SATAN'S BLOOD aka Escalofrio

SATAN'S BLOOD or ESCALOFRIO is an excellent Spanish EuroTrash Horror flic from 1977. Although many copies exist, the Mondo Macabro version has some outstanding features. The documentary on 20th Century Satanism with Church of Satan priest Gavin Baddeley is worth the price of admission alone!

Opening with a Black Mass done by a look-a-like of Eliphas Levi performing ritual sex on a voluptuous woman, we are in store for a creepy ride. We meet the listless Andy and his expecting wife Annie who thirst for some adventure. Their unconscious dark yearning magnetically leads them to a run-in with some "old friends", Bruno and Mary, who invite the couple to drinks at their house...

And what could go wrong at a house that looks like that? Well, maybe a little Ouija game gone wrong, confessions of infidelity and suicide attempts and there is that exploding painting of Jesus that leads to the rest....

Invitation to a Satanic Orgy

Prepping the Vessel

...

a succubus dream...

just fyi, she's holding a dagger.

not your average round table get-together.


Mary compels you to lust after Satan's Blood

{one final note- the devil-worshiping aspect of Satanism can be viewed as a bourgeois embodiment of the Manichean heresy. Thematically, the naming of the female antagonist as Mary is a definite nod to this ancient Bizzaro world-view. }

Batman's Utility Belt and Childhood Trauma

Preliminaries

Batman is characterized as an elitist (but not Reptilian) human being who to fight crime could only rely on his mind and body to be at its most functional and then blow shit up when nothing else worked. His utility belt provides a template for further consideration. This template is prophetic! Mind you, the future will be constant high-intensity urban warfare. Seeing the madness in Bombay is just the beginning.

And now our story...

Ahem...So, it was one pic of Batman's Utility Belt that kept my pubescent mind occupied for years. The culprit was the pic above and it appeared in DC Comics' "Who's Who Volume II". Hours past by thinking, scheming, about actually being like Batman. Of course, I would need to do pushups, bust out some tights for a costume, and then stuff a sock for the bulge...but the only real "in the field" supplement to his crime fighting are the tools on his belt. The Great Batman Equipment Archive lists damn near every tool the cowl-faced crime fighter carried.

I had to make one. The search began, along with friends, for the perfect utility belt. The saga passed through several stages.

and the trauma...

It became readily apparent after some dramatic instances in public, that wearing a utility belt WAS NOT going to get me laid. These instances have photographic and video evidence that will be posted on EuroTrash UtilityBelt. To verbally preview, I learned that, in general, just wearing a large, bright yellow belt with packs on it just wasn't doing much for my self esteem.

Ah..but it was the mental image of a girl in a utility belt...ready for some dirty crime fighting work, that carried me and my cohorts through a painful adolescence.

The Logic of Utility Belts
We became aware of the double-standard applied to utility belts versus fanny packs. It was a bafflement to us all. Girls seemed ok with fanny packs, but not with utility belts! You know what I'm saying.

A front worn fanny pack creates two instant yet mature observations. One, when you are reaching in there to grab something, you are playing with yourself. Two, if you wear them because you are a muscleman, you are just covering up your whithered nut sack.

Need I say more?

To be continued....

[Did you try to make a utility belt of your own? Come on, you did. What was in it? Leave a comment.]

WTF is This Page?

Hello, I’m SYDNEY FAMILIAR, accent on the liar, and I dedicate this page to the pursuit of my personal obsessions: utility belts, weirdo cinema, homemade horror flics, comics, secret notebooks, strange local music and 70s European movie chicks with hairy bushes; the more homicidal the better.

There will be free downloads of essential audio and video. Also interviews with the oddballs who keep it all too real.

If you have something that falls in line with the theme, drop me an email and I'll review it.

What else do I do? I run around and grunt with an untuned bass in the FELDMANS and avoid work with a page of bizarre links called LEDGERGERMANE.