Keep Rollin, Rollin, Rollin your bases out of green stuff

Things have come a long way since the days of sand painted goblin green when it comes to bases, and every man and his dog are in the scenic bases game these days.

But can you be arsed buying scenic bases for a full Necromunda gang? Probably. A 40k army, a Fantasy Battle army….? Perhaps not.

So what do you do? Make your own.

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Harder They Fall #4: Pre-Orders Up Now

Line Of Sight: Pic by Jeff Laisch

In a break from our scheduled programming, just a quick announcement that the latest issue of my very occasional punk fanzine Harder They Fall is now available for pre-order.  Issue 4 weighs in at 44 solid pages of content. No adverts, no filler. Interviews with Rancour from Wales, Ill Natured from Australia, Guilt Ritual from New England, xServitudex, Dan Duggan of Unholy Majesty/The Break In/Santa Carla and The Monster Merchants, Tom Pimlott of Arms Race/ Violent Reaction/Standpoint/ Marco Abiatello of Payday, Dan Capman from Firm Standing Law and Peter Falkous of Thirty Seconds Until Armageddon/ Grace/Vengeance Of Gaia/ Break It Up/ Jinn etc. Phew!

Alongside all that there’s the usual daft anecdotes and articles along with a slick layout courtesy of Falkous. This ones coming out via Static Age publishing so check it out HERE if you want to grab one!

March Of the Damned – This months demo round up

Well it’s been a while. Despite my best intentions of keeping the blog updated weekly, they stumbled and expired on the side of the highway like some knackered old tramp on a hot day when confronted with the greater evil of  an academic deadline looming on the horizon. Consider this update a palate cleanser for me then rather than an omen of things to come. I don’t know if or when I’ll be resuming regular posting/editing here. I don’t plan on leaving it entirely in abandons care but there’s a fallow season upon us.

To business then, first up is the demo from  World Of Difference. They are a new straight edge band that, if memory serves me correctly, contains former members of the Dublin group Bang Bros amongst others…. Continue reading

Marked For Justice – The Sermon

First of all in the name of full disclosure I’m a thrawn Scotswummin who doesn’t venture south of Hadrian’s Wall very often. Our current political situation and a steady diet of British sci-fi and horror from a young age has me convinced me that England is a Very Strange Place. J.G. Ballard may as well have written the towns into existence and the countryside? Well yous have zombies in your tin mines and all manner of sinister goings on behind your hedgerows. I have a real fondness for the weird vision of England conjured by classic horror though and I was genuinely excited to get a new English folk horror to take a look at.

The Sermon is a short film set in a small religious community deep in the English countryside. The village patriarch described in the films logline as a powerful hate preacher prepares to deliver a sermon however his daughter Ella has a secret which could destroy them all – her love affair with a mysterious older woman. Her secret is uncovered by one of the preachers lackeys who desires Ella for himself and an inevitable chain of events featuring a baying mob, a forced betrayal and a final act of “desperate act of ecstatic violence’’ is set into motion.

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Give ‘Em The (Re)Boot

Whilst the occurrence of the movie reboot isn’t anything close to new, I feel that just lately, it’s everywhere I look.

Heathers is on telly (don’t watch it), Tomb Raider at the flicks (probably won’t watch it), Death Wish (sorry but I will watch it), Flatliners, Lethal Weapon, IT, Robocop, Judge Dredd, Overboard, Total Recall, the 30 different Spider Man films no one asked for, DYNASTY for fucks sake. Training Day is a TV series (I’m sorry, Bill Paxton), MacGuyver, Lost In Space (maybe I’ll try), From Dusk Til Dawn (I watched it all, don’t be stupid like me). Mates, they are bringing back THE FUCKING MUPPET BABIES. The Grudge. Again. Masters of the Universe. Sister Act. These are all real by the way, it’s not just me listing literally any old film.

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You Can’t Stop Progress – Hardware

 

Author: Andrew Carr

When Corehammer sounded the horn for people to write about cyberpunk, I knew I had to answer the call. Now, there is a wealth of amazing cyberpunk flicks out there and I was pretty spoiled for choice, so I decided to avoid the obvious classics and look at some of the more niche flicks out there. I considered the artier stuff (Burst City/Tetsuo: The Iron Man) and also the trash (Hands of Steel/Nemesis); however, I eventually decided on something that kind of sits in between and holds a special place in my miserable Lancastrian heart – Hardware.

I only found out about this film a few years back, as I was starting to discover all those movies whose VHS cover art I used to stare at longingly in the local Spar when I was about seven. Podcasts like The Gentlemen’s Guide To Midnite Cinema and The Cult Of Muscle reminded me of those glorious days, when Cliffhanger was next to Ninja III: The Domination and Coneheads was a couple of rows below. As a kid, I discovered cyberpunk through Judge Dredd, Rogue Trooper and the rest of 2000AD. This evolved in my teens into an interest in Cyberpunk 2020, sci-fi movies and an unhealthy obsession with Fear Factory. As an adult, this finally morphed into a love of genre cinema from the 80s and 90s which, strangely enough, brought me right back to those days spent staring up at copies of Nemesis that I could never reach….. Continue reading

Hackers – This is the end, thank you for calling

The year is 1995. The only internet you have access to comes complete with screeching dial up tone, and pictures that load in 3 colours, one row of pixels at a time. The most technologically advanced thing in my house at the time that I was allowed to touch was probably our waffle maker. And then I put my chin directly on to the hot plate waiting for them to cook and it became the most hi-tech thing in our house that I was no longer allowed to touch.

When I finally was allowed access to our computer, it wasn’t anything like Hackers had promised me. MS-DOS was just green gibberish, no one tried to talk to me, much less start an argument with me, animated by HTML flames, and I didn’t descend into a pixelated cyberspace every time I turned it on. Also it took like 5 full minutes to warm up. The closest I got to an ambiguous and sinister online identity, was using a thunder and lightning emoticon in my MSN name. It was heartbreaking.

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Neo Tokyo Drift – Akira turns 30

Author: David Ager

What’s that, mate? You love future bikes? I do too. And what was that? You like laser guns and people that swell to a thousand times their normal size like they’ve been filled with Sunny D? I like that too. It may have been that strange combination of interests that means I ended up loving Akira, or maybe it’s the fact that if you have even a passing interest in science fiction then it’s almost impossible not to like Akira (even if you don’t understand it.)

It’s Cyberpunk week on Corehammer and when Nate threw the question out to everyone to see if they’d like to talk about something Cyberpunk that was close to their hearts, I knew that top of that list for me was Akira. I first saw Akira at a friends house when I was about 13, at the time we were obsessed with Metal Gear Solid, his Desert Eagle BB gun & these large figurines you could buy of SWAT and SAS figurines from a weird shop in Hull. Looking back at it now we were probably going the direction that several school shooters took but luckily my friend showed me a frog he’d killed and we didn’t speak after that.

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Friday The 13th Part VIII – Mama, Just Killed A Man

I’ll be honest with you – I wasn’t supposed to watch this film this week. In honour of the glorious Hallmark festival where you all get given a heart shaped pizza or whatever and I get a nice text off my mum, I was going to watch My Bloody Valentine, cos I saw it when I was small by accident and threw a teddy with a heart on it away after because it stressed me out. What I ACTUALLY wanted to watch was Valentine, the wanky teen slasher starring Angel off Buffy as a handsome lunatic, stalking girls who made fun of his thick specs at school, but it came out in 2001, and that puts it largely outside of our calendar catchment area. I’ll obviously still watch that when I’m done here.

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Nobody carries the dogboy! – Salute Of The Jugger

1989 was a real kicker of a year. I was 13 years old. My brain was already a bubbling toxic soup from prolonged exposure to lethal amounts of 2000AD and undiluted Kia Ora. I was peaking hard and gobbling up everything I could get my greedy claws on to feed my developing appetites in twisted fiction, dystopian sci-fi and martial arts movies. At the cinema we finally got a ‘dark” Batman courtesy of Tim Burton and my cinematic comfort blanket The Burbs was released into the world.

What was I listening to? Guns & Roses ‘Appetite For Destruction’ exclusively. I hadn’t traded in the Grifter for a mountain bike yet either. Life was pretty good.

A little googling revealed that cinematic trend for B-Movies in ’89 was underwater alien horror. Sophie already dismantled The Abyss a couple of weeks ago much to Boardy’s chagrin, but there were at least four other ‘Aliens living at the bottom of the sea’  films doing the rounds. Leviathan, Lords Of The Deep and Deep Star Six. That’s all well and good but I’m from Margate mate, I saw horror on the regular down that sea front in the 80’s and didn’t care to revisit it in the cinema. That and I’m terrified of deep water. No friends, my attention was drawn to the other end of the environmental misery spectrum. The dusty plains of the post apocalyptic future…..

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