I was running errands last week when I popped into a used book store to unload some volumes I no longer had space for. Knowing I’d get a bit of store credit back I ultimately traded my books for a handful of scary movie DVDs to watch during October. One of those movies was the original A Nightmare on Elm Street on Bluray. The 1987 release is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, and I’m late getting around to my traditional October horror cinema post. Take a terrifying trip back to Elm Street with this sweater weather documentary about Freddy Krueger…

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I’ve been seeing a lot of old David Lynch posts popping up as Facebook “Memories” lately, and I was reminded that we’re still celebrating the 30th anniversary of that strange, sad, scary and sensational film, Blue Velvet. It looks like we’ll be getting a new doc about Lynch and his visual art practice soon, but now’s a great time to re-watch Blue Velvet. As a teaser here’s a great little conversation about the film, the Twin Peaks series, and Pussy Riot between Lynch and Patti Smith…

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This year we celebrate the 30th anniversary of David Lynch’s surreal skewering of suburbia, Blue Velvet. A 2002 documentary illuminated that story’s darkest shadows. Here’s IndieWire with the word…

The 70-minute-long, 2002 documentary The Mysteries Of Love dives deep into the 1986 film, with interviews with key members of the creative team, including Lynch himself, along with Kyle MacLachlan, Isabella Rossellini, Laura Dern, and Dennis Hopper. It has some great insight into how the film came to be, both in terms of the financing and in the creative origins, as well as some great Lynch anecdotes from the actors, almost all revolving around Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank. The doc also talks about the use of nudity, the first reaction from producers and test audiences, and much more. This is one Lynch fans have to watch.

Here’s The Mysteries of Love…

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This year we celebrate the release of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. You read that right. The first film is the best horror movie of all time for some, but if it seems odd to be celebrating the sequel, you obviously haven’t seen The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. Did I mention it stars Dennis Hopper as a deranged lawman wielding chainsaws of his own, and that it’s directed by the same madman who helmed the original, Tobe Hooper? Stick with me. Here’s a review I wrote last year for one of my scary film columns last October…

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 begins with text crawling over the screen and read in deep, chilling voiceover. The narrator mentions a family of cannibals in an isolated farmhouse, chainsawed bones, chairs made of human skeletons. The introduction also recounts the fate of the five young people who “ran out of gas on a farm road in South Texas” in the original film. We’re told that “Four of them were never seen again.”

Fans of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre will recognize this opening because it’s exactly like the opening of the first film. The crawl at the beginning of the original lead viewers to believe the events in the movie were true – a perfect set-up for the visceral verite of the first Massacre and one of many elements that made that first film a shortlister for greatest horror film of all time. The last time I watched the original was at party when I was about 35 years old. I left the room about halfway through – it was just too real, and it was really fucking scary even drinking with friends with the lights on before midnight.

In this sequel the intro is more of a feint than a jab and the film that follows is not a brutal knockout of anarchic genius so much as a sucker punch – but it’s a smart sucker punch, and a funny one.

Massacre 2 takes place thirteen years after the original – roughly the exact same time between the movies’ 1974 and 1986 releases. The introduction informs us that after Sally Hardesty escapes from Leatherface at the end of the original she relates her tale about the grisly happenings in the old farmhouse. Authorities never find the house or the murderous Sawyer family. Chainsaw murders continue to occur all over North Texas, but authorities are quick to cover-up cases they can’t solve or explain.

After a drunken, college weekend chicken race two boys are found dead in a wrecked car. Dennis Hopper makes his first appearance as Lieutenant Boude “Lefty” Enright, arriving at the crime scene and discovering chainsaw damage on a detached car door. Lefty is the uncle of Sally Herdesty and her brother Franklin from the first film. Lefty’s obsession with finding the chainsaw murderers makes him a crackpot in the eyes of his peers. He can’t sleep. He chain smokes and he drinks too much.

Hopper is perfectly cast. The actor/director’s personal reputation for excess and screwy behavior make him instantly believable as the sullen-but-intense Lefty, and it’s the first time I’ve heard Hopper doing a Texas accent since James Dean socked him in Giant. While a movie with the word “chainsaw” in the title might make you think otherwise, 1986 was the greatest year in the actor’s career, seeing the release of Massacre 2 as well as River’s Edge, Blue Velvet and the basketball drama Hoosiers which earned Hopper an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

Hopper’s brooding intensity brings weight to his character, but Lefty’s mournfulness is shot-through with crazed focus and let-’er-rip righteousness that finds Hopper – not surprisingly – dominating his time on screen. When Lefty arms himself with chainsaws holstered like six-guns, and descends into the Sawyer family’s home beneath an abandoned carnival, there is no one but Hopper you’d ever want in this role.

Of course the presence of a madman film legend like Hopper is a huge clue that this film is not at all like the low-budget, lo-fi original. Tobe Hooper, director of both films and co-writer of the first, planned to do a satirical film about a whole town of cannibals. That movie was going to be called Beyond The Valley of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. By the time screenwriter L.M. “Kit” Carson finished the final screenplay, the idea had been revised several times, but the satirical angle was always in place.

The second movie feels almost nothing like the original, but that’s no accident. The fist Massacre is Hooper’s masterwork, and Carson’s credits include his diaphanous adaptation of Sam Shepard’s “Paris, Texas” which was made into a film by German auteur Wim Wenders. These guys aren’t dummies, and the Breakfast Club posing of the Sawyer family portrait on the film’s poster, the gallons of gross-out gore and even the anti-capitalist sentiments sprinkled throughout the film add-up to a sequel that stakes its own claims to greatness.

Here’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2…

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In a time when states across America are reversing decades of legislation against marijuana, and during a week when the president himself has declared the herb to be no more harmful than alcohol (even less IMOHO), it’s important to look to the past for guidance in the present.

Busted four times including once for growing his own weed on his farm, McCartney even had to deal with travel restrictions in America because of his marijuana-related arrest record. His last bust broke 30 years ago. Wiki has the skinny…

In 1984, while on holiday in Barbados, authorities arrested McCartney for possession of marijuana and fined him $200. Upon his return to England, he stated: “cannabis is … less harmful than rum punch, whiskey, nicotine and glue, all of which are perfectly legal … I don’t think … I was doing anyone any harm whatsoever…People are smoking pot anyway and to make them criminals is wrong.”

See for yourself…