I love a good list. Anything that agrees with my particular point of view or gives me something to complain about is welcome in my world. Thankfully, Time magazine seized the spirit of Halloween and laid out their candidates for the top 25 horror movies of all time. Not only do they pay the slightest slag to one of my favorites, The Silence of the Lambs, they do their best to rationalize their inclusion of Bambi on the list. Let’s get one thing straight, though, in spite of indescretions that rank Red Fucking Dragon above Silence and Bambi they also point out the indisputable classics (Texas Saw, Halloween, Jaws), contemporary fare (Audition) and well as some extraordinarily unexpected titles which I wouldn’t have even included (Men Behind The Sun).
Happy Halloween!
This last week has been the balls! Firstly, The Sox won the world series in a stunning show that was as dramatic as the ’04 post-season minus Schilling’s bloody sock. The only way it could have been any better is if I managed to make it down to Boston for the parade but I’ll settle for Theo re-signing Mike Lowell.
Secondly, tonight is Halloween, bitches! Last night our town did trick or treating and since I live in a densely populated area otherwise located out in the sticks, they truck the kids in on wagons and they run wild on our neighborhood for a couple of hours. To my dismay, the level of creativity in costuming is on the decline again. I can’t count how many kids just showed up in whatever they wore to school and held out their bags like I was supposed to get it:
“Oh, I see, you’re supposed to be an underachieving tween who is going to grow up and be a pro skater. Good luck with that. You get pretzels. The kids behind you in the costumes get the candy. Egg my house and die. I know where you live.”
But who gives a shit, right? Fuck candy. This time of year is like Christmas to me. Crisp autumn air, early sundown and the spooky je ne sais pas about New England in October. I settled down last night to sample this years Monsterfest on AMC which has been a dogshit film fest for the last few years but at least they’re showing the Friday the 13th sequels this year instead of Halloween 6 five times a day. Sure, those sequels are Friday 3 and Friday 7 but I’ll take it however I can get it. In spite of what you may think about Friday 8, Friday 3 with or without 3D glasses is the most useless sequel of the bunch and Friday 7 is just fucking ridiculous when the guy leaps out of the lake at the end and pulls Jason down. Seriously, Frank Mancuso, Jr., what the hell? I see where they’re going, though. Friday 3 finally introduces the famous Red Wings mask and Friday 7 introduces Kane Hodder as Jason.
The true question, however, is what to watch tonight? I have a growing stack of flicks to take in, some Halloween appropriate, like Fulci’s House By The Cemetery and Deodato’s House On The Edge Of The Park for a house themed double feature or the requisite Carpenter classic, Halloween and some not-so-horror themed flicks like Golgo 13, the Lonewolf and Cub movies and Shinya Tsukamoto’s recent Nightmare Detective.
I guess we’ll see.
Just in time for Halloween. Ghostwatch.
It’s that time again. Halloween is only a couple of days away and the B-Movie Webmasters are giving you precisely what you expected for this round of roundtable reviews. The theme this month is, of course, Halloween movies and while Bad Movies is giving you House 2 and Jordan at the B-Movie Film Vault is doing Ernest Scared Stupid, I’m going the unconventional route once again and delivering something that folks in the UK may be familiar with while those of us in the states will be completely in the dark. However, the word on the streets about Ghostwatch was that it was quite the phenomenon and nearly akin to the Orson Welles broadcast of War of the Worlds.
I’ll go on record and tell the world that in spite of my affinity for gore and violent horror movies I’m actually a huge fan of haunted house movies more than anything. There was a time when writers and producers knew how to do it right. The thrill and fear generated by just such a movie was the torment that you couldn’t see. You never knew what it looked like or where it was going to be next. When I was a little kid, my mom told me stories about living in a haunted house in Marblehead, Massachusetts and that was some shit that fascinated me ever since. The thing is, when someone asks me what my favorite haunting movie is, I can never come up with an example.
Untitled George A. Romero Diary Of The Dead Sequel
Inspired? Maybe. George Romero laid his new zombie festival on the general movie going public at the last Toronto International Film Festival and the reviews to come out of the show were positive across the board. I, personally, have not seen it but I’m wringing my hands in anticipation. Land of the Dead wasn’t a particularly bad movie but I didn’t feel like it was everything it could have been. Early word following Land was that the next Romero project was another zombie movie, which is unusual, and even more unusual was that it featured the same cast as Land heading to Canada in Dead Reckoning. Thankfully, news of that stopped and weird rumors of a zombie reboot were in the works. Turns out that was true.
Diary doesn’t even have distribution yet and it looks like George is ready to roll on his next feature, a direct sequel to Diary. Quite frankly, I got the impression that Land of the Dead was a pretty tough experience on George. When I met him at the ’05 Rock and Shock he seemed very tired and I’d read reports that fans weren’t shy about giving him hell about Land of the Dead. Things seem different now, though. The wheels of Romero’s filmmaking machine have been a typically slow-turning affair in the past but now he’s making a new movie before his last has even hit the light of a projector. Bring it on! Here are the details from Bloody Disgusting:
UNTITLED GEORGE A. ROMERO DIARY OF THE DEAD SEQUEL
Principal photography begins March 2008.
To be written directed by George A. Romero.
Cast to be announced.
The “diary” saga continues. Our heroes, trapped in the mansion where we left them, battle waves of ravenous zombies, barely escaping alive. In search of a safe place to settle, they commandeer an abandoned ferry and sail to a deserted island, only to find that it is already populated by a civilization of the dead. Told in the same first-person style that distinguished “George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead”, the next episode of the saga is a violent siege set in the middle of nowhere, a desperate struggle for survival, and peace, between two tribes: the living and the living dead.
Three Babylon Fields clips
I mentioned the Alive zombie TV project by some writers from Star Trek: Enterprise a little while back, but this is the other side of the coin. Dan from Exploitation Retrospect mentioned this one, which prior to his sweet name check I had not heard of. This sounds a lot more tantalizing to me than just another gun-crazy zombie stomp. When your subgenre is as tired as the old zombie adage, you really need to hit it with something unique if you hope to hold anyone’s interest. Babylon Fields was looking to do just that.
From TV Weekly:
The show explores the emotional and societal ramification of loved ones coming back from the dead. You know, like in “Pet Sematary.” But by the end of the episode, the zombie thriller is crossed with a crime procedural. So small-town police detective Stevenson is given a murder to solve while zombies wander the streets. It’s “ZSI.”
Unfortunately, Fields was pulled from the fall line up at the last minute and it looks like it will never surface. Thanks to James Hibberd of TV Week, we’ll at least get a look at what was turning out to be an off-beat comedy/horror/police procedural drama. Head on over to their website and check out the clips.
Doomed to die every day. The Deaths of Ian Stone trailer.
I’ve been following this one since I first picked up its signal a couple of months ago. Best described as Groundhog Day meets Dark City, The Deaths of Ian Stone follows its titular character as he struggles against unseen forces who kill him every day in a brutal manner only to have him wake up the following day somewhere else, no idea how he got there. It was just recently added to the 2007 Horrorfest list (aka 8 Films To Die For) which will tour a few hundred theaters around the country and then be released to DVD.
In Transylvania, no one can hear you scream. Deafula.
I can often be heard saying, “Now I’ve seen it all” when I take in a particularly weird movie but the truth is, I haven’t even scratched the surface. I’ve devoted a big chunk of my life to watching fucked up movies but for every strange, Psychotronic flick I watch, there are a hundred more with even weirder themes and worse acting. However, with Deafula, I’m fairly certain that this is the real deal. I’ve never seen anything like it. Nothing. I’m also fairly certain that I’ll never see anything like it again.
Vampire movies are a dime a dozen. Over the years, every possible combination of plot elements has been done. It’s a real dead horse of a horror movie. Sometimes they make a Bram Stoker style movie but it’s usually a horrible mashup of Anne Rice themes and Blade with high flying Matrix style action and tragic but sexy characters wearing leather and latex like second skin. A real, original vampire movie is hard to come by and Deafula is one of them. I’m sometimes reminded of George Romero’s is-he-or-isn’t-he a vampire movie, Martin, but even Deafula stands apart from the crowd.
You see, Deafula is a movie with no spoken dialog. The entire movie is acted out in American sign language.
I’m not kidding.
School’s out forever! Battle Royale.
This one ruffled some feathers. Back in 2000, a little more than a year after the shootings at Columbine, a trailer emerged from Japan and excited as many people as it offended. In the trailer, the Japanese military bullies a bunch of kids in a school room, Takeshi Kitano throws a knife which plants itself in the forehead of a mouthy girl and the only discernable english in the trailer is when Kitanosan points to the blackboard and proclaims in heavily accented English, “Battle royal!” What does any of this mean? At the time I had no idea but such a decadent movie captured my imagination immediately. As soon as it was available with subtitles, I was all over it.
Try as you might here in the states, but you’re not going to find this movie easily. Despite what you may have heard, Battle Royale isn’t banned here, there just isn’t a distributor in their right mind who will touch it. Toho’s contract for American distribution calls for a very high profile thetrical run of the movie and given the fact that kids in high school still pack heat routinely, it doesn’t look like the American condition is ever going to ease up so that this movie could infiltrate our culture without a massive parent group boycott and protest. Despite what it looks like, this isn’t a movie about school shootings as we have come to understand it. If you’re looking for that, you’ll want to see Duck! The Carbine High Massacre.
Ia! Shub-Niggurath! The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society is at it again!
It was easy to miss but one of the best movies I saw in 2005 was the amateur, silent short production, The Call of Cthulhu, by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society. Directors have been trying forever to faithfully adapt Lovecraft to the silver screen, but it never works out. Stuart Gordon has come close on many occasions, but there’s an intangible something about Lovecraft’s vision of horror that never translates to the visual medium. Maybe it’s trying to put a face to faceless, ancient horrors that ruins it. A monster movie that never shows the monster doesn’t really work. You need a pay off or you’re going to lose the audience. The HPLHS is the rarest of creatures that not only pulled it off, but also put their own unique spin on the Lovecraft adaptation by stylistically pointing to Lovecraft’s own era and producing a silent film. It looks absolutely authentic, features some outstanding stop-motion and visual trickery to properly visualize “non-euclidian geometry”. I cannot stress this enough. If you’re a Lovecraft fan and want to see how someone makes a Lovecraft film proper, look no further than HPLHS Call of Cthulhu movie, which you can order from their website.
Dread Central reported the story about an hour ago that the Historical Society is gearing up to release their next picture, based on The Whisperer In The Darkness. The teaser trailer is on their site now and this time around, they’ve made a talkie, which is fantastic! The look of the trailer is fantastic, too. Whoever is shooting these movies has serious photography skills with the moody lighting and whatnot. This looks like straight 1945 MGM productions and I, personally, can’t wait. Shoot over to the teaser site and check it out!
Trailer Trash
I’m in conflict with Eli Roth. I really quite liked Cabin Fever and Hostel but Eli is one of those directors who, like Quentin Tarantino, has injected as much of his particular personality into his own movies so that it becomes difficult to separate my distaste of the auteur, himself, from his movies, which I like. I also can’t stand reading interviews with the man since his own verbal diarrhea rivals that of Robin Williams on any given talk show.
Yet here I am again, cursing a man I don’t even know who had the taste to masquerade as Kakihara, pictured left. If Bloody Disgusting is to be believed, and I don’t know why you wouldn’t, Roth enjoyed shooting his faux trailer, Thanksgiving, for Grindhouse so much that his latest feature idea is as unconventional as the Grindhouse double whammy and probably doomed to the same fate. At least he’ll get to hang out in the unemployment line with his buddies Quentin and Robert (I kid).
Deatils on what Trailer Trash actually is are a little hard to come by. Apparently, the feature will be like those trailer reels you can buy but each trailer has some kind of common idea that ties them all together. I really liked the trailers in Grindhouse and would love to see some features based on Thanksgiving and Don’t. I don’t really know what to make of this, though. I’m not willing to write it off yet since I’m pretty sure that Grindhouse was toxic enough to the box office that anything related to it gets shut down seconds after the pitch meeting begins so it would have to have some promise to make the money people forget how much they lost on Grindhouse.
From Bloody Disguting:
Trailer Trash is not a horror film, it’s a comedy. It will be very R-rated and completely insane, and I’m producing it with Mike Fleiss (who I did both “Hostel” films with), and writing it with my friends Jeff Rendell (my “Thanksgiving” co-writer, who also played The Pilgrim), Noah Belson (my co-creator on “The Rotten Fruit,”) and my brother Gabe, who’s collaborated with me on everything I’ve ever done.
I want to make a film like “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” which I consider to be the greatest achievement in the history of cinema. The best part is I get to shoot some new THANKSGIVING scenes, as well as other holiday slasher films I’ve always dreamed of making but never would because they’d completely ruin me. I can’t wait to shoot!”
I guess we’ll see.
