We’ll be over the Black Country like a rash over the next four days, presenting a banquet of heavy metal cinema in all sorts of venues. The ‘heavy metal’ theme has been treated quite loosely, and as well as live footage, music docs and the obligatory Spinal Tap you can also find plenty of archive material, a special screening of Ken Loach’s Cathy Come Home with producer Tony Garnett and a couple of the horror movies which played an important part in shaping the metal sound…

The movie which gave the band their name, a lurid omnibus chiller with Boris Karloff nearing the end of his career…

…And Shane Embury from Napalm Death has hand-picked one of his favourite video nasties, Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond. Expect shonky dubbing and spectacular gore.

A nice post-gig buzz today, with the usual craving for a fry-up. I just wanted to draw your attention to Pontypool, a smashing little Canadian film which would be easy to miss amongst the current zombie-movie bombardment. This one only uses scraps of the zombie format, with a remote radio station piecing together the picture of a strange virus infecting the countryside around them. Disregard the Guardian’s one-star review (Peter Bradshaw is an eejit) and hunt it down if you can. And if you can’t, there’s always the radio-play re-edit; not quite as claustrophobic but a pretty good modern-day War of the Worlds (as in Welles). Kill is kiss!

At the last 7inch event we showed a brief clip from 1981 Indonesian horror flick Mystics in Bali, by way of a taster for a full screening at Flatpack in March. The response since has been so striking – ie, numerous people saying ‘what the hell was that?’, ‘you’ve infected my dreams’, etc – that we felt that we should spread the joy a little further. If you like the look of it, the dvd is available from Mondo Macabro. And this Thai advert for Sylvania lightbulbs is a handy primer on East Asian bogeymen: