Power metal is for people who know why twenty-sided dice and mana tokens are as important as power chords. If you like Iron Maiden or Dio, there are a million other bands paying tribute in their own way.

Power metal gets a bum rap from people who take music too seriously. (Even glam metal fans get their licks in.) I’ve always felt that it’s the musical equivalent of sci-fi and fantasy. Its classical roots give it an epic feel. The genre also stems from bands like Uriah Heep and UFO. Judas Priest laid the groundwork, but the power metal bands did it twice as fast, with precision and grace.

Visually, they’re easy to laugh at. But listen to how they play: they want to do it right. It’s easy to understand why metal fans hated grunge and nu-metal when you hear this stuff. It’s all about ability.

Helloween is one of my favorites. They’re kind of like Maiden, but faster and, at times, funnier.

I always saw Manowar’s albums in the store, and though, “These guys really like Conan comics.” Our long-gone metal station, KZDC, played this song in 1996, and I knew then that heavy metal would survive. If these guys could put out this song in the middle of the “alternative” music “revolution,” we’d be okay.

This movie rules. A road trip goes horribly wrong for Warren Oates. Plus, Peter Fonda wears the coolest shades ever! (Okay, so I had a pair just like them. Fonda makes them work.) Race With the Devil may conjure memories of Spielberg’s Duel, but it’s much more dangerous.

Your boy won the weekly San Antonio Current flash fiction contest. Not bad.

The story was inspired by the outstanding work of the Denver and St. Paul police departments.

I call it the good, old-fashioned, double feature.

If Dario Argento directed 200 Motels, you’d have Hausu.

If Martin Scorsese didn’t direct Cape Fear, you’d have…

And don’t forget the comedy short at the beginning!

…that special someone who projects an image onto a large screen.

I have acquired such a screen. Now, what’s a boy to do? Ignore it? Leave it in the closet, until a smarter, more ambitious fellow comes along? Hardly. I’m looking for the projector of my dreams…or at least a cheap one that won’t break in two years.

There are some budget models. And considering my apathetic stance towards HD, I’m hardly looking towards high-end stuff. Oh, those endless nights of movies – some from Hollywood, some from the next room – shafts of light across a darkened room, with no tubes or LCD to come between us. And if I get off the couch (when I finally buy one), you’ll be able to see Boris Karloff on the back of my skull!

I want to be the first – and only – kid on my block who has movie nights the old fashioned way.

Yipes.

Realizing…

Does anyone on my block even do movie nights? If so, is it purely Blockbuster fare, or do they take the plunge? Take John Carpenter films, for example. Sure, they’ve seen Halloween, but how about Dark Star?

I watched this movie with some self-proclaimed Carpenter fans, and they thought it was just awful. In fact, they stopped inviting me over after that night. Fine by me. If you can’t appreciate Carpenter’s genius on a small screen, you don’t deserve to see it blown up.

Film Threat interviews Jeff Mashino, the Indiana Jones of silent movie fans. He tracks down rare silent films, and has them restored and released.

Is there a market in today’s DVD world for silent movies? And what have been the challenges and strategies you’ve faced in getting the word out on your titles?
Absolutely! It is the lesson of “The Long Tail,” the theory popularized by Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson, that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream studio-produced DVDs and mass retail distribution) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of “specialty market” niches in the tail, driven in part by the Internet, which has allowed the costs of distribution to become cheaper and has provided a means by which more people can become educated about film history. I’ve tried to use this (and low overhead) to my advantage with Flicker Alley – since I am not entrenched in the traditional “bricks and mortar” retail store route, I rely on online promotion and sales.

The better mousetrap will be the one that keeps people interested in buying movies at all. We don’t make too many classics these days. The Departed and Pulp Fiction come to mind, but little else. There will be dozens more movies like Spider-Man and TransFormers, but they’ll be disposable as always.

The archivists of tomorrow will be sending off plenty of emails, looking for those lost, “great” YouTube videos. Let’s hope something truly great comes along between now and then, so we can say we lived through it. (Hint: It won’t come from Hollywood.)

When you’re growing up in a single-wide in 1986, this kind of thing looks really exciting. Throw in an atmosphere you’ll never be able to recreate, and you have a Christmas winner.  It wasn’t nearly as impressive as the ad, but whatever. I loved Lazer Tag.

I even had the Starbase, which you could program to play in lieu of partners, in case you had no friends or were too lame to share.

Do “futuristic” toys even exist anymore? Or is this the future? If so, where’s Snake Plissken when we need him?

The TransFormers, as scored by Manowar! Notice how the visuals match the lyrics. This is a tightly-edited fan flick. Bravo!

The posts below were all published in Austin’s INsite magazine. I had a great time writing for those guys, even if it was in exchange for swag. I think I could have done a better job here and there, but DVD reviews aren’t exactly the best forum for changing the language. If you like what you read, leave a comment!

Portions of this review originally appeared in INsite magazine, March, 2007.

Someone very special told me that Axl Rose is a big INsite reader. He buys it every month. He was going to contribute a tour diary, but that would mean he’d actually have to tour. Plus, it would probably take the place of the DVD reviews, and forget that. I need swag.

Okay, so there’s a small element of LIESLIESLIES to all of that. But I do talk to Axl. And right now, all I can say is that it’s not going to work. Do you read me, Axl? It’s not happening. Buckethead, Rivethead, Celery Head: nope. We want Slash and Duff back. We’d like Izzy, if you can swing it, but Gilby’s probably learned how to play since The Spaghetti Incident. If you can teach him to write, it may work out. Steve’s probably raking in millions with Adler’s Appetite, but we love Matt Sorum. Try to secure him in between Cult reunions.

Anything else is merely Axl N’ Pals. You can hire Jeffrey Coombs to reanimate Jimi and Duane, sew them together, give the thing a guitar and win a Nobel Prize for Musical Taste. It still won’t matter, because it still won’t be Slash.

Until the G n’ R faithful finally get their due (even if it’s a one-off song over the end credits of Road House 3), we’ll always have retro. It’s just a shame that Chrome Dreams, whose Sexy Intellectual titles have been fabulous over the past year, couldn’t get it together for the band that made me a lifelong metalhead.

At first, the new double-disc Guns DVD seems like a steal. It contains two documentaries, one on the band, the other more Axl-centric (in keeping with the band’s history, I suppose). The cover art is a classic band pose: even Steve and Izzy recline like this beautiful thing will never end. The back of the box promises goodies like “full colour picture discs and deluxe DVD slipcases,” making it a “collector’s item of the highest order.”

So heaven isn’t too far away. Get ready for nothing but a good time. No need to live on a prayer, because…

Nope. It’s awful. It’s just repackaged baloney from a few years ago, apparently before Chrome Dreams started taking advantage of fair use laws. Unlike their Nirvana, Velvet Underground and Rolling Stones discs, these documentaries contain no musical clips of the band. That’s usually the first sign of a bad time, but the interviews are just atrocious. While other documentaries from this company have included some fairly insightful talking heads, this one pretty much phones it in. You do get to hear from the girl who let the band borrow her apartment, though.

Not that G n’ R was ever as good as the rock press made them out to be (no band is), but fans deserve better than this rehashed one-off. I can’t believe I’m admitting this, but I’ve seen better stuff on VH1. Being an avid fan of Chrome Dreams’ good stuff, I honestly look forward to a genuine effort at a real Guns doc. Even with “superb packaging including inserts,” this product is rusty and wilted.