Cinema Suicide

It’s only appropriate that I follow up my review of The Room with a trailer for the next maddening midnight contender. This is Birdemic: Shock and Terror, described as a “romantic thriller” by its director, James Nguyen, it seems to be an amateurish tribute to Alfred Hitchcock’s classic siege flick, The Birds. The trailer runs a mean two minutes long, half of which is a series of long panning shots of idyllic California seasides and communities. This trailer conceals a suckerpunch full of crazy, though. When it reveals its true intentions, the resultant footage looks like any given Geocities website circa 1999. Screeching birds hover above a cityscape, defying the laws of gravity, occasionally swooping into the city and exploding in magnificent fireballs! Sold yet?

I was fairly certain that this was some kind of spoof until I did the research and learned about the bizarre history of this picture. Just secured by one of my favorite DVD boutiques, Severin Films, Birdemic was shot over the course of four years, funded exclusively by director Nguyen’s salary as a software salesman. When rejected by Sundance, Nguyen decked out a van in fake birds, blood and ads for the movie and drove around the Sundance theaters blasting the sounds of screaming humans and bird attacks. Needless to say, this ballsy move on behalf of film marketing turned heads.

BIRDEMIC, described by Nguyen as “a romantic thriller,” is a horror/action/special-effects-driven love story about a young couple trapped in a small Northern California town under siege by homicidal birds. BIRDEMIC also tackles topical issues of global warming, avian flu, world peace, organic living, sexual promiscuity and lavatory access.

Severin plans to release the movie on DVD and Blu but before they do, they’ll be premiering on February 27th at The Cinefamily in Los Angeles in a theater made up to look like an actual aviary and hosted by Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim of The Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, big fans of totally crazy cinema.

Want some more? Here’s another scene:

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I thought this project was DOA and I breathed a heavy sigh of relief. Typically, I ignore the remake market and watch the originals but Escape From New York being my favorite movie of all time since I was, like, 9, I just don’t know if I could hold out until the end of my days without curiosity getting the best of me. I would have to, at some point, see what they did to my precious Snake Plissken. The old draft of the script that was circulating amongst insiders was getting hearty guffaws for being campy and displaying a remarkable degree of failure that can only be described with a term such as “Epic” to understand what made the original movie tick. Add to this: everyone on Earth, including Kurt “Ted Nugent’s Best Man” Russell was horrified at the prospect of the remake starring Gerard Butler.

But that shit’s all gone, according to sources, and there’s a new draft making the rounds by Allan Loeb, who managed to rally the script for the upcoming Wall Street sequel. Essential details from the original picture have changed. Snake won’t be sent in to rescue The President. This time he’ll be going in to rescue some female senator, no doubt to cultivate a little David and Maddy tension/banter. Also, New York City has now been the victim of a dirty bomb detonation to explain why there’s a wall around it and only prisoners living there.

Most importantly, however, in order to move forward with this movie, New Line had to agree to a couple of conditions set by John Carpenter and they have to do exclusively with Snake. Carpenter, by way of legally binding document, made New Line guarantee that he always be called Snake, he has to have the eye patch and, I swear to god, I wish I were making this up, he must “always be a bad-ass”. Snake hasn’t  been cast yet, even though New Line is said to be moving fast on this production and, quite frankly, I don’t know who they’d consider but if New Line producers are reading this right now, I urge you to take my advice:

Cast LOST’s Josh Holloway as Snake Plissken. I can’t watch Sawyer and not imagine him with an eyepatch and a scoped Mac-10. There is no one on the planet better suited to play Snake. And for the record, it was tough to search out that photo and not feel totally gay.

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Here’s a trailer that pulls three rope-a-dopes in the span of two minutes. What begins looking like a ridiculous low budget fantasy movie suddenly shifts gears on you to reveal a couple of grown men whaling on each other with foam weapons and arguing rules in the middle of what looks to be a particularly elaborate Live Action Role Playing game but somewhere in the middle of the trailer that looks like a funny glimpse into a really strange subculture where pencils, paper and polyhedral dice aren’t enough for the fantasy this flick gets all rapey and heavy.

I have a few criticisms about the setting. Not that there’s way too much stuff and crazy detailed set dressing. I’ve met the people in this old meme and I can tell you this much, these folks take shit seriously, but the moody hipster cast is way out of place. It just doesn’t feature the usual LARP crowd of fat thirty something guys in kilts and no underwear seducing impressionable and socially awkward teenage girls.

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I tend to eulogize the passing of genre celebrities on a regular basis since the classics are dropping out like flies these days but it’s not often that I celebrate the births of horror’s finest contributors. I don’t know why that is. In spite of a love of all things ghoulish and gory, I’m actually a pretty chipper guy and only occasionally morbid and preoccupied with mortality. I knew it was George Romero’s birthday today. Just about every website vaguely related to horror is reporting this with glee. He’s a man who needs no introduction. Chances are if you’re a horror fan today, you’ve seen at least five of this guy’s movies and you’re an obsessed fan of three of them. Today, George is 70.

What I didn’t know and thanks to the lovely Lauren Oostveen I am now aware, it’s also Alice Cooper’s birthday today. He turns 62. This must qualify as some kind of high holy day for fans of horror.

This may be left up to debate but for my money, the entire existence of death rock and horror punk hinge on the proto-death of Alice Cooper. During the rise of Alice, hippies were reinventing rock and roll to be a sort of touchy feely love festival with a socially conscious bent. Can you blame them? Vietnam was bumming out the collective American experience and Richard Nixon was a fucking dick in the metaphorical sense. Detroit, though; that was where it was at. The fucking Stooges and The MC5 were plotting rock music along its logical evolutionary path but The Alice Cooper Band took it to grotesque new cavernous lows and Alice didn’t stop there. Horror didn’t have to be locked into a movie going experience or something you see on TV or in a comic book. You could express this in music, too, and Alice did it like no one else. His theatrical approach was absolutely pivotal in the crafting of heavy metal and glam rock.

So happy birthday George and Alice. You guys are my fucking idols and you were both born on the same day. What are the chances? Here’s some gory video of both dudes for your enjoyment.

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Looks like haunted house movies are the new zombie movie. If you have a single camera and not much money, a smart script and an eye for tension is the way to go. Paranormal Activity failed to capture my imagination and ultimately, I thought the marketing campaign was far more fascinating than the movie but it was proof positive that having a tiny budget to work with is no excuse. You can make a good movie with no money. So here’s the Uruguayan production, La Casa Muda, from director Gustavo Hernandez to up the ante and considering the amazing success of Paranormal Activity and it’s status as the most profitable movie of all time it should come as no surprise that Hollywood is already wringing its hands at the possibility of many more millions of duckets. It features a similar ghostly premise, is made on a budget that you couldn’t buy a car with and, like Paranormal Activity, operates primarily on a gimmick. Yes, it has that verite documentary style that people either love or hate but this baby is done in a single, continuous shot.

Alfred Hitchcock made Rope in 1948 and the big deal about that flick was that it was a single continuous shot, too, but not exactly. Though it creates the illusion that there are no cutaways, fillm stock comes in magazines that run about ten minutes a piece, Hitch had to zoom into actors and set furniture at the point that they would reload the stock and keep on going. But here’s the kicker. La Casa Muda actually pulls off the single continuous shot using carefully planned camera moves and expert direction and acting. To boot, this film was not shot using high def video cameras. La Casa Muda was shot with your average digital SLR. A Canon EOS 5D, to be precise. This is to say, the film was shot with a prosumer grade still frame camera. The 5D has the benefit of shooting video but not a whole lot at a time.  How they pulled off a feature film in a single take is a mystery to me, but this is a triumph for low budget filmmaking!

The trailer is fairly spooky and claustrophobic as the focal point of any given shot seems to be tight framing of our heroine as she freaks out in a haunted house. A good haunted house movie is a hard thing to make and based on 90 seconds of trailer footage, it looks like La Casa Muda manages to pull it off. Of note to horror and sci-fi fans, the recent short film that stormed english language websites, Panic Attack, supposedly snatched up by Sam Raimi’s production house, Ghost House Pictures, was shot by the same DP, Pedro Luque. Could this be the year for South American genre pictures to invade the english speaking world?

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I’m late to the punch with this one and by now, just about everyone who wanted to see this trailer has seen it. But maybe you, in particular, have not. Truthfully, I don’t know much about this flick nor have I ever heard of its director, Ben Hibon. A quick look at the website for production company, Stateless Films, shows off a particularly talented hand for cell shaded animation ranging from advertisements to video games but a couple of gems stick out. There’s not much to go on at the website and the trailer, apart from it’s beautiful stylized character design and animation, doesn’t show much. Stateless’ site lists this as a teaser trailer, maybe hinting that there’s an entire feature coming soon. Looks nice, doesn’t it?

If A.D. tickles your fancy, then you’ll want to see Ben Hibon’s short film, Code Hunters (below). It looks like a collision of Jamie Hewlett (Tank Girl, Gorillaz) and Yasuhiro Nightow (Trigun). Absolutely gorgeous animation!

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Do you have the acting chops to portray a blood thirsty vampire? Can you do the robot or at least some functional variation thereof? Can you feign the sort of desperation that says “I will tear you limb from limb, if only I could break through the driver’s side window?” If so, then the upcoming web series, How To Survive The Strange, a Cinema Suicide production, written by yours truly and local media master, John Herman, to be directed by John Herman, needs your skills.

I’ve been mum around here about this project but now that we have some dates set in stone and a plan, I can actually talk about it. We’re pitching the series in few words: Bob Vila, Vampire Hunter and the entire concept is a series of absurd shorts (2-3 minutes a piece) with practical advice for preparing for and surviving the many horrific scenarios that life may throw at you. Are you prepared the thwart a vampire attack during the summer BBQ? What do you do to survive the wrath of a backwoods campground slasher? Say your household appliances fail to perform their duty, do you have the extra sensory faculties to diagnose their ailments and give them a little telepathic pep talk to get them back to 100% and have your toast toasted? These are vital skills that a vast majority of the world have dismissed as “foolish”. Who will be the fool, then, when you apply the proper amount of current to the killer robot bearing down on you and later reprogram it to babysit the neighborhood kids? Won’t the neighbors be impressed? After all, robots are very strong and made of metal.

So here’s the skinny: If you’d like to be involved in this production, you are advised to be at Crackskulls in Newmarket, NH at 6pm on March 15th. Bring nothing but your bad self and maybe a little money to buy some of Crackskull’s fine coffee. Br prepared to portray either frightened humans or terrible monsters.

Should you need further information, the How To Survive The Strange Facebook group is up and is awaiting your participation. Join now!

Crackskulls
86 Main Street
Newmarket, NH 03857
http://www.crackskulls.com

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My review of Ong Bak 2 is about as wishy washy as they come. Tony Jaa set out to improve the mythology of his Ong Bak series by setting it in a feudal period of Thailand and broadenning the scope out to Peter Jacksonian proportions but he bit off more than he could chew. The resulting nonsense cost Sahamongkol a lot of money and practically ran Jaa right out of Thailand. Were it not for his mentor, Panna Rittikrai, the whole thing would have gone down the toilets and we would have been left with nothing. Ultimately, Ong Bak 2 was as shallow as its contemporaries, but hot damn! did that movie have some great fighting and stunts! So here we are again, picking up where 2 left off. Jaa has been taken captive and beaten down. Want to bet that he somehow finds a way to turn the tables on his captors and kill everyone with raw Muay Thai fury?

I’m not sure what the actual release date is but word has it that we can expect Ong Bak 3 to hit DVD later this year.

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This is actually really old news, but no one, apart from a Guardian film article from November of last year has reported on this. As disappointing as it is, given a seriously mind bending premise and some unbelievably sweet concept art that emerged from preproduction meetings, it’s not entirely surprising. Since The Rainbow Thief, Jodorowsky has had difficulty get any film off the ground and even prior to that, his involvement in the production of an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune is a sort of legendary cautionary tale for filmmakers flying too close to the sun.

Fundamentally, Alejandro Jodorowsky is box office poison but the difference between his features and some late era David Lynch shit like Inland Empire, is budget. Inland Empire may have, indeed, been three hours of nonsense but it was a cheap three hours of nonsense. Jodorowsky’s movies are always wild and genre oriented. They involved large sets and huge scope. Getting away with that kind of shit in the 70’s is the benefit of a permissive age of filmmaking and a wild art film that sparked the entire notion of midnight movies. However, today, the people making waves in Hollywood back then are now writing the checks and are only interested in explosions and robots that turn into trucks. If you want to produce an art film independently, you have to keep the budget small and scale  back any aspirations of making some kind of acid saga like Jodorowsky tends to do.

You can’t seem to keep this man down, however, and at 80 years old and looking extremely healthy thanks to a shocking abstinence from drugs, booze and smokes (not to mention a healthy lifestyle involving yoga), Jodorowsky plans to sequelize his signature picture, El Topo, by shooting Son Of El Topo and basing it on the intense hatred and ultimate redemptive experience he shared with producer, Allen Klein, who has more or less stymied Jodorowsky’s career since he refused to direct a picture adapted from the kinky classic novel, The Story Of O. On Klein’s deathbed, the two bitter enemies made peace with one another and Jodorowsky was left inspired to tell the story of two brothers whose hatred is earth shattering but in the end they unite to become one being. It sounds perfectly Jodorowskian.

I wouldn’t get my hopes up, though. Nothing about his latest project suggests that he’ll get that one off the ground, either. If you just have to have your crazy ass Jodorowosky fantasy, though, I strongly suggest that you look into his warped series of comic books, Metabarons.

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To call Dead Rising a shallow experiment in videogaming is a gross understatement of the facts. Though I never got tired of staving off a mob of flesh eating ghouls with a Flying V guitar or blinding zombies with hilariously oversized masks, there just wasn’t too much to the game. It did keep me coming back for more, though. There was so much to do, so many hilarious stunts to be pulled off at the expense of an endless supply of zombies and so much unlockable shit that by the time I traded the game in on whatever I happened to be buying next, I still don’t think I had seen even so much as 75% of the entire game. It was fun, it was interesting but if there’s one game in the world that doesn’t really need a feature film adaptation, it’s Dead Rising.

However, Capcom, Dead Rising’s publisher, respectfully disagrees and had commissioned a feature to be made. The end result, evident in this 90 second trailer, is not terribly exciting and looks like just about every other low budget shot-on-video zombie feature to come out of Japan in the last ten years or so. I don’t speak the language, so I can’t say what’s going on here but it looks nothing like the original game and may have more in common with the still unreleased Dead Rising 2. What more do you need to know, though? Zombies start eating people. Survivors clamor for shelter in a mall or a warehouse. Inevitably, they are forced to stave off waves of zombies. Herein, a wheelchair is outfitted with weapons, including a chainsaw. People are bitten. Zombies are mutilated. In the trailer, the letters FPS can be seen and some footage is first person perspective shots of navigating a warehouse, so one can only assume that there’s some kind of clever video game to film translation happening there. Dead Rising, the movie, may wind up being a lot of fun as it seems to share some common elements with the Hong Kong feature, Bio-Zombie, itself an homage to video games, but beyond that, it’s not much to look at.

I have no idea when this is being released but word has it that it’s going straight to video, will be released on the web and Xbox 360 owners will have the chance to download it, no doubt only if they’re in Japan, so set up a Japanese Live account if you absolutely need to see it.

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