[Horoscopes] by David Bertrand

Libra
Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972): Libra’s want everything perfect and comfortable. Well, a hang up like that will have you stabbing children before you know it, guaranteed. Italian gore maestro Lucio Fulci’s insanely titled, surprisingly emotional DTAD, is, for once, an Italian thriller without sexy corpses. Instead, a deranged smalltown priest starts offing young boys. Temperance is a nasty bastard, Libra. So are you. Up with abstinence!

Scorpio
Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion (1972): The most fierce, forthright, and freaky of the feminine signs, Scorpio gets her due in the mega-awesome Female Prisoner from Japan, starring cold-as-ice Meiko Kaji (Lady Snowblood) gettin’ her vengeance on. Scorpion encapsulates everything magnificent about Japan. Sleaze transcendent!

Sagittarius
Possession (1981): Always hurtin’ for the unattainable, is Sagittarius the half-human (with beast balls!). Well-represented by Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession, which grates the deepest hells of the male-female turbine as ruined couple Sam Neil and Isabella Adjani vomit their emotions all over each other. Adjani escapes into a grotesque tryst with her own tentacled offspring, an ungodly fuck-machine who thirsts for blood. Good date movie!

Capricorn
Silence of the Lambs (1991): The cool-headed, meticulous sociopath: that’s you Capricorn. Over-exposure has made Hannibal Lector a neutered Santa Claus, I realize, but before the concentrated sequelization, Hannibal the Cannibal was creepy. People who don’t panic under extreme duress are scary. You’re scary. I don’t trust you. Go away.

Aquarius
I Drink Your Blood (1970): Nothing poops on the Age of Aquarius quite like drugcrazed hippie-horror! I Drink Your Blood is one of the first and finest hunks o’ sleaze to milk the Manson Family murder-spree for box office bucks. Boobs, bile, bloodletting, rape, rabid meat pies and grandpa on LSD? Peace out, rainbowface.

Pisces
Dagon (2001): Chaos owns your ass, Pisces, in Dagon, another hyper-fun Stuart Gordonlicious dive into H.P. Lovecraftian gloom! Smalltown Spain is overrun with gilled, ugly fishmen sacrificing hapless tourists to an ancient seademon! Our comic, Evil Dead-ish protagonist is trapped and hunted in, basically, a Piscean Hell.

Aries
Black Sheep (2006): Always the impatient, impulsive, irritable lamb. Well! Strong wills lock with stronger wools in New Zealand’s Black Sheep, your classic zombie-comedy… only now with hostile, mutated ewes! Yes—murderous sheep devouring human flesh, turning people into sheep-people, who eat more people!

Taurus
Ebola Syndrome (1996): Ah, Taurus. Resentful, beefy, fuuuurriooous when angry—much like Anthony Wong in the family-friendly Ebola Syndrome! Greasy Mr. Wong murders his boss, rapes the wife, goes to prison, gets out, ex-pats to Africa, works in a scummy restaurant, goes batshit, rapes again, gets Ebola-bile puked in his face and then things get nasty.

Gemini
Sisters (1973): Temperamental two-faced terror… yes you, Gemini. Please observe Brian De Palma’s first Hitchcock tribute, Sisters, starring a pair of very fucked French-Canadian twins played by Mrs. Superman, Margot Kidder. Methodical and tense, with wicked use of split-screen—Sisters eases you in, makes you comfy… then stabs you in the mouth with a cake knife.

Cancer
The Thing (1982): You Cancers, like the disease, cancer, are sneaky things. You hide. You eat. You stay warm and shape shift your crooked ass to trick us: much like The Thing, John Carpenter’s masterstroke of spooks and crazy-ass latex FX. An unthawed alien flawlessly replicates Kurt Russell and his merry men at an Antarctic research station. Paranoia intensifies. Who’s real? Who ain’t?

Leo
Withfinder General (1968): You’re a mean, self-aggrandizing prick, Now tell me… is there any bastard bigger than Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General, notorious witch hunter of inquisitorial England? A real-life, publicly-sanctioned murderer, torturer, rapist, executioner, crook and sadist—Hopkins was also undoubtedly the creepiest asshole role of Vincent Price’s career.

Virgo
The Virgin Spring (1960) & Last House on the Left (1972): Young virgin, things aren’t looking good. In Bergman’s classic tragedy, a naïve farm girl delivering bread to Church gets forcibly deflowered and murdered by Swedish hillbillies. The Virgin Spring was imitated and sleazified for Wes Craven’s wonderfully undisciplined debut, The Last House on the Left, a benchmark for rape and torture. Yah!

Words David Bertrand

David Bertrand takes trash seriously. A film & music fanatic, freelance journalist and regular of the Vancouver film industry, David’s recent blurbs of interest include writing dialogue for game-makers Radical Entertainment, programming and hosting the weekly Bizzaro Film- O-Rama film nights, coordinating Nanaimo’s Green Mountain Music Festival and being a roadie for The Pack A.D. Cabin of Terror, a short horror film David co-wrote and produced, screens this October at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival. See it!