
A love of fake blood and DIY aesthetics collides with cockeyed nostalgia for the prurient indulgences of the past in Bleeding Skull!: A 1990s Trash-Horror Odyssey by Joseph A. Ziemba, Annie Choi (Shut Up, You're Welcome) and Zack Carlson. A follow-up to Ziemba's similarly titled 2013 book about low-budget horror films of the 1980s, Bleeding Skull! is a charming and appropriately rough-hewn homage to the Z-grade, no-budget oddities that helped fuel the titular era's consumer video rental market. Ziemba is creative director of the American Genre Film Archive (AGFA) and the founder of Bleeding Skull! Video, which works with AGFA and others to preserve and reissue many of the cinematic obscurities profiled here.
The authors' irreverent analysis is augmented by a lovingly preserved collection of film stills, mail-order ads ("If you are into gore, give Dead Meat a shot!") and scans of careworn VHS box cover art, often with fading video rental stickers still attached. Though their filmic subjects' shortcomings are frequently fodder for laughs, the trio's respect for these films and the people who made them is unwavering and unironic. "The inconsistency of the Super 8 film stock, the crude make-up, the mistakes that were left in--all of these random elements create an unmistakably special universe."
Ziemba, Choi and Carlson's exhaustive research, gleefully excessive prose and impressive photographic archive pay hilarious and tender tribute to a motley assortment of small-time auteurs, naïf experimentalists and backwater hucksters whose endearingly inept brainchildren gave birth to a defining new wave of independent genre filmmaking. --Devon Ashby, sales & marketing assistant at Shelf Awareness