The 6 Best Cult/Tv/Film Tshirts Available To You Right Now

If, like us, you re kind of daft on films, you KNOW that as soon as you see a belter of a tshirt with something you like on it, you're already weighing up how much ramen you'll need to eat for the rest of the week to balance out buying the fucking thing. And sure, if you're into Deadpool/Doctor Who/Keeping Up Appearances mash-ups that's fine. Its chronic, but its fine. But I'm talking about the good stuff here. The ones that, even though printed on shitty gildian tshirts that probably cost 17p, you secretly wear as "Your Good T-shirt", the one you'd wear to a job interview hoping theres a guy there that goes "awwwww mate i fucking LOVE Halloween H20, you've got the job."
THOSE ones.

Here's a wee list of the 6 best available to you right NOW.

Fright Rags - Aliens (v6)

Check that mother out. Breaking out at you like its escaping Prince's third bathroom.
As per most of these American sellers, the postage to the UK is fairly pricey but i mean, holy shit.
Sometimes you gotta eat ramen for TWO weeks to make good things happen.

Fright Rags - Alien V6 - $27



ThatSparrowBoy - Clueless

Clueless absolutely rules the hardest. And whats more FITTING (hehe nice) than to have scenes and quotes from the film hand drawn in a comic-style strip on a tee? None. You might be a virgin who cant drive, but at least you'll look cool as fuck. (plus its a UK seller so postage is cheap!)

ThatSparrowBoy - Clueless - £20


Pizza Party Printing - Street Trash

Street Trash is basically about Buckfast and Vietnam Flashbacks and people melting so its probably no surprise that i actually own this tshirt. It also helps that the design is rad as fuck and reflects how potent and mmmmelty Street Trash's style is. PPP's P+P is a bit of a stinger but ALL their stuff is really colorful and original and not only that, they send you everything in a self-branded pizza box. How COOL is that?

Pizza Party Printing - Street Trash - $20

monstersoutside - Friday Night Lights

 

Forgive the heinous sizing but the ideas there. WHO WOULDA THOUGHT that mixing up pop culture and hardcore punk would lead to some amazing things? monstersoutside on etsy. Theres alot of X-files/Hardcore punk mashups, Buffy/Death Metal mashups and Seinfeld/NY Punk mashups but the Friday Night Lights one is amazing. Showing how interchangeable the shows most famous line is, that it could easily be a Chain of Strength lyric. Not only that but its pretty fucking neat too!
Clear eyes, empty wallets mare like HOHOOOOOOOOOOOOO

monstersoutside - Friday Night Lights - £12

Pallbearer Press - Possession

Just do it. BE that person. You know the one. The one that tells your 14 year old cousins to watch Possession and ruin their lives forever. Do it. Pallbearer Press do some stark as hell designs, mainly in black and white almost death metal detail, but with slashes of colour to liven it up. This Possession tshirt is the tip of the iceberg for when it comes to gnarly designs from them. check it!

Pallbearer Press - Possession - $15

The Illustrated Mind - 80's (by Dave Roswell)

Holy shit I know. Usually tshirts with a multitude of film references on it are an absolute fucking disaster but Dave Roswells 80's tee is something else. Picking aspects or points in films for you to enjoy, not obvious things but a variety. Like the cover of the Dune soundtrack, or facehugger facehugging or the video cover to Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan (Richie made me do the full title) its just a lovingly made thing. The best of it is, theres a 90's one from him too and its JUST as cool.

The Illustrated Mind - 80's (by Dave Roswell) - £23



So aye, there you go. Put it on the credit card, don't tell your partner, sell yer toenails on fetlife, buy these tees. If not, have a nice wee peruse of the sellers, ye might find your next "Church Tshirt".


- Findlay 

Untombed and Exhumed: The Hidden (1987) / the Hidden 2 (1993)

Aliens are dicks.

It’s true. I mean they’re either mischievous arseholes or super malevolent pricks and what’s worse is: they don’t give a shit. Who’s gonna foot that bill when an alien spills paint on your car or destroys half your capital city with a condensed-blue death ray? Them?? Haha what ye gonna do tough guy? Email them a fucking invoice??? HAHA WHATEVER.

But, right, what if, the aliens brought down a weird interplanetary war that you weren’t even aware of and played it out HERE. On the streets. And all you had was a non-believing cop and an FBI agent to suss it out. Sounds like a tiny underperforming franchise called MEN IN BLACK, right? Wrong. These, my friends, are the proto-MIB films, The Hidden and The Hidden 2. Enjoy.

THE HIDDEN (1987)/ Jack Sholder/ New Line Cinema

Directed by Jack Sholder, The Hidden by all intent and purposes should be schlock-fest 9000, which it kind of is, but there’s ~craft~ to it. There’s a slickness and thrust to the directing that makes this film way more fun and cool than you’d think. Car Chases are break neck, fluorescent-light-on-bonnet, reflections in a night puddle, tyre screeching round corner blazes. The editing in gun fights and removal of frames, addition of shadows give everything such a fucking I m p a c t that you don’t even realise you’re sitting there first pumping through the whole thing.

The main alien in this is cool for the brief time we get to see it (as it is “hidden” in humans. No even an alien could enjoy that) as a gooey, insectoid little parasite, threatening 80s consumerism by reflecting its own mantra back on it. Want want want. Kill kill kill. Hey, this aliens stealing that fucking RADIO I was going to buy. HE’S THREATENING MY CAPITALISM. The aliens consumption even reaching the heady heights of taking a woman as a host and killing a guy during sex. It wants it all. Hedonism from the planet Pluto. The effects are great too, gnarly and goopy and full frontal agony as the transferral from host to host, revealing the parasite. Exposing it as weak outside the body, indestructible inside.

A pre-Twin Peaks Kyle McLachlan is here as an FBI agent and I couldn’t help but sit and daydream about how this could be Dale Coopers origin story. Retiring from chasing soul-jumping, body-expiring aliens for the rural mountain small-town chintzy banalities of murder and drama. He’s seen too much, now he wants too less. McLachlan and rusty cop Michael Nouri’s chemistry is pretty cool and they get a lot of fun lines in like when McLachlan’s character Lloyd tells Nouri’s character Tom about the possibility of aliens:

“I can read minds.”

“oh yeah what am I thinking?”

“youre thinking im full of shit”

“impressive”

“not really, youre easy to read.”

It’s just a heap of fucking fun. Plus if you needed extra selling, it shares almost the exact same soundtrack as TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2. Just to give you a wee hint of the music’s tone here. The film knows it’s a party film. Things explode, people die, chases are given, there’s ocean blue skies, 80s downtown LA, crash zooms and most importantly, that beautiful New Line Cinema sheen to it. Ye cannot beat it with a stick.

I had a big part about the ending too which, isn’t super spectacular, but does have a nice twist and a understated, meaningful final frame that I went “YESSSS” to, but I won’t spoil it. It’s a shame that barely anyone speaks about/has seen this because it’s so great. I was lucky enough to see it on 35mm at Edinburgh All Night Horror in a packed screen and it played like fucking gangbusters. Watch The Hidden. You’ll fucking love it.

The Hidden II (1993)/ Seth Pinsker/ New Line Cinema

Imagine pressing your lips to the lips of a loved one. Both your mouths open. Then what you do is, you inhale quickly but safely, giving the other person an exhilarating rush of breathlessness and you both laugh. Right, imagine doing that but you suck out too much air and your partner goes flat like a lilo. You’ve sucked them empty and they’re just a pepperami wrapper drifting down a gutter in the rain. That’s The Hidden 2.

Right, 90’s direct-to-videos are a shitemare of bad shooting, lazy concepts and actors that look like they’ve walked into the wrong shop. The Hidden 2 has all of this and a weeee bit more but there’s some stuff to enjoy. Like the effects are so cool and weird. We see much more of the parasites from the first film and they’re like these greasy, piccalilli coloured pakora alien wee dudes that look so ugly and gross you feel bad for the actors when they end up on their face and in their mouths. There’s also an incredibly violent body explosion at the end too that still looks SO great. There’s……um……also an ……..industrial warehouse dance sex party? That was cool. It kind of reminded me of the warehouse club from Hellraiser 3, except this time there’s no pinhead trapped in a statue, but rather wee pakora aliens trying to invade the one thing you hold sacred: Your body. If your body is a temple then these parasites are Lara fucking croft.

The film starts with a fake on-screen IBM transmission of backstory and facts and stats that remind me a bit of the transmissions from the start of alien3 and its fairly neat, but then it shows like 15 minutes of solid footage from the previous film, just to establish one minute of the new one. It’s just such a weird choice?

Apart from that, the film is so flat and dull and unlovingly made that it made me love it in a weird way. There’s a shoehorned love story between the female human lead and the male alien lead and it made me kind of freak. I should explain here that she’s the daughter of the cop Tom from the first Hidden. So she KNOWS full well that aliens are a nightmare in general, so banging them would be like your own mini-rubix cube of hang-ups. But oh well. There’s also some story about how the alien pods are looking for hosts to take over the world? It’s a fucking mess but I liked it in its own goofy, paceless, aimless way.

Here they are: coupla interplanetary dirties

Oh but, there’s an absolute banging techno track on here. Not even kidding as soon as I heard it I sat up from posting online about fucking an alien and went “OH SHIT”. Here it’s here.

BLOGGER DOESNT EMBED TEKNO SONGS

So aye, the Hidden 2. Like racing a Lamborghini in a bin bag full of skateboard wheels, it’ll never ever beat The Hidden but at least it exists for no reason.

-Findlay