The Borrower (1991)

"Don't lend him anything you can't afford to lose!"

Following up on Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer must have been a strange job for director, John McNaughton. His directorial debut had sat on the shelf for 3 years due to 'lack of faith in the project' from the producers, until they reluctantly began screening it in 1989. The film went on to be a cult hit, becoming one of the most controversial films to hit mainstream video in the 90's. Before all that could happen, McNaughton needed to find a new project to prove he could direct, seeing as Henry was unavailable. It seems odd that he landed on The Borrower, as it couldn't be more tonally different from his previous film, but McNaughton has proved over his patchy career that he is never interested in doing what is expected from him. And hey, that's definitely something to celebrate, whether you like his films or not.

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Goodsell Type TL Record PLayer

Sadly, we don't get as much time to listen to music as we used to in this house. These days, checking out new albums is done on MP3 players whilst out walking or travelling on the bus; all on headphones. When we have people over for parties or social gatherings, all our music comes through a player into our surround sound, making our CD player pretty much obsolete. Which is a terrible thing, really, as I love music and have hundreds, if not thousands of CD's.


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The Spider Labyrinth (1988)

"There's no God. There's no light. There's nothing."

A young boy runs into a shed while being chased by his friend. The friend decides to lock him in there as a prank, as kids do. Suddenly, a large spider drops down on the boy, sending him into an hysterical fit of screaming. Professor Alan Whitmore (Roland Wybenga) awakens in his bed from the nightmare, soaked through with sweat. Alan has been heading up what is known as the 'Intectus Project'; a world-wide academic study of a mysterious, ancient cult. He gets called into a meeting with the University directors, who advise him that their professor in Budapest has gone quiet, and that he needs to step up and head over there to find out what is going on.

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Movie tie-in #1: Alien 3

 (Mega Drive, 1993)

These days, nearly every kids film, tv show or blockbuster has some form of video game counter-part, and the vast majority of them are garbage. It's definitely not a new thing though, as film licensed games are nearly as old as the video game industry itself, and have gone hand-in-hand with every console generation since the Atari 2600 first hit the shelves. So lets try and weed out the shitty shovelware from the hidden gems as we dive into the world of movie/game tie-ins.


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Bargain-Bin Books #1: Slob, by Rex Miller

Something I truly love to do is go trawling through second-hand book stores and car boot sales, scouring for odd cover art or editions of favorites that I've never seen before. Sometimes the books aren't necessarily great; but the art is what drew you to it in the first place, so I find it hard to pass on stuff like this, even if the story didn't exactly set the world on fire. At this point I have a pretty good collection of such bargain-bin finds, so I figured where better a place to share them?

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Tremors (1990)

"I can't believe we said no to free beer!"

To most horror fans, the 90's was the decade that horror died a stinking, oozing death and retreated to the nether-regions of the video shelves, only to crawl out when Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson made it cool again in 1996. By the time 1992 had rolled around, the amount of larger budget horror films getting made were scarce, with companies like Full Moon opting to just go straight-to-video where they knew they could make the serious cash from horror junkies. The low budget filmmakers switched from making horror to more indie-genre fare in the wake of Tarantino and Kevin Smith, seeing that lack of money didn't have to equal lack of talent. It meant that being a horror fan, we didn't have too many really great films to watch. It wasn't all dead in the 90's, though, as a couple of gems managed to sneak through the financing meat grinder and make it to production. One of the best off the starting block for that decade was Tremors.

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