12 Bottle Bar

We’ve reached the end of our “Blood, Booze & Beyond” festival, and we all hope that you’ve enjoyed it – that perhaps you’ve found a new drink to try, a film to watch, or that our absolute love of the horror genre and the people behind the movies has rubbed off.  Not only were we able to provide a drink for each of our main spirits (quite a few for gin), we’ve also covered many of the hallmark periods for scary movies.  For easy reference, here’s everything by category:

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By Lesley Jacobs Solmonson

“Don’t expose him to bright light. Don’t ever get him wet. And don’t ever, ever feed him after midnight.”  These fateful lines are, of course, the central words of caution in the seminal horror-comedy Gremlins from director Joe Dante.  For those of you not in the know, the “him” referred to is a cute little Mogwai, which will turn into a murderous Gremlin if not cared for properly.  And so Dante reminds us of one of the principle tenets of the horror film – if you screw with nature, then it screws with you.

Frankly, we are pleased as punch to feature Mr. Dante in our final post in 13 Bottle Bar’s “Blood, Booze, and Beyond” bibulous Halloween film fest.  A 30-plus year veteran of the film industry, Dante began his career, as did so many Hollywood directors, in the care of Roger Corman, a man who has taught half of Hollywood how to make a film on budget, on time, and on topic.  That relationship led to the Corman-produced Piranha, a thinly-veiled send-up of Jaws, and put Dante on Steven Speilberg’s radar (Spielberg championed the film as a “spoof”, not as competition to Jaws).  Man-eating fish were followed by man-eating wolves in The Howling and then the Spielberg-produced, man-eating Gremlins, which Roger Ebert described as “a confrontation between Norman Rockwell’s vision of Christmas and Hollywood’s vision of the blood-sucking monkeys of voodoo island.” Dante’s career continued full throttle with family-friendly flicks like Explorers and Small Soldiers, as well as the tongue-in-cheek Amazon Women on the Moon (perfect for a lazy Saturday afternoon) and Matinee, which told the story of an exploitation film producer pedaling his monster movie Mant!  (“Half man! Half ant! All terror!) during the Cuban Missile Crisis.   Read More…

Our buddy Sam over at 11Points.com has decided to pair some of our Halloween drinks with appropriately themed costumes.   They’re damned funny:

11 Classy Halloween Drinks (and the Costumes They Match With)

Two horrifying events happened over the summer of 1976, while my family vacationed on the shores of Lake Tahoe.  For me personally, the big scare occurred when I decided to pursue a better fishing spot by climbing off of the dock and into someone’s moored boat.  Being a kid, I didn’t have the span I imagined that I had, and I slipped between the boat and the dock, plunging into the icy waters of the lake.  Horrifying in the Halloween sense?  No.  But, I did lose a brand new jar of salmon eggs.  Secondly, my older brother and sister, along with the teen daughter of the friends with whom we were staying, decided to take a trip to the movies.  I don’t remember a great deal from my childhood, but I do recall the three older children – young adults, I suppose – returning home that night, quaking while they detailed what seemed, from their account, to have been the most frightening film ever made:  The Omen. Read More…

Here’s a quick pop culture pop quiz: What do the following have in common?

Star Trek (original series), Untouchables (original series), The Lucy Show, Batman (Adam West version), The Man from UNCLE, Gunsmoke, Get Smart, Mission: Impossible (original series), THX 1138, Diamonds Are Forever, blaxploition milestones Coffy and Foxy Brown, Jackie Brown, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Rockford Files, Emergency!, Wonderbug, Electra Woman and Dyna Girl, Police Woman, Charlie’s Angels (original series), Hart to Hart, Quincy, Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century, Dukes of Hazzard, T. J. Hooker, Fantasy Island, The A-Team, The Fall Guy, Hill Street Blues, Amazing Stories, MacGyver, and Kill Bill.

Aside from essentially summarizing five decades of entertainment, the above is a very partial list of Sid Haig’s credits. Celebrating his 50^th year as a working actor, Sid Haig is one of those go-to guys who’s always there to deliver the goods, no matter what the part or genre. Of course, we’re talking horror right now, which means that when we called Sid, we wanted to speak with Captain Spaulding, Haig’s iconic death-dealing, fried chicken-peddling, psychotic clown from Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects.

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