We’ve got 2 awesome contests for all of you!

Contest 1: The Splattercast is participating in the 2010 International Zombie Photo Cookie Model Search being put on by Myphotocookie.com, author James Cheetham, and Girls & Corpses Magazine.

All you need to do is submit a high quality head shot of yourself to splattercast@deadlantern.com , the Splattercast hosts will then select a winner to represent Dead Lantern against a bunch of other horror podcasts. You’ll be zombified and have a chance to get your face on a delicious cookie! And with the full backing of the Splattercast Legions, you’ll have a good chance of winning, fo sho!

So take a photo of yourself and send it in! We’ll need to make a decision by the end of next week, so don’t miss out!

Contest 2: Dude, we’re totally going to be whoring the Dead Lantern name at a few upcoming conventions, including Flashback Weekend and Horror Hound. To do that, we need some swell t-shirts that will get us noticed and get us chicks!

Unfortunately, we’re creatively bankrupt and have no t-shirt ideas. If you think you can crack out a nifty design for us, send us a graphic at splattercast@deadlantern.com The winning designer will receive a free copy of Outpost Doom and a grab bag of all sorts of horror goodies. We’re not looking for anything complex and we’re very easy to please.

p.s. The printing company has told us that the DVD’s are finished. Now we’re just waiting for them to be shipped.

Writer Shawn Granger was kind enough to send me a couple review copies of Family Bones, a comic series based on the real life death row couple Ray and Faye Copeland (Author Granger’s great grandmother happens to be the sister of Ray Copeland) who took in drifters to help with their farm only to murder them and bury the bodies when they were of no more use. The 10 issue comic series has been condensed into 2 graphic novels. For full details, I encourage you to head over to King Tractor Press website to learn more about it and to read a few free pages. For now, let’s review the series and give you a chance to experience the comics yourself with a contest to win both graphic novels!

The Review: The story is about a city boy named Sean who is sent to live with his Aunt and Uncle for the summer. Being the city boy that he is, he is totally lost when his domineering uncle gets him to start doing your typical farm chores, such as killing chickens for dinner and working the tractor. The uncle regularly beats him and causes his life to be a total nightmare. Sean befriends a sexy neighbor named Wendy who becomes his only escape from the torments of his family. As the two get closer, Sean begins uncovering some strange secrets about the multiple drifters who show up to help out on the farm….and who mysteriously go missing when it’s time for his uncle to pay them.

Somewhat surprisingly, the focus of the story is not on Faye and Ray, but rather the relationship between Sean and Wendy.You get the distinct ominous feel that these are serial killers, but the aunt and uncle don’t really do much in those terms. They kill a couple drifters, sure, but most of it is off-panel and it’s never the focus. The actual serial killers are sort of peripheral in that respect. The uncle is definitely shown to be a little off his rocker, with his repeated beatings of Sean and his temper tantrums, moreso than the aunt who comes across as sort of oblivious to everything that is going on (except for interesting scene in which she puts a bunch of baby mice down the garbage disposal).  The story takes a little while to get going but once it does I was pretty engaged and interested to see where it went. I’d never heard of Faye and Ray so I came in knowing nothing about the history of them, but these graphic novels made me seek out more information after reading them.

There are numerous artists that work on the different issues making it very uneven in terms of a set artistic style, tone, and feel. Personally, I’m not a fan of switching up artists because  I feel it hampers the story and characters. For example, one of the artists draws Wendy sort of modest, with naturally sized breasts, while another artist in one of the last issues draws her super exaggerated, with almost porn star-esque giant breasts. It’s just distracting and doesn’t imbue the character with a definite set of traits. Is she sweet, girl-next-door sexy or is she supposed to be some unattainable sex object?  And with various artists, you’re going to have some you really like, and others that just ain’t that great. Luckily, most of the art isn’t distracting and it ranges from high detailed-contrasted black & white in the vein of Ghastly Graham Ingels to very minimalist, detail free drawings.

Overall, I enjoyed Family Bones. Some readers might be disappointed in that it doesn’t focus solely on Faye and Ray and their murderous adventures, but I liked the idea of this fish out of water nephew forced to deal with this crazy situation. Granger does a superb job of subverting big set pieces with simple lines of dialogue that hint at the disturbed minds of Faye and Ray. In one scene, Sean is forced to help deliver a calf. At first he is disgusted but after going through an intense ordeal of successfully delivering it, he realizes just how wonderful this new life is. Right up to the point when Faye tells him that they’ll eat the mother cow. It’s just a really wonderfully written and drawn sequence that builds and builds before Granger smacks the reader with the reality of the situation.

Family Bones is a pretty good graphic novel with some neat art. The writing is excellent and I give it credit for not taking the easy route and just following the adventures of Faye and Ray. At times it can be a little slow, the uneven artwork hampers the character design (especially Wendy),  and the ending didn’t quite pay off for me, but overall, I liked it and am glad I got a chance to read it. Would you like to read it? Contest time!

The Contest: Alright, so if you want to get your mitts on Volume 1 & 2 of Shawn Granger’s Family Bones, then here’s how: name the television series and episode where this description comes from:

A mysterious big breasted lab assistant appears who happens to be a bumblebee…you’re hired!

Think you know the answer? Either e-mail us at splattercast@deadlantern.com or leave a response on the blog. First person to get both the TV show and the episode title correct wins Family Bones!

EA are running a cool competition, whereby you can design an awesome kill for the upcoming Dead Space 2. The winner will be dismembered in the game!

Details are on the EA web site, and Dead Space facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/deadspace?v=app_4949752878

http://deadspace.ea.com

Dallas, to be exact. Thursday, February 4th at the The Grand 24 AMC Theater (7:30pm.)

If we have a listener or reader in the Dallas area who would want to free tickets courtesy of the Splattercast, shoot me an e-mail at splattercast@deadlantern.com

First come, first serve.

Send your entries to splattercast@gmail.com, post them here or on the forum thread, or PM me on the forum.

Just a friendly reminder that tomorrow is our Breast Cancer Awareness Show on Splattercast #153. We’ll be discussing all things boobage in the world of horror as well as giving out all sorts of information about how you can help destroy breast cancer! We’ve had a bunch of people leave voicemails (including some celebs) and send in e-mails, but if you haven’t done so yet, you still got some time!

Leave us a message at 206-350-9636 or shoot us an e-mail at splattercast@deadlantern.com

And don’t forget, if you make any sort of donation to a breast cancer charity, you’ll receive a free alternate, black and white, version of Outpost Doom.

Swell.

Well, we didn’t get a mass quantity of entries (thank you, by the way, for not sending in entries) but the winning entry is pretty great. Feast your eyes on Poobaby by Professor Bleak.

We got some cool t-shirts courtesy of Digital Kitchen and we want to give a couple away. Here’s how you can win one of these pimp-ass shirts…

Contest A: As we mentioned on Splattercast #130, just write to splattercast@deadlantern.com and give us your theory on why most Star Trek villains suck compared to other sci-fi properties. We’ll choose a winner on an upcoming episode of the Splattercast.

Contest B: A few of us on the forum have been stumped by a “guess the movie poster” puzzle. Visit this forum thread to check out the puzzle. The first person to post the correct answer wins a t-shirt.

Just a note: if you win a t-shirt and it arrives with cat hair on it, you can blame Steve’s cat. She climbed into the box of t-shirts and was hanging out like it was her own little fort.

I’ve been loving the hell out of Fallout 3 lately. The reaction is a bit mixed on our forum thread, but this is easily the most fully realized “real” game world I’ve ever played. It’s a blast roaming the wasteland of Washington D.C. and killing super mutants. And the characters are really good, too. For example, one of the earliest decisions you have to make is whether or not to detonate, or disarm, a nuclear bomb sitting in the middle of the town of Megaton. My first reaction was “I’m totally going to blow this place sky high”, and a mysterious dude offered to “take care of me” if I’d do it. But as I made my way around the town and interacted with the various inhabitants, I actually started to like all of them. So I disarmed the nuke and got my own house in the town with lots of perks inside. This game is just amazingly great and any horror fan would really be wise to give it a spin.

Speaking of horror, the Resident Evil 5 demo is out. I’ve downloaded it but haven’t played it yet. I’m a total RE fanboy and I’m unapologetic about it (the games, not the movies which are total shit). I even love the wonky control scheme. Initial reactions on our forum is that the demo is pretty killer. The full game doesn’t release until March but already I’m getting ancy to play. I have a tradition of playing through the RE games with a buddy of mine (Dawson from The Grand Horror ). Where art thou, Jeremy?

Oh, and the Elm Street cast went for like 2 hours last night. I’ve got quite a bit post-production work to do (including a new review by Mitts777) and since I’ve got class all day I won’t be able to get to it until tonight. Because of that, what you won’t hear until later is that next week is the Splattercasts’ Fan Appreciation Episode. We did this once on episode 61 and it is about time we did another one. I’ve got stacks and stacks of dvd’s sitting on my shelf that I’m going to give away. Wanna win one? All you need to do is e-mail us at Splattercast@deadlantern.com with a comment about anything. It can be about the Elm Street franchise. It can tell us why we suck. It can be a message explaining the intricacies of worm hole theory. Whatever you want; we’ll be reading everything we get on the show and you are guaranteed to get something in return. Consider it a late Christmas present from your friends at Deadlantern.com

Oh, and if you are really adventurous and want to leave a voicemail message 206-426-5306 you’ll have the chance to win a shiny, region-free dvd of Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza’s Splatcademy Award nominated [●REC]. Again, the voicemail can be about anything, although I will tell you that the funnier the message, the better chance you have to win this swell DVD.

cool, eh?

T.J. of Avanttrash.com is our resident hipster music guy so he might know more about this then I do. Our friends over at Cult Epics have sent a limited edition copy (only 2500 copies) of the 2-Disc Life After Death DVD  (scroll down the link to see the full specs) and rather than open it up I thought I’d give it away in a contest. Personally, I don’t know a thing about Gitane Demone, but she’s apparently a musician who used to be in some rock band called Christian Death and according to the DVD is “Madonna’s naughtier underground cousin”.

Sound interesting? Well, if you stopped looking at Diora Baird long enough to read this post and you want a free copy of this DVD which also includes a 12 page booklet that will probably answer all of your Demone questions, this is what you need to do…

Visit the Cult Epics website, browse around the different titles (horror, art house, erotica), and e-mail me at splattercast@deadlantern.com with the film you think looks most interesting. I’ll go through all the submissions and select one person who I think picked the raddest sounding flick. Feel free to send along some comments as to why you think I should pick your movie.

That’s it! Just visit their site, take a look around, and then e-mail me a movie you think is interesting. You may get one of only 2500 Gitane Demone “Life After Death” DVD sets. Get to it!