Some sad news was reported over at The Examiner as they report that Zelda Rubinstein, who rose to fame as the diminutive medium in the Poltergeist movie trilogy, is critically ill at Cedar Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. She reportedly has been hospitalized for several weeks, suffers organ failure and has been removed from life support. Rubinstein is 76 years old. The first Poltergeist was released in 1982, followed by sequels in 1986 and 1988. In other news, Fangoria reported today that Fango/Gorezone contributor Charlie (Chas.) Balun died on Friday, December 18, after a prolonged and courageous battle with cancer. He was 61. The writer contributed to the genre by penning various novels including ” Horror Holocaust” and “Beyond Horror Holocaust.”
Below is a special eulogy for Chas Balun written by Bloody Disgusting friend Josh Slates:

Before I had ever heard of Facets Video or realized that there were classified ads in the back pages of “Fangoria” magazine (and certainly long before I ever attended a film festival or knew was a “Brattle” was) it was Chas. Balun who fostered my insatiable curiosity for the more extreme fringes of world cinema. A friend of mine just texted me and informed me that Mr. Balun succumbed to cancer on December 18th, 2009 at the age of 61.

I grew up in a small college town by the name of Columbia, Missouri and was also an anxious and awkward movie nerd on the level of caricature. By the time I entered high school in the early nineties, my enthusiasm for the medium had also surely surpassed my actual access to the classics and not-so-classics of the past and present moviegoing experience. Al’s Video had since shuttered, years would pass before Ninth Street Video hit the scene and the 16mm screenings at the University of Missouri’s Ellis Library were only twice a week.

Sure, there were outfits like Home Film Festival that would allow you to rent rare VHS titles through the USPS postal service (I’d like to thank them for Abel Ferrara’s “Ms. 45” and Atom Egoyan’s “Speaking Parts”) but that wasn’t the most spontaneous way to go about it. I had a very fully-formed opinion of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s body of work as far back in 1993, as I had read every book on Pasolini that was available from interlibrary loan from the Daniel Boone Public Library. Nevermind that I had never actually seen any of his films; it wasn’t until 1999 that I finally saw “Teorema,” which I rented from Video Americain in Baltimore. Soon after I saw “Salo,” and soon after that I pretty much gave up.

So one Saturday night way back when, I ran into my friend Simon Barrett outside the Calvary Episcopal Church on Ninth Street. He was trying to explain who Dario Argento was and why he mattered as a producer and director. I had only seen a dubbed VHS copy of Lamberto Bava’s “Demons” that I rented from the Green Meadows Video Visions when I was home sick from school one day. I didn’t understand what the fuss was about. If you’ve ever met Simon, you know that he’s an insistent lot.

I had also never heard of the author Chas. Balun, whose credits included the books “Ninth and Hell Street” and “The Deep Red Horror Handbook,” and who had also made a name for himself as a designer of some gnarly silk-screened horror-themed T-shirts and wall art.

To prove his point, Simon started foisting Chas. Balun’s books in my face, such as “The Gore Score,” which would rate films I had never heard of in terms of skulls (one out of four) and a “gore score” (zero through ten). His prose was filled with evocative inventions of literary indulgence, my favorite being that of the “chunkblower”; as in, a he or she who blows chunks (in other words, any viewer without the strength of stomach to weather a viewing of any movie that merited a 10 on the “gore score”). As an adjective, it was equally fair game.

Balun’s non-fiction work represented a sampling of the pulse of eighties horror and exploitation cinema, from Tobe Hooper’s maltreatment at the hands of Golan and Globus during the post-production of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2” to items of lore such as a rumored alternate ending to Dan O’Bannon’s “Return of the Living Dead.” He demonstrated his opinionated temperament with essays bemoaning the chilling effect of the PG-13 rating on the horror film world (I’ll refer you to 1994’s “Bled to Death: Horror Eats Itself”) in equal parts to his overabundant enthusiasms for such cinematic obscenities as “Story of Ricky” and “Run and Kill.”

Aside from the New Zealand Film Commission, Chas. Balun was probably also the earliest champion of Peter Jackson’s early films, “Bad Taste” and “Meet the Feebles.” I’ll have to admit that I wasn’t a fan of either upon first viewing, but it is to Balun’s credit that he taught me how to recognize the silliness underlying the upsetting surface qualities of both. He was dissecting pseudo-documentary Italian cannibal films such as “Cannibal Holocaust” long before enterprising filmmakers learned to crib from them. Notwithstanding his background in horror, he was also as ravenous a fan of contemporary Hong Kong cinema as anyone I’ve ever met, and his personal video collection demonstrated that diversity. He was, in short, a relentless cheerleader for iconoclastic, ultra-subversive world cinema … most of it being incredibly difficult to obtain in the pre-internet (postal exclusive) era of video trading.

I guess you could also say that Chas. Balun was a master salesman in that he both created a demand for fringe world horror cinema and then satiated the market for it. If requested, he would mail you a stapled and photocopied list of his own personal collection of incredibly rare films, which he would then sometimes trade for comparably rare films (or, more often, accepting money orders from desperate movie nerds who were willing to pay $17 postpaid for a VHS dub of the Japanese laserdisc of “Twitch of the Death Nerve”).

Simon culled together most of his lunch money and I sold most of my music CDs for cash so the two of us could finance something approximating a contemporary genre cinema appreciation binge with Chas. Balun as our mad-hatter, chunkblowing chaperone. The tapes started piling up: “Braindead (UNCUT).” “Tiger on Beat.” “El Topo.” “Hard-Boiled.” “Armour of God.” “Tetsuo.” “Deep Red.” “Phenomena.” “Bullet in the Head.” “A Better Tomorrow II.” “Café Flesh.” “Tetsuo II: Body Hammer.” “Sex and Zen.” Pray tell, what would my college years have amounted to without that VHS tape of “Sex and Zen”?

But “City on Fire” … man, if only I had been more vocal about my suspicions (nay, certainty) that Quentin Tarantino had mined that Ringo Lam police actioner for inspiration for his own eerily similar “Reservoir Dogs” five years later. Mike White (“not that Mike White”) beat me to it, but did it with an incredible eloquence in “Who Do You Think You’re Fooling?” that I would have been hard-pressed to match. Just imagine, we were still so many years away from the ubiquitousness of talkback forums and the suffocating inanity of the Internet Movie Database discussion boards.

One of the reasons I was so sad to hear of Chas. Balun’s passing is that I think I might have been a much less adventurous moviegoer if it were not for my education-of-sorts at his hands. Perusing through his books and video collection at such an impressionable age taught me to enjoy a certain sense of humor about the medium and savor the non-sequitur spectacle of a kinetically chaotic genre film. If it weren’t for him, right now I would probably be proofreading the footnotes of an interminable 700-page dissertation on Hou Hsiao-Hsien and not writing this bittersweet appreciation.

Realizing how casually I came to discard Balun’s original VHS dubs of films that would (in turn and often inexplicably) receive digitally-remastered Region 1 NTSC DVD releases, I was relieved to find an old VHS copy of “Inferno (UNCUT VERSION)” still lurking on my shelf. And, as a matter of fact, I recently loaned my Balun-signature VHS tape of “Twitch of the Death Nerve” to a friend of mine who was desperately searching for a copy this last Halloween and called me in a panic when he learned that no video store in the area stocked it. I think it’s fun to think of Chas. Balun as still sort of with us, prankishly sharing his passion for over-the-top genre cinema with the occasional unsuspecting audience.