Halloween's coming up this week (Saturday) and with comes various art house series and cable channel marathons all spotlighting various macabre horror films to mark the occasion. Greenwich Library, in keeping with the Halloween spirit, offers DVDs of various horror thrillers, classic and otherwise, that you may find interesting -and hopefully entertaining- to watch at home.
The overwhelming success in Europe of Sergio Corbucci's classic "spaghetti western", 1966's Django, which, like Sergio Leone's films helped flip the western genre into new and outrageous creative styles, inspired many filmmakers to produce their own "Django" films. Most of these were obvious knock-offs and blatant copies (right down to casting and even costumes), but one fledging writer/director, Giulio Questi, despite having no interest in westerns, spaghetti or otherwise, wound up making his directorial debut as controversial and groundbreaking as Corbucci's own effort had been. The resulting work, 1967's Django Kill! (If You Live, Shoot!), which the library carries, is that rarity: a spaghetti western horror thriller.
Not many people seem to know about this, but for the past seven years, Greenwich Library has been offering TTY (TeleTYpewriter) phone service for the hearing and speech impaired. (Go here to find out about it from our web site.)
For decades after its publication, Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs was deemed "unfilmable" by movie studios. Yes, the book's episodic structure and overall theme would probably offend somebody in the audience. And filming the book as it was written would be a budget buster of no small means. But it could've been done!
In 1959, after William S. Burroughs spent two years in France and Tangiers typing and organizing, with the surprisingly able assistance of fellow Beats Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, his manuscript while simultaneously getting high on drugs (and, er, other stuff), Olympia Press in Paris (infamous for publishing works by Henry Miller, amongst other things), unleashed onto the public the completed work under the title Naked Lunch. Literature as society knew it then would never be the same.
The Lions Club of Greenwich (full disclosure: I'm a member) has, since 1923, served the needs of the local community, particulary those of the visually impaired.
Originally serialized in the pages of the pulp magazine Astounding in 1940 before being slightly revised and published in book form in 1946, A.E. van Vogt's Slan is an exciting thriller with subtle political overtones that are even more manifest in the present day.
