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TRASH Get ready, Damon Packard fans — the mad genius behind underground cult sensations Reflections of Evil (2002) and SpaceDisco One (2007) unfurls his latest, Foxfur, at Other Cinema's fall season kickoff (also on the bill: Marcy Saude with a slideshow on ufologist George Van Tassel, free champagne and VHS tapes, and more). I spoke with the Los Angeles-based Packard, who hopes to attend in person, ahead of the event.Read more »

TRASH The late, beloved Werepad begat the Vortex Room, the former closing when co-founder Jacques Boyreau moved from SF to Portland, Ore. But ties between those concerned with both venues remain tight, and August is a big month for them all. Firstly, it sees the release of Boyreau's latest coffee table tome, Sexytime: The Post-Porn Rise of the Pornoisseur (Fantagraphics, 96pp., $29.95). Really, you might ask, does there need to be a book devoted to full color reproductions of posters from the "golden age" (circa 1971-82) of XXX features?Read more »

TRASH History does not record whether the evening of January 23, 1974 struck anyone immediately as a momentous occasion. Probably not: perhaps distracted by Watergate, porn chic, rising gas prices, the Exorcist phenomenon, and passage (one day earlier) of Roe vs. Wade, any television viewers straying over from CBS's Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour to ABC at 8:30 p.m. could hardly have fully understood the significance of what they were about to experience.Read more »

TRASH Rejected by audiences. Panned by critics. Beloved by a loyal cadre of alternative comedy fans.

Wet Hot American Summer may not have found success when it premiered in 2001, but the offbeat comedy has since become — like so many underrated flops — a cult classic.Read more »

TRASH It seems hard enough to be a successful child actor without losing your head eventually, let alone one so identified with a particular role that no one is ever inclined to let you forget it. Yet The Bad Seed's Patty McCormack has survived intact the formative experience of playing arguably the most notorious child role ever — hundreds of times on stage and once in a 1956 film version that refuses to go away.Read more »

TRASH When it comes to home viewing, gratuitous violence is always a selling point for genre fans — the censorial gloves that handle most theatrical films are off, "unrated" becomes a plus rather than commercial suicide, "director's cut" usually means more blood and maybe a little flesh previously removed at the MPAA's behest. The flood of obscure old exploitation titles now being released to DVD and Blu-ray are duly advertised as high on mayhem, whether that's actually the case or not. Read more »

GAMER Take a look at your favorite games from the past few years and you'll find most were released not only on one system, but on two or three. The days of platform exclusivity are waning, and all these multi-platform releases mean console exclusives like Resistance 3 are increasingly important to manufacturers interested in maintaining their position in the industry.Read more »

TRASH One of the longer-running Holy Grail pursuits among a certain type of movie fan finally ended last month with the official DVD release of Otto Preminger's Skidoo, a legendary 1968 boondoggle that was the veteran Hollywood prestige director's attempt to tap the new "youth market." Someone deemed those crazy kids might be magnetized, in the year of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Rosemary's Baby, and Yellow Submarine, by a gangster farce starring the fossilizing likes of Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, Frankie Avalon, Mickey Rooney, and 78-year-old Groucho Mar Read more »

Movies today might be a gutless affair if not for the industry of Herschell Gordon Lewis a half-century ago. Literally gutless — you have Lewis to thank for every splattersome moment of exposed entrails and explicit gougings since.Read more »