RED LIGHT BYTES: Updates & Culture (6-3-2024)

The Latest From Your Favorite Cyberpulp + Some Tastemaking!

OVERVIEW

Hang on a minute? What’s that doing there?

Well friends, we’re consolidating the two newsletters back into one this week because of an odd predicament. We are SO close to having everything lined up to give you the works on what 365 Infantry: Summer 2024 looks like, but we have a few items snagged in the production process, so I don’t want to go full “The #9 Special” without those items in tow. Dropping three newsletters on you and clogging up the inbox is not how we roll.

It also means that this is our FINAL regular newsletter. We always take a grace period after the release of a new issue, so no new stories or updates for the rest of June after next week. Besides hearing from us should all go well concerning a certain sale, everything fires back up on July 1st, right on the button.

No guarantee on when that second newsletter drops (Wednesday ideally, Friday at the latest), but in the meantime, the updates stand as follows:

• 4/6 Sheets of Art are COMPLETE

• All Stories Are Being Edited

• Alan Firedale Episode 6 is Being Edited

• Bonus Article for The Quarterly is Being Written

To tip my hand a little, this summer’s issue is one of the gnarlier ones. Valentina and The Hunters are back in the wild, hunting down their devilish torture dome, and come face-to-face with another pack of unsavory characters, Lita and Professor Smith have quite the escapade in a part of Haven yet unseen, and General Knox is gearing up to take his war with A.C.E.S. to the next level. There’s a bit more Mad Max in the proceedings this summer, in the spirit of George Miller’s return to the Australian Wastes with Furiosa and just because we kinda felt like it! And needless to say, Alan Firedale is going to have quite the time sleeping off this next adventure. Dare I say, it’s out of this world!

HOUSEKEEPING

Speaking of the Desert Delinquent, with a new soundtrack album added to our growing library of musical offerings, I’ll take this time to remind you that if you love this series, you want to support us, but you have a hard time keeping track of what’s been released and where to go, use our Linktree to navigate our wide array of books, music and merch to keep us riding high.

Alongside our promise to create an official one-and-done guide to getting into 365 Infantry, we hope to have a store front in the not-too-distant future that, at bare minimum, will serve as an easy-to-use directory for where you can find our projects beyond this newsletter. In the meantime, that’s what Linktree is for!

I’ll also add something that I’ve been meaning to mention. When I enrolled all 365 eBooks into Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited service, I did so assuming that its exclusivity agreement concerned only the books the stories were assembled into, not the individual stories themselves.

I was wrong.

Enrolling in KDP Select means no “preview chapters” on other platforms, which would mean me nuking the publishing of stories here.

As you can imagine, that ain’t happening.

The books’ 90 day-runs end in June and July (varies between titles), so if you want to help support us and you already are subscribed to Kindle Unlimited, take advantage of the eBooks included with the service while you can! We will no longer be enrolling future books into the program.

REVIEW: Death Riders (1976)

With a Mad Max side-quest out in theaters, I’ve started thinking a lot about stunt performers. A natural line of thought, seeing as that series in particular has produced some of the most psychotic stunt work in film history. Guy Norris’ bone-snapping front-flip in Road Warrior alone is the stuff of legend. And while it’s tempting to dredge out the series, or some other great works of hairbrained cinematic insanity (car crash king H. B. Halicki of Gone in 60 Seconds fame, for instance), when I think about stunts, and my brain is permanently wired to dig up obscure oddities, I think back to a little documentary I discovered ages ago.

Death Riders is an American mondo film—a film that explores truly surreal acts in classic exploitation film fashion. Whereas Italian fare like Mondo Cane explore rituals of soil and blood, Death Riders explore rituals of fire and steel. This low-budget documentary follows the balls-out bizarre escapades of a stunt troupe of mostly 17-18 year-olds who entertain fairgrounds (and nudist colonies) with their (usually) death-defying stunts. A terrific time capsule for a post-Evel Knievel world, one where young guys go all out on the wildest shit imaginable, almost for the hell of it if nothing else. The whole attitude is summed up best by one of them, who says that the best thing about stunt performing is “staying alive so you can meet all the chicks afterward. A single guy has it made.”

Shot in 1974 and armed with the grit and grain of a 16mm shoot (some DP duties were helmed by Hollywood legend Vilmos Zsigmond), it exists in the same cozy space as C-list grindhouse fodder or home movies from the period, blessed with a bona fide “you had to be there” verisimilitude. You will know the smell of a fresh grassy field, the octane-haze of a dirt track, the ephemera of a rural fairground before the film wraps, you just will.

It does commit to its authentic observation of the Death Riders stunt team, so much so that it loses the focus other films like Bruce Brown’s 1966 surfer classic Endless Summer holds, with lots of these young bucks clearly not built for being on camera. That said, nothing can dull the gonzo stunt work on display. Bikers with sparks blasting off their backs, simple-looking stunts that can go off-the-rails fast, and the added realization that half these guys aren’t even out of high school (or almost certainly dropped out). Even without a hype-man to liven the soundtrack, there is a very real sense that things could turn to snuff with one wrong turn of the wheel.

In the end, Death Riders proves a slice-of-life approach to a truly intense profession, and a wonderful time-capsule of vintage 70s motoring and stunt shows. Bonus points for deadpan narration that makes everyone sound like an army of Steven Wrights. There’s a low-quality print of the film circulating on YouTube, but if you want to be a hero and support some physical media, the good folks at The Video Beat have also released the film on DVD, and its how yours truly was able to enjoy it.

CONCLUSION

Like our mid-70s mad lads, we gotta rock hard and ride like hell to get 365 Infantry out the door on time, but while you’re waiting, enjoy our 100th story (still feels weird typing that out!) “The 10-Ton Runaway” and get ready for an electrifying new issue of your favorite cyberpulp.

May God Bless You and This Force. Be Seeing You!

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