Man. If you’re going to name your movie Suck, you’d better be damn sure that the movie isn’t even remotely bad. It’s like naming your band Garbage. If you write even one single that is poorly received, everyone is going to rip you apart and the easy jokes will never end. It also doesn’t help that this movie is hitting shelves around the same time that Vampires Suck is hitting theathers because if the press is anything to believe, that movie is a piece of fucking shit and the name and vampire mode of this flick is sure to confuse folks at the Red Box.
Vampires are hot again and I’m at a loss to explain why. In the past, the monster has represented some fairly easy to identify social ills. At its earliest appearances in folklore, the monster represented high mortality rates in infants and perpetuated the bad reputation of dead locals with a legacy of bad behavior. In the 90′s, the vampire became an adequate metaphor for AIDS. For the last ten years, the zombie has been the perfect American monster as it’s a fairly solid stand-in for anyone you may happen to know but I can’t quite put a finger on the reappearance of the vampire. Truth be told, the latest iteration is a creature that I hardly recognize and while I’m the last person to scoff at someone playing fast and loose with genre conventions, our current vampire template is hardly a god damn vampire at all. True Blood paints them out to be neutered wimps, pining for mortality and a piece of warm-blooded ass and Twilight; well, I’m not even remotely comfortable addressing that situation. Another emergence in horror recently has been the reawakening of the horror comedy musical. It’s as though half a dozen filmmakers woke up one morning and realized that they had a hearty thirst for The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Repo The Genetic Opera, a flick I still have yet to see but am told is quite terrible, started a ball rolling that opened the door for Suck. Honestly, I can’t say that I don’t welcome a vampire movie that also happens to hit me in the sweet spot with a good soundtrack.
Being an American soaked in Irish blood, particularly here in New England, has its drawbacks. They’re hardly the sort of thing that dog me through life, but most people make all sorts of faulty assumptions about Irish people and automatically associate those of us with ancestral bonds to the old country with stereotypes that really fucking suck. The stereotypes, though celebrated by just about everyone but me, include but are not limited to the beliefs that: I am a rowdy booze hound with a boner for Guinness, that my favorite band now and forever is The Dropkick Murphys, that no Friday night is complete without a fist fight, that I have a separate wardrobe of green clothing specifically for St. Patrick’s Day and that I am a shame-ridden Catholic with an unquenchable desire to procreate. Truthfully, I don’t drink much these days and when I do, I go for vodka. I can take or leave Guinness. I’m a recovering Catholic, a strong advocate of birth control, I thought the Dropkick Murphys were better before Al Barr joined the band and the only people who wear green to the office on St. Patty’s Day aren’t Irish. I’m also repelled by the entire notion of St. Patrick. By driving out the snakes, they mean driving out thousands of years of cultural heritage and replacing it with Christian faith.
That said, I’m in love with my own tribal heritage. The modern picture of Ireland is a portrait painted in the minds of most people by James Joyce, whether they know it or not and that’s really too bad because in spite of ridiculous accents and lovable drunkards living in the dreary setting, Ireland’s cultural heritage in the days of the Celts is fucking awesome! Vikings get all the credit for being Europe’s resident badasses, but the Celtic and Picts of the region were easily just as badass and routinely went toe to toe in a mad dash for resources. What is known in the region since the tribal people of Britain weren’t too keen on writing shit down for posterity is pretty slim and the only reason we know what we know is handed down from word of mouth storytelling and the records of Roman invaders from the period and the stories those guys tell, particularly about their push into Scotland, are pretty dire. The Celtic tribes of the time were hardcore. Maybe this is why while watching Neil Marshall’s latest gory action flick, Centurion, I kept finding myself rooting for the Pict villains of the movie. This is not a good sign for your movie when the bad guys are confused for the good guys.
In case you haven’t yet gotten sick of me gushing over this Walking Dead series, here’s something that will either push you over the edge or win you over completely. AMC has been steadily stringing us all along with their various carrot/stick combinations since it was announced late last year that AMC had the series in motion with Darabont producing, writing and directing the pilot and ever since then they’ve been more than generous with the promotionals. The hype behind this show has also won over a legion of the internet’s most fickle, most jaded fans, too. Comic fans are notoriously awful when it comes to prejudging adaptations of their precious source material and the unanimous chorus of support coming from horror fans as well as comic fans is something of an anomaly. Strong enough, in fact, for AMC to make the unprecedented move of ordering a six episode run of the show before frame one of the pilot had even been shot. The marketing campaign that is steadily building the fan frenzy to frightening levels, nearing out-of-control chaos, is absolute genius and I’m pretty sure that the leak of the pilot script was a deliberate move by AMC to win over fans. I mean, even I got a copy of the god damn thing (Review) and that sort of thing never happens, bro.
So here’s the latest piece of buzz-generation. The trailer that premiered at Comic Con and hit the web in a dozen different versions, from crappy to watchable, has finally hit the web in a high quality version and the rumored premier date of October 3rd has finally been clarified. Appropriately enough, The Walking Dead pilot premiers this Halloween. Could October possibly seem further away than it already does now? I think not.
It’s that time again, folks. Time for me to romance the Prodigy of Providence, Richard Griffin. Do you know what the 48 Hour Film Project is? It’s a challenge to filmmakers around the world to produce, start to finish, an entire short film in the span of 48 brief hours. You have two full days to conceive, write, shoot and edit your piece and submit it to the governing body of the project. I know a bunch of people who take part in the New Hampshire mutation of the challenge and I’ve seen a lot of the stuff that comes out of the various projects. Let’s just say that the results are notoriously inconsistent and that for many people, 48 hours is just not enough time to come up with something of a coherent quality. Most of the time it inspires amateurish foolishness. Richard and the Scorpio Film Releasing troupe don’t seem to have that problem, though. Richard’s 2008 entry into the challenge eventually became one of his best features, Nun of That (Review), and while I’m told that his latest production, Disco Exorcist, may be his last for the foreseeable future, I’d really love to see Mutants of the Apocalypse become a 90 minute exercise in high-concept low-brow. The guy and his team are reliable that way.
Mutants of the Apocalypse is seven and a half minutes of Griffin lovingly making fun of Italian Mad Max knockoffs with a heaping side-order of Escape From New York. Michael Reed, who tends to wind up the center-piece of every Griffin production, whether or not he’s the star, does his best Snake Plissken. Reed’s wife, Sarah, formerly Nicklin, does what she does best: playing the most absurd shit as though it’s the most normal thing in the world. As for Brandon Aponte, best known for ridiculous mobster roles, he winds up an adequate stunt double for Mark Gregory and, apparently, is world-famous in Cuba! Also, the fascist Ilsa knockoff is none other than darling Providence horror hostess, Penny Dreadful of Shilling Shockers. This short won a bunch of awards at the Rhode Island screening, including Audience Choice. Also, my latest addition to the site, TV writer, Tony Nunes, had a hand in the production.
The end of Dexter’s fourth season and pretty much the entire season as a whole, not to mention the series as an entire body of work, left a high water mark in my mind. While everyone is still going inexplicably ape shit for True Blood right now, a show that I previously enjoyed and is now leaving me cold, I’m wringing my hands and pacing in anticipation for the follow-up to what was the most shocking moment of television I’ve ever encountered.
By this point, you should be up to speed so previous spoiler warnings will now go unheeded: Rita is dead; the last word from the Trinity killer after Dexter finally put him to rest. From what little plot and character information has come down from Showtime it’s looking like next season will concern Dexter’s struggle to keep his dark passenger a secret since a certain Kyle Butler, accompanied by a police sketch, becomes a person of interest in the investigation of the Trinity Killer. Meanwhile, he has to deal with Rita’s kids who, understandably, are bummed out by the death of their mother. Drama ensues. Also, Comic Con rumors floated around about Dexter’s sister Deb discovering the truth about her brother, something that actually happens in the last pages of the first book.
So to whet your appetite, here are some teasers and promos from Showtime to get you ready for the September 26th launch of Dexter Season 5. Can you taste the excitement?
For the unitiated, B-Sol, aka Brian Solomon of The Vault of Horror, is one of the web’s top horror bloggers. He is so prolific, in fact, that I sometimes wonder when he gets any sleep. Last Sunday I learned that B-Sol probably doesn’t get much since he and I were up at midnight talking about comic books.
See, a while back, Brian, myself and Nate Yapp of Classic Horror got into this epic Facebook thread about Man-Thing, the 70′s Marvel horror comic about the swamp monster that doesn’t speak and burns at the touch. This discussion grew to become a much larger conversation about the connection between Marvel comics in the 70′s and exploitation movies of the time. I planned an epic roundtable discussion podcast that involved myself, Casey Criswell of Cinema Fromage and Bloody Good Horror, B-Sol, John Cozzoli of Zombo’s Closet of Horror and curator of the League of Tana Tea Drinkers and Steve “Uncle Creepy” Barton of Dread Central. Unfortunately I couldn’t make it stick. That many people spread out across several time zones meant schedule conflicts and the whole thing fell apart. In its wake I began working on an epic length examination of the topic that I am still writing while I interview people at the heart of Marvel Comics at the time (Marv Wolfman, Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway).
B-Sol couldn’t let it rest, though. It’s a good thing because it’s a topic that he and I are both passionate about and spent a good deal of time exploring in our salad days when we actually had money to regularly follow comics. So here we are in the age of the podcast and I’m glad I got to be the guest on the latest episode of the Vault of Horror podcast, Conversations in the Dark. We spend nearly an hour chatting about the high points of Marvel Comics and how some of their most misunderstood titles are actually some of their best!
My best of 2009 list was a weird list, indeed. Last year was a good year for genre film fans but still the number one spot was occupied by Black Dynamite and a close runner up was a documentary. Given, this documentary was one of the most kinetic and entertaining I’ve ever seen, but a documentary nonetheless. I’m talking, of course, about Mark Hartley’s frantic ode to Australian exploitation cinema, Not Quite Hollywood (Review). I could have sat through a marathon session of that documentary, a never-ending parade of movies and stories of making them straight from the mouths of the filmmakers. Hartley’s skills in the editing department and thorough research took one of the world’s greatest untold stories of film and dressed it up in the sort of costuming it needed in order to be told right. It was a sleazy, trashy documentary about a ton of sleazy, trashy movies and I loved every motherfucking second of it. I wanted more. Badly.
Thankfully, Hartley was more than happy to oblige and is on his way back with another portrait of filmmaking from a corner of the world that most people ignored. Machete Maidens Unleashed is a profile of exploitation film set in the steamy jungles of the Philippines, where enterprising filmmakers, specializing in garbage, could go and make the most of their movie dollar in a setting where you didn’t have to deal with unions and regulations. The result was a boom of coked-out action and horror movies that tossed aside all notions of human decency and catered to low-lifes everywhere. It was glorious and the movies that came out of this scene were fucked up. Period. From the looks of this extremely Not Safe For Work (NSFW) trailer, I’m going to get more of what I wanted from Hartley the first time around and it’s just as frantic and fun as the first time. This time, Hartley hits up some of the usual faces of b-movie filmmaking and we get to hear all about making movies in the jungle from Roger Corman, Joe Dante and John Landis, just to name a few.
I don’t know who is responsible for this, but I must admit, I’d like to see more. This is probably what it would sound like if a 16 year old girl were to recap the classic Lovecraft vehicle, The Call of Cthulhu exclusively via text messages. Of course, the nuance and dread of Lovecraft is lost but something tells me that nuance and dread weren’t even on the menu since we’re going for laughs. Keep your eyes open because this one even gets a little topical.
Tremors is cool as hell, you guys. I dare you to disagree with me because I can conclusively prove that you are wrong in your dispute simply by pointing out that you’re wrong. The movie went on to spawn a franchise of sequels and a TV series, all of which sucked boners but the original flick with Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward is just so freakin’ cool. Above is a five minute animation set to resemble a BBC-style informational piece about the Tremors Graboid as though it were a real organism, coasting below the Nevada desert.I’m telling you. This video is brilliant!
Man. If you’re going to name your movie Suck, you’d better be damn sure that the movie isn’t even remotely bad. It’s like naming your band Garbage. If you write even one single that is poorly received, everyone is going to rip you apart and the easy jokes will never end. It also doesn’t help that this movie is hitting shelves around the same time that Vampires Suck is hitting theathers because if the press is anything to believe, that movie is a piece of fucking shit and the name and vampire mode of this flick is sure to confuse folks at the Red Box.
