G2: Mortal Conquest – Nicholas Diak's Homepage

Personal / Website News

Dark Dead Things #2

Issue two of Dark Dead Things is officially out!

This issue contains my essay, “Correlating the Contents: Mimetic Desire in H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Call of Cthulhu’.” It can be purchased at the Dark Dead Things website or at Amazon.

BlueSky

I have an account at BlueSky now. I can be found at: @nicholasdiak.bsky.social. I’ll try posting there concurrently with Facebook and Twitter. And maybe Post and Tribel, but I don’t see many folks on those last two.

IMDB Profile

I have a profile at IMDB now!

Granted, there is not much there, but I think it’s pretty cool I’ve got to be in a few things. Here is a frame capture from Best.Work.Weekend.Ever. that you can kinda see me in:

I am in front of the T-shirt, way in the back. Michele and I also play dead bodies in There’s No Such Thing as Vampires – you can’t miss us in that.

Anyways, if you want to help me grow my acting CV, I am totally available to appear in documentaries, supplemental features on blu-rays, you name it!

CoKoCon Schedule

The schedule for CoKoCon 2023 is online. You can find Michele and I on the following panels:

Saturday Sept 2 9pm – Fiesta Ballroom 2: From EC Comics to Shudder: Horror Comics That Excite and Scare Us
Sunday Sept 3 6pm – Coronado: Creepy, Crawly, Otherworldly Bumps in the Night, or Cosmic Horror Films
Monday Sept 4 1pm – Coronado: 1pm: Weird West in Popular Culture

I’ll be on premises the entire con, so feel free to hunt me down to say hi! Michele and I will also have a table we were sill be selling and signing books.

Scholars from the Edge of Time

New episode of Scholars from the Edge of Time is now online.

In this episode, Michele and I discuss the 1999 Highlander/Mortal Kombat hybrid film, G2: Mortal Conquest. Check it out on YouTube!

Publishing Recap

Below is a recap of my publishing endeavors so far in 2023.

Published in February, this collection contains my essay “Dance or Dēcēdere: Gladiator and Industrial Music Sampling.”

Vernon Press Product Page

Published in May, this issue of Weird Tales contains my essay “When the Stars are Right.”

Weird Tales Product Page

Published in late March, the first issue of the zine Footage Fiends, contains my essay “Analisi Della Cosa: Found Footage in Caltiki and Italian Theater Going Practices.”

Limited to 50 physical copies.

Order via Patreon.

Published in early August, Dark Dead Things #2 contains my essay “Correlating the Contents: Mimetic Desire in H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Call of Cthulhu’.”

Order via Dark Dead Thingswebsite.

Miscellaneous Tidbits

Autograph Roundup

These past few months I’ve gotten into the habit of sharing some of my autographed items (mostly DVDs right now) on social media. Figure I can share them here too because I think I have some rad stuff.

First up is my copy of Contamination signed by director Luigi Cozzi. I remember first getting into Italo-horror and exploitation films being exchanged with the poster art. It looks so ominous. When I finally watched the movie, it turned out to be amazing. The beginning is just like Zombi but then you got all the exploding alien eggs. The final 1/3 of the film is like a spy-fi movie. Simple film that aims big and succeeds. I snail mailed my DVD sleeve to Cozzi way back in the aughts and he was gracious to sign it for me.

Next up is Nightbeast signed by director Don Dohler’s son, Greg Dohler, who acted in his dad’s films. Dohler was the king of 80s creature features. Another sleeve I snail mailed to Dohler asking for an autograph (always include as SASE folks!).

Abominable is a damn fine cryptid film full of cameo actors, both old guard and (then) new school. My copy was signed by Lloyd Braun himself, Matt McCoy, at a Hollywood Collector’s Show in Burbank in the late 2000s/early 2010s.

I remember being super hyped for the first Transformers movie when it was released and enjoying it. I saw the second one and was really disappointed, and have not seen any since. I might give Transformers: The Last Knight a watch because of the Arthurian/peplum elements.

This special edition of Transformers came out in the 2000s, back when super crazy special editions were all the rage. The DVD comes housed in am Optimus Prime that folds out. It’s pretty cool!

I had my copy signed by Mark Ryan who voiced Bumble Bee. He was a guest at a tiny comic book convention in Seattle back in the 2000s. Over time the silver ink from the booklet got a little stuck to the plastic box. Doh!

In the latter half of the 2000s Michele and I became Oliver Gruner super fans and were buying as many films as he was in as possible. Once of those films was Velocity Trap and boy is it a fun film. Basically a Die Hard in space. I have my DVD signed by a lot of folks: Gruner himself (his signature is in ballpoint pin and hard to see, but it’s under Bruce’s name), Bruce Weitz, James C. Burns, and Jaason Simmons.

There was a small, tiny window in the mid-2000s, after MST3K concluded, but before Film Crew, Rifftrax, and Cinematic Titanic, that Mike Nelson was doing solo commentaries for Legend Films. So, if you wanted MST3K-like content, this was the way to go. One of those releases of a colorized version of Plan 9 from Outer Space that came pre-signed by Nelson and also with an air freshener (because the movie stinks?). Great version of the cult film.

Apparently the North American region, Blu-ray release of Dawn of the Dead is super rare and OOP. Licensing issues I believe? I don’t have a Blu-ray of that classic film, but I do have this huge digipack edition Anchor Bay put out. There’s a few different versions of Dawn of the Dead in this edition. I had Ken Foree sign ming.

Can’t have Dawn of the Dead without following it up with Day of the Dead. Another digipack edition put out by Anchor Bay, mine is signed by Howard Sherman (Bub!) and Terry Alexander. I believe I met them both at a Crypticon in SeaTac back in the late 2000s.

And that is a recap of the last week or so of autographed stuff I shared across my social medias. If you want to see more of them, give me a follow!

Personal / Website News

Dark Dead Things #2

The weird fiction/poetry literary magazine Dark Dead Things is publishing their second issue. I’m incredibly honored to be included in this issue with my essay on a Rene Girard reading of Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu.”

The issue can be ordered from the Dark Dead Things webshop as a bundle with a rad T-shirt of Meowlister Crowley. Issue 1 is still available, so check that out too and supporting this indie endeavor.

Sincere gratitude to Mike Salinas for including me in this issue.

Stranger Things Essay Citation

My essay, “Lost Nights and Dangerous Days: Unraveling the Relationship Between Stranger Things and Synthwave” that was published in Kevin Wetmore’s book, Uncovering Stranger Things, has been cited in Jutta Steiner’s book Nostalgie Im Upside Down: Das progressive Potenzial von Nostalgie in Der Retro-Serie Stranger Things.

My Stranger Things/synthwave essay continues to be my most cited piece of writing. Very flattered!

Bibliography Updates

I’m increasing seeing other texts aside from The New Peplum becoming cited and reviewed. Because of that I am creating subpages for some of these works with more detail. If you click the dropdown on the Bibliography menu you’ll start seeing them. These updates are a work in process, but I look forward to sharing more detail about these pieces I’ve composed or edited over the years.

Atlantis, the Lost Continent

A new episode of Scholars from the Edge of time is now online! In this episode Michele and I discuss the 1961 American sword and sandal film, Atlantis, the Lost Continent. Check it out on YouTube.

Publishing Recap

Below is a recap of my publishing endeavors so far in 2023.

Published in February, this collection contains my essay “Dance or Dēcēdere: Gladiator and Industrial Music Sampling.”

Vernon Press Product Page

Published in May, this issue of Weird Tales contains my essay “When the Stars are Right.”

Weird Tales Product Page

Published in late March, the first issue of the zine Footage Fiends, contains my essay “Analisi Della Cosa: Found Footage in Caltiki and Italian Theater Going Practices.”

Limited to 50 physical copies.

Order via Patreon.

Published in early August, the second issue of Dark Dead Things contains my essay “Correlating the Contents: Mimetic Desire in H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Call of Cthulhu’.”

Order at Dark Dead Things.

Miscellaneous Tidbits

CFP: Ancient World, Modern Music II at CAMWS 2024

Dr. Jeremy Swist has a new CFP that’s live:

An organized panel to be proposed for the 120th annual meeting of the Classical Association of the Middle West & South, April 3rd – 6th, 2024 in St. Louis, Missouri, USA at the invitation of Washington University, St. Louis.

After a successful 1st edition of the panel in 2022 at Winston Salem, we are seeking abstracts for another panel on the reception of antiquity in modern music. 15-minute papers on the topic may discuss any genre of modern & popular music, including folk & country, rock & metal, hip-hop & pop, and theater & soundtracks, and may focus on lyrics, album artwork, music videos, live performances, or the music itself. We are particularly interested in questions of how musicians integrate ancient culture, myth, and art into a modern medium, and how they read antiquity in response to the personal, the aesthetic, & the political.

Send 300-word abstracts and questions to Jeremy Swist (swistjj@miamioh.edu) by 15th August 2023. Potential panelists must commit to present in person if accepted.

Recent Peplum Acquisitions

I’ve plucked up two peplum films recently to add to the library.

First is Land of the Pharaohs which just got the Blu-ray treatment this past June. Michele and I recently talked about this movie on Scholars from the Edge of Time (YouTube video link here) and I really dug it! When I saw Warner Archive was going to do a new version of it I had to pre-order it.

Next is an old release of a movie called G2: Mortal Conquest. Apparently this movie is a re-worked version of the 1995 movie Gladiator Cop. A name like Gladiator Cop, I gotta watch it! However it’s OOP and kinda pricy, so I’ll pluck up a copy later. In the meantime, this alternate version in the form of G2 will have to do. I remember Daniel Bernhardt from Future War which was on MST3K, which was baaaaad. So, I am hoping this movie will be just as campy fun.

Secret Agent Barbie GBA Game

Last weekend was Barbenheimer – when two blockbuster films, Barbie and Oppenheimer, got released the same weekend. It looked like a pretty fun pop culture event, two movies at the polar opposites of tone and subject matter, but linked none-the-less.

I didn’t get a chance to partake, but I’ll definitely watch both movies when they are released on Blu-ray. In the meantime, just for fun, I’ll share the odd Barbie artifact in my collection: a complete, in box (CIB) copy of Secret Agent Barbie: Royal Jewels Mission.

I bought this game long ago, I believe at the SoCal Retro Gaming Expo in Ontario, CA. I don’t have many CIB retro games in my collection (then and now), and I recall this game being extremely cheap. It was also a time, I believe, I was knee deep in spy-fi studies when Michele was working on her James Bond book. So because of all of that, I plucked up this game when I happened upon it. I recall playing it for a bit on my Retron-5 and enjoying it. Perhaps I’ll have to give it a proper play through.

Anyways, a rare opportunity to see a CIB Barbie game: box, cartridge, poster, manual, and Nintendo booklet. Not pictured is my plastic case I keep the game in to keep it in the best condition I can (the outer box is a bit bent in though).