If “Bleeding Skull” was an archeologist, they’d be the type who specialize in digging up something nobody really cares about. They’d be that weird archeologist who doesn’t go looking and digging for rare dinosaur bones, treasure laden tombs and forgotten cities that would wow the world and get them a show on “The History Channel”, instead they go looking for dinosaur dung and broken shards of pottery from a tribe nobody gives a shit about. But you see, they serve a purpose, sometimes that dung is the dung of a dinosaur that hasn’t been discovered yet and that pottery might have veins of gold in it, though thats very rare. “Bleeding Skull” serves that purpose in the world, they dig up these movies that some crazy high school student or dad who wanted to be a film maker made using a cheap camcorder. The “Shot-On-Video” i.e. “SOV” movies, no budget travesties that are white noise to the nth degree, visual white noise that will have your eyes popping out of your head. Some of these movies actually saw distribution and ended up on the racks of video rental stores and some, like “Boarding House”, were actually fucking released to theaters. In other words, movies nobody gives a shit about. They also dig up really low budget movies with has been actors or wannabe actors. I prefer these weird archeologists, God speed their mission!!!
I discovered this web site through their first book “Bleeding Skull: A 1980’s Trash Odyssey”, it was a recommended book on Amazon because of my likes. I was automatically interested, to be honest the first SOV movie I saw was “Black Devil Doll From Hell” because it was in the “Psychotronic Film Guide”. “Black Devil Doll” rended my consciousness, and I couldn’t get it out of my head, it was like a black, carnivorous slug that bored its self into my brain and started to suck. It was a train wreck, it was offensive, dirty, nasty, no budget sleaze I wanted to hate it but couldn’t. I needed to find more like this, and “Bleeding Skull” ran to the rescue.
“Bleeding Skull” was founded by Joseph A Ziemba in 2004, to review these movies barely anybody knew existed. Again the archeologist digging deep in the ground for dinosaur poo hoping to find a new species. Dan Budnik was also involved in the beginning, reading his old reviews and articles in the book and web site always kept me in stitches, hope he is writing jokes for some show now. I love “Bleeding Skull”, however, the site is what I call a “wallet emptier”, they find movies all the time that I have to see. Most of them are impossible to find on youtube or as a torrent. The chase is actually better than the catch most of the time, when I see some of these movies I am kind of like “Ehhhh” but then I will find that new species of dinosaur and gold veins in that broken pottery and I’ll slap myself silly thinking, “why didn’t I find out about this earlier?!” Joe is a pretty cool guy too, when he reviewed “The Book of Bloody Stories Trilogy” I looked all over for it to no avail, in desperation I messaged him not expecting a response but I got one, he directed me to where it could be found all if which I document here: https://www.noisepuncher.net/2020/11/24/das-buch-der-blutigen-geschichten-translated-the-book-of-bloody-stories-aka-bloddy-curse-1987-1991/
“Bleeding Skull” also teamed up with Mondo Video, a branch of the Alamo Drafthouse to release a few of these hard to find movies, I recommend “Blonde Death” and “Night Feeder” all of which I will review at a later date. Now they’ve teamed up with AGFA and re released even more of these impossible to find movies. All of this is on their web site, reviews, features (some of which dig into new loads of visual white noise), where to buy copies of their first book, the second one “Bleeding Skull: A 1990’s Trash Odyssey” is set to come out this summer and I’ve already pre ordered it. So if movies with titles like “Satan’s Blade”, “Black Devil Doll From Hell”, “Alien Predator”, “Cards of Death” etc. than go right fucking now to this web site: http://bleedingskull.com/
Tell em’ noisepuncher sent ya!
