Gene Willow

I'm Gene Willow — the author of this blog.

 

My three greatest passions are old exploitation films, music, and France. My blog is dedicated to the first two, and the third one often lurks between the lines.

 

I like learning interesting facts and sharing them with like-minded people. Apart from writing my blog, I used to have an online shop for exploitation film fans where I sold B-movie T-shirts (and other clothing) with prints based on images from cult classic movies. However, now I just offer my B-movie shirt prints for free.

 

I started this blog with writing articles about films based on my own impression after viewing them and interesting information I could find online about them.

Then I started doing something much more interesting — going for first-hand knowledge by interviewing notable personas.

 

To date, I've interviewed the actresses Pamela Stanford and Fanny Magier (who worked with Jess Franco and Jean Rollin respectively), Véronique Djaouti-Travers (a close friend and assistant of Jean Rollin who has also played three roles in his films), Nigel Wingrove (a movie director and the owner of Redemption Films), and Ed Seeman (Eduardo Cemano) (a cult American adult film director and artist).

 

As an example, here is a video on my blog's YouTube channel (to which you may want to subscribe) where Nigel Wingrove tells me how he managed to literally force the British Government to legalize adult films.

 

 

Sometimes, I also find resources in French and translate them to English, making them available to a wider audience (interviews with Marie-Pierre Castel and Françoise Pascal, various facts in articles about French films, notably La Goulve and La Papesse).

Now, let me go over each of the main art forms I'm interested in and to which this blog is dedicated.

Films

The films I enjoy most are:

• made in the 70's
• French
  
• about something supernatural and mysterious: sects of devil worshipers, vampires, or at least creepy aristocrats doing some dirty business in their luxury mansions.
  

My favorite film ever is Fascination by Jean Rollin, who is also my favorite director.

Other notable directors whose works I love are Walerian Borowczyk, Jess Franco, Jose Benazeraf, Jose Larraz, Mario Mercier... However, I also like and write about American films, and sometimes about modern ones.

 

What I'm not much interested in is mainstream, including big production cult horror films that everybody knows. I gravitate to the more obscure and sleazier side of cinema. However, I gladly make an exception for a French film, including comedies, dramas, erotic movies, and more.

I don't like films focused on gore and humiliation. When it comes to horrors, I prefer the ones focusing on mystery.

To learn more about my tastes and to discover new film titles in your favorite topic categories, you can use my list of more than a hundred European exploitation films that I've watched, liked, categorized, and arranged for you.

Music

There are many genres I enjoy, so here are only a few main ones: old rock and heavy metal, notably death metal; witch house and other genres of dark electronic music; post-rock; 80's French pop. I listen to little music released after 1995, because of the loudness war that started in 1995-1996 and has been degrading the sound of most recordings since then.

I have fewer music-related posts than the ones about cinema, but I do publish something once in a while.

Apart from writing here, I am also a bedroom rock star with a YouTube channel where I publish my music videos. I mostly play acoustic death metal and heavy metal/hard rock songs (acoustic death metal means that I literally play death metal on my acoustic guitar, without distortion, and it sounds as heavy as normal death metal).

 

I shoot home-made (and street-made) parody music videos for songs I record. For now, all of those songs are covers and parodies. Maybe this will change in the future.

 

Sometimes I also film humorous videos unrelated to music.

 

I have older recordings of other music genres too. You can see them all on my Bandcamp and download for free in their full dynamic range.

 

Below, I'm providing links to my social media pages where I post updates about my new blog posts as well as less related things. You are welcome to befriend or follow me.

 

Find Me Here:

1. Subscribe to Escapist's Advisor's YouTube channel
   
2. Subscribe to my acoustic heavy metal and rock music YouTube channel 
3. Befriend me on my Facebook human page
4. Follow my official Facebook fanpage
5. Follow me on Twitter
6. Contact email: genesinglemail@gmail.com
   

Feel free to send me a friend request, but along with a message, please, so I will know how you learned about me and that you aren't a spam profile.

 

Note, however, that social media algorithms make this way of following very unreliable: they don't show you all updates. They pick for you which updates from your friends or followed pages to show you and which ones to hide.

 

So if you want to be sure you will never miss the most interesting news from me, subscribe by email (the subscription form is further down this page). This way I will email you about new posts and other interesting news directly. I never spam with anything irrelevant.

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I created this blog for like-minded people with weird taste for unpopular, obscure, and sleazy films and music. If you feel our tastes are similar, let's be email friends. You can also reach out to me if you need help in finding any rare film or music mentioned in by blog.

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