Canadian author riffs on his awesomely absurd book DEATH BY UMBRELLA! THE 100 WEIRDEST MOVIE WEAPONS.
Along with his partner Jeff Kirschner, Canadian horror fan Christopher Lombardo is known for his Really Awful Movies podcast, a by-product of the duos website, www.ReallyAwfulMovies.com.
Kirschner and Lombardos beat is to riff on low budget genre movies, not deride them but celebrate their eccentricities.
And eccentric is exactly what their first official book is.
Out now from Bear Manor Media, DEATH BY UMBRELLA! THE 100 WEIRDEST MOVIE WEAPONS showcases some of the screens strangest deaths; absurd demises from ridiculous horror movies.
SHOCK sat with Lombardo to find out why he and Kirschner opted to devote so much of their time looking for the strangest of fake finishes.
SHOCK: When did the lightning bolt hit to make such an unusual film reference book?
LOMBARDO: I’ve always been a big fan of 80s slashers and remember renting SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE II at an inappropriately young age. The power drill/guitar combo used by the Gene Vincent-esque Rockabilly killer blew my mind. Later, I saw the horror comedy EATING RAOUL, where the lead characters played by Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov dispatch with personal ad perverts with a frying pan. Two and two came together to equal four and I thought…this is a fantastic concept! Now, I’m a decent enough writer, but I needed to find someone who really knew their stuff in the horror genre and that was my writing partner Jeff, whose house is filled to the brim with horror memorabilia and whose body is covered in horror art.
SHOCK: Did you guys have to research or were you already studied in all of the films you covered?
LOMBARDO: This took quite a bit of research to go above and beyond the obvious kill methods known to most gore hounds: the TV set from HENRY, the Lawnmower from DEAD ALIVE we went for the odd “deep album cut” as it were, adding things like, well, the vinyl record used by the killer to slaughter a couple coeds in the needs-to-be-seen-by-many-more Quebec slasher DISCOPATHE. Talk about a deep cut!
SHOCK: The synopsis on the book cites the boxing sequence in FRIDAY THE 13th PART 8: JASON TAKES MANHATTAN, but can you speak on some of the other oddball weapons covered?
LOMBARDO: Being fans of Italian horror, we really loved seeing Giovanni Lombardo Radice (aka John Morghen) get “lathed” to death in City of the Living Dead, and for sheer joy, the stripper pole demise is terrific in the otherwise crappy SANTAS SLAY. Death-by-tattoo needle in TROMEO AND JULIET is wonderfully Trom-atic. And because we haven’t grown up, killer boobs in Greg Lamberson’s KILLER RACK. Jeff loves the brain-sucking straw in BLOODSUCKING FREAKS and the demonic piano in the Japanese pop-art, psychedelic horror masterpiece HAUSU.
SHOCK: Did you have to leave some of the weapons out and if so, will there be a sequel?
LOMBARDO: It’s damn-near impossible to cover everything, but we had to leave out a few of the more obvious ones, but tried to at least reference them. Being that this is the web and that filmmakers are getting ever more creative, we’ll no doubt hear about some oversights. But we really dug deep for this one. Having said that, we had such a great time researching and writing this one, we’d love to do a second volume down the road!
