TONIGHT! Weird film premiere in Portland

Just a note to anyone interested -- at Strange Maine the store, there is a great little horror film premiering TONIGHT!!!

WHAT: "The Grateful Undead" ... hippie demons tie-dyed in BLOOD!!!
WHEN: 9:00pm, Saturday, June 14th
WHERE: Strange Maine store, 578 Congress Street, Portland, Maine
WHO: Providence RI filmmakers wreak havoc with hippie undead, plus local weird music medley
MORE INFO: call (207)771-9997 or see The Grateful Undead on MySpace -- photos, trailer, more!

As part of the entertainment, various lovelies such as Dan Knudsen and Glade Swope will be busy intriguing your musical sensibilities at various interludes.

To quote the Grateful Undead site:

Set in the grunge-soaked heyday of the early 90's, "The Grateful Undead" is a shocking surrealistic spectacle about what happens when social waste turns toxic! Eno the Zero and Dr. Zog are two wastoids cut adrift in the Summer of '69. Disenchantment reigns supreme as they trudge through the junk food wasteland of mini-marts and parking lots. Their dense, hallucinatory haze draws the attention of flower-child wannabes who yearn for love and freedom in an age of apathy and rage. Take a stomach-turning psychedelic journey to a world of baby boomer nostalgia, tie-dyed in blood!

Filmed in Providence, Rhode Island over the course of seventeen exhausting days of communal living and miraculously completed on a budget of $854.82, "The Grateful Undead" is a bizarre piece of outsider cinema that captures terrifying real emotion and ecstatic reality in an unforgettable psychedelic slacksploitation experience.

Features a diverse original soundtrack by Providence locals Nefarious (epic black metal), The New Federal Hillbillies (improvisational psych-rock), Erica Tronstad (singer-songwriter) and New York City's ON/OFF (avant-jazz).

Brunswick Bigfoot (Smallfooted Variety)

The BFRO (Bigfoot Research Organization) site has a particularly enjoyable post on a mystery simian seen in Maine during the seventies. I remember the first time I read this, I had to giggle, especially when one of the young witnesses says, "I fell right down in front of him and all he did was look at me. I would have known if it were a hippie or something. But it had a regular monkey face. You have seen a monkey before, haven't you?"

Darn hippies.

At any rate, the sighting report is actually a list of consecutive sightings of the creature, all near the Brunswick/Durham area in Maine, during the summer of 1973. Most of the sightings centered around the Jones Cemetery. Witnesses include a variety of people, ranging from age 10 up well into the adult register.

The repetitive nature of the sightings provoked a full scale days-long manhunt, including helicopter scans, and resulted in a cast of a 5-inch or so footprint, which Androscoggin Deputy Sheriff Footman commented on thusly: "Whatever made it weighs 300 or 350 pounds and I can't tell you much more. It's definitely not a bear track. I don't know what's going on here and I'd rather not express an opinion."

Thanks to Nicole Duennebier for reminding me about this fantastic report, and to Loren Coleman for originally posting it on the site back in 1998.

Illustration by yours truly.