Ed and the rest of the creative folks at Midnight Syndicate have been friends of GeekintheCity.com for a good long time now. So, whenever I hear more about their ambitious movie project, The Dead Matter - I get excited! You might too after watching this:

Who are Midnight Syndicate? You can check out some of our earlier reviews (here) and interviews (here). The short answer is this; Midnight Syndicate is a dedicated group of people that got tired of the standard Halloween horror “music” and decided to make honest and atmospheric music. That was over 13 years ago and they never looked back. I could go on and on, but it might be best to let the masters take over from here!

Midnight Syndicate Films has announced plans to release a special edition of The Dead Matter DVD that will include two bonus CDs by gothic Halloween music artists Midnight Syndicate.  It will be available at all Hot Topic stores nationwide on July 30th.  The specially-priced set will include The Dead Matter DVD, the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack CD by Midnight Syndicate, and a new Midnight Syndicate 13th Anniversary greatest hits CD entitled Halloween Music Collection.   Midnight Syndicate Films has also released a new official trailer for The Dead Matter movie which can be viewed at the film’s revamped website, www.TheDeadMatter.com and YouTube.

The Dead Matter: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack CD contains the score composed by the film’s director, Edward Douglas of Midnight Syndicate, as well as several limited-edition remixes of Midnight Syndicate songs and other music that appears in the film from bands like Lazy Lane, HipNostic, and Eternal Legacy.   Midnight Syndicate’s Halloween Music Collection CD features over 60 minutes of songs hand-picked by Edward Douglas and Gavin Goszka to celebrate the band’s first 13 years.   Both new CDs will also be available at Halloween retailers nationwide in August.

Greetings programs! Let us just get straight to the point - Sam Raimi’s masterpiece of terror returns to Portland on February 12, 2010 at the Bagdad Theater at 11:00pm

For a mere $5, you can see the film that Roger Ebert declared “One of the most deplorable movies ever made”, while Stephen King called it “The most ferociously original horror film of the year.” I ask you, when it comes to scaring the holy crap out of you, who you gonna’ believe? The man that hailed Tomb Raider as a “wild and fun ride” or the master of modern horror?

Yeah, that’s what I thought ya’ primitive screwheads!

This is no DVD popped into a player and projected onto the big screen. No my friends, this is the original 35mm print. And, when I say the “Original 35mm Print”, I ain’t joking. This is the print. This is Sam Raimi’s personal damn print! You read right suckas. Sam Raimi has graciously loaned Sage Stallone and Murawski of Grindhouse Releasing the rights to run this classic nasty flick across our fine union. Taken from the Chin’s mouth: “Nothing can prepare an audience for what they
are about to see, because nothing punishes an audience like EVIL DEAD - especially on the big screen,” says Bruce Campbell. “I’m really glad it’s back. People are gonna be hurt.”

Tell your friends. Tell your enemies. Tell your priest. The Evil Dead has returned to Portland “Frakking” Oregon on Friday February 12, 2010 at 11:00pm. Keep tuning into this site and GeekintheCity Radio for more details.

Longtime readers and listeners will know that your friendly neighborhood Geek is a big fan of the folks at Midnight Syndicate. One, because I admire any group that truly busts their butt to make a product they’re passionate about. Two, it was so nice to have music beyond Rush and Wagner to play during my D&D and Vampire games. Ahem. Anyway, when we at GeekintheCity learned the folks at Midnight were making a Hammer Studio inspired horror film, and it starred Sex Machine, well we got all kinds of giddy!

Now if you chance to join this film. To make sure I don’t garble their “official rules” and such (which the folks at TFAW are painfully aware of my skill in doing so) here is the press release, direct from the morbid masters themselves:

The Dead Matter movie to be released on July 30th.  Midnight Syndicate gives filmmakers chance to have their work featured on The Dead Matter DVD and win prizes with their 13th Anniversary Video Contest.

(Cleveland, OH) Midnight Syndicate Films has announced that The Dead Matter movie and soundtrack will be released on July 30th.  Production on an interactive website that allows fans to delve deeper into the world and characters they will encounter in the movie is underway.  A set of three new trailers, the first of which will be released in February is also in production along with a mini-documentary produced by Smudgeline Productions and other behind-the-scenes featurettes.  All of these items and more special features to be announced soon will be included on the DVD release.

Midnight Syndicate Halloween Music is hosting a 13th Anniversary Video Contest where filmmakers and animators can create a silent film or music video to an existing Midnight Syndicate track.  The winner will be featured on “The Dead Matter” DVD as well as win prizes from sponsors: Screamline Studios, Conquest Graphics, Robert Kurtzman’s Creature Corps, Van Helsing’s Curse Halloween music, and Midnight Syndicate.   Other finalists will also win prizes and special promotions.

Judges include legendary frontman and horror fan Dee Snider (Twisted Sister, Strangeland), Horror FX-legends Tom Savini (Friday the 13th, Dusk Till Dawn) and Robert Kurtzman (producer From Dusk Till Dawn, KNB FX, Wishmaster), as well as Edward Douglas (The Dead Matter) and Gavin Goszka of Midnight Syndicate and producer director Gary Jones (Xena, Hercules, Boogeyman 3).

Additional information on the video contest can be found at www.MidnightSyndicate.com.  The official rules are posted at www.MidnightSyndicate.com/videocontest.htm.

First, pop on over to my buds at Blog From Another World. They’ve got a great little costume contest going on. Learn about your chances to win a flippin’ grip of horror comics swag. (Hell, I want to enter just for the shot at the Bernie Wrightson Frankenstein HC). And, because she had to know this was gonna’ happen…

You can find out more at TFAW.com/Blog.

Next, (and retrospectively, should have been the first item), happy anniversary to myself and the Lovely Jenn. Three years ago we skipped down the aisle together at the Hollywood Theatre. No, really, skipped… We used the Muppet Movie as our wedding march. Anyway, without her there wouldn’t be a GeekintheCity.com or GeekintheCity Radio. Here is a little special something just for Jenn, you folks can enjoy it as well.

Thanks baby! Kisses. (Oh stop, I can have feelings).

Eventually, I’m going to talk about the French horror film, INSIDE. I’m also going to tell you how it ends, partly because I want to ruin it for you. By the time you get there, you’ll understand why.

I have an enormous problem with the spate of “torture horror” films these days. I’m referring to films where the horror is all too human and the violence, which tends to be prodigious, isn’t borne of a voodoo curse or an alien’s genetic imperative to lay eggs in your butt. It’s just sadism. The HOSTEL films, THEM (2007), THE STRANGERS, VACANCY, P2, CAPTIVITY, TURISTAS, remakes of PROM NIGHT, THE HITCHER, WHEN A STRANGER CALLS…yadda yadda yadda. I find these films to be at best creatively lazy and at worst culturally damaging.

The evil that men do is not entertainment. If it was, we’d have a CSPAN for Darfur by now that would make American Idol look like a cable access hog report. Horror movies are supposed to be a break from reality. In order for us to suspend our disbelief, give us something to disbelieve in. Give us a MONSTER! And don’t feel that you need to hold back, either. The ghost of a cremated pedophile? I’m intrigued. A demonic, self-mutilating leather daddy and his carpool buddies from hell? Do go on. You don’t even have to work that hard. Did any of you see CREEP (2005)? It’s in that same awry-experiment mutant genre as THE HILLS HAVE EYES, only the writer/director assumed that his audience had an I.Q. above room temperature. That’s really all it takes. And then, to keep us on our toes, every once in a blue moon, lightly pepper in a believable sociopath. A Hannibal Lechter. A Henry. The AntiDundee from WOLF CREEK, even. But make them the exceptions, not the rule. Give our psyches some time to heal over before you squirt lemon all over them again by reminding us how scary the world is.

Now, I know what some of you are thinking.

“But Baron, isn’t man truly the biggest monster of them all?”

Please know that your half-baked, freshman philosophy class nihilism is causing me actual, physical pain. You want to vilify the human condition, Moonbeam? Go watch SCHINDLER’S LIST. There’s a reason that horror and sci-fi and fantasy share space in convention halls as well as in the hearts of nerds worldwide: it’s all about frakking make-believe. When a movie is just about violence and sadism, that makes it too real - even if the story framed around it happens to be fiction. It takes so little effort to push that same violence into the realm of fantasy. The killers were dead but now they’re only sorta dead. See? See how easy?

I’m assuming, of course, that we can all agree that movies are meant to entertain. They’re meant to add to our lives in some way, even if it’s just a 90 minute vacation from hearing about war and inflation and celebrity babies. In a perfect scenario, horror movies are a catharsis, allowing us to get our adrenaline pumping, scream and blow off the steam of a stressful world by rooting for the heroes and, even subconsciously, feeling just a wee bit happier that we don’t live in a world where the full moon is evil and brains are delicious.

Torture horror films do not do this. They make us feel worse about the world. Their message is loud and clear: you’re fucked. You don’t have to go into the basement when the electricity is out. You don’t have to read a passage from a book bound in human skin. You don’t have to have unprotected teen sex on the grave of a drowned leotards in the pet cemetery next to the nuclear power plant in order for unspeakable things to happen to you. All you have to do is be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

What? Don’t tell me that. That’s not what I want to leave the theater thinking. That’s just mean. I paid ten bucks for you to show me this? You dick!

Which brings me to INSIDE.

Written and directed by Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, INSIDE is the most relentless example of torture horror that has ever glued my eyes open in shock and awe. In a nutshell, a woman in her last weeks of pregnancy is trapped in her home and stalked by a scissor wielding madwoman that is dead set on a decidedly unscheduled C-section. Everyone that enters the house that night - and for a place out in the boonies, it’s surprisingly populated - ends up savagely and spectacularly eviscerated. Nothing is left to the imagination. Gore guh-gore gore GORE! Fast forward, crazy lady is in a rocking chair, cradling a blood soaked and possibly dead newborn, as the camera pans over mommy, torn open and spilling down the stairs like a wet, meaty piñata. Roll credits.

As a lover of film, INSIDE tears me. I want so badly to hate it and yet it’s brilliantly done. It truly is. The acting, the directing, the editing - brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. INSIDE’s short 84 minutes is packed - there’s barely room for you to blink, so peeing or making a sandwich is out of the question. Absolutely riveting, there’s no point in denying it. And yet, the story that was inside Bustillo and Maury busting to get out is about a psycho scissor sister that carves up a battered and bloodied pregnant widow like an Easter ham. Ironically, you’d have to view INSIDE in its entirety (in other words, don’t rent it from Blockbuster) to appreciate the depth of depravity committed to the story here. This is neither the product of nor the fodder for healthy minds.

Nine weeks after INSIDE’s US video release, a 23 year old woman in Kennewick, WA, tortured a 27 year old mother-to-be and cut her full term baby from her womb.

It’s true.

I was still feeling violated from watching INSIDE so this news hit me like a lead pipe. Coincidence? Cause and effect? Life imitating art? I cannot say. But I can say that when I seek out the vicarious thrills of a horror movie, this is exactly the type of world that I’m trying to escape from.

Why did your friendly neighborhood Geek pick this article to run from Baron Von Goolo’s past? Simple, to once again promise you fine readers that neither this site or GeekintheCity Radio will review or mention Saw VI beyond this little line.

Want real fun and horror? Be sure to check out the ghoulish Baron and his minions at Fright Town showing through November 1 at the Memorial Coliseum!