Cinema Suicide

Despite what you may think, the world of independent horror film is still very much alive. You may have never heard of films like Creature From the Hillbilly Lagoon or Splatter Disco, but writer/director Richard Griffin is making horror films on very small budgets, just like the movies you might have seen back in the era of drive-ins and backstreet movie theatres. Griffin worked for fifteen years paying his dues making car commercials for local Rhode Island television stations before he began his film company Scorpio Film Releasing with producer Ted Marr in 2004. Since then, the pair have made seven films and most have had decent distribution (most notably through Shock-O-Rama).

Scorpio Films will be unveiling their latest project, Beyond the Dunwich Horror next week in Providence. A modern update on the classic novel by H.P. Lovecraft and an homage to Italian horror cinema, it features cult favorite actress Lynn Lowry (The Crazies, I Drink Your Blood, Cat People) as well as an abundance of all the gore that you could want. Cinema Suicide writer Tim Fife talks with Griffin about his home town, his new movie, and plans for his next feature.

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I’ve never really thought about it, but there are plenty of scenes in Romero’s original masterpiece, Dawn of the Dead, that would go over fantastic if viewed through the red and blue lenses of a pair of 3-D glasses. I won’t lie to you. I LOVE 3-D. It’s a gimmick that I wish I could apply to every movie. It’s not often these days that you get to see a movie in 3-D. It’s expensive to produce, there’s the overhead of all these god damn glasses to buy and hand out. It’s just not particularly economic but Fango found out from Dawn ‘78 and ‘04 producer Richard Rubenstein that In-Three, Inc. a California based company that specializes in the “dimensionalization” of movies is hard at work making Dawn of the Dead a true stereographic experience.

From Fango:

“When Mike Messina [another producer on the DAWN redux] and I began to investigate using In-Three’s technique, I was very skeptical,” Rubinstein tells Fango. “I couldn’t see how it could be used without re-editing George’s film, which I was not going to do. I was also concerned that converting a 29-year-old movie would not be competitive qualitatively with the new 3-D live-action features being shot today. I was wrong in both cases. George’s DAWN OF THE DEAD can be reformatted into 3-D without any editing, and the image looks spectacular! As it stands now, it will take about a year to complete the conversion of the whole film.” Indeed, In-Three’s work has been hailed by George Lucas, James Cameron and Peter Jackson, among others.

Rubenstein is involved with some questionable shit, like a sequel to Dawn (that is not Day of the Dead, apparently) and ANOTHER adaptation of Frank Herbert’s unfilmable sci-fi novel, Dune, but this is some seriously exciting news. There isn’t a chance in hell that the movie will play around me, but we at Cinema S are going through the motions presently to book genre engagements in our particular locale. Details to come on that. In the meantime, Dawn of the Dead 3-D is planned for a 2009 release.

Cube Zero director Ernie Barbarash’s generic 2007 supernatural clunker They Wait is exactly the type of second-rate, slapdash motion picture you’d expect from executive producer/Internet hate object Uwe Boll. In addition to being highly illogical and beyond boring, the film provides little in the way of actual entertainment, effectively lulling the prospective viewer into the sort of life-altering coma generally associated with those unfortunate souls who have crashed through the windshield of their overpriced SUV and collided head-first with an enormous brick wall covered with fast food advertisements. If nothing else, at least you’ll get a good night’s sleep out of the deal. That’s got to be worth the price of a one-day rental, right?

Right?

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Maybe you’ve been around long enough to remember this but my daughter was born back in August and something really fucking weird happened to me. In an instant, my view of the world took on this entirely new dimension where things that didn’t bother me in the past, suddenly shocked the shit out of me, particularly when it was something shocking involving children. The younger they are, the more disturbing it became to me. It’s easy to understand why. Whether you want children or not, there’s a sleeping instinct in you waiting to wake up. Whether or not you wake it up is totally up to you. So bearing this in mind, France’s Inside was a little difficult for me to get through. But rest assured. I’m not completely broken. George Eastman munching on a fetus in Joe D’Amato’s deliriously violent high-note, Anthropophagus is still a fucking riot to me.

There has been a great deal of buzz in North America about Inside since it first started circulating in English speaking film festivals. I wasn’t sure if this was going to be my bag so I didn’t pay much attention until I started seeing it popping up in horror circles. Rue Morgue ran a cover story about it, which I haven’t read, and that was pretty much the final nail in the coffin. The word is that Inside is a fairly original take on the traditional stalker/survivor scenario. Somehow equal parts slow burner and bloodbath. A skillful navigation of the treacherous waters that are horror themes. I wasn’t about to let my aversion to hype get in the way of something potentially important for the horror community. France has been a mixed bag over the last several years, too, but whether they’re turning out high-culture genre affairs or pillaging the scripts of John Carpenter, I’m always interested.

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Listen. I know I made an announcement about the forums back when they launched a couple of months ago but they don’t get a lot of traffic so I figured I’d point them out again and make everyone aware.

I love discussion forums. I’m a regular member of a couple dozen different ones for a variety of topics and the entire experience is a lot of fun. I also don’t think that comment system on blogs is particularly good for back and forth discussion since they’re really a space for a one-off comment.

I’d like to encourage discussion of the articles you see here, so please take a moment to get familiar, get registered and get talking up in there. There are already a few topics down to get you rolling.

Get the heck in there!

I can’t say that I’m entirely excited about a special edition DVD release of the first Faces of Death movie but there’s really something to be said about it.  Before I saw it, back when I was a little kid combing the shelves at the video store, it had a dangerous allure.  A label proudly declaring it banned in 46 countries and a block of the cover real-estate explaining what you were in store for and that it wasn’t for the faint of heart.  Then there was the Gorgon Video logo which was a threatening entity unto itself.  Years later I would see it at a birthday party and realize just how tame and ridiculous it was but all shattered illusions aside, it’s cult reputation carries on today and in spite of its ridiculously faked set pieces, people continue to think that it’s real.  Good for them.

The unfortunate downside of a tape filled with real animal cruelty and fake human cruelty is that it would go on to spawn waves of actual real death mixtapes.  Each sporting a mediocre, ceaseless death metal soundtrack and the most brutal newsreel footage that your morbid curiosity begged for.  So it makes sense that the original king of the hill would come back to claim the throne.  According to Dread Central, the innovator of horror videotape, Gorgon, is going to stock your local Best Buy with a special edition DVD of the original extreme brutality movie, Faces of Death, that features featurettes from the effects team, the editor and Fred Vogel of Toe Tag plus a director’s commentary track and I’m sure much more.

I’ll have more details as they emerge, sickos.

Say what you want about the movie’s title. I was resigned to see this from the moment I heard about the production. A part of me still pines for those sunday nights (formerly Fridays) of that paranormal shit made mainstream by great writing and acting. Two of television’s greatest characters mired in one of the most compelling ongoing dramas that scripted television has been trying to emulate ever since (and has finally figured out for itself in the form of Lost). So color me excited when I saw that the trailer for the movie came down over the weekend. It’s still unclear what it’s about but one thing has been made clear. This is a monster of the week episode and has nothing to do with aliens. Also, photos leaked from the set of Chris Carter posing with some kind of wolf suit. It also looks like Billy Connolly is generating some real genre cred between this and his turn in Fido. Good for him. Here he seems to be a psychic of some kind with a fashion sensibility lifted from Slapshot’s Hanson brothers.

Anyway, here’s the good stuff.

A while back I reported that Fox and McG were in the process of producing an American flavored spin on the British comedy hit, Spaced.  I expressed great disappointment in this.  I also predicted that it would be cancelled after 5 episodes.

Looks like I was wrong.

American Spaced was cancelled after no episodes.

If you had any interest in this show at all, do yourself the favor and pick up the Region 1 DVD release of this show that’s coming to North America this summer.  You’ll thank me later.

I had avoided Twitter for a real long time because I couldn’t understand it.  I considered it an inferior messaging app but once we began our push into social media here at Cinema S, when the sudden blitz of marketing began, its usefulness became immediately apparent to me.  If you have a Twitter account, follow me.  I pretty much tweet any new posts to the site so chalk up another means of tracking new content here.  My first day on the scene, I was contacted by the unbelievably busy John Herman, producer of the interactive webisodic serial, Gravityland about joining a collective of new media enthusiasts for networking, brainstorming and coffee.  In other words, The New Hampshire Media Makers Meeting. I was hesitant at first since I don’t typically meet up with people from the internets but there was an energy about John that assured me that this would be cool without him having to actually say so.  So this morning, I rolled out to Crackskulls, a coffee shop/book store in scenic downtown Newmarket, NH with a bag full of stickers, postcards and business cards, bearing a Cinema Suicide tee ready to pitch the fuck out of this site. And pitch I did.  Simultaneously I got to hear pitches and introductions from an interesting cross-section of some of Seacoast, New Hampshire’s contemporary internet thinkers.

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Being a fan of european exploitation films I’ve always had an admiration for trash auteur Joe D’Amato. Love him or hate him, Joe has an amazing way of painting the world as a disgusting depraved universe where everybody is a twisted sociopath. D’Amato’ s work includes the more important films in the Emanuelle series, the 1979 homage to nechrophilacs Beyond the Darkness (aka Buio Omega) and the featus eating cannibal sleaze fest Anthropophagous (1980, aka The Grim Reaper). When I recently came across an ad saying one of D’Amato’s first films Death Smiled at a Murderer (1973) was being reissued, I was completely ecstatic. Previously only available on import and bootleg releases, it is an important part of D’Amato’s cannon, as it his first try at making a suspense/horror film; previously D’Amato had directed westerns and sexploitation films.

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