Cinema Suicide

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.

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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.

I fucking love this short.

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?

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.

Bring it on, I say! I can’t wait to see it.

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!

I’m going to start one of those online petitions to demand that someone actually make this movie.

I’m pretty sure that on paper, my relationship with George Lucas looks a lot like an abusive romantic relationship. Back in the day, George and I had it going on. A New Hope, Empire and Jedi were three home runs that are easily the three movies that captured my imagination more than anything and transformed me into a fan of science fiction, specifically, but the magic of movies, entirely. It’s a typical story. Entire generations of movie goers feel the same way about them as I do. It’s the reason that Star Wars is such an institution. But somewhere in the 90′s, our relationship started to go south. George became a different man. A lot of the movies he had produced were proving to be critical failures and he became angry and unpredictable. I drifted away and to win me back he brought back the three movies that made me fall in love with him in the first place but the cracks in his sanity were showing. The original trilogy had been, I don’t know, spoiled. George added all these special effects that had no business being there. It was nice to fall back on familiar territory, though. He did something weird, though. He made it so that I could only see these new versions of the movies. I couldn’t buy the originals. It seemed strange to me but I didn’t mind the special editions.

Then he announces that he was making a new trilogy of Star Wars movies, a series that explored the origins of everything and told the story of Anakin Skywalker before all that Darth Vader stuff. Oh, happy day! I’d have my George Lucas back! Unfortunately, he’d clearly gone to the dark side because Episode 1, which I’d been so excited for, was like a slap in the face. Many slaps, actually. I left the theater with a false sense of satisfaction. While everyone called him an asshole, I steadfastly defended Episode 1 because I loved him but it didn’t take long for my actual disappointment to turn into anger and I cast him out. A couple of years later, George came back with a new and exciting trailer. It had Yoda fighting and Boba Fett. He promised not to hit me any more and I let him back in but as soon as I saw Episode 2, the hitting and slapping started up again. I threw him out and told him I never wanted to see him again but it wasn’t long before he was back with another trailer for the last movie. I was skeptical this time. George was hateful and violent but I’d invested so much time and money in our relationship that it was too late for me to stop. I had to see Star Wars to the end but this time I would keep my distance from George and keep my arms folded and eyebrow arched. The final installment didn’t fool me, though and it ended on a disappointing note that I was able to predict. George was surprised that I didn’t take him back immediately. I was done with him. Or so I thought. Soon after the close of the film series, Lucasfilm announced that a weekly TV series was planned and that it would fall between the two sets of films, chronicling the rise of the rebellion.

I was excited and ready to take George back again. The fool that I am. I am a sucker for George Lucas and always will be.

Unsurprisingly, production of the show is  now on hold. It was still in early phases of preproduction but according to Digital Spy, Lucas admitted at a recent screening of The Empire Strikes back that they weren’t sure how to proceed.

“The live action TV show is kind of on hold because we have scripts, but we don’t know how to do them. They literally are Star Wars, only we’re going to have to try to do them [at] a tenth the cost,” he confirmed. “And it’s a huge challenge, [a] lot bigger than what we thought it was gonna be.”

George may be a schmuck and his actions sometimes make me think he has Asperger’s but if you can count on one thing, the man doesn’t skimp on his vision, even when it sucks. Color me skeptical, though. How involved are these shows? Special effects on TV have been catching up to the big screen in a big way. CGI for shows like Firefly and Battlestar Galactica were astonishing and expansive. However, in typical abused spouse form, I’m going to defend Lucas in this instance because I’ll tell you what, whenever Industrial Light and Magic hit an effects roadblock, they always found an innovative way to make the magic happen and somehow change the entire industry in the process. So while the production is on hold, it’s a safe bet that Lucas and his people are busily working on finding a way to make Star Wars grade special effects happen on a TV budget scale.

Be patient.

Every now and then I get a reader tip. Friend of the site, Troy Z sent this trailer to me and it melted my brain inside my skull. A while back I reviewed a documentary about the growing film industry in Nigeria called Welcome To Nollywood (review). It highlights a couple of Nigeria’s then-hottest directors and their many, many movies as well as the central mechanic of the entire industry. This is relevant because whether or not you’re aware of it, Nigeria is third in the world behind the United States and India among the world’s biggest film industries. They crank out shitloads of those pictures! I’ve seen some footage and trailers of Nollywood movies, though, and as fascinating as the culture is, the movies don’t look terribly interesting; lots of shit about witch doctors cursing romances and stuff like that. That makes it sound a lot more interesting than it is, actually.

This trailer for a film called Who Killed Captain Alex, is not Nigerian, though. This is claiming to be Uganda’s first action movie. I guess that’s what all the high-pitched yelling is about in the trailer. That narration track, which sounds like an alien from the Star Wars cantina scene screaming about some hip-hop album, is telling you all about how awesome Uganda’s first action movie is but the proof is in the pudding and I’ll tell you what, that trailer makes Birdemic look perfectly competent. All that really terrible CGI, poorly staged fight scenes and the prospect of a disproportionately huge helicopter smashing a city to pieces via fly-by makes me want to check this out. Also, LALALALALA ACTION!! has the potential to be the next big internet meme.