAUIGHTER DAUGHTER is going to be right up your alley. Like the films of those directors, it shines a light on alternative and deviant cultures that rarely get the spotlight in bigger budgeted movies.” Ambush Bug, Ain’t It Cool News

“The special effects are not something I would call phenomenal or truly amazing but they do fit the film and the kills we get on camera.  Overall, Slaughter Daughter is a film with a great story but fell apart during production.  I recommend it to watch at least once but it has no replay value.” Blacktooth, Horror Society

IMDb | Official Facebook

Mummy Dance! is a 2014 song by the mysterious American self-proclaimed “horror rock goddess” Characula whose musical influences apparently include Motley Crue and Gregorian chants. She and her henchmen will be touring the UK soon…

Mummy Dance! promo video:

Ready for Love promo video:

Official Facebook

13 Sins, previously known as Angry Little God and 13: Game of Death, is a 2014 American horror remake of the 2006 Thai horror comedy/psychological thriller film 13 Beloved. The film is co-written and directed by Daniel Stamm (The Last Exorcism) and stars Ron Perlman (Alien: Resurrection, Rats), Mark Webber, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Christopher Berry, Stephanie Honoré, Rutina Wesley, Devon Graye, Brittney Alger, Tom Bower, Beau Brasseaux.

The film is released on VOD on March 14, 2014 with a theatrical release date of April 18, 2014.

Plot:

A bright but meek salesman (Webber), drowning in debt as he’s about to get married, receives a mysterious phone call informing him that he’s on a hidden camera game show where he must execute 13 tasks to receive a multi-million dollar cash prize…

Wikipedia | IMDb

Night of Something Strange is 2014 American infection-themed horror film written and directed by Jonathan Straiton from a story by himself and executive producer Ron Bonk (Gut Pile, Satan’s Cannibal Holocaust, Sexquatch: The Legend of Blood Stool Creek). It stars Brinke Stevens (Nightmare Sisters, Cheerleader Massacre, Carmilla: The Lesbian Vampire), Nicola Fiore, Kera O’Bryon, Janet Mayson, Kirk LaSalle, Wayne W. Johnson, Michael Merchant, Toni Ann Gambale, Billy Garberina, Brett Janeski, Wes Reid, Rebecca C. Kasek, Trey Harrison, Tarrance Taylor, Alexis Katherine.

Plot:

Teenage friends out for beach week get unexpectedly detoured to a creepy motel where a deadly sexually-transmitted virus now runs rampant, turning those infected into the living dead…

IMDb | Facebook | Related: Shivers

Turbulence 3: Heavy Metal is a 2001 American horror thriller directed by Jorge Montessi from a screenplay by Wade Ferely. It stars Zak Santiago, Monika Schnarre, John Mann and Rutger Hauer.

Review:

Satanic metal rocker Slade Craven is performing a concert – in the cargo hold aboard a 747 commercial flying machine. This means the cockpit is now the mosh pit. The first-ever airborne heavy metal gig is also being simulcast on the Internet, or “world wide web.” Shortly after take-off the show begins, with Craven looking like a cross between Marilyn Manson and that white-faced vampire thing in Subspecies (1991). In the background, a law-pursued hacker manages to hack his way into the web TV’s mainframe to watch the concert for free.

During the show something goes wrong besides the concept; Craven shoots the pilot – and personal baggage is NOT stored safely in the overhead compartment. Seems an imposter Craven – a real devil-worshipper – is hijacking the plane with the plan to crash it into a specific church in Kansas, reputed to be the gateway to Hell, thereby letting out all the stink demons. (No wonder Dorothy wanted out of that town so bad).

The hacker sees all of this on his screen, as does the FBI, and the race is on to save a plane load of really stupid-looking Goth rocker fans from a fate they deserve for dressing so stupid.

Wild twists and cool shifts in plotting turn this preposterous premise into a real headbanger. At the very least, no one can accuse Turbulence 3: Heavy Metal (2001) of being clichéd. FYI: The ending is worth three times the DVD rental. I won’t spoil it so as to not ruin your heavy metal dreams. And hey, death metal songs to sing along with!

Jeff Gilbert, Drinkin’ & Drive-In

Wikipedia

Call Girl of Cthulhu is a forthcoming 2014 American comedy horror film directed by Chris LaMartina from a screenplay by himself and Jimmy George. The film is “inspired” by the writings of H.P. Lovecraft. It stars David Phillip Carollo, Melissa O’Brien, Nicolette le Faye, Dave Gamble, Helenmary Ball, Sabrina Taylor-Smith, Alex Mendez, Craig Peter Coletta. Horror genre veteran George Stover (The Alien Factot, Nightbeast, Vampire Sisters) makes a cameo appearance.

The filmmakers raised $27,750 on crowd funding website Kickstarter - click the link to watch video

It is the sixth feature film from Baltimore based production company, Midnight Crew Studios, whose previous movies include Witch’s Brew and President’s Day.

When a virginal artist falls in love with a call girl, she turns out to be the chosen bride of the alien god Cthulhu. To save her, he must stop an ancient cult from summoning their god and destroying mankind…

IMDb | Tumblr | Twitter | Promo photo by Josh Sisk

WH

Although magic lantern shows, projecting apparent spirits before an assembled audience, had been popular throughout the 1800′s, it wasn’t until the 1930′s that what we would now view as ‘ghost trains’ appeared at amusement parks. Static and travelling fairs had long used theatrical presentations with a supernatural theme, freak shows, illusions and grand spectacle to wow and unnerve audiences but, perhaps inevitably for British readers, it was Blackpool Pleasure Beach which brought together many of these ideas into one attraction. Taking note of the boom in what were dubbed ‘Pretzel Rides’ in the United States, Blackpool Pleasure Beach ‘borrowed’ one to adapt the strategy that was already seen to attract large crowds – a small car on a single rail, meandering around a mazy, twisted (like a pretzel, y’see) environment; sometimes a gold mine, sometimes a winter wonderland. The unique selling factor was to brand these cars as trains and to garishly adorn the advertising banners outside with suggestions of the scares and thrills within. It opened in 1930 and was designed by Joseph Emberton; it is notable as being the first real “Ghost Train” in the world, and the first to use the name of Ghost Train - at the time, ‘Ghost Train’ was a very successful stage-show written by Arnold Ridley (better known as Private Godfrey from WW2-based TV comedy, Dad’s Army!)

Ghost trains soon caught on - Dreamland (Margate), Pleasure Beach (Great Yarmouth) and Pleasureland (Southport) all soon had rides of a similar nature – small carriages carrying no more than two people, travelling along a pre-determined twisting route, often complete with sudden drops. The ride largely took place in the dark with the occasionally punctuation of noise and lights to make the riders jump. The addition of familiar horror characters from films and popular culture came later, in the 1940′s. Such was their success, Emberton was again called upon to put Blackpool’s Ghost Train back on the map. This time, no expense was spared, a huge frontage was erected and a essentially a rollercoaster built within, across two levels. It set the standard and from this point onwards, ghost trains used ever-elaborate marketing to sell their experience, though the ride itself rarely had much to do with the visuals promised.

The key to the most desirable rides in terms of the fairground owners was that they should be cheap, easy to run and, perhaps most importantly, easy to pack up when moving on to a new location – at this stage, static fairgrounds were something of a rarity. This was, to some extent, the ghost train’s undoing; the evolution of the ride actually stifled the usefulness.

So huge were many of the drops and turns of the train that the height of the attraction had reached its limit, though this did at least give huge scope was colourful, lurid displays – by the 1980′s, you were as likely to see images of Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ video as you were Frankenstein Dracula or later, Pinhead or Freddy Krueger. Horrific automatons often gave way to actors daubed in zombie make-up to alarm the general public yet further.

It is worth noting that ghost trains as a rule are rarely frightening. Indeed, they are possibly the shortest ride at the funfair, you’d be lucky to be on longer than 4 minutes on average. There is, however, an undeniable quaintness about them, exuding memories of a bygone age of barkers, pickpockets and plate-lipped ladies. The zillions pumped into the likes of The Haunted Mansion at Disneyland (which was even turned into a movie!) rather missed the point – flaky paint and rubber spiders are the true spirit of the ghost train, not lasers and 3D technology.

Daz Lawrence

Buy your own ghost train!

Terror at Blackpool https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcNxav7W-m8

Hidden Objects: Call of Horror is a 2014 Android game app for mobile devices.

Developer Description:

Dracula: The Dark Prince is a 2013 American horror film directed by Pearry Reginald Teo (Necromenta, Dead Inside/The Evil Inside) from a screenplay co-written by him, Steven Paul and Nicole Jones-Dion. It stars Luke Roberts, Jon Voight (Anaconda), Kelly Wenham, Ben Robson, Holly Earl, Stephen Hogan, Richard Ashton, Poppy Corby-Tuech and Vasilescu Valentin.

Plot:

In his search for the Lightbringer, Dracula crosses paths with a beautiful crusader named Alina who bears a remarkable resemblance to his murdered bride. One look at her and Dracula is immediately smitten. Could Alina be the reincarnation of his long-dead love? Dracula has Alina kidnapped and brought to his castle…

Review:

When I was a kid, Dracula was the horror character. The king of the bad men – no ambiguity, no white-washing. Dracula was scary, whether he was Christopher Lee and any lesser version. Then things began to change. I’ll put the finger of blame on the influence of Anne Rice and the 1979 Dracula, which first began to reinvent him as the tortured romantic character (Love at First Bite did likewise the same year, but at least that was a comedy). Since then, it’s almost guaranteed that Dracula movies (and vampire movies in general) will follow the same pattern, retooling the character as swooning material for teenage goths.

This depressing state of affairs plummets to new depths in the truly appalling Dracula: The Dark Prince (not to be confused with Dark Prince: The Legend of Dracula or Dracula Prince of Darkness), a film with all the charm and finesse of a SyFy production, but with none of the eccentricity or charm of those films. The only saving grace this film has – and it’s no saving grace at all, given how ham-fistedly it is executed – is that it at least tries something different with the Dracula myth. However, no-one was really crying out for a Dracula film that is a low rent sword and sorcery tale.

The film opens with clumsy animation setting the scene (and, in retrospect, acting as warning) as we see the Coppola-inspired origin of Dracula in 15th century Wallachia. A hundred years later, Dracula (Luke Roberts) is the master of… what, exactly? He seems confined to a castle, recruiting a useless army of desperately-trying-to-be-sexy female vampires (a few gratuitous boob shots being the only clue that this isn’t s SyFy Original) and a handful of warriors, alongside creepy assistant Renfield (Stephen Hogan in one of a handful of Bram Stoker name nods) where he frets about nebulous enemies.

These include would-be slayers (attention, Buffy fans!) Alina (Kelly Wenham) and Esme (Holly Earl), who are transporting miraculous weapon The Lightbringer to Leonardo Van Helsing (Jon Voight), when they are set upon by a band of brigands led by Lucian (Ben Robson). Before you know it, Lucian has joined forces with Van Helsing, the two Slayerettes and an unlikely viking Andros (Richard Ashton) to defeat Dracula, though why they are bothering isn’t entirely clear, given how little he seems to do. Alina is captured, and wouldn’t you know it, she turns out to be the spitting image / reincarnation of Dracula’s long lost love. Yes, the most well worn and annoying of the Dracula movie cliches is shamelessly trotted out again. Soon, she is torn between the personality free Dracula and the unpleasant Lucian, as the remaining good guys storm the castle.

The central idea behind the film is that The Lightbringer – a sword with assorted attachments – was used by Cain to slay Abel! As such, only a descendent of Cain can use the weapon and only a descendent of Abel – which includes Dracula – can be killed by it. The film does it’s best to convince us that these are two rare groups of people, when surely they would make up the whole of humanity if we believe the Bible. A quick check reveals that this weapon is not included in the original Cain and Abel story.

Shot in Romania – though you’d never know it, as any opportunity for location authenticity is buried beneath CGI and the sort of murky lighting that crap films mistake for atmosphere – this is a real mess. The acting is generally pretty shocking, the accents are all over the place – most of the leads speak with the sort of wooden, middle-class English stage school flatness that you find littering British TV, while Andros is curiously Northern and Voight adopts a scenery-munching Eastern European accent that makes no sense at all. The performances are also at soap opera level, so it’s hardly a surprise to find that Roberts is a Holby City veteran. Here, decked out in an unconvincing long blonde wig, he displays all the personality of a log and the idea that he is either a seductive charmer or a threatening monster is frankly laughable. He’s almost certainly the weakest Dracula ever seen.

Worst of all though, the film is numbingly dull. Little actually happens, and the few action scenes are clumsily handled. For the most part, it’s a series of scenes of people spewing exposition, wandering through dimly-lit woods or Dracula mooning over Alina like a lovestruck teenager.

Of course, the film might have somehow pulled all this together in the final five minutes, miraculously turning into a masterpiece of cinema. As my screener had a fault that rendered these final moments unplayable, I’ll probably never know, but I’m willing to go out on a limb and suggest that it remained as awful as the preceding 90 minutes.

This is the nadir of the ‘romantic Dracula’ films. If nothing else, it should at least be used to show others why they should avoid going down that route ever again. Let’s get back to a Dracula who wants to tear the heroine’s throat out, not give her a bunch of flowers and promise to still respect her in the morning.

David Flint – The full version of this review is at Strange Things Are Happening

Buy Dracula: The Dark Prince on DVD from Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk

“The Dark Prince shows very little blood, no gore, and were it not for a trio of breast pairs briefly exposed here and there, it would seem that the film might have been intended for teenagers or mature women with its romance novel overtones.  Given how many notes it tries to hit on the heartstring and fantasy adventure fronts, it is indeed questionable who the target audience is.  Even with brief nudity, the eroticism is toned down.  Swordfights occur, but they are few and far between.  In their place are scenes involving a lot of bobbing heads that talk, plot, and scheme, without too much else of sustaining interest taking place.” Culture Crypt

” … the tone of the movie is SyFy, as for the acting… The girls do what they can with what amounts to two pretty shoddily drawn warrior women. Luke Roberts works well as the misunderstood Dracula but pretty poorly as the monstrous creature. Stephen Hogan is literally channelling Wormtongue. A lot of the film is built in CGI, its ok but it does show. I kind of feel it wanted to be castlevania but didn’t quite work out how to be epic. Nude boobs on show, for titillation purposes, just seem gratuitous. The film wanted to do something different, kudos for that, but it seemed to throw a lot in the mix, gave it a quick shimmy and hoped for the best.” Taliesin Meets the Vampires

Wikipedia | IMDb

Poor Albert and Little Annie is a 1972 psychological horror film directed by Paul Leder (A*P*E, Sketches of a Strangler, The Baby Doll Murders, Vultures) from a screenplay by William W. Norton (Day of the Animals). The plot concerns a violent sex criminal with a psychotic fixation on his mother. The film’s often inappropriate score was culled from the back catalogue of prolific TV composer Herschel Burke Gilbert (It Came from Beneath the Sea).

As far as promotion of this film is concerned, notice the early use of the “Don’t” tagline that would later become used many times in publicity and movie titles (and re-titles), plus the tweaks to the original threatening killer-behind-the-door artwork on subsequent releases.

During its 1974 US theatrical re-release by Europix as I Dismember Mama (a pun on the play I Remember Mama), moviegoers were given free promotional paper “Up-Chuck Cups”. An overlong and somewhat irritating trailer advertising ‘A Frenzy of Blood!’ double feature paired with 1972′s The Blood Spattered Bride was created in the style of a news report covering the “story” of an audience member who had allegedly gone insane while watching the two films. The mocked-up movie theatre apparently showing the co-feature has a marquee with Blood Splattered, as opposed to Spatted Bride. So much for the $16,000 allegedly spent on the trailer.

International titles for the film include Crazed; El Psicopata; Tras La Puerta del Miedo and La tentazione impure…

Plot:

Albert (Zooey Hall) has tried to kill his rich snobbish mother once, for which he was institutionalized. The low security hospital she has sent him to, however, isn’t prepared to deal with the extent of his problems. Obsessed with his own hatred for his mother, Albert is dangerously violent toward all women and attacks a nurse, after which his doctor decides to send him to a high-security state institution. Albert easily escapes by murdering an orderly, and the police put his mother in hiding after he phones her and threatens her. Unfortunately, when Albert returns to his mother’s home, he finds her housekeeper Alice (Marlene Tracy), whom he tortures and murders.

When Alice’s 9-year-old daughter Annie (Geri Reischl) returns home from school, Albert immediately takes a liking to her and he tells her that her mother has gone to the hospital and left him to take care of Annie while she’s away. Albert seems to revert to a childlike persona and they immediately form a friendship…

Reviews:

” … this attempt at pathos amidst bloodletting is feeble, misguided sentimentally.” John Stanley, Creature Features

” … the film’s centerpiece is Zooey Hall. His performance as Albert is as terrifying as David Hess from “Last House on the Left”, but Hall endows the character with a likable side too, which really makes it upsetting when he lapses into his deranged behavior. The scene where he threatens Alice and makes her strip is really scary because he is so calm and collected during the whole thing, but his explosive violence in the other murders is just as scary.” Groovy Doom

Wikipedia | IMDb

Harry Novak (January 12, 1928 – March 26, 2014) was an American film producer and distributor. Best known for his sexploitation and exploitation movies, Novak also financed and distributed a number of horror films himself and via his Boxoffice International Pictures company.

Novak began his career at RKO handling Disney movies until its collapse in 1957 and he also handled the US release of early Carry On films.

His first production was the 1964 ‘monster nudie’ Kiss Me Quick! (original title Dr. Breedlove, a pun on Dr. Strangelove). Although it features Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, a mad doctor and an alien, this science fiction horror comedy flick was merely an excuse for full colour topless female nudity. Cinematographer Lazlo Kovacs later worked on Ghostbusters. Click here to watch the trailer [contains nudity].

Horror-themed films distributed by Boxoffice International Pictures include The Beautiful, the Bloody and the Bare (1964), Mantis in Lace/Lila (1968), Any Body, Any Way/Behind Locked Doors (1968), Jean Rollin’s The Nude Vampire (1970), Requiem for a Vampire/Caged Vampire/Caged Virgins (1971), The Mad Butcher (1971), The Toy Box (1971), Toys Are Not for Children (1972), A Scream in the Streets (1973), Please Don’t Eat My Mother! (1973, an ‘adults only’ remake of The Little Shop of Horrors), The Sinful Dwarf (1973), Axe/Lisa, Lisa (1973), Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks (1973), Rattlers (1976), The Child (1977), Rituals (1977).

Wikipedia

Sharknado 2: The Second One is a 2014 made-forTV American horror film directed by Anthony C. Ferrante (Sharknado, Hansel & Gretel) from a screenplay by Thunder Levin (Sharknado, Mutant Vampire Zombies from the ‘Hood!). It stars Ian Ziering, Tara Reid, Vivica A. Fox, Judd Hirsch and Mark McGrath. It will premiere on the Syfy channel on July 30, 2014.

Plot:

A freak weather system turns its deadly fury on New York City, unleashing a Sharknado on the population and its most cherished, iconic sites – and only Fin (Ian Ziering) and April (Tara Reid) can save the Big Apple.

IMDb

Zombie Zin Zinfandel is a Californian wine blended from 95% Zinfandel grapes and 5% Syrah grapes at the Chateau Diana Winery by Dawne Sacchetti. The alcohol content is 13.7%

Official blurb:

The Zombie Zin is sporting a new label design with a torn look, that suggests a window into another world.  The colors are more vibrant earth-tones and the capsule is a deep red.  The grapes for the Zombie are sourced throughout California, mostly from the dry, hot sandy soils of the Delta region and the Central Valley. The final blend benefitted from some inky Syrah grapes that came from the Central Coast. The wine was fermented in Stainless Steel and aged for about a half a year in American oak.

The Zombie Zinfandel is very dark in colour, almost a black-purple. The aromas are of ripe, dense black fruits and a hint of dried herbs. The flavours are complex and rich, sporting succulent blackberries, powdered cinnamon, cola and cherry jam.  Just a hint of black pepper in the long finish.

Food Parings:  Bloody BBQ meats, sinister soups with eye of newt, bubbly caldron of fleshy stew.

Buy Zombie Zin from Amazon.com (you must be over 21 year-old)

We are grateful to Front Porch Wine Tasting for the main image. Cheers!