Halloween (She Get So Mean)by The Ghastly Ones (feat. Rob Zombie)
If White Zombie was a garage band in the late 60’s, they might have sounded a whole lot like our next divisible by 20 track.
From the Zombie A Go-Go released holiday mix Halloween Hootenanny comes this great Halloween track from perennial spooksters The Ghastly Ones.
Providing some uncharacteristic lyrical accompaniment for the Ghastly’s this time around is the man himself, Mr. Rob Zombie.
Since the song is titled Halloween (She Get So Mean) I’ve led the track in with every Halloweener’s favorite Halloween avenger Rhonda from Trick R Treat, as she schools us all on the sinister origins of our Hallowed holiday.
It seems as though I’ve been ignoring my Horror Themes category. Better sock one in here before the playlist ends up with a giant lyric-less cluster somewhere in the middle.
And if you need a go-to Horror Theme, then Francis Haines’ Return of the Living Dead Main Title Theme will do just fine.
Perfectly creepy, perfectly Halloweeny, The Trioxin Theme is just the break we need from the rock to bring a little ambiance back into the mix.
As soundtracks go (official, purchasable albums that is) The Return of the Living Dead is a great one. Not only is the music awesome, but it chock full of so many great samples from the movie I don’t even need to bust out my DVD to lead them in. Just grab 2 tracks, splice ’em a little and we’re good to go.
From one of the greatest zombie movies ever made, here’s the synthy and spooky Trioxin Theme from The Return of the Living Dead.
Cause you can’t not follow that sample with anything else.
Right on the heels of one Frankenstein song comes this lesser known effort from Bobby “Boris” Pickett.
As stated previously, Bobby tried to recreate his Monster Mash success several times over the course of his career. File this one under the “Heavy Metal” attempt, though there’s little metal going on here.
Finding information on this track is a bit tricky but it seems to have originated off the Dr. Demento show.
Bobby has brought his (actual?) son along for the ride, who takes his own stab dear old dad’s monster making.
He creates a monster that’s the right shade of green and ready for some rocking. And even though he was implanted with a brain labeled, as Fritz claims, “Musician: heavy metal, not blues,” the song is a certainly a far cry from anything resembling metal.
It’s a Shindigger all the same, and how could it not be? Anytime Bobby Pickett decides to sing about monsters rocking out, we gotta represent.
Check it out! I won 150 bucks last night playing this crazy Monster Jackpots machine at the Golden Nugget in Vegas.
Must have been a Frankenstein/Friday the 13th miracle. The machine was pretty sweet, it played little gif-like clips from the movies and had some killer fonts blasting across the screen.
Perennial spooksters Blitzkid are back at #77 with their ode to Mary Shelley’s classic cautionary tale of scientific hubris gone wrong.
Sympathetically written from the Monster’s perspective, the song actually has a bit more in common with the source material than the 1931 film used to lead-in the track. But a clip sample that perfect can’t be ignored, not by The Shindig at least.
Here’s Shindig All-Stars Blitzkid with a Franken-Weener of monstrous proportions!
I’m gonna wrap up this Vampire block with a Title Track of ridiculous proportions, from one of my favorite sub-genres, 80’s Monster Comedies.
Though technically released in 1990, Rockula was written and filmed in the late 80’s and has all the trappings of an 80’s Monster Comedy, and as such is filed accordingly by the Shindig.
If you’ve never seen Rockula, here’s the jist:
Ralph (played by Dean Cameron, aka Summer School’s Chainsaw) is a typically 80’s “friendly” vampire. Ralph’s got a problem though. See, 400 years ago Ralph failed to save his beloved Mona from a ham bone wielding pirate who murdered her on Halloween. After which, a terrible curse befell Ralph. He must relive this trauma ever 22 years, as Mona is reincarnated and Ralph is given another chance to prevent this tragedy. A chance which he always seems to squander.
However, in the late 80’s, Mona is resurrected as a musician, so Ralph becomes Rockula to win her heart, and maybe to keep a close eye on her to finally prevent that whole Halloween/ham bone/pirate murder thing.
Sound great? No? Well it is, and it features a couple of great tunes performed by Dean Cameron (and one by Toni “Oh Mickey” Basil, who plays Ralph’s Vampire mom.) Tunes that, of course, are featured on the Shindig.
From Rockula, performed by Rockula, it’s the triple threat, Rockula!
Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your perspective) there was more than one disco Dracula tune.
In fact, there was a whole album. It was even called Disco Dracula. It was the only effort from weird German band called Hot Blood and there’s a couple of vampire themed tracks on this sucker. Hell, there’s even a Frankenstein song called “Baby Frankie Stein.”
Mostly a funky instrumental, this lyrically sparse number does repeatedly feature the the titular phrase “Soul Dracula,” which is honestly enough for the Shindig. However, Hot Blood puts a little pepper on the porridge by using a goofy Dracula voice. Bonus.
Leading this track in is a clip from Blacula, cause lets face it, Blacula is the soulest motherfuckin Dracula around. To quote James Brown “Eddie Murphy, eat your heart out.”
And because it is mostly an instrumental, we went ahead and saddled the whole track with some Blacula clips, cause Blacula is awesome, and he deserves it.
Johnny Alucard pouring blood all over Hammer Vixen Caroline Munro. While perhaps best know for her Bond Girl performance in The Spy Who Loved Me, she’ll always be Victoria Phibes in my book, even if she is uncredited.
Disco was no stranger to novelty tracks. And as all you Shindiggers know, novelty tracks were no stranger to monster songs.
Though originally recorded in 1979 by Andy Forray, The Shindig prefers this slightly more up-tempo version by Red Lipstique.
Never heard of Red Lipstique? Well, that’s because they weren’t really a real band. It was a pseudonym The Bollocks Brother’s used when they released several singles, including this cover of Andy Forray’s disco hit.
Never heard of The Bollocks Brothers? Well, I hadn’t either.
However, I have heard of this song, and it’s definitely Shindig material, no matter what band records it, or what name they use.
So c’mon Weeners, sing along…
“I wanna suck your OOOOOHHHH!”
Dracula, Drac’s back!
(side note: I could think of nothing more fitting to lead this track in than a clip from Hammer’s Dracula A.D. 1972, which finds Christopher Lee’s Drac being resurrected into London of the early 70’s. Not quite the disco era but still appropriate.)
I noticed there were a lot of vampire songs in the queue, so coming off the heels of From Dusk Till Dawn, why not just drop a block of blood-suckers right here in the 70’s?
By 1990, Concrete Blonde had already been around for some time and utilized on some pretty awesome genre soundtracks (Texas Chainsaw 2, The Hidden), when they released their best selling album Bloodletting.
The title track is a great Shindig addition about New Orleans and vampires with some serious Anne Rice ambiance about it.
Legend has it (read: the Internet) that the song was indeed inspired by the lady herself, or at least her writings, at any rate.
Though inclusive to many different movies and TV shows, none of them really hit the mark. So, we’re gonna lead this fucker in with an appropriate, Big Easy-style sample from Interview With The Vampire, just for good measure.
Before Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez gave the world Grindhouse, they first collaborated on the 1996 mash-up horror flick From Dusk Till Dawn.
Opening the movie most appropriately is this toe-tapper from The Blasters. It not only sets the tone for what is to follow but captures the atmosphere of their western-crime-horror perfectly.
This whole soundtrack is pretty great, for anyone who likes their tunes a little on the tex-mex side, featuring tracks from Tito & Tarantula, ZZ-Top and Stevie Ray Vaughn amongst others.
I won’t assume everyone’s seen this flick, as I don’t catch too much about it on tumblr, it’s almost 20 years old by now and Tarantino and Rodriguez aren’t quite the pop culture icons they were at the time of it’s release.
If you haven’t seen From Dusk Till Dawn, I recommend it to both horror fans and crime fans alike, as the picture starts out as one and becomes the other. Which, while working at several video stores back then, was a complaint I heard a lot from some renters. Renters that apparently didn’t expect the movie to explode into an all out blood-bathed gore-fest in the 3rd act.
Honestly, I think that’s the movie’s greatest strength and I kinda wish more films engaged in this type of genre bending. Characters that finds themselves in horrific situations were leading perfectly non-horrific lives until that point. Why should that lead up always feel like a set-up?
The fact that these characters are allowed to live and breath in a world outside the trappings of a horror film, until they are decidedly in one, is refreshing. It makes them real, believable characters and gives more weight to their reactions to the horrific turn of events.
Add to that a solid script from Tarantino, some first rate action staging from Rodriguez, a great big screen leap from George Clooney, some awesome gore and creature FX from the KNB crew, fun cameos from Tom Savini and Fred Williamson, multiple performances from Cheech Marin, one sexy as all hell Selma Hayek, a bevy of naked vampire strippers and a great soundtrack and you’ve got yourself one hell of a movie. So fun a movie, in fact, that we can forgive Tarantino and Harvey Keitel for their somewhat labored performances.
So grab a bottle of whiskey, some condoms filled with holy water, and maybe a jackhammer tricked out to be the most bad-ass vampire death machine ever, cause its gonna be a dark night.
And remember, psycho’s do not explode when sunlight hits them, I don’t give a fuck how crazy they are.
