Happy Cloud Media LLC

One of our longtime associates and fans brought to our attention that one of our movies is up on eBay: "Brinke's Tales of Terror." Now, I'm of the opinion that if you buy it, you can do what you want with it. I'm not a fan of bootlegging indie movies but I can't do much to stop it. You want to spin the wheel and try your luck to sell a DVD-R for $30, all power to you. BRINKE'S TALES OF TERROR, however, is a different animal. Producer Joe D. Casey died mid-production and we ...weren't able to redigitize his footage. The result, 3 of the 6 shorts have a weird compression stutter. The only way to correct it would be to re-edit his shorts from the original sources and he shot without slates, he didn't have a shot log. The time and work required was astronomical. I mean, I can't be mad at the guy for dying. That is the main reason we never sought a legitimate distributor for it. After Joe passed, we decided to simply make low-cost DVD-Rs and pass the proceeds long to charities Joe loved. It was a personal and business decision. Over the years, we've sold these for $5-6 bucks, people seemed to enjoy it and understood the limitations. Largely, people in the horror community are kind. I'm not going to dog the eBayer here. I will sympathize with whoever buys it for the price he wants. I WILL say, however, if you're interested in this bit of history, with shorts starring Amy Lynn Best, Suzi Lorraine, and hosted by Brinke Stevens, shoot us a message. I'll add it to the www.happycloudpictures.net site over the weekend. It'll run you $8-10 depending on how fast you want it and, again, the money will go to one of Joe's charities like The Humane Society.

Been a while since I've been over to the Goodreads Page for HOT SPLICES. As a dozen or so of you know, HOT SPLICES was my collection of inter-related short sto...ries concerning Film Addicts and their way of joining with their films, via a junkie process called "flixing." I'm pretty proud of some of the imagery, particularly the Film God Mythology. There are a dozen or so reviews of the book over there and only one person hated it - for disturbing reasons as apparently she found the stories anti-female and transphobic. They're certainly not meant to be. As a matter of fact, there aren't too many shining examples of humanity to be found in the film as they're all...well...criminals and junkies. Apparently they were meant to be upstanding and highly progressive criminals and junkies, so I'm sorry to have failed that one reviewer. (I can accept criticism, but I have to understand it to fix things.) Most of the stories in there are surreal ad infinitum spins on some of our adventures working in film labs and on weird productions. The Film Addict thing was very close to my life as a film student, minus the literal dorm aspect of things. Keep in mind, the majority of these stories were written either in that nightmarish film lab, or in response to years of untended-to trauma. The background noise for these were usually VIDEODROME, NAKED LUNCH, BRAZIL, THE THING, and STATE AND MAIN. I'm still awaiting post-COVID confirmation, but there was an audiobook company interested in putting this out, and Amy Lynn Best, Stephanie Bertoni, Terry Thome, and Jim Steinhof recorded sort-of an audio play of the Screenplay Sections of the book. These sections were part of the original draft of Cameron Romero's "The Screening" and are available in print for the first time. And plus...the cover! Again, Ryan Hose bats it out of the park after long discussions of the design. "Add more dick skin," was a frequent direction I gave him. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42103660-hot-splices You can grab the actual book at www.happycloudpublishing.com

For those of you who dig our little history blogs, there's a new one up at our HCM site: https://happycloudpictures.net//happy-cloud-history-the-s/ And if you missed the link to the final essay from our our dear late friend, Carmine Capobianco, you can download the pdf here: ... https://happycloudpictures.net//farewell-to-carmine-capob/

Grindhouse Purgatory #18 is live on Amazon and will be in Pete Chiarella's and Happy Cloud Media LLC's stock soon. If you can't wait, pick up a hard copy and K...indle version at: https://www.amazon.com/Grindhouse-Purgatory-1//ref=sr_1_1 With all the hell and chaos of last year, all we have left now is Obituaries and Porn. We'll getcha coming and going.

Before Women In Horror Month vanishes for another year, I need to call out one of the women responsible for its existence. Back in the 2000s, the number of fem...ale horror fans was small but growing. Yet, there was no safe space female fans could go without being harassed by male fans. (I witnessed this.) Amy Lynn Best, while working full time and running Happy Cloud, teamed up with Heidi Martinuzzi and Jen Whilden to create Pretty-Scary.com, the first female-centric horror site. Women were in control, it never became a meat market, and a dozen new projects grew from there. As the community grew, member Hannah Neurotica declared her birth month Women in Horror Month and a movement was created. In addition to all the hard work she puts into our own company, Amy makes sure we’re inclusive, sensitive, and supportive. It’s time she’s recognized for that.