PseudoPod 530: The Madness of Bill Dobbs: A Tale of Snuff Movies and Cannibal Cults
Show Notes
This is the author’s first sale
Pseudopod wants to direct your attention to a project by one of our Authors, Greg Stolze. This is a good time to go back and relisten to episode 317, Enzymes.
YOU is a novel, set in the universe of the democratic horror game Unknown Armies, which pits readers against a book that hates them while situating them in the person of a middle-aged businessman named Leo Evans.
Leo is divorced, a fan of racquet sports, and a cultist of the Necessary Servant—a quasi-religion he freely admits seems silly, except for the way it grants him extra senses and paranormal abilities. The chief cultist, however, is his ex-wife, and the two of them clash over a key question of what it means to truly “serve” with integrity.
In the process of hashing all this out, Leo must survive a couple attempts on his life, come to grips with an enchantment that makes him hate the person he previously loved most, and deal with lingering issues between himself and his son.
This novel is Kickstarting in February, check the trailer at www.gregstolze.com/you
The Madness of Bill Dobbs: A Tale of Snuff Movies and Cannibal Cults
By Sean Pearce
Eaters is regarded by some as a flawed masterpiece and an underground classic. To others, it is vile, racist, ethically bankrupt, and derivative.
It makes for peculiar viewing. The plot follows the formula of the Italian cannibal movies for which director Bill Dobbs had an unashamed fondness. An anthropological expedition into the Amazon jungle encounters and brutalises a tribe of ‘savages’ in the name of science, and find themselves pursued, captured, and finally gruesomely eaten alive.
(The film was originally going to be released as Dark-skinned Cannibals of the Tropics, though thankfully someone more enlightened than Dobbs suggested the title we now have. It almost goes without saying that Dobbs has been unanimously described as a completely unrepentant racist.)
Eaters is a movie with a mythology around it. Dobbs himself famously went insane shortly after release, and no less than three cast members died during location shooting (in what may be a rare flash of good taste, Dobbs chose not to use the footage of the unfortunate actress Lisa Springer’s fatal accident in the film), and, in a strange echo of Cannibal Holocaust before, Dobbs was briefly investigated by the authorities on suspicion of producing a snuff film. However, it was later revealed that Dobbs had in fact bribed an FBI agent into launching the investigation as a publicity stunt – it worked. (Continue Reading…)