Gutbrain Records

2024 October 21 • Monday

There can't be any serious debate about Dario Argento's best movie. It's Suspiria. His second best movie, though? That could start some arguments.

The Gutbrain Records staff isn't 100% sure but the 827th Soundtrack of the Week is from his funnest (and contender for second best) movie: Phenomena, with a score by Claudio Simonetti, Fabio Pignatelli and the mighty Goblin.

This presentation is just for the score, so it doesn't include Iron Maiden's "Flash of the Blade" and whatever other songs might have been in the movie.But it does include some unused cues as well as alternate versions and different edits.

The main title music is, ahem, phenomenal. One of Simonetti's best, with dreamy wordless vocals and mesmerizing piano swirls sliding into a massive synth rock groove. This is right up there with some of Goblin's best and might recall some of their Zombi cuts.

Goblin gets four major cues to establish the bulk of the score. "Jennifer" is a beautiful tune that suggests love, innocence and purity.

"Wind" is the creepy suspense track that introduces dread, wonder, tension and excitement.

The driving, pulsating and lean "Sleepwalking" is the perfect musical accompaniment for one of the movie's most memorable scenes and "Jennifer's Friend" is a light and upbeat number, bouncy and more or less sunny but complex, with a few different musical ideas layered on top of each other.

It's a great score for a favorite movie, frequently and affectionately referenced around Gutbrain HQ with the phrase "Chekhov's monkey laser".

2024 October 18 • Friday

Michael Gallatin is a pretty typical male power fantasy action hero. Super smart, super handsome, a super stud, worldly and multi-lingual with a mysterious past—his father was probably no less than Rasputin, just in case you weren't already impressed—he's the only chance the Allies have, several years into World War Two, of stopping some nefarious Nazi plot that might like totally derail D-Day.

And so Michael Gallatin leaves his remote castle home and parachutes into occupied France to meet up with the Resistance and figure out what evil stuff is going on and, you know, deal with it. Because the primary fantasy in these stories is high-level competence.

It would be a fairly standard men's adventure story if it weren't for one other little detail: Michael Gallatin is also a werewolf.

The book is Robert McCammon's The Wolf's Hour. Let's go.

So this book was a lot of fun. Michael Gallatin can transform whenever he wants to. Full moons are not relevant. He can do full or partial wolf. He's totally wolfed out when we first meet him but soon thereafter, while fighting with a Nazi assassin and about to lose and be killed, he goes half wolf to turn the tables.

The World War Two story line alternates with Gallatin's origin story, how he became a werewolf and was raised by a werewolf family/community after his human family is murdered.

Both story lines are equally engaging and thrilling and McCammon is not shy or reserved. He seems to love what he's doing and his enthusiasm is contagious. There's constant action, sex and intrigue. There's even a werewolf version of the John Henry myth and an umpteenth reiteration of The Most Dangerous Game—but this time it's on a moving train with the hunter pursuing his prey through a series of death-trap train cars.

There are page turners and then there's this book. Robert McCammon might be the most unabashed writer I've ever encountered and I wouldn't mind if there were fifty books about Michael Gallatin. This is an evolution and expansion of pulp fiction and men's adventure tropes in the best way.

The first line is "The war went on".

2024 October 16 • Wednesday

The Howling is a very well known werewolf movie. It's based on a novel by Gary Brandner, which is extremely different. The two share only the basic premise, which is itself a spoiler and so won't be mentioned here.

The novel was first published as a Gold Medal paperback in 1977, which would make it one of the very last of the Gold Medals. The Gutbrain library always has room for another one and The Howling is in the stacks now.

The movie has a lot more going on in it than the book does. The novel starts out with a mysterious account of mass violence in a small European village 400 years ago. Then it jumps to present-day Los Angeles and a brutal rape scene whose consequences include loss of pregnancy for Karyn, the victim.

In an attempt to recover from this trauma, Karyn and her husband Roy leave the city for a small, remote town called Drago.

If you've seen the movie The Howling, then you know where this is going. But the path the book takes is quite different and involves, among other things, werewolf sex and lesbian nuns.

One thing the book does better is the procurement of silver bullets. This is both witty and informative in the book. The movie's handling of this same problem is way too much of a coincidence/miracle but is admittedly fun and created some screen time for beloved actor Dick Miller.

Certainly The Howling is an exploitative novel—that's practically Gold Medal's mission statement—but it's interesting to see how much more complex the story was made for its movie adaptation. And Brandner has some very effective suspense and horror writing in here.

The first line is “In the dark Arda forest on the border between Greece and Bulgaria there is a dead gray patch of land roughly one mile square where no one goes and nothing lives”.

2024 October 14 • Monday

The 826th Soundtrack of the Week is an Alfonso Santisteban double feature: his music for the films Killing of the Dolls and Necrophagus.

The title track for Killing of the Dolls is parenthetically identified as "Black and Blue" and is fantastic, combining strings and classical piano flourishes with break beat drums, wah-wah guitar, overblown flute, harpsichord, percussion, electric piano, you name it! It's a bit like some of the later Lone Wolf and Cub music.

The main theme that repeats several times is called "Amor dde cartón" in its vocal version and uses "Für Elise" as a template, sticking closely to that famous melody.

Not just Beethoven but Bach also gets taggedd here in the funky orchestra choral "Opus Bach".

Elsewhere there are other compelling tracks, such as the hypnotically groovy "Los traumas del asesino" and the atmospheric and late-night jazzy "Del sueño a la realidad".

Necrophagus starts out with a solo organ piece for its "Main Title", rather sombre and churchy.

This theme gets a lot of workouts for intriguing combinations of instruments: electric bass, drums, harmonica, flute, organ, etc.

All the tracks are "Seq. 06", "Seq. 07" and so on and some of them are really interesting miniature avantgarde jazz pieces.

2024 October 11 • Friday

Anoka is a short story collection and the debut of Shane Hawk. With the exception of the first story, the territory is very clearly horror—and often very unsettling horror.

All the stories take place in Anoka, MI, although Hawk himself lives in San Diego, CA. The other connecting thread is indigenous life, as each story features indigenous characters and offers comments, observations and insights into both the history and present-day realities of indigenous people. Hawk himself is Cheyenne and Arapaho.

Some of the writing is quite gruesome and even when it's not so viscerally horrifying it's still very disturbing. This isn't a book for everyone but real horror freaks should like it.

The first line of the first story is "When we brought Roland into our home, he had a difficult time adjusting".