Bleeding Skull!: A 1990’s Trash-horror odyssey is a three-hundred-page book, which looks at the wackiest, low grade, demented, and deranged horror films of the 1990s. The glossy though deliberately messily laid out tome takes in a selection of reviews from the Bleeding Skull team, with the tone of the reviews going from flippant and jokey, onto amusingly storytelling led, though to the more passioned and in-depth.

The book is a paperback- with a study colour cover on it, and the whole been perfectly bound- so it’ll certainly stand up to the dipping in and out this type of title will need. It’s sized just under A4, with nice fairly glossy paper stock inside.  The book's contents are a blend of text, loads of neat VHS covers, crazy stills, and random paper inserts. The whole thing is laid out in a deliberately messy and haphazard manner- which of course perfectly fits the tone of the films featured with-in.

The book opens with two introductions- the first is from Mark Polonia, who is most known for making classic SOV fare with his brother John in the ’80s/ 90’s- such as Splatter Farm, Feeders, Church Of The Dammed, Hallucinations & How to Slay a Vampire, though he still makes low budget horror films today. Next to his intro, we get a great picture of the two late teen Polonia with cheesy smiles on their faces holding up a severed head between them. His intro runs a page, and gives a great summing up of the charm/ attraction of trashy low-grade horror. Next, we get a two-page write-up about how/ when the Bleed Skull website was started in the early 2000s, and what it’s covered since its launch.

As we move into the main body of the book, we get a selection of reviews laid out in an alphabetic manner- with the reviews written by Joseph A. Ziemba, Annie Choi, and Zack Carlson- with each having their own take on reviewing the titles. And boy do we get a wacky and wonderful selection of titles- with even myself as a fairly seasoned trash horror fan not heard of quite a few of these titles. Here are an example of some of the more memorable/ bizarre- Attack Of The Serial Killers From Outer Space, Burglar From Hell, Death Metal Zombies, Goblet Of Gore, Lisa Cook’s Deadly Workout, Psycho Scarecrow, and Terror Of Blood Gym.

Each of the reviews run between a few hundred, to around five-to-six hundred words apiece- and they move between amusing and more fact/ background-based ones. And for the most part, they make for an entertaining read- and thankfully they are all down to earth & honest, so there’s no bland scholarly/ or academic analyses here- it’s real fans of these films commenting on them.

It’s certainly great to see the Bleeding Skull guys with this their second book following up 2013’s A 1980s Trash-Horror Odyssey. And if you enjoy any form of low budget horror fare/ creepy trash Bleeding Skull!: A 1990’s Trash-horror odyssey is most definitely a must-have item!