We’re entering a weird new era in cult film. The way it used to be was that some smarmy business man would declare himself a producer and make a movie that was intended to make the most money on the least amount of effort. To do that, the script he came up with would be loaded with the most id-satisfying elements. If you gave the audience enough roaring engines, bullet wounds and tits, they’d tell their friends and the movie that cost ten grand to make would turn around and make a million. Between the 50’s right to the mid-80’s, this was a monstrous industry of exploitation that turned out thousands of pictures so shitty that they were charming. Home video comes along and dozens of botique VHS labels immortalize these pictures. The video store culture spreads the word through word of mouth. Voila! An unlikely fan culture is born. That fan culture then grows up and goes to film school. They make a couple of indie pictures in the early 90’s that are heavily inspired by Roger Corman, Russ Meyer and Lucio Fulci (and in Tarantino’s case almost directly ripped off of Ringo Lam) and then graduate to make bigger budget movies with the same trashy elements. Time marches on and these former fanboys turned Hollywood powerhouses amass a dedicated cult of college age assholes thanks in part to their movies’ inclusion of lap dances, decapitation and gangsters. Those assholes then go to film school with the vaguest notion of what a grindhouse picture actually is. They also grew up with the internet. Their idea of exploitation is this warped concept that has been filtered through a second generation of filmmakers only now these guys feel obligated to flood their scripts with video game sensibilities and shit they saw in Bang Brothers videos.
In the end you wind up with something like Bitch Slap.
Quite possibly the most interesting parody I’ve seen this year, A Muppet Wickerman is, 0ddly enough, a bit more morbid and a little less funny than I thought it would be but I’ll guarantee you this: You probably won’t find a more compelling or interesting mashup/remix than this one right here. This is not a movie, it’s more like a fumetti comic book where words collide with pictures and if you’re familiar with that genius Edward Woodward and Christopher Lee vehicle, The Wickerman, the resultant product is a hoot and perfectly cast. The Henson puppeteers have adapted other classic works to combine with their puppets. Honestly, why not this one? Obvious notions of Kermit the Frog as burnt offering aside, this would be sheer kickass!
I’d love to see more Muppet mashups in the future. Dracula done with The Count, Prairie Dawn as Mina Harker, Bert as Abraham Van Helsing, Ernie as Renfield and Johnathan Harker played by Elmo would probably be about the funniest thing ever produced.
Things have been awfully quiet at chez Cinema Suicide this last week and it’s mostly because I’ve been devoting time usually allotted to blogging to theming this mean bitch of a website. It dawned on me a few months ago that I’d been using a slightly modified version of Misty Look for the better part of two and a half years and that it was probably time to join the big leagues with a brand new custom theme. I’d previously worked with Steve Jencks, he of the mighty Lost Highway, to do the Sub Rosa Drive-In design but I figured I’d try someone new this time around and gave a shout to my friend, Jared Laham of The Solid Studios to see if he could come up with something apporpriately awesome. I was not disappointed.
Basically, the new design affords me more real estate for bigger everything and this whole site no longer screams Wordpress Theme Directory like it used to. Not that there’s anything wrong with the theme directory. There’s a million options in there for whatever you need, but a certain pride comes with building one yourself. I figured with all this exciting shit going on around me, a new web series, the comic book in July, the article running in Screem in April and the possibility of my short fiction being published later this year, I should move on up to the east side where beans don’t burn on the grill, if you get my drift.
So here it is, Cinema Suicide Mark 2 (Jazz Odyssey)! Drop your feedback in the comments, will ya? I need to know if anything is broken. Also, hit refresh a bunch of times. You’ll notice that sweet header image changes out every time.
It’s been several days. I owe you suckas a post. I’ve been spending most of my free time this week working on something big. By that I mean the new Cinema Suicide design. It’s going to be freakin’ sweet. Before that crazy-ass undertaking, I spent several days without power thanks to this seemingly new trend of annual catastrophic weather in New England. Just so no one out there starts feeling like I’m throwing in the towel, I offer you this slightly off-beat post and a reminder of my real inner nerd that I only reveal every once in a while.
I used to love to play pencil and paper role playing games. That’s not in the past tense like I’m over that weak shit these days, that’s in the past tense because I’m in my mid-30’s and you have no idea how difficult it is to get a group of adults in my age group together once a week for gaming. I just don’t have the kind of time that RPGs require anymore and even if I did, all my crew wanted to play was Vampire: The fuckin’ Masquerade or AD&D and I just wasn’t feeling those games anymore. I had a pronounced love for science fiction games and horror and loved both Cyberpunk 2020 and The Call of Cthulhu but both were rather complicated and one was a little abstract in that it had monsters but you couldn’t play as them, there was no melodrama to be had and the sad truth was that everyone lost their minds in a single session of gaming, usually. Cthulhu was a harsh game. However, in recent times, I managed to shack up bi-weekly with a group of righteous people with a refined taste for eldritch horror and time constraints similar to my own. Because role playing games require a dedication unavailable to us, we play board games. Not board games like Monopoly or Candy Land, mind you. It started with the extremely sweet Battlestar Galactica game, which emulates the vibe and pace of any given season of the show perfectly, and recently moved on to Fantasy Flight Games’ massively entertaining but almost unbearably complicated horror board game, Arkham Horrror, based on H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.
I do so many reviews of new releases up in here that I feel like I’ve lost perspective. Back when I started up this blog, my reviews were of whatever I watched the night prior. I started to gain a reputation, though, and it wasn’t long before I was reviewing next week’s new releases on the dime of some home video distributor looking for a little press. Since then I haven’t done a whole lot of these Wabac machine reviews where I dig into the vault and produce something of such remarkable cheese that I’m beside myself when the credits roll. However, with Supervan, I get the best of both worlds.
MVD stands for Music Video Distributors. They put out a lot of DVDs of live music but I got an email last year soliciting some unnamed exploitation pictures that I accepted sight unseen. For the next six months they sent me porn. Periodically, though, they’d send me something interesting. Among the interesting batch was Supervan, a flick I’d only become aware of after catching a trailer for on Boing Boing. It’s an interesting specimen of 70’s culture that could have only been produced in that decade and it’s exactly what I needed tonight. Hurricane force winds knocked out power all over the state and the last few days without electricity have been raw. A movie about a guy, his girl, his futuristic custom van and his struggle to win five grand at a van contest was the only dose of insanity that could properly close out my weekend. Continue Reading »
These days, Max Headroom is known for doing a bunch of quirky, strictly 80’s style ads for Coca-Cola but what no one aside from myself seems to remember is that he also starred in a totally sweet cyberpunk TV show. What’s truly awesome about this is how far ahead of the curve Max was. See, Cyberpunk didn’t really penetrate the pop cultural consciousness until the mid-90’s when the internet started to gain traction in public and even then, most filmmakers were playing catch up with the novels and most were focusing on the wrong aspects of the genres, trying to make action movies set in Ridley Scott’s movie, Blade Runner. Never mind that no one really tried to put their hooks in some of the heady concepts of corporate culture run amok and an entire society under the thrall of mass media that registered on religious levels. Max Headroom did all of this and that’s probably why it failed. Nobody got it and in a lot of cases, the show was a chilling reflection of then-contemporary culture. It also had to compete with Dallas. One of the running jokes from the 2009 Super Bowl was a series of ads that ran only a couple of seconds long. The ad agency in charge of creating these ads no doubt thought that they were living dangerously on the edge and were fostering an entirely new paradigm in advertising. Obviously not one of them had seen an episode of Max Headroom to realize that Max beat them to the punch in the 80’s with its hazardous ad parodies, blipverts.
FYI, Max Headroom takes place 20 minutes into the future as journalist, Edison Carter, uploads his consciousness into a computer to create a ROM clone of himself after an injury. Carter. his news team, a hacker and Headroom use their collective talents week after week to expose a number of scandals often involving corrrupt television networks and crime. The series starred Matt Frewer and was based on a made for TV movie in the UK called 20 Minutes Into The Future.
Shout Factory has stepped up to the plate and is planning an August release for the complete Max Headroom series, a mean 14 episodes. Max was kind of a big deal circa 1987, so you can pretty much bank on a decent record of the Max Headroom experience. There are no details regarding extras at this time but come this August you can finally throw out your moldy old Max Headroom bootlegs.
When you’re tapped into the world of horror filmmaking like I am you hear crazy-ass marketing gimmicks all the god damn time. Some people operating on limited budgets will do anything to get their movie in front of people and some of them get downright desperate. Additionally, back in the day, William Castle made a bunch of really crappy but extremely fun movies that became landmarks based entirely on their crazy marketing techniques. Joy buzzers in select theater seats, forcing theater patrons to sign waivers absolving theater owners of responsibility should they die of fright and whatnot. I didn’t really think people did that anymore. The internet makes that sort of chicanery moot and there’s a distributor these days for everything so even if you make a movie of yourself taking a dump, you can sell it to someone out there as an art film and it’ll wind up playing at Museum theaters at the very least. That’s just how it goes.
I’ll confide something in you, though. I love sketchy solicitations. I miss the sort of arrogant declaration that assures me that Horror Movie X will scare the shit out of me or my money back. I especially love this kind of solicitation because I swear to god, there isn’t a movie on Earth that really frightens me so bad that I feel like I can’t continue. As it stands, there’s, like, three movies in existence that I’m unable to finish but only because of how much they suck (Freddy Got Fingered, Underworld, The Pest). I’ve never heard of Phoonk. I’m not tapped in to Bollywood at all so movies coming out of Mumbai tend to fly past me without notice. Here’s director Ram Gopal Varma, though, with a sequel to his 2008 horror movie, Phoonk. He swears up and down that the movie is so frightening that no one will be able to watch the whole thing alone in a theater. If you can, he’ll hook you up with 500,000 rupees which you can then turn around and buy some bombs, a boomerang and some jars to keep fairies in or you can just take them to your local currency exchange and get the $10,000 that that amount of money roughly works out to.
Truthfully, I don’t even know what Phoonk is about. I’m told it’s a ghost story. Varma apparently tried this once before with the previous Phoonk and then withdrew the contest when allegations came out that the contest was rigged for failure. He told the press that the candidate ran out only a half hour into the movie. To challenge this, a fan in Bangalore booked an entire theater and kept medical staff on site while they watched the movie. Apparently, they made it all the way through. So to you, Ram Gopal Varma, I throw down this gauntlet. Fly me to Mumbai, hook me up to your machines and let me watch your movie. You’ll be owing me a cool ten grand, my friend.
You know? Even though it deviated wildly from the original comics and butchered my favorite scene, V For Vendetta could have been a lot worse. I actually liked it. It completely downplayed the political angle and I can sort of understand why. It was no longer the 80’s and it wasn’t produced in England. Context is everything when it came to V. Director James McTiegue had a good eye for style and even though I think his lens sterilized a movie that should have been a little murky, he came off like one to watch. Then they announced his next project.
Ninja Assassin hit the internet like a bomb with an amazing stunt training video. It was also a movie about ninjas. At least that’s what I gathered based on the title. To boot, it was to star Korean pop sensation, Rain, who co-starred in Park Chan Wook’s mostly overlooked crazy people in love movie, I’m A Cyborg But That’s Okay. So here we have a modestly budgeted picture out of Hollywood featuring ninjas and starring no one anybody in the west has heard of. Hyped by a killer training reel, Ninja Assassin was looking up to be the movie highlight of my year. It really sucks that the movie is such a fucking royal disaster.
It says Cyberpunk in the title cards and that always throws up red flags for me. Cyberpunk is a many splendored thing that very few filmmakers ever seem to get right. A lot of people make dystopic post-apocalypse flicks and then label them cyberpunk in the Gibsonian sense of the word and it kind of looks like that’s what we have going on here. Frame 137 is an Australian indie adapated from a short comic that ran in issue #61 of Dark Horse Presents back in the 90’s, a story by James O’Barr, creator of The Crow. Shot with one of those Red cameras with a particular lens that makes the whole presentation come off like it was shot in Cinemascope, which is why that video looks so god damn wide.
Directed by Judd Tilyard, the picture stars 10 year old Sam Ransom who does all his own freakin’ stunts! All the fighting, all the wirework, even that bit where he breathes fire. That’s fucking amazing! Chloe Moretz has a little competition this year for being the baddest tween in film. This movie looks so awesome. Holy shit, am I impressed!
It’s Rondo time! A festive time of year for horror fans the world around. David Colton, with the help of horror fans everywhere through the majesty of The Classic Horror Film Board, has published the much anticipated ballot for the 2009 round of Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards and for the second year in a row, this here website is on the ballot for best blog. I managed to place a surprising third for 2008 considering the outstanding blogs I was in competition with. I wound up finishing behind Max Cheney’s great Drunken Severed Head and the towering stardom of Tim Lucas’ Video Watchblog, a blog I didn’t think I’d have to contend with this year since Tim shut it down the day after nominations for best blog turned up last year. Wouldn’t you know it, Tim is back and he’s on the ballot and for good reason. Tim is a legend among genre historians and his blog is just one more outlet for him to flex his knowledge but we can beat him this year! You and me, dear reader. All you have to do is hop over to the official Rondo voting site and take part in the voting process.
Read the instructions and follow them to the letter. Make sure to put your name in the email you send so the votes are counted, and for the love of god, don’t just vote for me! I’m fairly certain that waves of emails to the Rondos last year simply casting a vote for Cinema Suicide and nothing else were tossed out and cost me dearly in the running. Vote for as much of the ballot as you’re familiar with. There’s a lot of great stuff and at the very least, looking it over is going to direct you to a lot of movies, DVDs, books and magazines that you may not have even heard about. It’ll also afford you the opportunity to see some websites and blogs for horror obsessives like myself and direct your attention to some outstanding contributions to the genre. So take your time and have fun with it. The Rondos have no affiliation with any commercial entity and are put on at great expense to the organizers. This is a true labor of love and I’m honored to even be recognized.
We’re entering a weird new era in cult film. The way it used to be was that some smarmy business man would declare himself a producer and make a movie that was intended to make the most money on the least amount of effort. To do that, the script he came up with would be loaded with the most id-satisfying elements. If you gave the audience enough roaring engines, bullet wounds and tits, they’d tell their friends and the movie that cost ten grand to make would turn around and make a million. Between the 50’s right to the mid-80’s, this was a monstrous industry of exploitation that turned out thousands of pictures so shitty that they were charming. Home video comes along and dozens of botique VHS labels immortalize these pictures. The video store culture spreads the word through word of mouth. Voila! An unlikely fan culture is born. That fan culture then grows up and goes to film school. They make a couple of indie pictures in the early 90’s that are heavily inspired by Roger Corman, Russ Meyer and Lucio Fulci (and in Tarantino’s case almost directly ripped off of Ringo Lam) and then graduate to make bigger budget movies with the same trashy elements. Time marches on and these former fanboys turned Hollywood powerhouses amass a dedicated cult of college age assholes thanks in part to their movies’ inclusion of lap dances, decapitation and gangsters. Those assholes then go to film school with the vaguest notion of what a grindhouse picture actually is. They also grew up with the internet. Their idea of exploitation is this warped concept that has been filtered through a second generation of filmmakers only now these guys feel obligated to flood their scripts with video game sensibilities and shit they saw in Bang Brothers videos.
It’s been several days. I owe you suckas a post. I’ve been spending most of my free time this week working on something big. By that I mean the new Cinema Suicide design. It’s going to be freakin’ sweet. Before that crazy-ass undertaking, I spent several days without power thanks to this seemingly new trend of annual catastrophic weather in New England. Just so no one out there starts feeling like I’m throwing in the towel, I offer you this slightly off-beat post and a reminder of my real inner nerd that I only reveal every once in a while.
I do so many reviews of new releases up in here that I feel like I’ve lost perspective. Back when I started up this blog, my reviews were of whatever I watched the night prior. I started to gain a reputation, though, and it wasn’t long before I was reviewing next week’s new releases on the dime of some home video distributor looking for a little press. Since then I haven’t done a whole lot of these Wabac machine reviews where I dig into the vault and produce something of such remarkable cheese that I’m beside myself when the credits roll. However, with Supervan, I get the best of both worlds.
These days, Max Headroom is known for doing a bunch of quirky, strictly 80’s style ads for Coca-Cola but what no one aside from myself seems to remember is that he also starred in a totally sweet cyberpunk TV show. What’s truly awesome about this is how far ahead of the curve Max was. See, Cyberpunk didn’t really penetrate the pop cultural consciousness until the mid-90’s when the internet started to gain traction in public and even then, most filmmakers were playing catch up with the novels and most were focusing on the wrong aspects of the genres, trying to make action movies set in Ridley Scott’s movie, Blade Runner. Never mind that no one really tried to put their hooks in some of the heady concepts of corporate culture run amok and an entire society under the thrall of mass media that registered on religious levels. Max Headroom did all of this and that’s probably why it failed. Nobody got it and in a lot of cases, the show was a chilling reflection of then-contemporary culture. It also had to compete with Dallas. One of the running jokes from the 2009 Super Bowl was a series of ads that ran only a couple of seconds long. The ad agency in charge of creating these ads no doubt thought that they were living dangerously on the edge and were fostering an entirely new paradigm in advertising. Obviously not one of them had seen an episode of Max Headroom to realize that Max beat them to the punch in the 80’s with its hazardous ad parodies, blipverts.
When you’re tapped into the world of horror filmmaking like I am you hear crazy-ass marketing gimmicks all the god damn time. Some people operating on limited budgets will do anything to get their movie in front of people and some of them get downright desperate. Additionally, back in the day, William Castle made a bunch of really crappy but extremely fun movies that became landmarks based entirely on their crazy marketing techniques. Joy buzzers in select theater seats, forcing theater patrons to sign waivers absolving theater owners of responsibility should they die of fright and whatnot. I didn’t really think people did that anymore. The internet makes that sort of chicanery moot and there’s a distributor these days for everything so even if you make a movie of yourself taking a dump, you can sell it to someone out there as an art film and it’ll wind up playing at Museum theaters at the very least. That’s just how it goes.
You know? Even though it deviated wildly from the original comics and butchered my favorite scene, V For Vendetta could have been a lot worse. I actually liked it. It completely downplayed the political angle and I can sort of understand why. It was no longer the 80’s and it wasn’t produced in England. Context is everything when it came to V. Director James McTiegue had a good eye for style and even though I think his lens sterilized a movie that should have been a little murky, he came off like one to watch. Then they announced his next project.
It’s Rondo time! A festive time of year for horror fans the world around. David Colton, with the help of horror fans everywhere through the majesty of 
