The Devil Rides Out

TRACK #319:

The Devil Rides Out by Icarus

So here’s a curious situation that I’m not sure we’ve encounter thus far on The Shindig.

On the surface, this song (the debut release from British rocker’s Icarus) is a full blown Title Track. Now, that’s what I like to hear!

But wait a sec, this song doesn’t appear anywhere in 1968’s The Devil Rides Out.

That can probably be attributed to the fact this song wasn’t written for the film at all, but rather after the film was made. Turns out Icarus was inspired by the pre-release marketing for The Devil Rides Out to write this song. That’s a little weird.

However, it was totally released in tandem with the premiere of the film and the band themselves were even invited to the shindig. What’s goin on here?

So, written because of and about, and is named after the movie? So, is this a Title Track or not?

I say no. If anything it’s a Title Track After the Fact, but even that’s a stretch. It appears in no film that I’m aware of, sequel or otherwise, relegating it the land of Referential, I’d say. But it’s so close, so very damn close to being a Title Track.

But enough about that business, let’s talk The Devil Rides Out, Hammer’s straight-faced, Christopher Lee anchored, Christianity-conquers-all, Satan-banger.

Just check out this French Grande:

I have this thing, and it rules. Unfortunately, it’s goddamn giant and I don’t have any more wall space in The Hole for shit this big. Sorry also to my giant-ass Videodrome and Dracula AD posters.

Hey, check out this sweet Baphomet, which Christoper Lee calls The Goat of Mendes, which is what artist Éliphas Lévi was known to refer to his famous Sabbatic Goat image. He rules too.In fact, just check out The Devil Rides Out, cause it rules.

Shindig, ridin’ out!

Satan (Theme)

TRACK #318:

Satan (Theme) by Paul Wibier

Our next stop on Satan’s Cannonball comes from a picture you could argue isn’t exactly a horror picture. I dunno though. Being rundown, raped and murdered by freaky, gakked out bikers sounds pretty goddamn horrific to me. But hey, everybody’s got different ideas of a good time. Either way, when you’re throwin’ me a tune which sounds as at-odds with its subject matter as this one does, The Shindig takes note.

From Al Adamson’s 60’s biker freak-out Satan’s Sadists comes our 318th track, Satan (Theme).

Starring the incomparable Russ Tamblyn as Anchor, leader of the biker gang “The Satans” with such fantastic biker members as Willie, Muscle, Firewater and Acid. The latter of which is played by none other the the films writer, and director of such classics as Without Warning, Satan’s Cheerleaders, Wacko, and The Uninvited, Mr. Greydon Clark.

It’s a 60’s biker explotation picture, so if you’re familiar, you know what you’re getting into and whether that’s frying your bacon or not. Again, it’s not explicitly horror in tone or vibe, but exploitation veers so close sometimes, and this song is just too awesome too ignore. And c’mon, we need a little more Satan around these parts.

So here comes his theme!

Hey Satan

TRACK #317:

Hey Satan by Fearless Leader

Of all the categories on Halloween Shindig, the one that never seems to get much representation is The Devilish Track. I’m not even sure how many there are in total. Hang on a sec.

Jesus, there’s only 13 of these things? Really? I need to double check that number right quick, maybe I didn’t label a few.

Nope. 13 seems legit. Man, I knew it was low but geez, that’s only like 4% of the playlist.

At any rate, those are some pretty rookie numbers in this racket, so we’re gonna add a little padding to that percentage here (honestly only a measly 1% though) with a couple Satany tunes for all ya’ll to groove on.

Aptly leading off the charge is the song Hey Satan, from the San Fernando Valley’s own Clown Lord’s of the Garage-Bizarre, the splatter-glam festooned, Fearless Leader.

Known for the generalized insanity of their live stage shows (which often included the cramming of spam into various orifices) Fearless Leader were something of hometown heroes around these parts,…to a certain section of weirdos anyway.

Their album ¡#$;!, which features the bands name written in such a way as to maybe cause one to raise an eyebrow, actually got them banned in Germany. Worry not though, as it’s simply a KISS reference and not some secret Gestapo salute.

What’s more? These guys actually made a fuckin movie. Yep, and it’s pretty great. 1992’s Graveyard Rot is a bona fide piece of feature-length Rock-N-Roll music video horror-trash SOV madness, and comes highly recommended…to a certain section of weirdos anyhow. You know who you are.

This particular copy featured here may or may not have sold for $500 buck. Seriously? Even asking that much is ridiculous. Get real VHS community. You needn’t shell out that kinda dough though, cause you can just click that picture to watch the movie on Vimeo thanks to the fantastic Hamilton’s Trash Cinema. Big ups!

Sarge, Alien Rock, Oral B. Goode and Spammy Haggard set upon a little road trip to shoot a new music video for this very song. In the process they run afoul some hostile local rednecks and inadvertently raise a long dead Rock-N-Roll singer.

It’s silly, no-budget, band-just-having-a-good time-with a camcorder fun that features (as you might imagine) lots of Fearless Leader tunes.

However, if you’ve never seen Graveyard Rot, this song might still sound familiar if you’ve ever treated yourself to Everything Is Terrible’s The Great Satan.

If you haven’t, I recommend doing that as soon as possible, because it’s fucking bonkers, and Hey Satan sets the whole thing off and running perfectly. Click this to get a little taste.

If you’re not aware of the found footage fiends over at Everything is Terrible, I also recommend familiarizing yourself with them as a whole post-haste.

The Great Satan specifically, is a mind-melting media-mashup of all things Morningstar, spliced at breakneck speed for maximum what-the-fuckery. We’re talking batshit Christian scare-programming, z-grade yard sale movie clips and bizarro homegrown freakouts.

A good-time Satany garage rocker, technically featured in 2 separate, definitely worth your time, movies? Hey, that’s Shindig material all day long.

Hey Satan, Fearless Leader wants to party, but don’t worry, they brought their own sandwiches!

To The Devil a Daughter

TRACK #303:

To the Devil a Daughter by Incubus

Bet you never thought you’d see Incubus on The Shindig, huh? Well, I certainly wouldn’t have ever added them, because I don’t like Incubus.

And if you don’t like Incubus either, then you’re in luck, because this isn’t that Incubus.

Nope. Just like any band post-1990, there’s probably 4 other bands that already held that name in the past. And such is the case for, the perhaps inappropriately named, Incubus.

No, this one comes from New Wave of British Heavy Metal outfit Incubus, and their sound is much more aligned with what you might expect from a band named Incubus. Not wholly, but certainly closer.

Now I’ll admit, this isn’t strictly a referential track, I don’t think. But what few lyrics we are given don’t not conjure images of the film.

Should it be added? I dunno. I like the tune, and since To The Devil a Daughter is technically a Halloween movie, we’re pickin’ em up!

I would also like to add that there is no shortage of metal songs called To The Devil a Daughter. In fact, Shindig-adjacent Wytchfynde actually have one as well. I say adjacent because that’s not a typo, as Wytchfynde with two Y’s was an offshoot of Witchfynde (with an I) vocalist Luther Beltz when he left the band in 1999. However, Luther Beltz didn’t join Witchfynde until 1983’s Cloak and Dagger, the album after Stagefright from which the Shindigger Trick or Treat appears.

However, Luther’s era of Witchfynde sounds pretty different from our Witchfynde, which kinda make’s Luther’s Witchfynde a completely different band altogether than our Witchfynde, which would then make Wytchfynde with two Y’s even more different still. So much so that I probably shouldn’t have even mentioned them at all, but here we are.

Are any of those other To the Devil a Daughter songs more aligned to the film? Not sure. I didn’t really like any of them very much, or at least enough to really cross reference the lyrics. Wytchfynde’s didn’t seem particularly referential, and it was a newer cut, so I wasn’t too keen on the sound. So Incubus it is, names be damned.

We kinda blew our To the Daughter a Devil sample load on the Hallo’s Eve track, but we’ll still pepper in some here, cause hey, it seems a bit more appropriate than maybe it was there.

Full Moon / Night of the Demon

TRACK #301:

Full Moon / Night of the Demon by Demon

Well, we’ve passed the 300 mark on Halloween Shindig, so we’re gonna kick off the next phase of the playlist with block of classic heavy metal tracks.

And what better tune to set the mood than this epic instrumental called Full Moon from New Wave of British Heavy Metal outfit, Demon.

“Rise,” they chant, over some synthy goodness and some gurgling belching noises. And we shall do just that.

It’s perfectly Halloweeny and it leads directly into their song, Night of the Demon. Now this song is not explicitly referential to either the classic 1957 film (more commonly known as Curse of the Demon) nor the 1983 Video Nasty Bigfoot freak-out. But hey, so what! It’s great for Halloween as well.

Cause what’s Halloween if not the night of the demon?

And just look at that album cover! It’s awesome. It’s one of the coolest album covers ever.

So sit back, relax, grab some pumpkin boys and the beverage of your choice, cause shit’s about to get heavy.

Cause don’t you know? It’s the Night of the Demon!

Bargain with the Devil

TRACK #267:

Bargain with the Devil by Franco Micalizzi

In 1973, William Friedkin tapped straight into some ancient Catholic corner of the world’s collective unconsciousness with his masterpiece The Exorcist. People went berserk.

As in the wake of anything that hugely successful, the imitators quickly emerged.

From India’s Seytan, to Canada’s The Manitou, to Spain’s Excorsimo, to Germany’s Magdalena, to our own home grown Abby… there’s definitely no shortage of Exorcist knock-offs.

But nobody pumped em out like the Italians, Pope John Paul II be damned.

There’s The Antichrist, ya know, that one where a paraplegic Rosemary-look-alike totally licks a goat’s asshole. And I mean totally. That one’s pretty awesome.

Or there’s L’Ossessa, also known as Enter the Devil, The Eerie Midnight Horror Show, The Sexorcist, The Devil Obsession, The Obsessed, The Tormented, or The Movie with the Most Alternate Titles Trying to Capitalize Whatever Film Was Most Popular at a Given Time.

That one finds a wooden crucifix Jesus coming to life Morty-style and having his way with our young protagonist. He’s actually the Devil, and later he climbs off a different cross during a weird ritual and totally crucifies this poor girl to it instead. Yikes.

Or how bout poor Bava’s previously titled Lisa and The Devil? It wasn’t faring too well, so the producers re-cut that fucker to improve marketability. They infused it with new scenes deliberately ripping off The Exorcist and released it as The House of Exorcism. Some of those scenes were even shot by Bava’s son (and Demons director) Lamberto Bava, but Mario claims that version is no longer his film at all really.

While all these have their place and finer points, none of them are quite as head scratching or entertaining as Italy’s original Exorcist knock-off, Chi Sei?, which was released to American audiences as Beyond the Door.

More importantly, none of them feature a funked-up ode to the Devil himself like Bargain with The Devil.

From the weird voice dubbing, to the strange children, to Dimitri being a general skeezer, it’s all pretty bizarre. For me though, it’s weirdness culminates when an aggressive pack of street musicians accosts Robert, one of whom appears to be playing a recorder through his nose. That’s creepy.

Here’s the soulful tune about soullessness, Bargain with the Devil. You know, it sounds like a jerk-off session in the bathroom.

Devil Take Me

TRACK #235:

Devil Take Me by Moloch

Hey, remember that one episode of CHiPs where Ralph Malph plays a Shock Rocker named Moloch who discovers secret backmasked messages on his own albums after someone mysteriously tries to murder him?

Oh. You’re using that real estate for actual memories of real experiences from your life and don’t have the any room for myopic bullshit from a 37 year old cheeseball cop show? Yeah, I get that.

Well, in the event that you don’t remember, or can’t remember cause you’ve never seen it, or wouldn’t remember cause CHiPs is some stupid shit you wouldn’t waste your time with, Halloween Shindig is here!

Rock Devil Rock was the name of that episode and it was the CHiPs Satanic Panic Halloween special in 1982. It aired on Halloween Night and guest starred Elvira! She MC’s the Highway Patrol’s holiday party and even cuts a rug with Ponch himself. Halloween bonus.

In fact, our bitchin’ Season 2 Shindig Radio logo that will probably totally earn us a cease and desist from the Mistress herself, is taken from this episode.

Anyway, so yeah Moloch. He’s this KISS-styled Alice Cooper type that sings about the Devil while uppity do-gooders protest his very existence. His car also starts spewing smoke from the vents and tries to kill him while spouting Devil shit from its wood-paneled cassette deck. Now, if that paragraph doesn’t grab at least some corner of your imagination, I gotta believe you’ve just stumbling upon this website by complete accident and may want to hit the back button.

Yep. Someone’s got it out for old Moloch and it’s up to Ponch and the boys of the California Highway Patrol to save the day. After fraternizing with Elvira and helping the bassist from Suicidal Tendencies deal with some Halloween issues.

This episode’s pretty fun, plenty festive and, as you may have already assumed, provides us with tonight’s musical selection.

From the man himself, Moloch, comes the Black Magic Rock Opus…Devil Take Me!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I literally just found someone on teepublic selling this t-shirt and I have to go place that order immediately. Will post upon arrival.

Heavens to Betsy!

He’s Coming Back

TRACK #225:

He’s Coming Back by Chris LeVrar

While attempting to pull some samples from Repossessed for its Title Track, I naturally stumbled across this end credit oddity, which can only be called a gem when you host a playlist like the one I’ve constructed here.

A highly referential Monster Rap Sweet Song? Oh, this is going on the playlist for sure, I don’t care how bad it is.

That this is my knee jerk reaction is a bit of a shame, because this song is bad. And I mean it’s bad, so I apologize for that.

So bad in fact, that you happen to be looking at the proud recipient of 1990’s Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Song from a Motion Picture.

I hope you all can understand and appreciate it’s inclusion. My compulsive need to include inclusive (and referential) Monster Raps Sweet Songs prevents me from treating this thing objectively, or considering your overall enjoyment of this playlist. But my hope is you can at least see why, when stumbling upon something of this nature, it has to be included.

Well, either way I apologize.

In fairness, the verses aren’t so bad. It’s really the chorus here that’s dragging this whole track down. But lyrically, you’re getting a heaping helping of allusions to the film, plenty of bizarro lines and a rhyme structure that is off-center, to say the least.

Not helping matters is it’s length. It’s crazy to me to think Repossessed had enough credits to sustain a 4 minute song. For real? That many heads on Repossessed? They must roll at an unnaturally slow pace, cause I don’t know what the hell all those people were doing.

I will say, I wish I had rediscovered this thing earlier so we could have had the chance to really dig into this one on our Monster Raps episodes. Oh well. Perhaps we’ll amass enough new Monster Raps to warrant a Part 3. Fingers crossed.

In closing, I do hope that somewhere, someone listening to this playlist actually likes this song. Or at the very least, appreciates the necessity of it’s inclusion, because I’m fairly sure they’ll be the only one.

Repossessed

TRACK #224:

Repossessed by Cindy Valentine

While certainly not what I’d call a good movie or even all that funny, you can do a lot worse than 1990’s Horror Spoof Repossessed. Namely Transylvania 6-5000. But I digress.

The best thing going for this silly slice of parody is Linda Blair. Landing the star of the original film you’re spoofing is a big play in this racket, and here she does a fine job lampooning herself, tongue firmly in cheek. It’s neat just to see her there in the blue dress taking a poke at herself and it goes some distance to endearing this movie to a certain audience.

I’m also a sucker for Leslie Nielsen, though I have to admit, his accent takes me out of this one a little. This is not one of his crowning comedic works, but it certainly beats Spy Hard or 2001: A Space Travesty.

A lot of the jokes here don’t land well, but there are a number of smaller gags that I think work and produce some genuine laughs. This, however, is not the gold standard of horror parodies, by any means. Hell, it ain’t even a copper standard.

Making all of this a little easier to ingest though is its upbeat Title Track from Teen Witch’s own Cindy Valentine. A second (hell, maybe even 3rd or 4th) tier 80’s pop singer you may or may not be familiar with. I vaguely recognized a couple of her bigger hits (from where exactly, I could not say) but if you had no recollection of ever hearing any of her assembly line genri-pop, that would be perfectly understandishable.

I’ve yet to hear a Cindy Valentine song I didn’t like and that very much includes Never Gonna Be The Same Again from Teen Witch. But in fairness, I haven’t listened to the breadth of her catalog. I’m sure there’s some turkeys in there, even by my admittedly dubious standards.

But here it is, my personal pick from the crop of Bad and Ugly Title Tracks of Episode 8, it’s Cindy Valentine with Reposssessed!

Prince of Darkness

TRACK #168:

Prince of Darkness by Alice Cooper

In 1987, after struggling to work within the studio system and the unfortunate box-office performance of Big Trouble in Little China, John Carpenter decided to go rogue once again.

And rogue indeed, producing a straight-faced and strange (maybe even ahead of it’s time) film that I can’t imagine any major studio green-lighting. What emerged was an atmospheric, dread-drenched affair of Science converging with Religion to prove the existence of God.

Or perhaps more appropriately, the existence of Satan.

Sub-atomic. Moving within the atoms of things, where logic need not apply. Liquid evil. A green, putrid substance filled with all the abominations of the earth.

It was captured and sealed up long ago. A race of Humanoid Aliens, of which Jesus was a member, kept watch. But the truth was hidden. Wrapped in metaphor and buried under ritual.

Now, in light of our faithlessness, it has awoken, and it wants control.

I like Prince of Darkness. It’s a little talkie, sure, and maybe a tad slow, but I don’t mind. I could listen to Egg Shen spout off about theoretical physics all night. Donald Pleasence is solid, even if he feels like he’s just plugged in from The Devil’s Men, and A.J. Simon is only distracting if you actually used to watch Simon and Simon, which you probably didn’t. The supporting players do a fine in their respective roles, including Carpenter regulars like Victor Wong, Peter Jason and Dennis Dun.

And, once the scientists start being slowly absorbed by the evil and the hobos begin to gather, John turns on the gas a bit.

Speaking of the street people, Alice Cooper jumps in to play the pale-faced, beanie-rockin, head-hobo. He even kills a dude with a rusty, old bike. A dude who happens to be listening to this very song on his Walkman….meta.

Seems this bike was Alice’s own personal prop too, as he used to do this gag live during his stage show. Now thats pretty bitchin’.

Here’s reigning All-Star Alice Cooper rockin’ again with the patented Title Track Prince of Darkness.

Halloween Shindig

The Horror Fans Halloween Playlist

Devilish Tracks