Now Playing ABSOLUTELY FREE On You Tube: Erotic Euro Horror!

While I would never claim to be the toast of all social networking sites, far from it, I can claim to have a fairly robust following on old You Tube. I have a following of 5,500 faithful followers who want to be entertained by my posting of rare films unavailable on DVD or even on TV. Unfortunately, the brain police at You Tube have been pulling down many of my posts at an alarming rate, claiming that I have violated the laws of intellectual property.

What this means is that if James Toback can't make a cent off his wobbly 1983 suspense film Exposed then I cannot even post it for people who want to view it. Other films that provoked near-suspension included the noir classics Desert Fury and The Gangster as well as the Brigitte Bardot-Louis Malle potboiler A Very Private Affair.

Meanwhile, sites like Spotify and Pandora are doing more to rip off artists than my movie posts on YT. The priorities are getting dodgy. I've had so many of my posts pulled down that I've gotten leery about posting more movies. But I will persist. Besides, there's always Vimeo.

While all this drama is unfolding other Tubers are posting an exciting stream of classic erotic Eurohorror films. Many of these films have floundered on the VHS gray market for years, and now beautiful prints can be seen on YT. Unfortunately, half of them aren't in English, but hell, it's time to brush up on your high school French and Spanish!

Movies I have seen in their complete form in the past two months on You Tube:

1. The Female Vampire - Jess Franco starring the great Lina Romay
2. Shiver of the Vampires - Jean Rollin with a cool death metal soundtrack dubbed in, and it works
3. Kilink! - great Turkish series about a supervillain dressed like a skeleton
4. Lisa And The Devil - classic Mario Bava with Elke Sommer and a lollipop sucking Telly Savalas, as the devil
5. Evil Eye aka The Girl Who Knew Too Much - more Bava with a classic haunted house theme
6. Four Times That Night - Bava doing a bedroom sex farce with some real sex for a change
7. All The Colors of the Dark - psycho giallo starring Edwige Fenech
8. 99 Women - women in prison classic starring Edwige Fenech, Rosalba Neri, Luciana Paluzzi, and more
9. Virgin Among The Living Dead - more Jess Franco insanity with more nudity (not from him!)
10. The Nude Vampire - Jean Rollin with vampire laboratory rituals with animal masks and hoods! Creepy!

There's also lots of American exploitation in their complete form, like Russ Meyer's Cherry, Harry, and Raquel and Jack Hill's The Big Bird Cage. There's also tons of Laura Gemser sleaze to feast your eyes on. I also caught the Japanese film classic Onibaba. There's no limit to what you can catch on You Tube these days.

And just to compliment all the wild European horror films watched you can also catch an English TV documentary mini-series about the whole genre called Eurotika. Eurotika has segments devoted to the previously mentioned Jess Franco, Mario Bava, and Jean Rollin. It's pretty cool seeing starlets Brigitte Lahaie and the reclusive Pony Castel talking about their mentors.

Eurotika is almost touching in the way it celebrates freedom in sexual and artistic expression, eventually folding up towards the conservative early Eighties (the Moral majority-AIDS-Thatcher-Reagan years). But that's what makes these films so precious: just like the films from the silent era they show us a society that almost resemble aliens form another planet, a much, much freer planet.

WRANGLERS' CANYON/CRASH WALKER Double Novel Out Now!

Meet Crash Walker: a man too obtuse for trouble, too lazy to kill anyone, and in addition incredibly boorish, self-centered and incredibly good looking enough to earn contempt from everyone he meets, especially from other men. He is the star of my double novel set WRANGLERS' CANYON/CRASH WALKER.

The western novel format is an extremely limited one. Most stories from that era are rigidly defined; they have to be, of course, since they are confined to a specific point in time. The standard western tale has been told countless times via literature, television, radio shows and motion pictures for over a hundred years. The biggest challenge for me was to write something fresh within that classic genre.

I made a concerted effort to avoid the current nouveau Western clichés by drawing on a pair of disparate influences: With Wranglers' Canyon I went for a more surreal approach, so I used Alejandro Jodorowsky's classic film "El Topo" as a major influence, but more importantly I drew from the erotic horror films of Jean Rollin and Jess Franco.

As for our hero, Crash Walker, although he populates both novels, no two stories could be more different; in Wranglers' Canyon our hero is a floater, drifting between jobs as a cattle driver, ranch hand, rodeo rider, singing star, convicted criminal, ultimately promoting to Sheriff of Jonestown. He accepts the role forced on him.

In the second novel Crash Walker,which takes place 100 years later, he's a western television star in Hollywood during the post-JFK era. This time he’s the target of an ominous conspiracy to exploit him as a puppet politician propped up to serve a small Californian committee of powerful businessmen. In the second novel, unlike the first, he doesn’t accept the role forced on him.

He’s also charged with the murder of a right wing television star, making him simultaneously famous and notorious, but not quite the way he wants it. Through it all he films toy commercials, performs publicity stunts, makes public appearances, visits his mentally insane missile designer father, and dodges an even more mentally unstable ex-girlfriend.

Walker is even more of a fantasy figure in the second novel than in the first one, i.e. his name isn’t even real, it’s a showbiz name created by a casting agent. While the first novel challenges the bridge between fantasy and reality, the second one has its feet firmly planted in reality with our star earning his keep with fantasy.

TV westerns were a major pop culture force during the Sixties, putting our hero squarely in the center of the action in Hollywood, placing him at Sunset Boulevard parties, teen festivals by the beach and Hollywood movie premieres. If it happened in the Sixties then Crash Walker was most likely there.

The book you’re reading is presented in the double novel format so popular during the paperback publishing boom of the Forties and Fifties. Both novels have been joined together in one volume because in addition to starring Crash Walker they also have parallels in characterization and plot development. This was a surprising coincidence, given that both novels were written four years apart of each other.

In both novels Crash Walker responds to a whirlpool of turbulent change forced upon him by men of control, greed and societal pressure. These are tales about troubled times and the man who meets them head on.

Wranglers' Canyon/Crash Walker, Andy Seven’s double novel is available for $3.99 at all popular eBook retailers, including:
Amazon Kindle:
http://www.amazon.com/Wranglers-Canyon-Crash-Walker-Seven-ebook/dp/B0149J3P8Q/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1440213205&sr=1-1&keywords=9781483557540
iTunes:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/wranglers-canyon-crash-walker/id1032555968?mt=11
Nook (Barnes & Noble):
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/wranglers-canyon-crash-walker-andy-seven/1122574654?ean=9781483557540
Oyster:
https://www.oysterbooks.com/book/APoGRc2kxCC2tR8NZvJNtm/wranglers-canyoncrash-walker

Each website provides a short sample - about four chapters worth - of the novel for previewing before purchase so you can see what deviltry is brewing in this shiny beast.

Rock & Roll Confidential Part 9

One of the most attractive releases of 1971 was an import LP that looked like a cross between a Command Records stereo demonstration album and a Euro techno album, when in fact it was neither. It was the second release from Curved Air, simply titled “Curved Air Second Album”, following up their dazzling picture disc from the year before, “Airconditioning”. The album performed well with British listeners, peaking at #11 on the album charts.

Curved Air was a product of their time, less prog and more like a hard rock band with lush symphonic sounds courtesy of Darryl Way and Francis Monkman’s keyboards and violin playing. Many of the sonic textures on the album recall Euro sex horror films of that time, sounding like they belonged in a Jean Rollin or Mario Bava movie. In addition to the vampire opera vibe of their sound was the presence of lead singer Sonja Kristina, who wouldn’t look out of place in any of these films, looking like a sister to Ingrid Pitt, Maria Perschy or Soledad Miranda.

Some of the lyrical content focused on wayward urban girls with titles like “Young Mother” and “Back Street Luv”. The pastoral textures of “Piece of Mind”, “Puppets and “Jumbo” have that lush-cum-nightmarish sound that makes me think of movies like “She Killed In Ecstasy” or “Requiem For A Vampire”. Kristina sings in a dreamy falsetto that compliments the Dracula in St. Tropez vibe of the music.

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By the way, here's a picture of Keith Richards serving up some Larry Fine action for you just in case you want to believe he still looks like a badass outlaw. Put that doo rag back on, playa!

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I've always had problems trying to like Kevin Ayers even though I like the idea of a prog-rock troubadour a la the great Peter Hammill. I think the reason I could never embrace him as a serious artist is because he comes off as some lazy bastard who just wants to fuck and get loaded. His records for the most part give off the image of Artist As Vacation Resort Gigolo. Frank Zappa once wrote a song called "Honey, Don't You Want A Man Like Me?" All humor aside, the scary part is that Ayers aounds like he really means it.

An album like "Shooting At The Moon" is pretty indicative of both his strengths and weaknesses, the strengths being great Henry Cow-style jazzy art school workouts like "Shooting At The Moon" and "Colores Para Dolores". The weaknesses come in the form of his bad samba gigolo tunes like "May I?" returning later in a French version just to underscore the sleaze of his advances. The paradox of Ayers is that just when you're ready to slap him for a lech ballad like "Clarence In Wonderland" he counters that with a slice of menace like "Lunatic's Lament".

At first I thought I was being a little hard on everyone's favorite blonde playboy, but even Wikipedia weighed in with, "one of the frustrating and endearing aspects of Ayers' career is that every time he seemed on the point of success, he would take off for some sunny spot where good wine and food were easily found". While I came to praise and not bury Ayers I think his preference to having a good time made his music suffer because the urge for self-indulgence and narcissism spoiled what could have been further records with the daring of "Joy Of A Toy" and "Shooting At The Moon".

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Here's a picture of the Voxmobile, and from what I understand (which means that I'm leaving room for error, so don't scream) is that guitars could be taken off the side of the roadster and played. I also understand that an amplifier is built into the car with an organ in the rumble seat, also. For further information go to http://www.thevoxmobile.com. Imagine that, now that's what I call really rocking on the road.