The Dark Side

[dem]

The Dark Side # 10 (Maxwell, July, 1991)

Simon Dewey

The 'Jack the Ripper Special!" Before dragging the reader down into the blood and entrails, editor Allan Bryce fiendishly lulls us into a false sense of security with You've Got To Get A Gimmick, an entertaining celebration of the desirable freebies once thrown at horror fans - the Mark Of The Devil vomit bag, the grow your own Torture Garden bag of seeds, etc. - to entice them into the cinema. Afterward, it's pretty much the Ripper show. Bryce is back with Butcher Of Whitechapel which catalogues the murders in what comes over as a horribly salivating manner and surely can't have been what he intended? Stan Nicholl's fares better with Death's Deputy, taking a microscope to the 'evidence' supporting an alleged "occult" connection, and Maitland McDonagh examines the many faces of the Whitechapel Butcher as portrayed onscreen from 1924's Waxworks through to Edge Of Sanity in 1989 (for an excellent book-length treatment of the subject, see Denis Meikle's Jack The Ripper: The Murders & The Movies (Reynolds & Hearn, 2002).

Scattered through the magazine, the usual film, video and book reviews, readers letters, etc. There's a Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea episode guide, Clive Barker's Letter From America (I think a Barker item was pretty mandatory in the early issues), Gavin Badderley's regular column Tunes of Gory (upcoming HM bands with a fondness for gore) and the original fiction department, Fright Break, showcasing Joe Hackett's tale of a house-hunting accountant who finds himself locked-up by a mad knife-man in the supposedly empty residence of the China Doll.

[mattofthespurs]

The Darkside used to be my favourite genre magazine and I have a complete collection going up to the last month or so.
Sadly it's layout and juvenile letters column is beginning to piss me off that I'll only get it if I see it, and not go out of my way to pick it up.
The DVD reviews column is very badly laid out as well and drives me to distraction.

It's had it's day I'm afraid.

[dem]

The Dark Side #40 (Stray Cat, June/ July 1994)

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An A-Z of Hammer Heroines ("Beautiful Birds From Bray") - what took them so long? Cathal Tohill on sex and horror in Lust At First Fright: John Martin on Snuff And Nonsense, a very interesting piece on whether or not "snuff movies" actually exist. Prints of Darkness features - among others - The Creation revamp of Lorrimer's House Of Horror, Shock Xpress 2 and 'Gavin Newman's The Hangman; Stan Nicholl's interviews Freda Warrington, author of several vampire romance titles; and the Dark Side Horror Guide continues with the Robert Bloch scripted The Cabinet of Caligari through to Cat Women Of The Moon.

[dem]

The Dark Side #1 (Maxwell, October 1990)

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I don't have many issues but on the strength of those seen it's probably fair to say that The Dark Side is more gore film orientated than Fear although there is the welcome Prints Of Darkness book section. Here's the debut. Usual news and features centered around current or forthcoming movies - it seems Reanimator II, Two Evil Eyes, Highlander 2 and the Robert Englund Phantom Of The Opera were big just then. Part 1 of an Outer Limits retrospective, Caroline Munro celebrated in the Hammer Glamour dept., obligatory Clive Barker feature, computer games, etc. John Brosnan's book reviews take in Robert McCammon's Blue World, Kim Newman's The Night Mayor and Shatter by John Farris.

[orlof]

I used to collect this one...but this is pretty interesting stuff here:
thedarksideofplagiarism.com/

[dem]

oh dear, what a depressing turn of events.

I can see the editor's difficulty if people really are sending these reviews onto him and passing them off as their own, but maybe he should adopt a policy of "if you've already used it on-line, don't send it to The Dark Side", otherwise he looks .... not so good. He might also like to take a sample sentence from each review and try it in a search engine.

Encountered a similar problem on another, non-horror board: the guy who was doing the stealing already had a reputation as the most despicable plagiarist so we tried that "sample sentence" check on him and, sure enough, he was ripping off word for word the very 'vampire' goth's he claimed to despise. Fuck me, it's not that hard to write a review (dead simple if you don't care how crap it reads!): sometimes Fear would bypass the lit. crit. aspect altogether by just slinging down a list of contents and giving it three skulls out of five.

Thanks for drawing our attention to this scandal, orloff. Perhaps, should he see this, our long-time Dark Side contributor - a GENUINE one - can shed some light?

[allthingshorror]

Thats really quite sad - used to be such a fan of the magazine as well. Don't know why I gave up reading it - just wasn't as fun any more...

[justin]

Bryce's alledgedly dodgy business tactics are nothing new I'm sorry to say!

Back in the early 90s when video nasties were still only available as pirated VHS copies, the UK's number one journalist on such things was John Martin, whose speciality was italian horror films. Martin had been a prolific contributor to Dark Side over the years and received a lot of plaudits in the letters column. At film-fairs around that time, the growingly bitter Mr Martin would often be heard mumbling that Bryce has his own swimming pool whilst he was still chasing him up for unpaid invoices and would no longer work for him. (Although I did notice Martin make a return to the mag's pages a few years back)

Back then Martin self-published a book on Video Nasties called Seduction of the Gullible which was considered the definitive work at that time. When Allan Bryce published a book called Video Nasties which reproduced every single cover of the videos, actual size (at that time people would sell colour copies of the covers at a quid a time for collectors to put with their pirated tapes, so Bryce knew his target market) with a 'review' of the film on the reverse. People started noticing very strong similarities between John Martin's earlier reviews and Bryces. I can't remember if Martin went public on it- he did once lash out at all of the horror fandom glitterati in an editorial in his zine Giallo Pages. I think he used the phrase 'maggots on my coat-tails' in his editorial.

And this was before the internet and in a book authored by Bryce. So his spurious excuses of being supplied reviews by improverished students who had ripped them off the net weren't valid back then.

I kind of regard Bryce as the magazine equivalent of the exploitation film producers he so often features- defying the odds by producing a product despite lack of public interest and a crippingly low-budget. Even if it does mean cutting a few corners here and there....

Some other time I'll tell you about Trevor Barley of Media Publications (he used to put on the Eurofest film days) and his alledged involvement in dalek porn films and polish slasher films.

[orlof]

Woops...sorry to drop out of the conversation! Thanks for the info Justin. So, is Trevor the FANTOM KILER / ABDUCTED BY THE DALEKS producer? Very odd stuff to say the least. Fantom Kiler (it is spelled that way on the print if I recall) was a curiosity I needed to check out. The license plates sort of spill the beans, but I have to admire someone so set to do an end run around the truth as to shoot in Polish and subtitle those productions. I saw the first two and did not bother checking out the rest. But, I keep my ear to the exploitation ground at all times and the second series is supposedly far more severe.

And sad to report, I have a numbered original of Abducted By The Daleks

I have my own Dark Side story that involves me being interviewed and then not only having my name spelled wrong, my contact details being completely in error AND then watching an interview I facilitated get very oddly reformatted (an email interview which somehow became a sit down between the interviewer and subject complete with back slapping added)-but then having to actually jump on the person that did the phony "interview" after he insulted ME because of his nonsense.

Of course, I made sure to poke fun at his claims to have a film that was invented as a joke years ago in my book Tough To Kill... just for fun.

A few more details here:
david-z.blogspot.com/2007/06/thriller-cruel-picture-they-call-her_06.html

[erebus]

Got Darkside when it first launched after seeing it in John Menzies and from then on in Ive never missed an issue. Although the mag has dwindled , peaked , plummeted and risen so many times I kind of stay along for the ride.
Of course the early glossy covers like FEAR were good old days but times moved on.

The mag introduced a horror guide A to Z style that ran for years and the small reviews for the films seemed to be reiterated from old articles from way back ie No fresh material. Reviews or articles for the video nasties were basically word for word and never changed in the decades.

And I agree with the above member , the dvd review pages are awfully laid out.
But I still keep on buying the rag. In face my letter was in one a few months back

[erebus]

Just to add , fans of the Pan horror series may want to pick up a back issue of no 7 of the mag as they did a piece on the books.