Magazine Review: The Dark Side – Issue 182

The Dark Side
Issue 182
Ghoulish Publishing
Editor: Allan Bryce
www.thedarksidemagazine.com

The arrival of a new issue of The Dark Side is a delight for those of us of a certain cinematic persuasion, such is the plethora of pieces tailor-made to quench the thirst of the more discerning genre hound. Keeping to their increasing publishing schedule not only with impressive punctuality but also a consistently sky-high standard of content, The Dark Side arrives at issue 182 all ready to spill its guts for you.

Following the editorial, news and In Memoriam pages, the first feature of the issue is an entertaining interview with Tigon Films star Sally Geeson (also covering her stints in the classic Carry On comedy films and her UK sitcom work). It’s an oddly low-key start to the issue, but still a strong start and certainly different to what other titles offer.

The magazine’s Post Mortem letters page now fills four pages, and the debates raised tend to be rather entertaining (including one letter which may go down in the magazine’s lore as particularly angry), which is nice to see in an age where magazine letters pages are largely a thing of the past. Son of Choice Cuts covers scenes trimmed from the US release of Hitchcock’s Psycho, while Horrors Under The Hammer follows the lifetime passion of memorabilia collector Simon Greetham.

Strips To Thrill is a surprising addition to a magazine largely focussing on horror, as it covers some unexpected ground in the world of comic book adaptations of classic (and not so classic) genre flicks. The cover images in this feature are worth the cover price alone. Man, designers knew how to make stuff look cool back in the day.

The DVD Library reviews section is typically excellent. A definite highlight of this section is editor Allan Bryce’s brutal review of We Are The Flesh, which has got to be the worst film I have seen in many years (and believe me, I’ve sat through a lot of crap). I’m definitely with Allan on that sorry mess of a film.

A feature on the darker aspects of Disney will have Disney fans agape with horror, followed by an enticing examination of Hammer’s TV output. A fun writeup of the Birmingham HorrorCon event is up next, followed by a frank interview with Takeshi Kitano. The issue ends with a look at Shin Gojira, which brings the most iconic iteration of Godzilla back to screens for more city-stomping mayhem. While this issue felt a little jumbled in terms of the order of features, it nevertheless remains peerless in terms of quality.