I have my problems with Mamorou Oshii. Personality quirks aside, such as an otaku-grade obsession with Basset Hounds, he is the king of anticlimax. His anime and film, Avalon, have a tendency to plod along at a snail’s pace until everything starts falling into place in the final moments of the movie when it suddenly gets really good… and then rolls credits. It’s as though he’s never heard of the three-act structure. It would be one thing if he were experimenting with the ways in which we tell stories, but even the most avant know when to call it quits and try something else if their approach doesn’t work. Still, Oshii has an arresting visual style that helps me ignore the fact that his movies go nowhere until the very end. I’m not ready to give up on him yet and this trailer tells you nothing about the movie (it is a teaser, after all), but once again, it’s a real sight to behold. Attractive women wielding very large guns attack giant monsters. What more do you need to know? How’s about this:
In the aftermath of global thermonuclear war, the Earth’s surface has been turned into a desert battlefield. Three beautiful female hunters: Gray (Meisa Kuroki), Lucifer (Rinko Kikuchi), and Colonel (Hinako Saeki) traverse the barren landscape armed with powerful assault rifles to fight a group of deadly sand-dwelling monsters called “sunakujira” (sand whales). When the the epic battle eventually seems to be coming to an end, the sparkle of muzzle flash dies down and assault ship flies overhead. Suddenly, a gigantic super mutation called “Madara Sunakujira” attacks.
I’ve been aware of Canuxploitation flicks for a long time, but unlike a lot of genre writers with a fondness for the early 80′s, such as I am, I don’t have any particular hang-up on Canada’s graceful bellyflop into the world of exploitation pictures because, quite frankly, I’m not really sure what characterizes them as distinctly Canadian since they’re explicitly made to look like American pictures and often were set in American locations, or at least locations that were supposed to pass for America. There were quite a few of them, too. A trip to the video store’s genres and you could find any number of them leering at you from the shelves. My Bloody Valentine, Def Con 4 and this title, Screwballs, were just a few of the dozens of exploitation pictures that sought to make Corman-grade bank on Canada’s social support of the arts. I know. Recoil in horror, dear American reader. That’s socialism at work.
T&A comedies were never really my thing, man. I’ve seen a lot of them because I was a video store junkie and that often meant renting every tape in the house so naturally you make your way to Porky’s and its sequels and after that, you’ve more or less seen every one of these soft skin flicks. It’s just that some were better than others at telling a funny story and others were just Animal House ripoffs with a pair of naked boobs every ten minutes. Screwballs, unfortunately, falls into the latter category. It’s actually just a Porky’s ripoff with half an already meager budget.
I’ve gone on at length in the past about how much I love Robert Kirkman’s comic, The Walking Dead. In spite of being unbearably bleak and unpleasant, it is easily one of the most compelling comic books I’ve ever read, chock full of substantial human drama. What I did not know was that even though the book is set in Georgia, Kirkman based all the settings on actual places that you can go to and visit on a map. It would seem that a fan with an even bigger appetite for zombies and human suffering than myself, took the time to go through 64 issues of the comic and mark all the dramatic turning points of the series on a Google Map, complete with a brief explanation and a scan of the related panel from the comic.
Seriously. This is epic. Exceptionally nerdy and indicative of obsessive compulsive personality features but for fans of the book who want to be able to sync themselves up in meatspace with the comic, this is your source. To Jason the “anumation artist”: Good work, man.
I’m really not entirely sure how you can take a movie like Heathers and expand the plot to fill a full season of television. Maybe if they did it in the BBC mold of 6 episodes and that’s it, but we don’t really do it that way. American television has a way of bleeding every possible concept dry until it features the most ridiculous character on the show on a pair of water skis about to jump over a tank containing a live shark. See what I did there?
What do I know, though? Variety is reporting that Fox, Sony TV and Lakeshore Entertainment are working on a TV adaptation of Michael Lehman’s cult teens on the edge flick. The premise, a trio of the biggest bitches you’ve ever seen conduct a symphony of rejection and drama until their latest rejection falls in with a psychopath. Together, they plot the murder of their classmates and stage them to look like suicides until it all culminates with a plot to kill the entire student body. How they plan to pull this off is beyond me since we’re ten years on and still walking on egg shells around high schoolers thanks to the ugly precedent set by a pair of losers in Colorado. But I’m interested and that’s all that should matter at this point. If they script something that hits TV like a bombshell anti-Gossip Girl, I’m all for it. Fox is turning to TV writer, Mark Rizzo, who only has one writer’s credit to his name, with help from Sex and the City’s Jenny Bicks.
I’m still on the fence about the role of commerce in social media. Many of the stabs, mind the pun, in the past have been woefully misguided as business x attempts to tap into this rich market only to make themselves look like total assholes when they hire some giggly, hip 20-something to sit in front of Tweetdeck all day saying “OMG u wont believe how much cheese Pizza Hut stuffs in their crust!!!1″ and I have to admit that I’m skeptical about fictional characters starting up Facebook profiles. It seems like a cheap novelty to me as it may be a better idea to just start a page or a group for whatever movie you’re trying to pimp. However, Behind The Mask: The Rise Of Leslie Vernon was a huge surprise for me and remains one of my recent favorite horror movies. So I’m willing to hear them out and have added Leslie both to my Twitter feed and my Facebook friends. I’m really not sure where they can take such a sequel as I really feel like the first movie covered it all and did a great job at being funny, horrific, emotionally manipulative and a great send-up of slasher movies everywhere.
But if you, like me, love social media and Behind The Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, you can keep up on where the sequel is heading by adding Leslie to your Facebook friends and following his Twitter feed.
There is nothing on Earth at all like City Of God’s Son. As the MP3 crept to a halt this morning, I got chills. Producer, Kenzo Digital is poised to unleash something entirely new on the world that will redirect the art of the mashup much like Danger Mouse’s bootleg masterpiece, The Grey Album (combining Jay-Z with The Beatles) did.
Truth be told, City of God’s Son doesn’t really belong here being as it is little more than a radio play at this point, but it’s presentation is cinematic; a self-described movie for the blind. It takes the streetwise vibe of any given blaxploitation picture and projects it through a lens that is equals parts Hughes Brothers and Wu-Tang Clan. What Kenzo Digital has done is cut up pieces of interviews and movies, instrumental and a capella tracks to tell the story of three friends growing up in a city that is portrayed as a jungle. It chronicles their lives coming up in the streets among hustlers big and small and features characters “played” by Jay-Z, Nas, Raekwon, Ghostface Killa and Biggie and clips from movies that are repurposed to put Samuel L. Jackson, Laurence Fishburn and Delroy Lindo in the story. Each piece is taken out of context and rearranged to form a larger narrative. This must have taken forever to build and all that work has paid off. I live to discover amazing projects like this!
If you head over the City Of God’s Son website you can see the trailer and download the first hour-long part of the story via MP3 and if you’re in New York City, keep your eyes peeled because Kenzo Digital will be presenting City of God’s Son in an expanded, sensory art installation.This is something entirely new. There is nothing like it anywhere. Get in on the ground floor and see the true potential of mashups.
We knew it was going to land somewhere in October but the official release date for Night of the Creeps is just in time for a Halloween night screening. Particularly if that screening happens to be at a guerilla drive-in. In Dover, New Hampshire. It also looks like the choose the least offensive design contest that Amazon was holding went with the yellow package comp for some reason. The Blu-ray design, something I don’t typically worry about in a DVD package, is actually pretty decent. Now all I need is a Blu-ray player and the home theater components to properly experience the hype.
So now you can finally get your Night of the Creeps fix on October 27th when the DVD and Blu-ray discs hit shelves with their impressive list of extras. It’s up at Amazon now for preorder where the Blu-ray version is actually cheaper than the DVD version.
My mom gave me a Sunday edition of The Boston Globe back in the late 80′s that had an article about H.P. Lovecraft in it. I’d never heard of him at that point, even though I’d seen a few yellowed paperbacks on our bookshelves around the house. Upon reading the article, I immediately scoured those shelves again and pulled out those yellowed pulps, this time devouring the eldritch horrors of Innsmouth, Charles Dexter Ward, Miskatonic University and Cthulhu. I was completely swept away by the utter hopelesness of his world, a place where people who dare to look deeper, behind the veil, found only unspeakable horror and madness. His prose is a little tough to process at times and at other times, impenetrably dense and dry but the imagination at work is unlike anyone else. Lovecraft is easily one of the most important horror authors of all time, not that that is any kind of grand revelation, this is a widely accepted belief.
I chose Lovecraft as the topic of a paper I wrote in seventh grade and if my teacher hadn’t already thought I was freaking insane, this was the final nail in the coffin. From a young age, I had learned just about everything there was to know about the guy so watching a documentary like Fear Of The Unknown didn’t exactly provide me with any new insight but it is a fairly deep examination of all things Lovecraft that dedicated Cthulhu cultists and casual readers alike can appreciate.
How’s this for a good time? If you live in or around London or plan to be in town throughout the month of September, here’s your chance to win a pair of tickets to one of the screenings of their Sexploitation In September series. The BFI has been generous enough to supply a pair to one lucky winner.
To enter all you need to do is send an email to bryan@cinema-suicide.com, the subject line must say BFI Sexploitation Contest and put your favorite sexploitation title in the body of the email. The winner will be chosen at random on 31 August! That’s monday, so don’t delay!
From 2nd September the BFI Southbank plays host to SEXPLOITATION CINEMA, a tantalising season of screen erotica when we question whether it is time to develop a critical framework for sex-rated cinema.
Come see classics such as Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Joseph Sarno’s The Bed and How to Make It! and Come Ride the Wild Pink Horse and Radley Metzger’s lesbian classic Theresa and Isabelle.
Also screening: the UK premiere of Schlock! The Secret History of American Movies (2001), featuring Roger Corman’s teen and monster quickies alongside the skin shows produced by David Friedman. The director Ray Greene willintroduce both screenings and take questions from the audience.
It’s been a while since I’ve put in a Bodycount Column for Sound On Sight. The summer turned out busier than I thought it would be and doing a bunch of ordinary reviews for them has put the strain on this site and their site. But I’m back. Inspired by an upcoming piece for Horrorblips, I expand upon my conclusion for them that the obvious winner in a battle Shapes is John Carpenter. Not only did he invent Michael Myers, his killer is a much more measured attempt at mixing campfire tales and urban legends with a genre that was waiting for body count movies. Rob Zombie’s version of Myers is a Freudian extension of his usual rock video shit show.
I’ve been aware of Canuxploitation flicks for a long time, but unlike a lot of genre writers with a fondness for the early 80′s, such as I am, I don’t have any particular hang-up on Canada’s graceful bellyflop into the world of exploitation pictures because, quite frankly, I’m not really sure what characterizes them as distinctly Canadian since they’re explicitly made to look like American pictures and often were set in American locations, or at least locations that were supposed to pass for America. There were quite a few of them, too. A trip to the video store’s genres and you could find any number of them leering at you from the shelves. My Bloody Valentine, Def Con 4 and this title, Screwballs, were just a few of the dozens of exploitation pictures that sought to make Corman-grade bank on Canada’s social support of the arts. I know. Recoil in horror, dear American reader. That’s socialism at work.
I’ve gone on at length in the past about how much I love Robert Kirkman’s comic, The Walking Dead. In spite of being unbearably bleak and unpleasant, it is easily one of the most compelling comic books I’ve ever read, chock full of substantial human drama. What I did not know was that even though the book is set in Georgia, Kirkman based all the settings on actual places that you can go to and visit on a map. It would seem that a fan with an even bigger appetite for zombies and human suffering than myself, took the time to go through 64 issues of the comic and mark all the dramatic turning points of the series on a Google Map, complete with a brief explanation and a scan of the related panel from the comic.
I’m really not entirely sure how you can take a movie like Heathers and expand the plot to fill a full season of television. Maybe if they did it in the BBC mold of 6 episodes and that’s it, but we don’t really do it that way. American television has a way of bleeding every possible concept dry until it features the most ridiculous character on the show on a pair of water skis about to jump over a tank containing a live shark. See what I did there?
I’m still on the fence about the role of commerce in social media. Many of the stabs, mind the pun, in the past have been woefully misguided as business x attempts to tap into this rich market only to make themselves look like total assholes when they hire some giggly, hip 20-something to sit in front of Tweetdeck all day saying “OMG u wont believe how much cheese Pizza Hut stuffs in their crust!!!1″ and I have to admit that I’m skeptical about fictional characters starting up Facebook profiles. It seems like a cheap novelty to me as it may be a better idea to just start a page or a group for whatever movie you’re trying to pimp. However, 
There is nothing on Earth at all like City Of God’s Son. As the MP3 crept to a halt this morning, I got chills. Producer, Kenzo Digital is poised to unleash something entirely new on the world that will redirect the art of the mashup much like Danger Mouse’s bootleg masterpiece, The Grey Album (combining Jay-Z with The Beatles) did.
My mom gave me a Sunday edition of The Boston Globe back in the late 80′s that had an article about H.P. Lovecraft in it. I’d never heard of him at that point, even though I’d seen a few yellowed paperbacks on our bookshelves around the house. Upon reading the article, I immediately scoured those shelves again and pulled out those yellowed pulps, this time devouring the eldritch horrors of Innsmouth, Charles Dexter Ward, Miskatonic University and Cthulhu. I was completely swept away by the utter hopelesness of his world, a place where people who dare to look deeper, behind the veil, found only unspeakable horror and madness. His prose is a little tough to process at times and at other times, impenetrably dense and dry but the imagination at work is unlike anyone else. Lovecraft is easily one of the most important horror authors of all time, not that that is any kind of grand revelation, this is a widely accepted belief.
How’s this for a good time? If you live in or around London or plan to be in town throughout the month of September, here’s your chance to win a pair of tickets to one of the screenings of their Sexploitation In September series. The BFI has been generous enough to supply a pair to one lucky winner.
