Media hound Rob Zombie’s latest musical release, after the successful re-launch and re-imagining of the Halloween franchise this past August, is a live collection of songs recorded in 2006 as part of the Educated Horses tour. The disc, popping in at over an hour, and containing 18 songs, is a great mix of big radio hits and somewhat lower key songs dug deep from within the artist’s long career, even harking back to the days of White Zombie.

The massive production values of the live shows certainly come out to play here as the overall sound of the disc is loud, amplified, and certainly live with the banging drums and screeching guitars sometimes drowning out Zombie’s vocals. The crowd is ever present throughout, but, in opposition to most live albums around, either Zombie’s interaction with them is cut for the sake of time, or each concert is just one song after another until its all done kind of affair. The former could be understood, while the latter would certainly be disappointing. For those who have never made it to a Zombie show, they may feel as though the very fan-oriented singer/songwriter/director lacks that extra bit of stage presence.

As mentioned before, track selection ranges from the big hits like “Dragula,”; “Living Dead Girl,”; and “More Human than Human“; to deeper cuts like “House of 1000 Corpses“; and “Sawdust in the Blood.”; Zombie took a bit of flack for the entire Educated Horses album do to its decidedly different tone in comparison to the more macabre earlier works by the artists, so it’s nice to see him so vehemently include even deeper tracks from that disc.

The biggest disappointment of all is the once promised live DVD and highly anticipated art book were not released in tandem with the album, as once suspected, and will be streeting early 2008. Fans may take this as a way to grab even more money from them by selling the two sets separately, albeit a bundle pack containing all three items is all but a given next spring.

Overall, Zombie Live is a standard live album with great production values, no real surprises or new material, and just a general, middle-of-the-road type release to let Zombie’s legion of fans know that he’s still making music, touring, and coming to get you.

It’s Saturday and another disappointing B-movie from the Sci-Fi channel, this time capitalizing on the upcoming Halloween holiday with Headless Horseman. Forgetting everything that happened in the Washington Irving story of Sleepy Hollow and its terrified residents, Horseman puts a more sinister spin on the tale of the headless equestrian owing up his existence to a deal with the devil for some backwards, hillbilly town to continue to exist.

Of course, in the vein of Rob Zombie’s colorful collection of characters from House of 1000 Corpses, the town is filled with brain dead hicks that sabotage cars every couple of years so the horseman can collect seven heads and continue to be appeased. The seven teenagers (how convenient) traveling to a party are the standard, cookie cutter staples including the cocksure leader, bitchy girlfriend, closed off sensitive bookworm who becomes the hero, the girl the bookworm likes, the bookworm’s best friend, etc. With no surprise, each is picked off, one by one, in a series of been-there-done-that deaths that don’t even compare to the most mundane horror films.

The movie continually strings along the staples of horror films, but being on cable, keeps away the gratuitous sex and nudity which usually saves your two hours, just a little bit. Instead we get a side boob shot of one of the mysterious towns’ people curiously changing in front of a door.

The special effects aren’t even up to Alien Apocalypse B-movie standards with most of the CG work done by, what seems like, a graduate student earning credits at DeVry. When seeing a shot of the horseman carrying out a head, it’s almost humorous how the actor has to keep his hand steady and in the same place (a foot from his body) so that the effects could later be put in.

There’s a point in the middle of the movie where you just feel bad for some of the actors having to endure the dialog, most of which is nonsensical, usually equating to “we have to get to the bridge and get help” only, like all horror movie participants, they stick around, trying to fight rather than run. You, in the audience, if you made it this far, simply stare in disbelief at how people can still write scripts that feature such annoying and dumb characters.

Zachary Weintraub’s script could feature any number of antagonists in the role of a monster collecting heads; it just worked out well to have a headless horseman around Halloween it would seem. Couple that with color-by-numbers direction, drama school acting, and a general lack of cinematography and there just isn’t much to like about Headless Horseman. The film is yet another generic, cookie-cutter movie spat out by those who didn’t make it to Hollywood, finding a home on cable, and making the next two hours of your life purely inconsequential.