Quite possibly the most interesting parody I’ve seen this year, A Muppet Wickerman is, 0ddly enough, a bit more morbid and a little less funny than I thought it would be but I’ll guarantee you this: You probably won’t find a more compelling or interesting mashup/remix than this one right here. This is not a movie, it’s more like a fumetti comic book where words collide with pictures and if you’re familiar with that genius Edward Woodward and Christopher Lee vehicle, The Wickerman, the resultant product is a hoot and perfectly cast. The Henson puppeteers have adapted other classic works to combine with their puppets. Honestly, why not this one? Obvious notions of Kermit the Frog as burnt offering aside, this would be sheer kickass!
I’d love to see more Muppet mashups in the future. Dracula done with The Count, Prairie Dawn as Mina Harker, Bert as Abraham Van Helsing, Ernie as Renfield and Johnathan Harker played by Elmo would probably be about the funniest thing ever produced.
Things have been awfully quiet at chez Cinema Suicide this last week and it’s mostly because I’ve been devoting time usually allotted to blogging to theming this mean bitch of a website. It dawned on me a few months ago that I’d been using a slightly modified version of Misty Look for the better part of two and a half years and that it was probably time to join the big leagues with a brand new custom theme. I’d previously worked with Steve Jencks, he of the mighty Lost Highway, to do the Sub Rosa Drive-In design but I figured I’d try someone new this time around and gave a shout to my friend, Jared Laham of The Solid Studios to see if he could come up with something apporpriately awesome. I was not disappointed.
Basically, the new design affords me more real estate for bigger everything and this whole site no longer screams Wordpress Theme Directory like it used to. Not that there’s anything wrong with the theme directory. There’s a million options in there for whatever you need, but a certain pride comes with building one yourself. I figured with all this exciting shit going on around me, a new web series, the comic book in July, the article running in Screem in April and the possibility of my short fiction being published later this year, I should move on up to the east side where beans don’t burn on the grill, if you get my drift.
So here it is, Cinema Suicide Mark 2 (Jazz Odyssey)! Drop your feedback in the comments, will ya? I need to know if anything is broken. Also, hit refresh a bunch of times. You’ll notice that sweet header image changes out every time.
These days, Max Headroom is known for doing a bunch of quirky, strictly 80’s style ads for Coca-Cola but what no one aside from myself seems to remember is that he also starred in a totally sweet cyberpunk TV show. What’s truly awesome about this is how far ahead of the curve Max was. See, Cyberpunk didn’t really penetrate the pop cultural consciousness until the mid-90’s when the internet started to gain traction in public and even then, most filmmakers were playing catch up with the novels and most were focusing on the wrong aspects of the genres, trying to make action movies set in Ridley Scott’s movie, Blade Runner. Never mind that no one really tried to put their hooks in some of the heady concepts of corporate culture run amok and an entire society under the thrall of mass media that registered on religious levels. Max Headroom did all of this and that’s probably why it failed. Nobody got it and in a lot of cases, the show was a chilling reflection of then-contemporary culture. It also had to compete with Dallas. One of the running jokes from the 2009 Super Bowl was a series of ads that ran only a couple of seconds long. The ad agency in charge of creating these ads no doubt thought that they were living dangerously on the edge and were fostering an entirely new paradigm in advertising. Obviously not one of them had seen an episode of Max Headroom to realize that Max beat them to the punch in the 80’s with its hazardous ad parodies, blipverts.
FYI, Max Headroom takes place 20 minutes into the future as journalist, Edison Carter, uploads his consciousness into a computer to create a ROM clone of himself after an injury. Carter. his news team, a hacker and Headroom use their collective talents week after week to expose a number of scandals often involving corrrupt television networks and crime. The series starred Matt Frewer and was based on a made for TV movie in the UK called 20 Minutes Into The Future.
Shout Factory has stepped up to the plate and is planning an August release for the complete Max Headroom series, a mean 14 episodes. Max was kind of a big deal circa 1987, so you can pretty much bank on a decent record of the Max Headroom experience. There are no details regarding extras at this time but come this August you can finally throw out your moldy old Max Headroom bootlegs.
When you’re tapped into the world of horror filmmaking like I am you hear crazy-ass marketing gimmicks all the god damn time. Some people operating on limited budgets will do anything to get their movie in front of people and some of them get downright desperate. Additionally, back in the day, William Castle made a bunch of really crappy but extremely fun movies that became landmarks based entirely on their crazy marketing techniques. Joy buzzers in select theater seats, forcing theater patrons to sign waivers absolving theater owners of responsibility should they die of fright and whatnot. I didn’t really think people did that anymore. The internet makes that sort of chicanery moot and there’s a distributor these days for everything so even if you make a movie of yourself taking a dump, you can sell it to someone out there as an art film and it’ll wind up playing at Museum theaters at the very least. That’s just how it goes.
I’ll confide something in you, though. I love sketchy solicitations. I miss the sort of arrogant declaration that assures me that Horror Movie X will scare the shit out of me or my money back. I especially love this kind of solicitation because I swear to god, there isn’t a movie on Earth that really frightens me so bad that I feel like I can’t continue. As it stands, there’s, like, three movies in existence that I’m unable to finish but only because of how much they suck (Freddy Got Fingered, Underworld, The Pest). I’ve never heard of Phoonk. I’m not tapped in to Bollywood at all so movies coming out of Mumbai tend to fly past me without notice. Here’s director Ram Gopal Varma, though, with a sequel to his 2008 horror movie, Phoonk. He swears up and down that the movie is so frightening that no one will be able to watch the whole thing alone in a theater. If you can, he’ll hook you up with 500,000 rupees which you can then turn around and buy some bombs, a boomerang and some jars to keep fairies in or you can just take them to your local currency exchange and get the $10,000 that that amount of money roughly works out to.
Truthfully, I don’t even know what Phoonk is about. I’m told it’s a ghost story. Varma apparently tried this once before with the previous Phoonk and then withdrew the contest when allegations came out that the contest was rigged for failure. He told the press that the candidate ran out only a half hour into the movie. To challenge this, a fan in Bangalore booked an entire theater and kept medical staff on site while they watched the movie. Apparently, they made it all the way through. So to you, Ram Gopal Varma, I throw down this gauntlet. Fly me to Mumbai, hook me up to your machines and let me watch your movie. You’ll be owing me a cool ten grand, my friend.
It says Cyberpunk in the title cards and that always throws up red flags for me. Cyberpunk is a many splendored thing that very few filmmakers ever seem to get right. A lot of people make dystopic post-apocalypse flicks and then label them cyberpunk in the Gibsonian sense of the word and it kind of looks like that’s what we have going on here. Frame 137 is an Australian indie adapated from a short comic that ran in issue #61 of Dark Horse Presents back in the 90’s, a story by James O’Barr, creator of The Crow. Shot with one of those Red cameras with a particular lens that makes the whole presentation come off like it was shot in Cinemascope, which is why that video looks so god damn wide.
Directed by Judd Tilyard, the picture stars 10 year old Sam Ransom who does all his own freakin’ stunts! All the fighting, all the wirework, even that bit where he breathes fire. That’s fucking amazing! Chloe Moretz has a little competition this year for being the baddest tween in film. This movie looks so awesome. Holy shit, am I impressed!
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 The Classic Horror Film Board, has published the much anticipated ballot for the 2009 round of Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards and for the second year in a row, this here website is on the ballot for best blog. I managed to place a surprising third for 2008 considering the outstanding blogs I was in competition with. I wound up finishing behind Max Cheney’s great Drunken Severed Head and the towering stardom of Tim Lucas’ Video Watchblog, a blog I didn’t think I’d have to contend with this year since Tim shut it down the day after nominations for best blog turned up last year. Wouldn’t you know it, Tim is back and he’s on the ballot and for good reason. Tim is a legend among genre historians and his blog is just one more outlet for him to flex his knowledge but we can beat him this year! You and me, dear reader. All you have to do is hop over to the official Rondo voting site and take part in the voting process.
Read the instructions and follow them to the letter. Make sure to put your name in the email you send so the votes are counted, and for the love of god, don’t just vote for me! I’m fairly certain that waves of emails to the Rondos last year simply casting a vote for Cinema Suicide and nothing else were tossed out and cost me dearly in the running. Vote for as much of the ballot as you’re familiar with. There’s a lot of great stuff and at the very least, looking it over is going to direct you to a lot of movies, DVDs, books and magazines that you may not have even heard about. It’ll also afford you the opportunity to see some websites and blogs for horror obsessives like myself and direct your attention to some outstanding contributions to the genre. So take your time and have fun with it. The Rondos have no affiliation with any commercial entity and are put on at great expense to the organizers. This is a true labor of love and I’m honored to even be recognized.
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.
I intend of participating as so far it’s been a pretty good year for Bryan White in print, and you can, too! Here are the guidelines:
Stories should be between 1,000 and 8,000 words, though longer stories will be considered.
You don’t have to be from New Hampshire, but your story must have something to do with the state.
It has to have zombies, hence the title, Live Free Or Undead
Accepted submissions will receive $50, a copy of the book and a write-up in New Hampshire magazine. Admittedly, I’ve long felt that zombies are out of gas, and when faced with the task of writing something zombie related, I tend to take it way out into left field since I’m a firm believer that even the most tired of horror tropes are capable of being interesting as long as you’re trying to do something original with them.
So go on with your bad self! Write up a short story about zombies and New Hampshire and head over to Live Free Or Undead where you can find everything you’ll need to be a contender for this upcoming anthology.
Want to learn how to destroy evil robots with jumper cables or how to troubleshoot broken household appliances with ESP? New web series ‘How to Survive the Strange’ aims to be PBS’s This Old House meets a zombie apocalypse survival guide. An open casting call for the show will be held March 15th at 6pm at Crackskulls Coffee and Books in Newmarket, NH.
‘How to Survive the Strange’ is a tongue in cheek how-to series created by web producer John Herman and Bryan White, author of B-movie blog Cinema Suicide. According to the creators, the show aims to prepare the public for everything from alien invasion to campground slashers –often using common objects around the house. Herman and White are looking to cast zombies, ghosts, evil robots, and even a crazed mob. And there are non-strange roles to cast too.
Interested non-union actors are encouraged to bring a headshot and talent resume, though neither is required to audition. Actors will be seen on a first come, first served basis. How to Survive the Strange debuts May 3rd on the web.
I’ve been yelling about Black Dynamite (review) since 2008 and last year I named Black Dynamite the Cinema Suicide top pick of 2009. My most anticipated movie of the year turned out to be my favorite movie of the year thanks to a hilarious script and one of the best comic performances of the last decade by Michael Jai White. Unfortunately, the movie has only been making the rounds on film festivals and in a limited theatrical run so really, you were pretty lucky if you got to see it on the big screen.
Now’s your chance, though! Black Dynamite will be hitting DVD and Blu-ray this Tuesday, the 16th and you can buy it at just about every available outlet. I strongly recommend that you preorder now.
The good news doesn’t end there, either! Though it’s just barely a mention in the press release, director Scott Sanders aludes to an upcoming Black Dynamite animated series that will be running on Cartoon Network’s Adul Swim at some point in 2010. Unfortunately, the news ends there.
I thought Doomsday was a little on the crappy side. A decent action flick but the references to my favorite post-nuke and dystopia movies did not go unnoticed. This trailer for the next feature from director Neil Marshall looks like a nice recovery. I had decided after seeing Dog Soldiers that Marshall was one of the most promising directors working and then he became one of the most exciting with The Descent but I’m a little tired of reference heavy movies and Doomsday, a good idea, was fairly derivative and rescued by how ruthless it was.
Centurion, however, looks like a cool flick even though it’s looking like Marshall is referencing another one of my favorite movies, The Warriors. I just wonder how I’m supposed to give a crap about brutal Roman soldiers when I typically root for the heathens. Rome’s legacy speaks for itself but in the process of dominating the known world, they destroyed every foreign culture that they came into contact with. Watching a legion of Rome’s finest get their asses handed to them by a tribe of Celts ought to be nothing short of awesome.
Knowing Marshall, this movie is going to be a nasty, bloody affair that never stops short of showing you what your insides look like.
These days, Max Headroom is known for doing a bunch of quirky, strictly 80’s style ads for Coca-Cola but what no one aside from myself seems to remember is that he also starred in a totally sweet cyberpunk TV show. What’s truly awesome about this is how far ahead of the curve Max was. See, Cyberpunk didn’t really penetrate the pop cultural consciousness until the mid-90’s when the internet started to gain traction in public and even then, most filmmakers were playing catch up with the novels and most were focusing on the wrong aspects of the genres, trying to make action movies set in Ridley Scott’s movie, Blade Runner. Never mind that no one really tried to put their hooks in some of the heady concepts of corporate culture run amok and an entire society under the thrall of mass media that registered on religious levels. Max Headroom did all of this and that’s probably why it failed. Nobody got it and in a lot of cases, the show was a chilling reflection of then-contemporary culture. It also had to compete with Dallas. One of the running jokes from the 2009 Super Bowl was a series of ads that ran only a couple of seconds long. The ad agency in charge of creating these ads no doubt thought that they were living dangerously on the edge and were fostering an entirely new paradigm in advertising. Obviously not one of them had seen an episode of Max Headroom to realize that Max beat them to the punch in the 80’s with its hazardous ad parodies, blipverts.
When you’re tapped into the world of horror filmmaking like I am you hear crazy-ass marketing gimmicks all the god damn time. Some people operating on limited budgets will do anything to get their movie in front of people and some of them get downright desperate. Additionally, back in the day, William Castle made a bunch of really crappy but extremely fun movies that became landmarks based entirely on their crazy marketing techniques. Joy buzzers in select theater seats, forcing theater patrons to sign waivers absolving theater owners of responsibility should they die of fright and whatnot. I didn’t really think people did that anymore. The internet makes that sort of chicanery moot and there’s a distributor these days for everything so even if you make a movie of yourself taking a dump, you can sell it to someone out there as an art film and it’ll wind up playing at Museum theaters at the very least. That’s just how it goes.
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.
I’ve been yelling about Black Dynamite (
.
