Crease Magazine

Double Feature #2: Él + Poison for the Fairies by Buzz Drainpipe for Crease Magazine Some double features shake hands. This one slips a note under the door that says: Belief is dangerous when the wrong person realizes it works. Luis Buñuel’s Él and Carlos Enrique Taboada’s Poison for the Fairies are not the same kind of movie, unless you are paying attention in the proper basement-light. One is a blackly elegant study of male jealousy, Catholic repression, and bourgeois madness. The other is a schoolgirl witchcraft nightmare where childhood cruelty blooms like mold behind the wallpaper. But put them together and the wall starts talking. Both movies are about people who invent a reality, enforce it on others, and then treat the consequences as proof that they were right all along. That is not fantasy. That is not horror. That is civilization with a fever. I. Él: The Jealous Man as Private Inquisition In Él, Francisco is not merely jealous. Jealousy is too small a word. Jealo...

Or: The Misfiled Cabinet of Porcelain Pop, Cracked Teacup Prog, and Nursery Gothic 🎠🕯️ The error begins, as errors often do, with shelving. One finds these records filed under psychedelic pop , or baroque pop , or Canterbury , or British eccentricity , or, with the tired shrug of the database clerk, rock . But none of these labels quite opens the door. They describe ingredients, not architecture. They tell you there is string section, Mellotron, music-hall bounce, whimsy, choirs, brass, childhood imagery, eccentric narration, and a faint air of mothballs. They do not tell you that you have entered a miniature stage where the scenery is painted too carefully and the moon has visible string. The proper name is Toy-Theater Baroque . Not because the music is small, but because it understands smallness as a metaphysical device. The toy theater is not a lesser theater. It is theater compressed until every gesture becomes symbolic. A painted flat of a village becomes the v...

Crease Magazine dispatch from the Mexican double-feature chapel by Buzz Drainpipe There are films you watch, and there are films that find a room inside your skull and refuse to leave . Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel and Juan López Moctezuma’s Alucarda are not “art movie plus horror movie” in any clean museum-label sense. They are siblings with different table manners. One wears evening dress and slowly becomes a goat in the parlor. The other wakes up in a Catholic convent already screaming blood at the ceiling. Together, they form a perfect Mexican double feature because both movies understand a sacred truth: Civilization is just a room everyone agreed not to flee from yet. And Mexico, in its cinema at its strangest and most illuminated, knows that the room is never just a room. The room is class. The room is God. The room is sex. The room is death. The room is the old world pretending not to sweat through its shirt. I. The Dinner Party That Eats Itself In The Ext...

Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett Filed from the Shelf, where the glue is dying and the streets are already guilty 📕🔫 Perfect #3. This is the poisoned-town engine. This is not detective fiction as puzzle box. This is detective fiction as industrial solvent. Hammett takes a corrupt mining town, drops the Continental Op into it, and lets him behave less like a hero than a match tossed into a basement full of turpentine. The town is called Personville , but everybody calls it Poisonville , because subtlety has already been murdered in an alley. 1. Complete Plot Breakdown The Continental Op arrives to meet a reform-minded newspaper man named Donald Willsson , but Willsson gets killed before the Op can do much besides smell rot in the walls. From there, the Op starts tracing the power structure: crooked cops, bought politicians, gangsters, bosses, strikebreakers, parasites with nice shoes. The town is not “corrupt” in the normal mystery-novel sense. It is structurally diseased...

Or: why the 1996 Killing Time album is absolutely a fascinating artifact ⚔️📼 Yes. The 1996 Killing Time album is fascinating. Not because it is the purest Sweet Savage document, and not because it replaces the early NWOBHM material. It is fascinating because it is a time-displaced debut album: a band from the first NWOBHM wave finally making an album after their moment had already passed, partly because Metallica dragged their name into the 90s metal bloodstream. That is exactly the kind of object that glows in the Outer Order scanner. The short verdict Question Answer Is 1996’s Killing Time a fascinating artifact? Yes. Extremely. It is a “lost debut” made too late, with 80s bones and 90s metal skin. Is it the best thing they did? As an album, maybe by default. As Sweet Savage essence, no. Is the 80s stuff still the stuff to seek? Yes. The 1980–81 material is where the magic, danger, and historical voltage live. Should you keep loving the 1996 album? Absolutely. That album...

A Don Overcast Misfiled-by-the-Culture Double Review Subtitle: Two men enter the institution. Reality leaves through the service exit. 🗂️📺⚡ Harlequin , directed by Simon Wincer, is an Australian fantasy thriller starring Robert Powell, David Hemmings, Carmen Duncan, and Broderick Crawford. It was released in the U.S. under the much blunter title Dark Forces . ( Wikipedia ) The Sender , directed by Roger Christian and starring Kathryn Harrold, Željko Ivanek, Shirley Knight, and Paul Freeman, is a British supernatural horror film about a disturbed telepathic patient whose visions invade other people’s minds. ( Wikipedia ) DON OVERCAST OPENS THE CABINET Culture misfiled these two because culture has only a few lazy drawers for movies like this: Horror Thriller Occult Psychological Weird but not famous enough to canonize But those labels are administrative cowardice. These films are not merely “odd.” They are about institutions suffering a breach . One is politics breached by miracle. O...

Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society Reviewed by Buzz Drainpipe 📼⚙️📖 There are paperbacks you read and there are paperbacks that look up from the table and say: “I have been waiting for your entire civilization to become my footnote.” Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society is one of those. Look at this cover: not a man, not a city, not a mushroom cloud, not a screaming worker crushed beneath the gears. Just a reel-to-reel machine staring back with big yellow magnetic eyes, as if the future has already recorded your confession and is patiently rewinding the tape. This is not a “technology is bad” book. That would be too easy, too bumper-sticker, too cave-dweller-with-a-typewriter. Ellul is doing something colder and more useful. He is saying that technique, not just machines, becomes the organizing spirit of modern life. Not gadgets. Not wires. Not computers. The method. The optimization. The procedure. The system that asks every human activity to justify itself in ...

Maverick City Cinema’s June Program of Afternoon Psychic Menace By Don Overcast Genre is useful until it becomes a landlord. It gets the keys, paints over the mold, changes the sign out front, and suddenly half of cinema’s strangest tenants are living under false names. A vampire film that is not quite a vampire film. A political thriller that is really an occult seduction object. A kidnapping chase film that behaves like a nervous breakdown with a transit map. A hospital psychic thriller where the institution itself becomes the haunted house. This June, Maverick City Cinema reopens the drawer and files these things properly. Not horror. Not thriller. Not cult. Not “weird movies,” that lazy little junk drawer where criticism goes to nap. The category is: AFTERNOON PSYCHIC MENACE 🕯️📺🩸 Films where the world is still daylight-visible, but reality has started leaking behind the baseboards. These are not midnight movies. Midnight gives too much permission. Midnight flatters...

by Lou Toad / Outer Order Media Filed from the Shelf, where the glue is dying and the lurid promises still glow 📚🩸📺 There is a particular kind of paperback that does not ask to be respected. It asks to be grabbed . It sits on the shelf with a cracked spine, a dramatic title, an author photo that looks like a surveillance still, and cover art that promises at least three of the following: murder, espionage, sex panic, devil worship, computer dread, biker vengeance, haunted children, government experiments, martial arts, desert justice, psychic warfare, or a man in a leather jacket realizing too late that he trusted the wrong blonde. This is not the canon. This is the back alley behind the canon , where the dumpsters are full of forgotten thrillers, drugstore horror, men’s adventure paperbacks, movie tie-ins, occult cash-ins, paperback originals, Cold War techno-panic, regional crime, sword-and-sorcery bruisers, post- Exorcist demon leftovers, and novels with titles that...

Buzz Drainpipe on Little Brother by John McNeil The Possum Ate My Kid: Early-80s Computer Panic in Paperback Form 💾🟩📺 There are paperbacks that smell like bus station cigarette ash and Reagan-era carpet glue before you even crack them. Little Brother is one of those little black-cover gremlins: a computer thriller from 1983, reissued in the mid-80s paperback ecosystem, promising “suspense and fast-paced action” and “more frightening than War Games.” It is by John McNeil, also author of The Consultant and Spy Game , and it clocks in around 255–256 pages depending on edition. ( Kirkus Reviews ) This is the kind of book where the computer is not yet furniture. It is an altar. A blinking little domestic demon. The family brings it home, and suddenly the house has a second brain. Prong One: Complete Plot Breakdown Spoilers below. The green screen is already humming. Toby Sorenson is a security chief at a Massachusetts computer company. There has been a strange theft at wo...

Sex, knives, loyalty, bad decisions, and everyone dressed like they’re about to die in a music video By Buzz Drainpipe for Crease Magazine 📼🩸 When the pose is fake, the pain is real. That is the whole leather-jacket gospel right there. That is the cracked tablet dragged down from Mount Tubi in a plastic shopping bag. That is the secret frequency humming under this triple bill of doomed cool, criminal melodrama, street-corner operatics, and grown adults making decisions so bad they become architecture. We are not talking about realism. Realism is a landlord word. Realism is what people say when they want every movie to dress like an HR onboarding video and apologize for having shadows. No, this is pose cinema . This is chrome-plated heartbreak . This is the genre where everyone smokes like they have personally disappointed God, where betrayal happens under blue light, where every alley looks like it was built specifically for someone to get stabbed in while a saxophone lo...