This week is a bit weird. Yesterday felt like Friday, and on top of that I have the feeling that January is only just getting started. But the fact of the matter is that we already arrived at the end of the month with only this evening left. Yet there I was in December 2023 planning to post about Killarmy in January. Well that did not turn out as planned. The month itself had some damn cold weeks up here in the Northern hemisphere. So cold that the clear mornings turned into a literal Red Dawn. Even with that ominous beautiful daily reminder of incoming doom I ended up writing in the last hours.
In my previous post I wrote about how Killarmy’s third album deserved a better name that was more in line with the previous two. Since, I have been going back over the second album, Dirty Weaponry. Which gave me a podcast that bored me even at 1,5 times the speed. A remarkable feat if you ask me. More interesting though, while looking into Dirty Weaponry I actually discovered a 1990 album called Dirty Weapons, by Killer Dwarfs, a Canadian hard rock band.1 The similarities between the name of the group and the title of the album are so close, that one would almost wonder if this was a starting point for the group. Something I would follow up were it not for the simple fact that the name of the Killarmy comes from the Shaw Brothers movie Killer Army.2 Furthermore, the term dirty weapons is a broad term within the military that took more foothold after the fall of the Soviet Union due to nuclear material going missing. Which would play into the hands of the existence of so called dirty bombs.
Something else I did not know until recently, was that the quotes on the album are from the cartoon series Todd Mcfarlane’s Spawn. So far I have only had time to watch the first episode of the short lived series.3 But the style immediately struck me and reminded me of an adult version of Batman Beyond. Looking forward to watching the rest and see what it brings. For clarification, I am not familiar with the comic, and it could be that it just takes style notes from there.
The voice over of Spawn that they spliced into the Dirty Weaponry was a perfect fit. The reflections on fighting & warriors always sounded like it came from some bleak 70’s/80’s movie. It actually was a perfect fit when I was editing the video for Red Dawn with the scenes of Red Dawn. Which brings me to this second version of the video focused on January, that still holds up pretty well.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_Dwarfs) ↩︎
- The correct name would be The Rebel Intruders. Killer Army was an alias that was used in the foreign markets. The original name is ????. https://hkmdb.com/db/movies/view.mhtml?id=6149&display_set=eng ↩︎
- The animated series ran for only 3 seasons with a total of 18 episodes. With a running time of about 26 to 30 minutes each. ↩︎