Tuesday, May 09, 2006

Murderous madmen, gun-toting gangsters and extra-troubled teens; new this week at the buffet...

We were supposed to host an in-house photo shoot for Thee Minks' upcoming 7" this past Sunday but the lovely Miss Liz Lixx rescheduled us, leaving the Kommandant and I with a rare day off. We considered staying home and working on the next issue of c14, which is due to go to the printer at the end of the month - for about a minute. Instead we decided to go out for brunch and hit a flea market in Lambertville, NJ.

The Country Host tends to be a little pricey for our tastes, featuring a lot of vendors selling expensive "antiques" of questionable age, assorted forms of advertising paraphernalia and hand carved seating made of trees. It's usually fun for browsing purposes though and sometimes there are tables filled with cheap junk - which is much more up our alley than brass clocks in the shape of various animals, giant coca-cola signs and tree benches. (Those are actually kind of cool if you're into that type of thing.)

My browsing resulted in the acquisition of two vintage enamel flower pins and a stack of sleaze paperbacks; plus a pair of sunburned shoulders. It was looking like the Kommandant was going to walk away empty handed - which hardly ever happens, as there are dollar record bins at pretty much every flea market we've ever been to and he hasn't met a dollar record bin that didn't contain a piece of vinyl he thought he might like. But then he came across a cranky old dude overseeing table after table of dusty old VHS tapes.

They seemed to be cast-offs from a defunct Blockbuster so the wobbly tables were laden with comedies, chick flicks and children's stuff but he persevered and unearthed copies of Mighty Peking Man, a movie we've already seen but agreed we would watch again; Stripped To Kill II, a Roger Corman produced sequel to a mid-'80s slasher flick neither of us had ever heard of; and a movie we kept meaning to rent in order to review as part of our Decade That Dripped Blood column but never quite got around to it, Sleepaway Camp. (Oddly enough the three tapes together cost a dollar less than it would have cost us to rent any of them from our local video store.)

I've been wanting to see Sleepaway Camp since I watched a somewhat recent interview with Felissa Rose where she reflects on her role as sullen pre-teen camper Angela. (The interview was part of the extras section on Troma's Slaughter Party DVD, which I reviewed earlier in the year; I totally and unknowingly spoiled the whole plot of SC in the one sentence I wrote about it in said review, so don't read that if you wanna be somewhat surprised by the ending.) I must admit, it definitely lived up to my expectations of being one crazy f'ed up movie. Interested parties can read the Kommandant's thoughts on this most unusual slasher flick here.

Also new to the buffet menu this week is a double dose of darkly lit film noir-esque "krimis", Monster Of London City and Secret Of The Red Orchid.

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