Cinema Suicide

At what point do you stop giving a shit about Worst Case Scenario? Is it even possible? I really want to just put this god damn movie to rest but I’ve seen both the teasers and no matter how much time passes before I even think of it again, I’m as excited about it as the first time I saw the trailer back in what seems like 2004.

Hey, I realize that making an independent picture, particularly one as visually outrageous as this one, can’t possibly be a walk in the park. I mean, for crying out loud! Trailer 2 has a shitload of nazi zombies invading Holland by hot air balloon. So it’s not like I’m shitting on this movie or its producers. I really, really want to see it.

Well, it looks like that might still be happening. Looks like some money of Dutch origin has come into the production’s pockets as well as the leftover sets from Paul Verhoeven’s latest picture. After many failed attempts to sell the movie to the American film market, Richard Raaphorst and crew threw in the towel on that venture and kept it strictly homegrown, no pun intended. Whether or not this movie actually moves forward to a full-blown production with cameras, lights and hundreds of thousands of feet of real film stock is up in the air. This movie has a reputation for going on hold for long periods of time. This time around, though, it looks like they have Brian Yuzna’s name attached to it after Raaphorst lent his talent to shoot the title sequence for Beyond Re-Animator, which I haven’t seen. Lately, Yuzna has had some action in the European market, what with Fantastic Factory being based in Spain, so I guess we’ll see what happens.

All I know is that I want this movie to come out so badly. What I really look for in a zombie flick these days is more than the usual point and shoot teenage fantasy, gun-porn bullshit. I want a zombie movie with a new angle. I want someone to come along and prove me wrong in my notion that all the best zombie movies have been made and they bear the name George A. Romero.

Chew on this promo footage.

Big ups to Twitch for the scoop!

Seemed like back in the 90′s there was a surge of vampy-goth posing that more or less hit peak mediocrity a few years ago with the LARP-fantasy of the Underworld movies but back about ten or fifteen years ago it seemed like you couldn’t throw a rock without hitting some Anne Rice inspired tale of beautiful, androgynous euro-trash vampires and how miserable it is to be trapped in a stunning twenty-something year old’s body for eternity. Cry me a fucking river, Lestat!

Looks like vampires are coming back again but this time without the vague themes of AIDS and high-fashion wardrobes set to a soundtrack of Agoraphobic Nosebleed instead of Bauhaus. It’s about god damn time those things became monsters again. Seems like it all began with 30 Days Of Night, which I still haven’t seen but on the horizon is vampire themed Twilight from the series of books by Stephanie Meyer but according to my wife, those books barely qualify as horror. Coming from Sweden, though, is an interesting one that is getting quite a bit of praise. Based on a novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist (the english title is Let Me In), the story is about a young boy in the suburbs of Stockholm who befriends a vampire child from around the neighborhood. Unfortunately, that’s about all I know at the moment. Magnolia pictures, who recently brought us The Signal, are establishing themselves as a risky venture with some real off-beat pictures coming from their genre arm, Magnet. The rights to the Swedish picture have been purchased and a theatrical/DVD release is planned. When that happens is another matter, entirely.

I don’t want to sound like I’m licking boots here, but with the flicks coming down from Magnolia, particularly Magnet, the future of horror is pretty bright. They’re also releasing the weird-beyond-words, Dai Niponjin, about the woes of a kaiju in a world where giant monsters routinely fuck shit up in Japanese cities.

This news could not possibly be any better. Jose Mojica Marins is prepping for the release of his first film in some time, set to be released in Brazil on July 25th, entitled The Embodiment of Evil or The Devil’s Reincarnation, depending on your source. This movie marks the return of the Coffin Joe character, still on the prowl for the perfect woman to bear his son. But that’s not all! In preparation for a Coffin Joe retrospective, Marins uncovered the Super 8 footage shot for a feature in 1980, entitled The Plague which has sat unfinished since the money ran out. There’s no release date, but Marins has shot some footage to round it out and cut the piece together with a likely premier to coincide with the release of the new Coffin Joe movie.

From Twitch:
A Praga was almost entirely shot in super-8 back in 1980, but the footage was shelved due to lack of resources to finish it. During the preparations of a major retrospective of his work that took place in São Paulo and Brasilia in 2007 – for which brand new 35mm prints of no less than 25 films were made –, Mojica and producer Eugenio Puppo jumped at the opportunity to finish the project. Puppo put together the raw material, shot additional scenes, edited and supervised all the post production process, and the result was shown to those lucky enough to attend the retrospective. Puppo and Mojica are now looking for means to transfer the film to 35mm. A Praga is expected to travel around international festivals and there are plans of a commercial release in Brazil.

For the uninitiated, Coffin Joe is a Brazilian superstar. The nation’s greatest bogeyman. A bearded atheist in a top hat, sporting eight inch long fingernails and a nasty disposition. He’s an undertaker with a deep-running hatred for religion and an obsession with finding the perfect woman to bear his perfect child. It’s extremely bizarre but also extremely awesome. A couple of years back, Fantoma released a boxed set containing the three best-known movies and a shitload of supplemental material, including a series of comics. They are not to be missed.

Check out the Embodiment of Evil trailer:

Let’s get one thing straight. Neil Marshall is fucking awesome. Dog Soldiers put a cool werewolf spin on the Night of the Living Dead survivor formula and The Descent actually lived up to all those retarded blurbs on the poster about tension and claustrophobia. The guy has that rare ability as a director to marry visual style and storytelling and still put his own voice into the production. Doomsday is next up, hitting theaters on March 14th in the United States and May 9th in the UK, which is weird since the whole god damn thing is a British production.

Apparently, a virus breaks out in Scotland and the only way to contain it is to wall off Scotland. The people who survive inside become savages. When the virus breaks out elsewhere, a team of specialists has to go in to find some kind of cure. It’s supposedly inspired by movies like Mad Max and Escape From New York, which I am all about. Expect a sweet Road Warrior style car chase as well as a scene where someone is cooked alive and eaten by cannibals.

Here’s the trailer.

My opinion of anime/manga is well-covered here at Cinema S. I take a snobby approach and make the simultaneously bold and naive claim that most anime brought to the states for our market is usually directed at the growing legion of self-diagnosed Asperger’s sufferers. But I’m told that, in fact, there’s something for everyone in that wretched arena. Case in point, Akira. In spite of my aversion of all things big-eyes/little-mouth I can’t deny the cool factor of Katsuhiro Otomo’s 80′s manga brought to screen, Akira. Released in 1988 to global acclaim, the anime is a mostly-confusing highlights reel of the original manga presented in totally awesome animated style. Back in 1989 when I saw the trailer on MTV, I was immediately captivated by such a wildly divergent style of animation and when I finally caught up with a bootleg in 1990, I was stunned. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense and the final thirty minutes of the movie is mostly two characters screaming each others’ name but this was way before you could find this stuff in abundance. I still like Akira quite a bit and the recent Kanye West video for Stronger was pretty bad-ass, too.

So it looks like Hollywood is gearing up for a live action adaptation in two parts. Produced by Leonardo DiCaprio and directed by newcomer, Ruari Robinson, who I know nothing about. An IMDB search of his name turned up some results about some short films he’s done with some emphasis on the visual effects. So who knows? I’m all about introducing new blood into the film production scene and having them be someone other than a former music video director. To Americanize the flava, the setting has been changed from Neo-Tokyo to New Manhattan. I’m sure this will piss off everybody with an extensive and well-organized collection of manga and anime dvds but fuck them. Seriously. There are just as many reasons that this movie could succeed as it could fail. The most interesting part, to me, is that rather than adapt the anime, they’ll be adapting the manga, reprinted here in the states by ex-Marvel division Epic Comics (later in trade format in black and white by Dark Horse) in two parts. One movie will tell the first three issues and given a solid box office return, the sequel will tell the last three issues and wrap it up proper. Not bad. Not bad at all. I’ll be keeping an eye out for this.

I don’t like Disney animations. I haven’t in some time. Back in the day, during the most vital part of the company’s history, there was a time when you could see that Walt Disney was all about pushing the boundaries of animation and approaching it as a source of entertainment while still treating it as art. Disney employed power house artists of the era to contribute to some of their most ambitious projects but even with names like Kay Nielson and Oskar Fischinger involved it still surprises the shit out of me that Salvador Dali and Walt Disney were tight.

Seems like several years ago that I first heard about Destino. Maybe I read unconfirmed folklore about it at Snopes but it was very much spoken of in the same way that people talk about Walt Disney’s cryogenically frozen corpse being contained under the Pirates of the Carribean ride at Disney World. It’s just another strange rumor. Turns out that the unfinished animation was found back in 2003 by Roy Disney and that on November 11, 2008, Disney plans to release the finished product on 2-disc DVD. Rounding out the package is a feautre-length documentary about the Destino project, another feature about unfinished Disney projects and then an exploration of the surprising line-up of personalities who were involved with Walt over the years.

Ordinarily I wouldn’t report to you on such matters, but this is Salvador Dali and his weird-ass psycho sexual art wrapped up with an organization best known for milking the pockets of parents everywhere. Destino serves as a reminder that Disney wasn’t always about scorched earth marketing tactics but at one time was a daring studio that would bet the farm just to see how far they could push the envelope.

Read more at DVD Active. Thanks to Twitch for the heads up.

I really wish that I had something witty to say about this but this is one those moments in life where I firmly slap the palm of my hand to my forehead and exclaim, “Gan ni niang!”

Here’s the deal. Reuters is reporting that the upcoming ’08 Olympic games in Beijing is bringing on a new cultural crackdown that blacklists horror movies. Never mind that the Mainland is home to, perhaps, the largest black market of DVDs in the world where you can get just about anything you want from any genre and the authorities are powerless to stop it. I guess it’s the gesture that counts. The Chinese government’s General Administration of Press and Publications has officially declared horror movies contraband. And, of course, they’re just thinking of the children. I’m glad someone is. I only wonder when those children that they’re so worried about have time to watch horror movies when they’re pulling 16 hour shifts slapping coats of lead paint on baby toys headed for America for a couple of yuan a week.

Call me crazy.

I suppose as the communist government’s role in the changing face of China on the world stage becomes a lot more ambiguous, they have to put their foot down somewhere to show the world that they still call the shots. After all, there are going to be a lot of people watching those games set in their own homeland. You don’t want to look soft when the whole world is looking.

I like John Landis a lot based entirely on his 70′s and 80′s output. Helicopter crash or not, he’s definitely my bag, man. It seems entirely appropriate that he would be up to direct a bio-pic based on the life of William M. Gaines, the head of the notorious EC Comics, which spawned some of the most ghoulish horror comic books such as Vault of Horror and Tales From The Crypt and eventually led to the dreaded Comics Code Authority.

From Ain’t It Cool News:
JOHN LANDIS TO “GHOULISHLY YOURS, WILLIAM M. GAINES”

John Landis (“National Lampoon’s Animal House,” “The Blues Brothers,” “Masters of Horror”) has been attached to direct the authorized feature biopic, “Ghoulishly Yours, Wiliam M. Gaines.” Landis will develop the project with Joel Eisenberg, who is penning the screenplay based on the life of the titular EC Comics’ publisher (“Tales from The Crypt,” “Mad Magazine” et. al.).

Pic will revolve around the banding together of an anti-establishment group of artists and writers, led by a reluctant Gaines, as they produce their controversial yet hugely popular line of comic books. At the peak of his success Gaines becomes an unwitting First Amendment figurehead, defending his livelihood against the U.S. government amidst accusations of perpetuating juvenile delinquency.

Landis most recently helmed “Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project” for HBO.

Eisenberg is a partner in production concern EMO Films, LLC with Tim Owens and Eugene Mandelcorn.

Landis’ sense of humor seems perfectly suited for this kind of project. With American Werewolf, in particular, you can tell that the ghoulish gallows humor of EC Comics had a large role in the writing of the script. EC horror comics are also eternally cool, tame by modern comparison but fun to read in the same way that old Vincent Price AIP flicks are to watch.

I’m already looking forward to this movie.

I’ve been away far too long. While every day I scoured for something worth posting, I just couldn’t find any news. The writer’s strike has taken a real toll on the American film market, even in indie circles and what isin production or on the slate for release is just weak-sauce. Finally, there are some things to talk about and other people doing the reviews to save me the effort, not that I don’t love hyping the movies that I enjoy.

I’ve given Asia the cold shoulder in recent times and I’ve listed my reasons for doing so in the past. Namely, inconsistent output from Japan and Hong Kong’s love affair with pop-singers as action stars. However, I always take it easy on Thailand and I have a really good reason for doing so. Prachya Pinkaew is a director whose name I couldn’t possibly pronounce out loud. He’s also a director that I try to keep a close eye on. I was won over big time with Ong Bak and Tom Yum Goong and in spite of his use of script as a cheap excuse to drape exciting action sequences around, I couldn’t ask for more. The review of Pinkaew’s latest, Chocolate, at Twitch knocks off points for Pinkaew’s inability to tell a worthwhile story but when it comes to Thailand, I leave storytelling expectations at the door and look at their movies purely as exploitation spectacles. If it’s a Thai boxing movie, I’m really only going to be let down if the fighting and stunts are sub-par and if it’s a horror movie, I’m really on the lookout for excessive bloodshed. Rarely am I ever let down. Chocolate’s set up sounds like a lot of fun as an autistic girl, using her savant ability of muscle memory to fight dudes in order to collect on old mob debts, sounds like a lot of fun and in the Pinkaew tradition, features a climactic title match of 30 on 1 that I just have to see. After the brilliance of Tom Yum Goong’s one take Hotel lobby fight, the bar was set pretty high.

Back in Hong Kong, Stephen Chow has finally come around and released CJ7, a family-friendly toy from outer space story tha, unfortunately, hasn’t really grabbed my attention like talk of Shaolin Soccer and Kung-Fu Hustle did. Now those movies I can watch a million times. Chow was a big deal throughout the world in the 90′s as he ground out a new comedy every year but in recent times he has slowed down. I’m really not sure what to expect from CJ7, though, and the cutesy story about a little boy (portrayed by a little girl) just doesn’t sound like something I’m going to five a shit about, but come on! This is Stephen Chow we’re talking about! This review suggests that Chow is an alien, Jesus, Captain America, Superman and a bunch of other ridiculous superlative characters fictional and otherwise but also gives the impression that the movie didn’t jive with them and they just can’t reconcile with the fact that maybe Stephen Chow dropped the ball and took four years to do so. This review is a little more to the point.

I have a stack of movies sitting at home awaiting my own review. Hopefully soon, I’ll have some real time to sit down, watch them and then come back here to tell you whether or not they’re worth watching.