R.I.P. Nick Walters AKA Hack Movies’ Nick Head


Last night I was invited by a lady friend to watch her play volleyball. Afterward, we went to a small bar in town where I immediately ran into an acquaintance I rarely ever see. The last time I saw him a few months ago, we caught up and traded stories about our mutual friend Nick who neither of us had seen in quite some time.

Last night when I saw this friend he asked me, “oh are you here for the gathering?” I asked him what he was talking about. He told me Nick had died yesterday and his friends were all gathering at the bar to remember him. I’d stumbled into my friend’s informal wake completely by random chance.

And that’s how so much of Hack Movies went. Making movies was never hard for me. All of the scripts, actors, locations, editing software, camera and lighting equipment, it just manifested when it was needed and disappeared when it wasn’t. I always felt, as stupid as it sounds given the nature of my basement level gutter-trash films, that a higher power was guiding Hack Movies.

So it didn’t really surprise me that the B-Movie gods or whatever it is put me in that bar to swap stories about our friend Nick Walters AKA Nick Head who tragically left us far, far too early at the age of 41.

I didn’t tell it last night because his friends weren’t into filmmaking, but my favorite memory of Nick was on the set of Nixon And Hogan Smoke Christmas. He was set to reprise his role as Nixon’s iconic neighbor Don Duepe, tying the movie even tighter into the Strangeville Mythos.

Nick was playing triple duty as set designer, cinematographer and actor that day and he was very stressed out. The night before, he had recorded himself reciting all of his dialogue for the scene, which was massive. Probably 3 pages worth of ridiculous Kevin Strange monologue.

On set, Nick wore ear buds while dressing the scene and setting up the camera and lighting. He listened to his lines over and over and over again for maybe two hours. He would mumble them to himself as he worked. Mind you, he was already completely in costume which always included rubbing dirt all over his face for whatever reason.

Before he would act, he always looked in a small hand mirror and scrunched up his face, giving him that hideous Don Duepe expression. So once it was time to record his parts, he took the earbuds out, held up the mirror and proceeded to fuck up the lines dozens and dozens of times, having to grab the mirror and re-apply his Don Duepe face each time.

It was one of the most hilarious things I’ve ever seen and I could not keep myself from laughing to tears at poor Nick’s expense which only made him all the more frustrated that he couldn’t get his lines down. Needless to say he got through it and the scene is perfect and will live on long past all of us, Nick, me, you all reading this. Don Duepe will live forever.

The last phonecall I had with Nick was last year. He’d suffered a stroke a few years prior and I’d had my own health problems in recent years. I was feeling very, very mortal and in that long 3 or 4 hour conversation (our phone calls were always manic and endless, covering dozens of topics in rapid succession) I told him that I felt compelled to make a new film with him before one of us died. We never made that movie.

I spoke about our meeting in a Hack Movies retrospective I penned for this website several years ago. I’m going to re-post what I wrote about him, then elaborate further:

The DEAD SHIT era is what I consider the true beginning of the Hack Movies style and universe. It also saw the creation of Strangeville’s two most important characters, Nixon and Hogan. But before that happened, I got an excited email from one of the weirdest dudes I would ever meet. We would form an art-loving bond so strong that our friendship would last well beyond the final time I picked up a video camera.

I’m talking, of course, about Hack Movies cinematographer Nick Head. Turns out he was from the same stupid small town I was from and he was also in the middle of making a movie. A Star Wars parody movie at that! We met one day in a Steak N Shake parking lot and talked for hours about our love of film and our ambitions as filmmakers. It was a no-brainer that we’d work together on a project or two. But I don’t think either of us had any idea how often we would work together in the future, or how important of a role he would play in bringing my cinematic universe to life.

That’s not hyperbole. If I am the brains behind Strangeville, then Nick Walters is the heart and we’ve lost our heart, gang. I can’t stress enough how often Nick and I talked in those early years. We’d sit at his house and print thousands and thousands of Hack Movies promo DVDs with trailers and teaser scenes on them that we’d then go hand out at music stores and take on the road with us to conventions.

On those long nights pressing up DVD after DVD, we’d talk through the Hack Movies universe, the interconnected films and characters. We’d make filming schedules, lists of props and gear. We’d obsess over other no-budget films together and swap filmmaking how-to books to reverse engineer the cheapest and fastest way to shoot our movies.

Nick was every bit as much Hack Movies as I was. Everything you love about the Hack Movies cinematic style and everything you hate about it is all thanks to Nick. He made it his life’s work to learn everything he could about cheap video cameras and lighting and editing equipment.

We became brothers and we stayed brothers long after Hack Movies ended. In recent years Nick had withdrawn from just about everyone after suffering a stroke and sadly I only communicated with him back and forth a few times after that happened. But that night that we talked for hours about making a new movie? That night it was like no time had passed, no health problems were standing in our way and the old fire and flame, the old lust for cinema was back with us, even if only for one night.

I’m going to miss my friend. If you’re a fan of the movies, give ’em a watch this week and be satisfied in the knowledge that those movies would have never existed without the hand and heart of Hack Movies’ Nick Head. May he rest in peace.

2017 The Year In Strange


2017 saw more than two thirds of the total traffic this website has ever seen. It was by far our biggest year. It was also the year I lost nearly every single liberal friend and colleague I’ve ever had. I lost friends so close to me this year, I had to re-write my living will to remove a guy I trusted so much, I was willing to put my entire literary legacy in his hands after I die.

It’s also the year I launched my podcast network and skyrocketed past 20,000 downloads due to my coverage of the Bizarrocon and Bizarrogate controversies. Speaking honestly about those two events got me blacklisted and excommunicated from the horror and bizarro small press communities.

2017 was also the year I showed everyone in those communities that their endorsement is basically worthless. I have higher web traffic than even their main hub for bizarro fiction, BizarroCentral.com. I am far more popular now without their seal of approval than I ever was with it. In fact, it seems to me like the years between retiring from filmmaking and leaving the bizarro community did little other than hold me back artistically and socially.

2017 was the year I finally drew a line in the sand and stood up for my country and my culture after years of biting my tongue in a sea of liberal writers. Yes, everything before this year WAS me biting my tongue. As outspoken and vociferous as I’ve always been, I’ve always tried to maintain an air of civility and open-mindedness about my liberal cohorts.

But Trump derangement syndrome changed all of that. It is no longer possible for me to sit by and watch so-called professional writers claim that “white men” are responsible for all of the atrocities on the planet. I can’t sit back and listen to them psychotically call President Trump a Nazi, or anyone who disagrees with their opinions Nazis for that matter. I can’t allow editors and publishers of so-called subversive fiction to publicly praise censorship and privately reject any fiction not expressly promoting and praising progressive politics.

Brilliant authors have been reduced to writing inside a narrow minefield of topics and points of view for fear of offending the alt-left feminist leaders who have taken over small press fiction. Writers who in years past have never shied away from controversy now just existing as quiet, muted voices fearing that they’ll be the next white guy to fall to the ferocious beast that is the progressive Left.

Amazingly talented artists have gone off the deep end and now just draw pictures of Donald Trump and Mike Pence as gay lovers as if being gay lovers is some kind of insult.

Worse are the soy boy male feminists who have decided that the best way to navigate Trump Derangement Syndrome is to go balls-in and pretend that their girlfriends and wives ballooning up an extra 75 pounds, growing out their armpit hair and dyeing it blue while shrieking like starving hyenas on social media about the evils of all men is AWESOME! If 2017 has taught us anything it’s that the male feminist is feminism’s biggest target right now.

These guys have to spend every night laying awake just sweating bullets hoping against hope that their number isn’t picked next.

2017 saw the closing of Lazy Fascist Press, one of the premiere bizarro small press publishing imprints. Although, ask anyone associated with them and they’ll tell you that the mysterious “market downturn” had nothing to do with Trump Derangement Syndrome nor the curious tendency for more and more bizarro authors to simply stop writing bizarro fiction while pushing for mainstream literary acceptance.

Even though the editor of LFP himself said he’s a leftist who feels uncomfortable owning a press with the word fascist in its title. He’s gone so far as to leave the press’s logo off of the last few books released by the imprint. If that’s not Trump Derangement Syndrome, I don’t know what is.

This time last year I was promoting my newest short story collection ALL THE TOXIC WASTE FROM MY HEART. I went on to publish two more novels in 2017, I DIED IN A BED OF ROSES and BEETLE BRAIN while I serialized a 4th book for free right here on this website called SHE WAS ONLY A CLOWN which is currently published through chapter 32.

My podcast READING TO STRANGERS not only covered controversial publishing news, we also recorded and released half a dozen brand new audio books from the Kevin Strange collection. I hope to get back to recording in the new year to provide you with even more audio flavor from Strangeville.

Not to be outdone, our podcast partner Jeremy Maddux launched a podcast on the Strangeville Podcast Network in 2017 called THE QUIET PLACE. Jeremy broke his own ground by covering a myriad of important social, political and publishing world topics. He was able to secure fantastic interviews with highly relevant guests like conservative cartoonist Ben Garrison, Lovecraftian historian ST Joshi, freelance journalist and tip-of-the-spear covering the Mandalay Bay mass shooting in Las Vegas Scott Binsak and many, many more.

2017 was by far one of the best ever for Strangeville. I see nothing but greatness on the horizon in the next few years, as well. Conservative voices will continue to rise throughout western culture but particularly in the entertainment fields where progressives and deranged feminists have begun to lose their choke hold on audiences.

I will proudly count myself among those new voices who offer a sane alternative to all of the caterwauling and teeth gnashing coming from the insane Left. President Trump is truly making America great again and we here in Strangeville are doing our part to make conservatism weird again!

God bless and happy new year from Kevin Strange and all the peculiar denizens of Strangeville!

Hack Movies Returns to Youtube


Gang! In honor of Diamanda Hagan’s new Youtube review of Kevin’s 2008 feature length film COLONEL KILL MOTHERFUCKERS, we have decided to ULOCK the vaults for a LIMITED TIME and return ALL ELEVEN short and feature length films in the Hack Movies Strangeville universe to Youtube ABSOLUTELY FREE!

For those unfamiliar with Diamanda Hagan, she’s a prolific youtube film critic who has made it her mission to review ALL of the Kevin Strange feature flilms. She’s been at it for quite some time now, reviewing NIXON AND HOGAN SMOKE CHRISTMAS, DEAD SHIT and now COLONEL KILL MOTHERFUCKERS!

Watch that review right here:

We here at the Strangeville compound were so moved by this trip down memory lane, we decided to unlock the vault and let the Hack Movies FREE once again, but only for a limited time! So if you’re in the mood to watch some schlock horror/comedy goodness, park your big ass in front of the TV and click here to watch ALL the hack movies on youtube for FREE!