Scarier and more entertaining than the financial collapse of Parma schools: Shock Around the Clock in Columbus Oct. 15-16

Yes, Clevelanders are feeling really on a roll lately, with the Cavaliers championship and the Indians winning and the Lake Erie Monsters winning and the whole city not turning into a burnt-out ruin of a disgrace with this summer’s RNC. So what is my philosophy?

GET OUT NOW! GET OUT WHILE YOU CAN!

You just know, with Cleveland luck, that once the region is lulled into a false sense of security something awful will come along and knock the city off its shiny new little plaster pedestal.

Perhaps all those looters headed for the Republican Convention who got delayed in lines with the TSA will finally land at Hopkins and ravage the entire downtown (catching police and first-responders unprepared/drinking at their favorite sports bars).

Perhaps the sheer mathematical magnitude of the Browns losses will create a dimensional shift in quantum time-space continuums, inducing a black hole that swallows large parts of the lakefront. Or the city’s cash reserves. At least that’s the excuse offered by sticky-fingered local officials, suddenly driving shiny new Teslas.

Perhaps LeBron will go back to Florida; now that the place is trashed by hurricanes, real-estate is going super-cheap and he can buy up the entire state this time.

31 Days of Halloween 2012: Werewolves on Wheels (October 20th at the Grandview Theatre "Shock Around the Clock" horror marathon in Columbus, OH)

[WEREWOLVES ON WHEELS screens sometime between noon on Saturday October 20 th and noon on Sunday October 21 st at the Grandview Theatre in Columbus as part of their “Shock Around the Clock” horror film marathon. For more information visit www.horrormarathon.com.]

An appreciation by Bob Ignizio

A gang of mean, dirty bastards called “The Devil’s Advocates” and their old ladies spend most of their time riding around on motorcycles and looking menacing.When they stop for gas, a bite to eat, and a little fun roughing up some of the locals, the gang’s resident mystic One (Severn Darden) does a Tarot reading for Helen (D.J. Anderson), the “old lady” of gang leader Adam (Stephen Oliver). One says he doesn’t read fortunes, just cards, but either way he sees death and doom ahead. An unimpressed Adam says, “We all know how we’re gonna’ die, baby. We’re gonna’ crash and burn.”

Eventually the gang comes across a Satanic church where some evil monks give them drugged bread and wine. The head monk then sacrifices a cat and says some mumbo jumbo which causes Helen to dance naked with a snake, resulting in a great scene that positively exudes sleaze, cartoon Satanism, and psychedelic hysteria. The gang eventually wakes up, trashes the ceremony, and hightails it out of there, but not before the power of Beelzebub has turned at least one of their number into a werewolf that knows no gang loyalty when in the throes of lycanthropic bloodlust.

31 Days of Halloween 2012: Kill List (October 20th at the Grandview Theatre "Shock Around the Clock" horror marathon in Columbus, OH)

[KILL LIST screens sometime between noon on Saturday October 20th and noon on Sunday October 21st at the Grandview Theatre in Columbus as part of their “Shock Around the Clock” horror film marathon. For more information visit www.horrormarathon.com.]

Review by Matt Finley

Thinking of checking out British thriller KILL LIST? Two suggestions: go! And go cold! Stop reading this review. Don't allow my clumsy prose to spoil what you probably already know is a wild and gruesome escalation from domestic drama to high-stakes genre freak-out. (If you didn't already know - I told you to stop reading). Don't even wait for me to assure you that said freak-out is not a self-congratulatory tone-shifting face-melt executed for the sheer primal joy of face melting alone, but rather as the bleak, unsettling conclusion to a decent character study that's as socio-politically relevant as it is genre defying. Just Go! You won't miss me saying it's brilliant - it isn't quite, but as an evocative thriller that effortlessly avails itself of pulp horror, arthouse, and action hallmarks to construct a grisly parable about violence and identity, it just about bullseyes the target. 

Are you still reading this?! You check the little topographical map that comes with the Whitman's Sampler, don't you? Okay. Fine.

Here's what I can tell you: