Time for some pussy

Nashville Pussy – From Hell To Texas (SPV/Riot)

Amphetamine fueled rock and roll that’ll have you screaming “YeeHa” and guzzling straight shots of whiskey.

It’s been awhile between drinks for Nashville Pussy – their last album came out in 2005 but they haven’t been wasting time, hell no, they’ve been touring the world, getting shitfaced, partying hard, collecting stories and coming up with the twelve stone cold classic rock and roll party anthems that make this album their best effort yet. From the get go with Speed Machine their blend of Motorhead meets Lynyrd Skynyrd meets Willie Nelson just hits the right damn chord. In the past the band have been guilty of maybe ploughing the same furrow over and over and their albums can lose a little steam half way but with From Hell To Texas they’ve stepped up and really come up with the goods. The down home rollicking porch stomper that is Lazy Jesus, the 60’s Brit invasion meets Tommy James chorus that is Why Why Why (although I don’t think Sir Paul ever wrote a lyric like “I shaved my balls for this!”) change the pace and strengthen the album. But don’t worry, these bastards and bitches (Hubby and wife guitarists Blaine Cartwright & Ruyter Suys plus stalwart drummer Jeremy Thompson and since 2005 Karen Cuda on bass) ain’t going soft on you, they still deliver the kick in the crotch they always have with songs like Ain’t You Business, Pray For The Devil, Late Great USA (with a touch of Peter Criss drums – or maybe that’s just me) the title track and the song to play whenever you’re feeling suicidal and need a reason to live – Dead Men Can’t Get Drunk. Like a decent bottle of bourbon you just have to have it all and damn the consequences. This is a band that refuses to compromise, refuses to go mainstream and god damn but you gotta love ‘em for it. Now if you’ll excuse me it’s my shout.

book launch - get ready to party

Paroxysm Press presents S. F. & T.* (sucked fucked and tattooed) by Kami
reprint and re-launch
Friday 20th February
TUXEDO CAT
Rooftop 15-19 Synagogue Place off East Rundle St, Adelaide

ISLE OF THE DAMNED
D: Mark Colegrove 2008

Supposedly directed by Antonello Giallo in the 80s and lost to the public, this twisted spoof on those classick 80s cannibal/jungle bungle/eyetalian horrors that haunted nerdy collectors lists is badly dubbed, poorly acted and complete with grainy lines running down the screen and washed out 80s colour. Hell if it wasn’t for the obviously fake wigs and facial hair you’d almost think you had stumbled across a lost spaghetti cannibal flick long consigned to the bottom shelf at yr video emporium. That’s how good it is!
Our hero Jack Steele complete with Chopper Read moustache, mirror shades and a glorious head of 80s hair has been hired by treasure hunter Harold Thompson to help find the lost treasure of Marco Polo in the jungles of South America. (where, after all, life is cheap!) Steele’s poor troubled foster son Billy has come along for the adventure. And boy does he get himself into some sticky situations. Seems Billy has victim written all over his forehead, cos Thompson just can’t keep his hands of Billy’s butt! With a ship’s crew that consists of Captain Feather sword, Phil Lynott and Dave Navarro our heroes head off to find the treasure. Of course, it has to be on an island that is populated by wild animals and cannibals namely the Yamma Yamma tribe, a hairy bunch of metal heads not unlike the guys from Immortal who we first encounter castrating and de-sacking some poor soul while his daughter looks on in horror. It’s all down hill from there with gut wrenching, cheesy, bloody, vivid red gore – limb lopping, fetus munching, piranha chomping fun, not to mention the bloke on a stick! Yep this baby has it all.
After rescuing the catatonic daughter, Steele and Billy bump into Alexis Kincaid and his mute sidekick Cain, a former Yakuza assassin (even if he is a tattooed white boy). Kincaid, an anthropologist, lives on the island with a couple of native slaves and Cain in a nice little mansion on the hill where he offers Steele and company a place to rest. Thompson meanwhile has been captured by the Yammas and is caged up ready for a horrifying ritual – A nu-folk music festival!! Actually no that was just the warm up, Thompson is considered such a coward that he ain’t worth eating so after the music fest he gets sodomised by the tribe!! Oops, must have been a black metal festival. Kincaid and Steele rescue the bum bleeder though and take him back to the mansion to recuperate. Thompson hasn’t given up on the treasure hunt though despite his bleeding butt. Meanwhile Cain and Catatonic gal have something going on and it seems love has come to the island. Of course, it’s all downhill from here with blood, guts, sodomy with a knife (!) and some fitting Day Of The Dead type deaths.
This is a well crafted tribute to those dumb ass days of 80s grue, hell if it wasn’t for the obviously fake wigs you wouldn’t know this wasn’t legit – it is that tacky, sleazy, badly acted and dumb. These boys know their movies and obviously have a love for them. What with the mysterious anthropologist, the native rituals, token wild animal footage, the greedy treasure hunter, catatonic gal, the mother fucker of a hero, grotty natives, sodomy, gut chomping gore and monkey chops with iguana semen gravy you know these guys have watched every great (and not so great) cannibal flick there ever was, probably shitty 3rd or 4th generation dubs that they traded with some other nerdboy half way across the world. One of the funniest, sleaziest, bloodiest and dumbest movies I’ve seen in a while. I can’t give it any higher recommendation!

bang that head that doesn't bang!

METALHEADS
the good, the bad and the evil
D: Bill Zebub 2008

Written, directed, produced, edited, starring and probably catered by as well, Bill Zebub comes on like a yankee metal slightly nuts version of comedian Bill Bailey at times but damn he’s good at it.
This film is a slice of the life of a couple of metal head schmucks who do nothing much at all but get wasted, dream about making money, look at girls, take trips, drink, look at girls, get wasted… in short, this is pretty much what most of us are doing.
Our main men, Bill and Rich are a coupla losers who need to grow up but don’t seem in any hurry to do that. Bill’s girlfriend Elaine is constantly giving him shit cos he’s got a little dick, no car and no future. In fact she’s even thinking that maybe she should “date outside of metal.” That’s how desperate she is! Rich, well he’s just there for the ride, that dependable mate with a car and some sort of common sense or at least more sense than Bill anyway. You know the guy, he’s at the bar now buying you a beer cos you’re short of cash and he’ll drop you off home later and he’s always around to get drunk with you and play some air guitar… that guy. So we’ve got Bill and Rich and Elaine. Bill keeps finding money laying around, things just don’t go anywhere but you’ll recognise every sentence and every person and then when Elaine kisses Rich cos she thinks that maybe he’s not a bad guy, well then things go a bit haywire but you sort of knew it would happen cos it did just Saturday at the bar didn’t it and you still aren’t sure what you’re going to say to your mate when you see him next. Bill ends up tangled with a mad metal head, who tells him he’s been “living with the volume turned down.” and now it’s time to get things rolling. It’s party time now, with naked girls, light bondage, stealing, drinking, revenge and Bill looking well out of his depth.
Meanwhile Elaine is fantasizing about a muscle bound, well groomed metal head with a car and a job but though her hand is getting right into it her heart belongs to that idiot Bill. Billy boy soon realizes that he doesn’t need the volume turned up that loud and goes back to his friends but it just ain’t gonna be a happy ending. There’s a real nasty, misogynistic sting in the tail of this movie that at first sort of disturbed me but I realized that it had to be there. If we’re honest, the whole metal scene is in general, bloketown. It is misogynistic, it is sexist, it is dumber than a box of politicians – that’s why we like it. We want naked women and beer, loud music, perennial adolescence and a shit hot guitar solo. Bill recognizes that but he’s not afraid to just make us just a touch uncomfortable about it too. There’s some great laughs in this film, there’s those moments where you go, shit, that’s me! There’s a lot of very recognizable people and ideas and actions and you’ll be sitting there shaking your head thinking “what a goose!” before you then realise that you’ve done exactly the same thing, or your mate has or the guy who plays in that band that you see every weekend has… For a low budget, labour of love, one man band this is pretty damn good. No one’s a great actor but there’s a certain natural feel to the whole flick and I get the feeling there was a lot of improvising as well. The girls are hot looking, the boys are dweebs, the soundtrack rocks… this is metal, this is the real world as lame as that world may be at times. No super heroes, no government conspiracies, no zombies, no future… I can’t recommend this dumb ass, no nothing, going nowhere movie high enough. Forget Hollywood, the low budget/no budget scene is where it’s all happening now.

10 out of 10.

a goddamn movie moment

DEMONS AMONG US
D: Stuart Simpson 2006
Accent Underground 2dvd set


A long term labour of love this Aussie independent horror film first saw the light in 2001 as a short film before Simpson expanded the storyline and started filming the long version in 2003. It took until 2006 to complete it with a volunteer crew, a cast of unknowns and more balls than Wendy O Williams.

Kicking off with an opening segue of yabbie races, roadkill, powerlines, dirt tracks and railway lines in washed out black & white with spatterings of colour you straight away get the feeling that this is not your usual horror/splatter fare.
The story starts with city slicker Joe Melton (Nathaniel Kiwi) wandering into the local roadhouse in Miranda Falls on Christmas Eve to stock up on catfood where he meets Kylie (Laura Hesse) and they do that flirty ‘new boy in town’ stuff (and I come from the country, Simpson nailed that scene perfectly) before Joe is then accosted by a local who in a tribute to F13’s Crazy Ralph babbles about the signs and the evil before downing a tinnie. Joe then goes home to feed his cats but they don’t come for their tucker before sitting down to start his article on the evils of advertising. Meanwhile Kylie’s workmate Sally Winters (cover girl Hollie Kennedy) can’t get hold of her mum on the phone and is starting to worry about her. Things start to get a bit weird here. Joe wakes up to see something bloody and disturbing, he runs out of the house, the scenes fall apart, the colours wash out, the picture starts to drag and roll and stutter and I’m sitting there thinking, I’ve had this feeling before, what is it? Before I can work it out though, young Joe has stumbled upon the Winters household only to find blood, guts, grue and the entire family massacred in their lounge room. Seems Sally’s brother Jack was killed just a few days before in a car accident and now he’s back looking like a poorly paid extra from a Marilyn Manson video and he’s chowed down on the family and Joe’s moggies! Joe runs into the night only to bump into Sally who has arrived home to find her family dead and the weird city guy covered in their blood. Fast talking ain’t gonna get him out of this situation especially when the local cops find all his dead cats and Sally nailed to a tree. Of course, being possessed by demons, Sally ain’t really dead but her initial discovery by the local coppers, based by the way on the two dingbats from Debbie Does Dallas 2, is a good laugh but a real waste of a good looking sheila. (much the same as Debbie Does Dallas 2) Luckily Joe manages to convince Kylie that things aren’t quite right out there but not before Sally pays them a visit. It was about now too that it dawned on me – the fucked up flickering vision, the gap toothed fading out, the hazy pictures, the black & white movies, the split screens and blank memories… this is exactly like the end of a three day bourbon bender complete with DT’s, blurry nights, stumbling around on unlit roads in the dead of night, too bright mornings, blood all over yr clothes, monsters lurking, faces fading in and out… this is a horror movie not for the drug fucked but the booze fucked!!
And when the local cop Sgt Harding (Peter Roberts) started talking to himself before reaching for a bottle of Jimmy Beam to neck, well then I knew I was on the right track.
And though the pacing and style made me occasionally think I was watching an SBS late night short film with the use of colour, the split screens and blurry vision not to mention the hand held claustrophobic camera work I forgave Simpson – its a case of knowing your limitations and using them to your advantage. And when was the last time SBS showed a Demon-Noir flick drenched in bourbon, beer and blood anyway?
And despite the artistic bent when the demons are unleashed it’s a frenzy of blood, guts and grue that’ll have the horror geeks popping their loads in very short time. Throw in Joe in a dress carrying a talking axe (just a touch of Bruce Campbell there) car wrecks, dead bodies, demons on park benches, the copper with a drinking problem, parasitic eels and an advertising guru bastard arsehole (Ed Winters played by Peter Roberts in a dual role though you wouldn’t pick it) and you’ve pretty much got country life in Australia nailed. Okay maybe not the advertising guru but hell he’s really just the arrogant bastard who always stands at the back yelling out advice at the footy or cricket, who could run the country and still be home in time for tea if only someone would listen to him but is never there to clean up or sell raffle tickets or help out on working bees or remember his wife’s birthday... every little town has a family secret they try to hide away, little monsters and demons they don’t want people to know about, it’s just in this town it turns out to be the bloody devil himself. This is supposed to be a film that is having a dig at advertising and marketing but to me it’s a movie about life in the country. Either way, it doesn’t throttle you with the message, just lays it out there for you to find.
Forget Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman, forget all those high falutin’ arty champagne sippin’ aussie directors – Christ those fuckers wouldn’t know how to have a decent bender anyway… this is the real Australia, this is the real deal. These bastards are gonna turn the industry up on its head, or at least they’re gonna gate crash the party, drink all the piss, crack onto the hostess and not remember a thing in the morning. And as for Stuart Simpson I only have one thing to say – you silly, twisted boy.

redneck lounging in newcastle

The Anti-Social Social Club
Saturday 4th October, 3:00 – 5:00, Festival Club Newcastle
The Anti-Social Social Club resides in the outside lawn at the
Festival club. Grab a deck chair and kick back.
Saturday: The Redneck Lounge,
where fun activities include recovering from Friday night, Country n' Western toons and beer-ku poetry.

Beer Drinking Rock and Roll

The Veebees – Get It In Ya + Fair Dinkum Rock’n’Roll CD
The Veebees – Crack Us Anotha! EP
The Veebees – Drive Thru Bottlo DVD (All thru Ocker Records)

Like their namesake beverage these bastards are light on taste, light on bubble but fuck they’ll do the job to ya!! In the tradition of such other ocker rock scum as the Cosmic Psychos and the Meatbeaters these bastards are even more bloody Aussie (if that’s possible) with songs about barbecues, drinkin’, goin’ to the bottlo, utes and my fave – drinkin’ problem (two cans, two hands, one mouth) . After listening to this I was so thirsty I had to tell the missus and kid to piss off to nanna’s, buy a slab of beer, stop off for some snags, get home and fire up the barby, dig out me vhs of the 2000 grandfinal between port and glenelg and relax for awhile in true ocker fashion. Fark, but it was nice. This is Aussie Ocker rock the way its supposed to be played – a sense of humour, a sense of place and no bloody keyboards or nu-metal shite or any of that fucking hiphop/r&b jism sucking, gold chain yank wank. Just loud and proud three chords (ok two) oi oi oi aussie aussie aussie get a dog up ya crack another can where’s the bloody remote go you liddle bewdy fuck I’m so drunk even y’re sister looks good rock and roll! And the bloody extras on the dvd are funny as fuck – worth yr money alone!
www.veebees.com.au