Gabe Powers
Gabe Powers lives and works in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota. Now unemployed he spends most of his time sitting before the television watching movies, while collecting a diminishing number of insurance checks. He's written for DVDActive.com for about five years now, and racked up over 500 reviews, and was even linked on wikipedia.com. Gabe is also involved in several forms of art and design, and has been known to obsessively re-record the same guitar tracks on his iMac ad nauseam.
So I took off Friday afternoon, spent the night in Madison with friends, and
arrived in Chicago (technically Rosemont) around 11pm (which, just so you know,
is two hours earlier then I usually wake up). This year was the busiest, but
there were also fewer dealer tables. Most of all I missed seeing my friend Tony
from xploitedcinema.com, who usually has a delectable array of foreign DVDs. So
despite going in with more money in pocket then ever before, I’ve walked out
with the least amount of swag.
I’ve had my eye on the Region 2 two disc special edition of
Creepshow for some time now, and the gentlemen that produced the feature length
documentary was at Synapse’s table. He was trying to sell the disc to some
other dude, and I was eavesdropping. He sold me. Later I came back to the
Synapse table and bought Kei Fujiwara’s nightmarish Organ, which is out of
print. Then I found a decent bootleg of Joe D’Amato’s Absurd, which is one of
two movies I went to the convention willing to buy on burned disc (the other is
the Big Foot splatter spectacular Night of the Demon). I also picked out that
They Live ‘Obey’ T-shirt. The seller had a Goblin (the band) shirt too, but it
was only XL, which would look retarded on my scrawny frame.
Though Tony was missing, I did get to meet former DVDActive
writer Dustin McNeil, in person, which is the first time I’ve met any DVDActive
staff in person. Dustin is now working as a handler for Phantasm’s stars, and
assisting in some documentary-ish stuff. I had misread the Flashback Weekend’s
main site, and thought that there were only going to be Phantasm stars signing
stuff. I’m not really all that into autographs, I really hate lines, so I
wasn’t even going to bother, no offense meant towards any members of the
Phantasm team (I was thrilled to casually walk by and exchange smiles with Angus Schrimm).
But then I got there, and saw that George Romero was still
signing. Dawn of the Dead is my all time favorite film, and I couldn’t pass it
up. There were dozens of 8x10s available for signing. I picked one featuring
both Romero and Dario Argento. I figure there’s a possibility of meeting
Argento someday too. I ended up being the third to last autograph he signed,
and I could tell that he wanted to get out of there, so I was sure to get out
of his way after a hearty hand shake.
On the way out I picked up a flyer for a Minnesota horror convention. I had no idea
there was a Minnesota
convention. This is the third one. The fucking thing takes place less then five
miles from my house. I’m an awful fan.
The surprises didn’t stop. The area around the hotel was
very busy. I was joined this year, as I have been every year, by my friend
Blake, a comic book geek who I drag along. Blake and I noticed a whole lot of
Cosplayers walking across the street from the Flashback convention. It’s Wizard
World Chicago, and Blake didn’t know. I dragged him to Flashback, he gets to
drag me to Wizard World. Apparently Bruce Timm is going to be there for Batman
Gotham Knights. That’s enough reason for me.
