Cinema Suicide

Gotta love Comic Con weekend.  The one weekend of the year when movie news drops left and right.  It’s tough to keep up with it all.  Among all my excitement over the Friday remake (and that Dharma Initiative shit) this bit from Sam Raimi fell through the cracks.

I’d love to make another Evil Dead picture. And actually that’s in the wheelhouse. I’d like to work on it with my brother Ivan when he comes up next week.

So there you go.  Among all the excitement about Drag Me To Hell, another proposed Spiderman sequel (that I can do without) and the word about Raimi doing a Tom Clancy flick, there was this tidbit.  These three sentences that lit the crowd up like Christmas.  Fuck another Spiderman movie, Ash needs to kick ass and we need to watch him do so.

Make it happen, Sam.

UPDATED! The clip is back!

Get it here y’all! The Platinum Dunes Friday panel at the San Diego Comic Con (which I vow to attend next year) ran a quick demo clip from the upcoming Friday remake and in spite of the shitty sound and dark and out of focus picture, you can see enough.

I’m going to have to keep an eye on this clip throughout the day. You never know when it’s going to get yanked from Youtube. As for the looks of it, can’t say that I’m disappointed in any way. I’ve been vocally opposed to remakes and you’d think that I’d be REALLY pissed off about my favorite slasher franchise getting the treatment but the way I see it, the guy has been to space. You just can’t make it any more outrageous than that and even if you change the fundamental pieces of Jason Voorhees, the producers have changed him enough throughout the sequels that nothing you do can possibly be any worse than having him mutate back to a child under a torrent of New York City sewer sludge. So this is just another sequel to me and it’s looking pretty good.

Back when I first moved to New England with my family, I discovered Force Five on Channel 25, which is now a Fox Affiliate.  I guess it only ran in New England and in Italy.  It was five shows, one for each day of the week.  Dangard Ace, Grandizer, Spaceketeers, Starvengers and Gaiking.  Each one cheesy as hell but boasting one or many totally sweet giant robots that often fought other giant robots while the pilots called out their attacks before they did them (Double! Sickle!).  Good times.  A couple of years later I would discover Tranzor Z (aka Mazinger, I think, I’m sure Necrodave will correct me if I’m wrong) and somewhere along the lines I saw a cool one called Dynamo which I never saw again.  They bring back fond memories and a yearning to actually go to Mr. Big Toyland on Moody Street in Waltham, MA thanks to the ad that ran after the shows.

So imagine my excitement when I saw this in production in Korea.

Hell yeah.  I don’t know jack about it aside from its title, Taekwon V but I believe that I’ve been waiting a long time for a proper Shogun Warriors style giant robot throwdown and we’re about to get one.

Finally, here’s a the Mr. Big Toyland clip.

Ah, sweet Comic Con.  I’ve been waiting for this to go down to get the skinny on what was going into the MST3K 20th Anniversary Boxed Set.  So here’s the deal.  You get:

• First Spaceship On Venus
• Laserblast
• Werewolf
• Future War

Seems like Werewolf got a shit ton of circulation while the show was in its death throes on the Sci Fi channel but it’ll be nice to have the American cut of First Spaceship On Venus and Laserblast (“are you ready for some football???”) since the latter was hard to come by and fell into that weird seventh season void.  But that’s not all.  There is some supplemental stuff like the 20th anniversary panel and interviews with the cast and crew which is being done right now at the San Diego Comic Con.  There are also some lobby cards and a figurine of Crow. So, that’s pretty awesome.

I was REALLY hoping for some serious archival stuff.  At the very least, clips from the KTMA days, but I’ll take it.  This looks great!

We’re looking forward to this like you wouldn’t fucking believe.  Mystery Science Theater 3000 brings me back to Mortal Kombat 2 tournaments and stolen beers in Mike’s basement until midnight when we had movie sign.  Can’t wait.

Available, appropriately enough, on October 28.

I was ready to let this one pass me by because I’ve actually seen claims pop up on the internets many times over the last 15 years or so that lay claim to someone finding and watching a print of the lost Tod Browning film, London After Midnight starring the late great Lon Chaney.  It looks like someone is back with another claim that they have found the movie but Ain’t It Cool News is getting behind this one.  Of course, that doesn’t mean jack since they’re really just a rumors site and have been fooled in the past, but I figured I’d throw this out there since I’m fascinated by this movie and the mystery that surrounds it.

AICN reported a couple of days ago that someone named Sid Terror had located and watched a print of London After Midnight under the title The Hypnotist, a known alias of the movie.  They link to a very, very long post by Sid at The Horror Drunx forums.  By this point I was ready to dismiss the whole thing, immediately, but then this post popped up on AICN, so for whatever that article is worth, it might be true… then again.

I badly want this to be true.  For my money, this is the holy grail of lost movies.  I’ve seen the reconstruction from a several years ago and while it’s really just some title cards and still photos, it paints a picture of a very strange movie.  What it all boils down to, I’m sure, though, is that this is all just another hoax.  I’m waiting for someone to prove me wrong.

Hey, everybody! Remember when Hollywood made original movies? Alright, neither do I but the point that I’m trying to make is that there was a time in Hollywood’s history, not so long ago, when the movies that they made at least had things about them that set them apart from movies from their past.  Remakes are really nothing new, after all you can go way back in the day and find remakes of The Seven Samurai and so on but people are fucking lazy these days and will spend money on whatever, so the machine keeps on chugging.  Chugging so well, in fact, that they’ll remake anything, evident in recent news of a Plan 9 From Outer Space remake and this new slice of pie from Hollywood’s festering armpit: They’re remaking The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Variety is reporting that MTV is producing a remake with the original script and music, plus some original new numbers.  If it’s the original script and music?  Why remake it at all?  If one thing can be said for remade horror movies, they’re at least using new scripts based on old ideas.  This just seems lazy.

No word on whether this will be released theatrically, to cable or straight to video but no matter how you slice it, they’ll be missing the point.  The culture around Rocky Horror is obsessed with the ritual of audience participation.  These days, the movie almost seems secondary to the fandom.  I wonder how this will turn out.

Boy, if ever there was a movie that needed a special edition, it’s The Story of Ricky.  This insane, blood-soaked prison smash-em-up, made famous by the old Daily Show Five Questions clip of a dude smashing another dude’s head to pieces, shot up to cult movie fame and circulated heavily on the bootleg scene for years before Media Blasters did something about that and released a region 1 DVD with subtitles, no doubt sourced from existing foreign market DVDs.  The problem is that the old DVD looks like ass.  Thankfully, for those of us with either Region 3 or region free DVD players, are going to have a superior option.  Yesasia is taking preorders on this remastered edition.

Extras are still as scarce as ever, featuring only an interview with Ricky star, Fan Siu Wong but you get a stellar picture and audio in a Dolby 5.1 mix.  The price is also tough to beat at $13.95.  If you’re a cult movie fan and don’t have a region free player, I feel sorry for you.  I have this on my must own list.

For more information on this crazy-ass martial arts flick, check out my review.

I’m a web developer, professionally, and I like to keep up on what’s current in trends on the web. In case you haven’t noticed, Social Media is all the rage at the moment. It has come to a point where you can download and implement your own social media CMS; something akin to Drupal or Joomla, but with the focus less on creating a singular site with automated content updating and more on the side of building your own social network. In simpler terms, your own Myspace. I guess this is called Ning.

One such network just popped up on the radars and I think it’s the shit. Cult Media Studies is a social network for the sort of people who frequent our feed. If you’re into cult movies, exploitation, horror, the low end of cinematic spectrum, you’ll probably want to swing over to Cult Media Studies and have a look around. Like us, they give bad movies the benefit of the doubt and throw some deep analysis and examination their way. These flicks don’t necessarily deserve that kind of scrutiny but there is something to be said for them as a sort of cultural barometer for the periods that they were produced in.

Bear in mind that Cult Media Studies seems to take their studies seriously. This isn’t the Bloody Disgusting forums where you can blindly post shit like “ZOMG! Michele Myars kills u fagats!!1″.

Once you’re set up, drop by my new profile and hook up with me.

Glass Eye Pix sent this along in preparation for the July 22 release of Larry Fessenden’s latest horror flick, The Last Winter.  To get you primed for the DVD release, they’re making available pieces of the DVD extras on their site.  In this case, a talk with Ron Perlman (Quest For Fire, Hellboy, Blade 2, any role asking for a big-ass neanderthal looking dude) who is totally awesome.  The topic here is about his father’s role in Ron’s becoming an actor.

The movie, itself, I have not seen, but I have heard nothing but praise for it.  Larry Fessenden is hit or miss with me but I can’t possibly find an argument to counter any claims that he’s one of the most original voices working in horror today.  The Last Winter is eco-horror of the highest order, I’m told.  A story of an oil company drilling team in a remote, Arctic region of Alaska driven crazy by mysterious forces.

Get on over to their site and check it out.

That’s it.  That’s all you get. Entertainment Weekly got the scoop but that’s the best look you’re going to get until they start to market the flick heavily.  What do you think?