Fighting Fantasy Charity Auction

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One of life’s great certainties is that sooner or later this world will find some way of knocking you on your arse. Even the best of us can get caught slipping and once the blows start landing and the damage starts mounting, it’s all you can do to cover up and ride it out. Sometimes it’s nice to reach out a hand and help folk get back on their feet. Instances like that reveal a lot about the character of the people around us and the communities we build and contribute to. With that in mind I thought it worthwhile drawing our readerships attention towards the efforts put forth by Joe Kelly and fantasy artists Russ Nicholson and Malcolm Barter who are hosting an auction of original artwork and rare game book materials in order to help out a mate who’s having a rough ride.

Here’s the LINK and Here’s the blurb:

“A member of the gamebook community has fallen on hard times, and myself, the incomparable Russ Nicholson and the esteemed Malcolm Barter would like to help them out.From our own collections we have donated a wealth of gamebooks and original art (including two original colour pieces from the Goldhawk Series) to be auctioned to raise money for our friend.

All books, book sets and pieces of art will be available for auction from Saturday 4th November 5.30pm GMT to 8.30pm GMT. The auction will run over three evenings. Bids should be PMed directly to Joe Kelly and I will update sale items with the highest bid. Bidding will be put on hold between each evening.

Prices given are minimum bids.

Postage will be extra. A single book will cost approximately £9 insured but untracked anywhere in the world. Insured and tracked will be approximately £15, posted from New Zealand. Artwork will be £3.50 signed, £12 tracked posted within the UK, international shipping cost will be more. Postage is included for the badge set, map set and Malcolm Barter art.
Payments will be made by paypal to joehell@gmail.com. All money received after paypal deductions will be forward to our friend (Russ, Malcolm and I are making no profit from these sales).
MINIMUM NEW BIDS SHOULD BE IN INCREMENTS OF £5 FOR ART, £2 FOR BOOKS.”

Jagged Visions: The Devil and Joseph Wilding

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It is often said that ‘The Devil is in the details’ and that is certainly true when discussing the meticulous work of Chester based artist Joe Wilding. His illustrations are dense with visceral ideas and hang heavy with sinister mood and potent symbolism. And whilst the man himself is as genial and personable as anyone you’d care to meet, his artwork never fails to horrify or stir a funeral mood. It’s this duality that makes Joe such a pleasure to collaborate with. I caught up with him recently to peer behind the veil and discuss the ideas behind his new series of limited prints (available HERE )…
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Corehammer Christmas Mosh & Raffle

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Yo, just a quickie. Our annual festive meet up is scheduled for November 18th at Mantic HQ in Nottingham. Games will be played, rips will be executed, snacks will be consumed. Much laughter and jackanapes to be sure. All are welcome. Fiver gets you in and you can get a ticket HERE

Organise some games, play some new ones, make new friends, raise some money, enjoy a little solidarity. No bullshit attitudes or nazi’s cheers. Stay the fuck home.

We are also running a charity raffle at our Christmas do to raise money for St Mary’s Sexual Assault Referral Centre. Thanks to some very generous and kind individuals and companies, the prizes for this are absolutely incredible, check out our Facebook and Instagram over the next few weeks for what’s going to be up for grabs.

You need to get a ticket to take the ride though, and while we will obviously be selling some on the day, we’ve got you covered if you can’t make it either. We will be selling them in packs of five (it doesn’t make sense to do less due to the Paypal fees etc, which is what the 40p is for), and will send you a photo of your tickets with your name written on them. They will be added to the draw on the day (which we stream live as it’s 2017), and you will have just as much chance of winning as anyone else. Anything you do win will be posted to you, wherever you live in the world.

People have been generous, you can be too. Link HERE

All money raised from entrance to the day and from the raffle will be donated to assist the good work that the folk over at St Mary’s Sexual Assault resource centre. Go have a read of their website HERE and get your head around exactly what they do.

 

Nate Vs The Living Dead Part 2: Inhale The Horror

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The Nightmare Legion blew into my life like a sepulchral wind. I could not peel my eyes away from that glorious box. This was everything my pre-pubesecent self had dreamed of. I had no idea what a Regiment Of Renown, a Warhammer or a Games Workshop was. All I knew is that the image on the box of an army of grinning skeletons, marching forth from their tombs clad in rotting armour beneath a ragged banner. It was one of the coolest things I had ever seen. This was better than having Findus Crispy Pancakes for tea or being allowed to stay up and watch The Equalizer or catching a glimpse of Linda Lusardi’s knockers whilst out on my paper round.

I cycled back to the head shop the very next day. Bombing it all the way. Grifter gears cranked way up to red. Parka blowing in my wake. That’s how serious this was. I was full of courage and excitement.  Upon arriving at the store I nervously peered into the murky entrance. I don’t know what I expected to find in there? A coven of witches gathered round a boiling cauldron cooking up Liquid Gold? Maybe a drug dealer, like the ones that hung around in abandoned precincts off Double Dragon, waiting to smash my head in and stick hypodermic needles into me and get me addicted to heroin. These were genuine concerns for Yung Nate. I dug deep though, found some of that ‘Intestinal fortitude’ that Gorilla Monsoon used to talk about and crept inside. 

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Too Much Horror Business: Overdosing on the macabre at the age of 4

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Not one to blow my own trumpet, but I’ve seen pretty much 95% of all Horror films ever made.

Where did I get that percentage from? My arse. I’ve absolutely no idea how many I’ve seen, but it’s a fucking lot I can assure you.

Earlier in the year my Mum told me that my fucking dickhead Dad showed me The Hills Have Eyes on VHS when I was four years old. A ridiculous thing to do and I wish he hadn’t as, apparently, I was greatly affected by it and rightly so, it’s a fucking NASTY film. But, a year later, Ghostbusters shit me up just as bad so maybe I’m just a YELLOW CHICKEN. But it ignited a love for ghoulies and ghosties that never left. It was kept burning by Fighting Fantasy books, Scream comic, 2000AD, Splatterhouse arcade machines, Garbage Pail Kids, Monster in My Pocket, Supernaturals, Oink! And the ability to draw whatever my imagination desired. The mid-late 80s was a fucking incredible time to be a young Horror fan.

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A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge

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Author: Joe Boyd

This review starts on a cluttered bedroom floor in a small Derbyshire town, where two gangly teenage boys with too much hair are sat in front of an eviscerated VCR. It’s the mid-2000s, and me and my friend Mike are watching horror movies.

This always was a bit of a trip for me. Mike has a personality disorder, so spending time with him was never like hanging out with the average teenage boy. His moods are erratic, and his outlook on life switches from happy to nihilistic in an instant, flicking back just as quickly. He’s been diagnosed with ADHD before, and it’s easy to see why; his attention is constantly springing from one activity to the next. Watching horror movies is, therefore, an interesting experience.

Mike doesn’t have the patience for a whole movie, or even half of one. He watches them in bursts of energy, like a series of sprints, pausing to play a videogame or take something apart to see how it works, before catching up where he left off. When him and I get together, therefore, he skips most of the films. What I get is a kind of highlight reel of all the gory bits, as he switches out one tape for another in excited glee.

We watched vampires slash up a bar in From Dusk till Dawn, followed by Drew Barrymore’s fatal final phone call in Scream. We watched Final Destination – the perfect film for Mike’s attention span – in a chaotic, random order, skipping from death to death and laughing at the contextless slaughter.

In retrospect, that’s not actually much different from watching Final Destination normally.

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Kiss Me Fat Boy! – Stephen Kings IT

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Now I want to preface this article by admitting that It is an obvious choice for a horror movie retrospective but it has significant importance to me – it managed to scare me off a whole genre of film up until this very day, which means I’ve missed out classics such as Jason X and Nine Lives. I cannot stand watching most horror movies and I really do believe it links closely to the clown played by the guy from Home Alone 2.

It’s best for us to go back to where this haunting began – I believe the year was 1996, I was at a friends house for what I understood would be an enjoyable birthday sleepover. I remember we played some Tekken 2, I assume we ate some breaded chicken and watched the Demon Headmaster – all things that guarantee a 9 year old a great night of entertainment.

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The Eclipse – True Past Death

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“Then she knew. She knew that she was seeing a ghost, and she realized for perhaps the first time in her life, that she too would die. That her husband would die. And that her children would die. She knew in that moment, that she was looking at reality”

Is it a scarier prospect that ghosts are real, or just inventions of the mind? This is one of the fundamental questions wrestled with in the little watched Irish film “The Eclipse.” It is a film that focuses on loss, and how the people we love fill spaces in our world that don’t close easily when they’re gone. It is about holding onto whatever is left, even pain, in order to avoid forgetting, and how that can turn toxic and limiting. The film is a hybrid of a slow paced character study, relationship drama and horror. It borrows all sorts of tricks from the latter to ramp up tension and even provides a few jump scares and ghost sightings. Using voyeuristic camera angles, shots from inside darkened rooms and just behind railings or bushes, it gives the whole film a feeling of dread lurking just outside the frame. But this dread isn’t usually of the typical horror manner, it isn’t a chainsaw wielding maniac or vengeful spirit manifesting itself to expel intruders. The dread is of a more human kind. When someone loses a wife, a mother, a child or anyone really, what do they hold onto ultimately to keep their life from spinning out of control?

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Marked For Justice: Creepshow 2

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As the father of a nine year old, I’m forced to watch and listen to a lot of garbage. Kids of this generation listen to some of the worst music in the history of recorded sound. It’s hard to believe but the television shows are worse. The ratio for movies fares a bit better. For every Batman Vs. Superman, at least there is usually a palate cleanser like a Rogue One or Guardians of the Galaxy available that you can watch and reaffirm your faith in film. Whenever we have to see something like Tomorrowland I quietly wonder to myself, “Dear God. Did I enjoy trash like this when I was her age?” As I pondered what I would skewer when writing this piece I realised that yes, childlike naievete can actually make a steaming pile of dog shit seem like a good movie. 

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Thirty Five Years* of Lycanthrope Love – An American Werewolf in London

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“A naked American man stole my balloons”

Backpacking and travelling around the world with nothing but the clothes on your back and the stuff in your rucksack used to be all the rage. This is almost certainly why Jack and David, two clean cut all American youths and the main players in John Landis’ tale of hirsute supernatural monstrosities find themselves rambling through the wind-blasted moors of the North of England in the middle of winter. I don’t know which tourist guide told them that this was the hip and happening pace to be in the early eighties, but whichever one it was should be ripped into pieces, set on fire and buried in a deep hole.  Anyway, it starts to rain so they seek shelter in a local pub called The Slaughtered Lamb, which is a proper local watering hole for locals only and Landis makes this abundantly clear when the strangers walk in by ensuring that everyone in the crowded establishment shuts the fuck up as soon as they walk in and then stare at the poor innocents abroad as though they were a posh red wine from somewhere like Tuscany. Which, anywhere north of Watford in the early eighties, was a big no-no and in some places was enough to get you run out of town.

Soon enough though, it’s all laughs and banter as the teacher from Kes, Rick from The Young Ones and a whole host of other bit players accept their new comrades into their drinking club and all is going swimmingly until our clueless heroes start asking questions about the Pentagram on the wall, at which point they’re kicked to the curb, thrown out in the rain and warned in no uncertain terms to stay off the moors. As they walk out of the pub and the locals’ lives, there’s a lot of hand wringing and chatter in the pub about how they shouldn’t have let the lads leave while in the background there’s a Lon Chaney style howl, which despite being louder than an old lady’s telly, isn’t heard by that bloke from Kes who obviously needs a hearing aid. Cut back to the young Americans chatting about girls and what not, who being young and out in the world for the first time, venture off the path and onto the moors. The opposite of they were told to do by the more local than local locals in the Slaughtered Lamb.

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