Joe Wawrzyniak

Writer, trash film historian, longtime horror movie lover, oddball music aficionado, and general hardcore weird cinema buff Joseph Andrew Wawrzyniak was unleashed upon an unsuspecting world on June 1, 1972 in Neptune, New Jersey. He has a younger brother named Erik and an older sister named Lisa. Joe and his siblings were raised by their registered nurse mother Helen after Joe's father Joseph Anthony Wawrzyniak died from cancer when Joe was only six years old. Wawrzyniak attended Moss Elementary School in his sleepy suburban hometown of Metuchen, New Jersey. Joe majored in baking at Piscataway Vocational Technical High School, where in between watching countless obscure flicks on VHS and penning amateur movie reviews in a private journal he somehow managed to graduate with honors and win the Golden Cookie Award for Bakeshop Excellence. Wawrzyniak went on to attend Kean College in Union, New Jersey; he earned a (largely worthless) B.A. in English-Writing, began writing film reviews for the college newspaper, and even pulled off the miraculous feat of graduating with a 3.56 grade point average. Joe has written numerous articles and/or film reviews for such classy publications as "VEX," "The Exploitation Journal," "Cult Movies" (his inexhaustibly thorough and comprehensive overview on Bigfoot cinema was nominated for a Rondo Award for Best Article in 2003), "Shock Cinema," "Film Geek," "Screem," "They Won't Stay Dead!," "Cashiers du Cinemart," and "Psychoholics Unanimous." Moreover, Joe has a regular column of album reviews called "The World According to Wawrzyniak" on the music website www.JerseyBeat.com. Tall (6' 2") and lanky, with a deep manly voice, rapidly receding and often uncombed dirty blonde hair, and a disposition that could most kindly be described as "nerdy," Wawrzyniak appears as a trash film historian (i.e., himself) in the documentary short "Grindhouse Gorilla: Making the Bloody Ape." Under his Internet alias of Woodyanders (it's an amalgam of letters from his first, middle and last names), he has written countless film reviews and penned hundreds of mini-bios for the IMDb. Joe still lives in Central New Jersey, where he can be frequently spotted at local grocery stores and funky mom'n'pop retail outlets purchasing all kinds of wild and tacky movies on DVD at dirt cheap prices.