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Post by andydecker on Aug 23, 2009 16:25:57 GMT
Pinnacle Books, 1976, 148 pages So this is the novel Laurence James and John Harvey couldn´t sell in England. Now if that isn´t a recommendation It begins with beautiful Reena, a porn-star in California. She is shooting with director Priest, the man who never loses his white gloves, working hard to finish the scene with the guy in a mask. The guy who pulls this knife from under the pillow at the climax and slits Reenas throat, before he mutilates her body. Another snuff movie in the can. Enter private eye Reagan from San Francisco. The ex-cop got thrown off the force after killing the pusher who supplied his wife with the smack on which she overdosed. This is the seventies, and nobody cared if a black drug-dealer was killed in broad daylight or not. Now Reagan tries to make a living as a P.I., but he suffers from asthma, which makes his life complicated. Beautiful und rich Lorraine Hamilton from L.A. hires Reagan to search for her sister Lee, who is a bit wild. Meaning she fucks everything with trousers on. Reagan´s investigation leads him to the hippie-camps in the hills of L.A, where everybody is crazy, dirty and high. He finds Lee in Priest´s commune, where the crazy director has something like a cult going. Reagan and his Magnum are not amused. At 148 pages this is a slim novel, so you really don´t expect Ross McDonald. But this is a strange mix of some efforts in characterization and exploitation straight out of a Roger Corman or Russ Meyer movie. Only with some hardcore sex. Considering the time of the publication this is astonishingly graphic and even more violent than most of the PC westerns. The murder in the snuff movie scene at the beginning gets 4 whole pages of bloodshed and flying entrails. Of course the slight plot has nothing whatsoever to do with real life. Everybody acts like a cliche and a maniac, Reagan out-chandlers Chandler and makes Dirty Harry seem like choirboy. But this is strangly wooden at times, as it misses the right wing rhetoric which is the background of many american paperback originals of the time. Even the topic of snuff movies isn´t milked for the usual moral outrage. Still, there are some truly funny and innovative scenes, as when Reagan kills two of Priest´s henchmen in Disneyland, one in a toilet and one during the trip through Pirates of the Caribbean. Or the end where the castle in Priest´s movie-set burns down with one villain who is an actor in Gothic horror movies. It is easy to imagine James or Harvey chuckling while hammering this into the typewriter. I wouldn´t call this a suspenseful thriller, as it is not, but as an truly trashy exploitation novel and an interesting James/Harvey co-production this is a must-read.
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Post by dem bones on Aug 23, 2009 19:43:58 GMT
well done, Andreas! Was hoping someone would start a Cut thread ever since Justin mentioned it in PF. Judging by your review, it really doesn't sound that dreadful and I'm sure it was a fun collaboration ("You get stuck in, John, and give me a shout when you need the sadistic murders and hardcore sex!"). It was already on me wants list, but there's a double red asterisk next to it now.
Am sure there must've been more snuff movie-sploitation novels, but can't think of any off the top of my head. anyone?
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Post by allthingshorror on Aug 23, 2009 21:01:15 GMT
The only one I can think of - is Gods of Death - which says that it is a factual book, but its terrible shite of the highest order. SO bad I actually put it in a bag of books to go to Oxfam. Here is a run down of it from ABE Books Simon and Shuster (1997)Synopsis:An investigative journalist travels from Thailand to France to suburban America in search of the shocking world of snuff pornography, describing this small, fragmented, but very real business that trades in illicit sex and death. Review:Legal scholar and anti-pornography activist Catherine MacKinnon approached journalist Yaron Svoray about snuff films, because he was the only person who'd said in print that he'd seen such a film (while undercover investigating neo-Nazis for his book In Hitler's Shadow), in which a girl was raped and murdered. It is my misfortune, Svoray says, to have been born with a need to look under the carpet. After a bit of soul-searching, he undertook the investigation described in this book--a series of adventures with many dead ends and mishaps, some of which are quite funny. The writing, while sincere, is overdramatized and synoptic, leaving the reader to decide whether to believe Svoray's hair-raising tales. This book is important for what it says about how (in Svoray's words) blood sells, and it will no doubt spark much discussion among those who doubt the existence of snuff films
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Aug 24, 2009 5:58:15 GMT
SO bad I actually put it in a bag of books to go to Oxfam. JohnnieThe equivalent of euthanasia
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Post by dem bones on Aug 24, 2009 10:37:35 GMT
It eventually came to me. The ones I had in mind yesterday weren't novels at all, they were John Burke's A Comedy Of Terrors and Raymond Williams' Smile Please from 9th Pan Book of Horror Stories. Here's a potential suspect .... David Lindsay - Heat From Another Sun (Corgi, 1986) Blurb: Detective Stuart Haydon is back – in another suspense‑charged case of murder and corruption that tests his capacity for facing up to the darkest side of human nature. He must track down a killer who feeds on violence like a drug–`a fabulous heat from another sun that attracts human beings like moths to the flame'
At the heart of the case is a business magnate of enormous wealth, power, and resources–a man whose every whim is indulged on demand; a man obsessed by a perverse passion he will go to any lengths to satisfy. But Haydon has his own obsession, and his singular determination to confront his own potential for evil draws him dangerously close to the edge of breakdown. The trail leads from a murder in the luxurious offices of an ad agency to the Houston red-light district to the mansions of the super-rich–and culminates in one of the most terrifying scenes ever created.
Heat from Another Sun will make your blood run cold. It's been a while, but i mostly remember Heat From Another Sun for the "one of the most terrifying scenes ever created" moment toward the end, a suitably nasty rejig of Ewers' Tomato Sauce. Haydon, fresh from his latest nervous breakdown (most likely sustained at close of previous novel A Cold Mind), is lured from retirement to investigate the murder of shady video dealer Wayne Powell. His prime suspect is the Chinese, Ricky Toy, an ex-Vietnam war photographer whose footage became so ghoulish and grisly that his agency were obliged to recall and dismiss him. Toy is now providing business magnate Josef Roeg with some very 'specialist' material. "Josef Roeg is an odd man in every respect. He looks odd, acts odd, and has one of the most unusual obsessions in the world. He loves violence. That is, he loves to watch it, a wisely passive observer.
He has a film archive in that big place of his over by the River Oaks Country Club. A big vault with controlled humidity and temperature to preserve old film, as well as the new developments in video technology. He has spent hundreds of thousands to stock that archive with the most violent things ever captured on film. Mostly war footage, naturally, since that's about the only kind of violence you can get on film legally. He's got pirated copies of most of what the networks couldn't show. He's got Nazi SS interrogation film, gassings, brutality in the camps. Those bastards pioneered that kind of thing. The documentaries you see on television doesn't even scratch the surface of the stuff that's available." Toy is blackmailing Roeg over the content of one particular underground video and the deeply unpleasant stuff really kicks off when we finally get to see the content (i wrote 'bloodshed and torture' in my too skimpy notes). It could be some time before I get to re-read this and confirm Heat From Another Sun is the snuff job I think it is, but will chance my arm and suggest it might tickle Noah's fancy ...
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Post by allthingshorror on Aug 24, 2009 12:04:04 GMT
It eventually came to me. The ones i had in mind yesterday weren't novels at all, they were John Burke's A Comedy Of Terrors and Raymond Williams' Smile Please from 9th Pan Book of Horror Stories. Good catch Dem!!
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Post by franklinmarsh on Aug 24, 2009 12:09:59 GMT
Great stuff, Andreas. Of course, 'Priest' was one of The Last Heroes motorcycle outlaw gang (as well as being a science-fiction author).
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Post by jonathan122 on Aug 24, 2009 14:10:20 GMT
i'm sure there must've been more snuff movie-sploitation novels, but i can't think of any off the top of my head. anyone? I've never read it, nor seen the legendarily bad Audrey Hepburn movie made from it, but I'm pretty sure Sidney Sheldon's Bloodline has a snuff movie theme.
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Post by dem bones on Aug 24, 2009 16:47:35 GMT
How could i forget! Richard Laymon's Out Are The Lights! Lo-fi snuff movies also feature in Joe R. Lansdale's stupendously unpleasant short The Night They Missed The Horror Show, while a suspect in Robert Bloch's Psycho II, movie producer Santo Vizzini, is said to have overseen a Euro-snuff although i can't recall if Bloch gives any specifics. And at least one of 'Michael Slade's butchers goes in for filming his murders - there's even a reference to them in the Ghoul blurb. If i remember, the police receive a taunting video of one of their lab boys coming to grief via a portable guillotine?
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Post by andydecker on Aug 24, 2009 17:56:21 GMT
Considering that snuff movies seemed to be a big topic at the time it isn´t often done in horror novels. I seem to remember a Shaun Hutson novel, but one of his so-so thrillers. Don´t ask me which one. Deadhead maybe?
I guess this is more a topic for crime novels. Hard boiled P.I.s.
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Aug 24, 2009 18:53:37 GMT
There was a short story in the Pan Horror Series dealing with it. Title slips my mind though.
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Post by Johnlprobert on Aug 24, 2009 20:28:27 GMT
The only one I can think of has already been cited by Dem - Raymond Williams' Smile Please. Who was Mr Williams? Can Johnny Allthingshorror enlighten us? All his stories feature dollops of 'naughty' sex and violence, they all made me feel quite queasy when I was a little 'un, and I regard all of them with a kind of twisted fondness now. Smile Please has that wonderful line about the 'nudist Joan of Arc' being burned alive doesn't it? Oh how I chuckled and cringed at the antics of Edward Hitchcock!
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Post by allthingshorror on Aug 24, 2009 20:44:57 GMT
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Post by Johnlprobert on Aug 24, 2009 21:14:04 GMT
Are you sure that's the same bloke? I see that his Pan contributions aren't listed. Plus could the author of Smile Please really be a feminist?
I hope it IS him though - another horror writer from Abergavenny! I feel an essay coming on....
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Post by dem bones on Aug 25, 2009 7:35:17 GMT
Not entirely convinced that both these Raymond Williams' are the same entity myself, but ... you never know ...
A few more.
Never managed to finish this one, but if it's at all faithful to the movie then 'Jack Martin' (Dennis Etchison)'s novelisation of Videodrome (Nel, 1983) has to be a contender.
Michael Marshall Smith's More Tomorrow: Another short piece, perhaps borderline, but extremely worthy of your time! A series of static gif files as opposed to a movie and the protagonist has stopped short of murder (so far), but that's hardly a consolation to the girl he maims ...
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