You know? Even though it deviated wildly from the original comics and butchered my favorite scene, V For Vendetta could have been a lot worse. I actually liked it. It completely downplayed the political angle and I can sort of understand why. It was no longer the 80’s and it wasn’t produced in England. Context is everything when it came to V. Director James McTiegue had a good eye for style and even though I think his lens sterilized a movie that should have been a little murky, he came off like one to watch. Then they announced his next project.
Ninja Assassin hit the internet like a bomb with an amazing stunt training video. It was also a movie about ninjas. At least that’s what I gathered based on the title. To boot, it was to star Korean pop sensation, Rain, who co-starred in Park Chan Wook’s mostly overlooked crazy people in love movie, I’m A Cyborg But That’s Okay. So here we have a modestly budgeted picture out of Hollywood featuring ninjas and starring no one anybody in the west has heard of. Hyped by a killer training reel, Ninja Assassin was looking up to be the movie highlight of my year. It really sucks that the movie is such a fucking royal disaster.
It’s Rondo time! A festive time of year for horror fans the world around. David Colton, with the help of horror fans everywhere through the majesty of 
I don’t often equate New Hampshire with horror. There’s something so vanilla about this state and I have a hard time believing that anything horrific ever came from this place, even if it did spawn G.G. Allin. However, I think that the one thing this state has been waiting for is the right author. H.P. Lovecraft put Rhode Island and Massachusetts on the horror map and a key ingredient in the success of Stephen King is the star of most of his stories, the great state of Maine. Quite frankly, I think I may be the guy to bring New Hampshire to the fore, or that may just be my arrogance talking. I don’t really know what it is about New England, but nowhere else in The Union does it seem like horror has roots like this region yet there really isn’t a horror author out there whose stories are categorically New Hampshire. To remedy this and maybe cultivate that association, editor of New Hampshire magazine, Rick Broussard, is kicking off a series of New Hampshire pulp fiction anthologies with a collection of horror shorts set in or concerning the Granite State and he’s taking submissions from any and all right up to the end of March.
A friend of mine went down to that 24 hour sci fi film fest they hold in Boston every year and he came back raving about this weirdo short film that he called something like “Coolio, paranormal drug dealer”. Turns out he was close on the name. Coolio has nothing to do with the picture and its title is actually Frank Dancoolo: Paranormal Drug Dealer. A little research turned up a couple of leads and before you knew it, director Andrew Jones was showing me to the website where you can watch the movie. At almost 8 minutes in length, Frank Dancoolo proves to the world what you can do with a green screen, a little know how with Adobe After Effects and a really weird-ass idea.
If you Google Devil Doll, you’re going to wind up with some common search results. You’ll get a couple of early hits for the Tod Browning movie. You’ll find a bunch leading you to various resources for a nasty rockabilly band and you’ll find some cyptic hits for fansites related to an experimental rock group fronted by a wide-eyed lunatic by the name of Mr. Doctor.
I’ve been yelling about Black Dynamite (
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