I don’t know why I’ve been keeping mum about Machete. Every poster I see, every photo, every god damn trailer nearly makes me lost control of my bowels and bladder. Thing is, of all the Grindhouse faux-trailers, Machete wasn’t the one I most wanted to see. I was actually all about Don’t. From the looks of all marketing materials for Machete, it’s a movie about Danny Trejo killing everybody on Earth. And what a cast! Trejo, alone, is enough to make me want to watch the movie but somehow Robert Rodriguez talked Don Johnson, Cheech Marin, Stephen Seagal, Jessica Alba, Lindsay Lohan, Michelle Rodriguez and Robert fucking DeNiro into being in his gory action movie. Yes, you saw it here, people. There’s a scene where Mahete rips a man’s intestines out and swings out a window onto a level below! HOW AWESOME IS THAT???
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, of all the premium cable horror TV on right now, which I guess is True Blood, Dexter is the clear victor. There isn’t a tighter script or better cast of characters out there. What a fucking show! Season 4 of the show, with villain played by John Lithgow, stands as one of the finest serieses I’ve ever seen and the finale was so shocking that I almost couldn’t handle it. So naturally during this gap between seasons, and a period where Michael C. Hall fought cancer, apparently, I’ve been dying for more Dexter. If you’re like me, this won’t ease the suffering since it, too, doesn’t land until later this year, but here’s another Early Cuts series.
Early Cuts is a motion comic/web series, chronicling Dexter’s earliest kills following Harry’s death but before he joined Miami Metro Homicide. This new one takes place during medical school where Dexter is spotted doing his dark passenger’s dirty work. Rather than being busted, the witness kicks up his own killing spree, copycatting Dexter’s style but without knowledge of The Code. We all know how this is going to wind up, the again, we always do. It’s the cat and mouse of the story that will thrill us.
Dexter’s fifth season kicks off September, 26th with Dark Echo following in October illustrated by one of my personal favorite comic artists, Bill Sienkiewicz.
I admit that I’m late to the bus on this one. By now, everyone who is interested in The Walking Dead has seen this. I passed on it because I have yet to be wowed by a motion comic. I’ve seen a few and most of them aren’t much more than static panels where a facial expression changes here or there. This one, however, from Juice Films, also responsible for the Watchmen motion comic, really knocked it out of the park. This Walking Dead motion comic is practically a cartoon with great music and voice acting (even if there isn’t much dialog). The animation is extremely dynamic and for a 2D presentation, it delivers a real feeling of volume and dimension. If this is the future of motion comics, I’ll start paying more attention.
AMC is going balls to the wall with the promotion on their new series. Comic fans are a fairly jaded lot and most horror fans burned out on zombies long ago but the usual chorus of disapproval that is hyper-critical of their beloved comics going to movies or TV have been nearly unanimous in their support of the show. As far as I see, The Walking Dead is already hit and it’s still a long way to October. This motion comic recounts the first issue of The Walking Dead, in case you’re just catching the wave and haven’t seen it before. It’s a great adaptation and their treatment of Tony Moore’s art is fantastic.
Man, for a movie trailer about The Goon, there’s an awful lot of Frankie in there. There’s also an awful lot of sweet zombie-abuse, violence, boobs and mayhem. Simply put, from the looks of things, this movie is doing it right. The vibe is right, the voices are right (though, I always imagined Frankie’s voice to be a little more high-pitched). That’s Paul Giamatti doing the voice of Frankie, though, and you can’t get much better than that.
Of all things, this is a clip from MTV’s site, which I think is kind of weird since MTV seems like the place to go if you want to know about the banal lifestyles of scuzzy Italian kids from New Jersey or the glamorous and scripted lives of young assholes trying to make it in the world of the Los Angeles fashion scene. Cool news about Eric Powell’s greatest creation is the last thing I expected to find.
Wanna know more about The Goon? Here’s the deal: Every issue is basically about the low part of town that The Goon runs. He tangles with monsters and competing mobsters in the district and usually ends each battle by punching and stabbing said monsters and mobsters. There’s a lot of zombies involved and his loyal-to-the-end friend Frankie does a lot of talking and shooting. It’s a genius comic with great art and even though it sometimes feels like you’re reading the same comic again and again, Powell occasionally throws a curveball and pulls at the heart strings.
No word on when this movie launches, it’s been production forever. MTV promises the entire panel coverage later this week when more details will come on down.
Suddenly, I’m like Cory Doctorow up in the place and it seems like every other new post in here is a hype piece for the Zombie Bomb comic. There’s a pretty good reason that I’m pushing for this comic. Apart from the fact that I have one of the bigger stories in this volume, it’s a fucking great comic! I see a lot of zombie-related media these days thanks to this site but that’s not necessarily a good thing. So much of it is garbage and very few people are doing anything original with the monster but someone over at Ain’t It Cool News’ trashy Talkback system quelled the naysayers by honestly comparing the book to Heavy Metal magazine and there’s no higher compliment than that since it implies that it’s original, sophisticated and edgy.
The book is finally out! After all the excitement, it’s out there on the market and if you’re in San Diego right now, contemplating Comic Con, you can own one. To be honest, it feels a bit anti-climactic now that the book is out. I don’t even have a copy for myself at the moment (but I will, eventually). I expected this moment to be cathartic, but oh well. Right now, series co-creator, Adam Miller, is out at Comic Con at the Terminal Press booth (that’s booth #1221, if you want to drop by and buy a copy, say hey to the people who made it and all that) hustling the book to whomever will give him the time. Following Comic Con you’ll be able to buy it from the Terminal Press website and many direct market outlets. In the meantime, watch the latest installment of the Zombie Bomb videos with series creators, Rich Woodall and Adam Miller.
I’ve been restraining myself with all of these updates on AMC’s upcoming show, The Walking Dead, because even though AMC has been really generous to the fans with what they choose to get us all excited with, it’s not really enough to warrant a post on this site. I mean, a photo’s just a photo even when they feature some sick zombie makeup. I have been posting a lot of this stuff straight to the Suicidal Facebook page and linking elsewhere but now the rules have changed. We have a full cast photo and Comic Con is right on top of us where it’s a safe bet that AMC is going to run fucking wild in the streets of San Diego hyping this show. Principal photography on the pilot is pretty much done and the one thing that I know about The Walking Dead at Comic Con is that they’ll be previewing it there. So if you’re the lucky type and your circumstances permit you to go, you just know that you’re going to have to squeeze into that screening and then come back here with the details. Frankly, I’m pretty sure that I’ll never get to go to Comic Con. That’s just how it is. So allow me to live vicariously through you.
So there you go. The first full shot of the cast in all their glory and I’ll tell you what, they look about right. From left to right: Emma Bell as Amy, Jon Bernthal as Shane Walsh, Steven Yuen as Glenn, Sarah Wayne Callies as Lori Grimes, Chandler Riggs as Carl Grimes, Andrew Lincoln as Rick Grimes, Jeffrey DeMunn as Dale and Laurie Holden as Andrea. Give them one season and they’ll all be looking a whole hell of a lot different. If you’re familiar with the comics, you know that it doesn’t take long for these folks to bottom out. If you’re unfamiliar with the comics, then I strongly suggest that you get familiar. Otherwise you’re missing out on the best horror comic of the 21st century, bitches.
The Walking Dead hits in October on AMC. As details come down from Comic Con I’ll be posting them here. So stick around, will ya?
Just what I needed to see, Tommy Wiseau bawling and rubbing fake blood all over himself. As if twenty minutes of his ass in The Room wasn’t bad enough. I wish I knew what the fuck was going on in this clip. Some might say that it’s TEARING ME APAAAAART!!!
Do you know who Tommy Wiseau is? If you don’t, then I suggest you pop over and read my review of Wiseau’s magnum opus, The Room and then come on back. It’s an eye opener.
With Wiseau’s weird-ass sitcom pilot, The Neighbors, seemingly in a holding pattern, it was only a matter of time, I guess, before the legendary weirdo rolled cameras again and this time, it’s look like his project is a horror picture. Whatever The House That Drips Blood On Alex turns out to be, attendees of The San Diego Comic Con are going to get a look on July 24th and you can bet that immediately following the preview, crappy cell-cam videos of it will flood Youtube, so keep your eyes on this spot because I’ll be unable to control myself and will inevitably post one of those fucking things here. My only concern is that The Room and The Neighbors were both produced before Wiseau had a reputation as the world’s worst filmmaker and now that he tours The Room as some kind of ironic black comedy, reading Shakespeare before his personal appearances at screenings and so forth, I have to wonder if he’s tuned in directly to the irony and if The House That Drips Blood On Alex could come off forced in order to maintain consistency with his other film projects. Then again, I have to wonder if that would even matter since it’s not like he knows what he’s doing with a camera anyway. The guy is the Wesley Willis of film, making real outsider art.
Edit: A little more research has demonstrated that this is not an original movie by Tommy Wiseau but a short film produced by Studio 8, a group that shoots short comedies. Wiseau is merely an actor in their latest piece.
So I go off the radar for a couple of days, taking some much needed R&R, and what do I come back to the office to find? News that Mel Gibson is even crazier than I had first thought and news that Harvey Pekar had died. What the hell, world?
See, there’s indie comics and then there’s indie comix and for a really long time, Pekar fell into the latter category. He was one of those guys working so deep underground that he was associated with Robert Crumb and as Crumb started to come to the surface, Pekar hung out in the depths for a bit longer before his unique personal style was propelled into the mainstream with a sweet biopic starring Paul Giamatti. And it was about time. I discovered American Splendor on the high shelves of a local comic shop when I was at my snobbiest. Having been fed up with the double gate-fold excesses of super hero books in the early 90′s and a revelation that The Uncanny X-Men insisted on looping back around again and again to jump that fucking shark with a book dedicated entirely the marriage of Cyclops and Jean Grey, I started digging deeper for comics that had some kind of actual value to them in the creativity department and in the process found Harvey Pekar. Most of the my early experiences with off-beat indie books rolled off into oblivion, most of them pointless exercises in abstraction, but Pekar wrote with a voice that echoed in my head for days or weeks after reading.
If you’ve seen interviews with Harvey or the awesome biopic, which features him extensively, you know that he’s a pretty mousy guy and he comes off exceptionally pessimistic and bitter but that was just his way. The real Harvey, seen in the pages of his comic, American Splendor, was deeply human and very funny. He documented his take on shit that happened all around him in his native Cleveland, Ohio, and did it in such a way that made the extremely ordinary seem downright exotic. This was a sentiment that I could understand seeing as how I’ve spent most of my life living in the slow lane of small-town New Hampshire (aren’t they all small towns?). A lot of people have flexed their creative juice by talking up the banality of their particular setting but nobody did it like Harvey and it made the ennui of a thrill seeker living in a place where nothing ever happens seem a little less oppressive.
Harvey was the antithesis of pretense and his modesty is what made his art so potent. There’s an enormous back catalog of American Splendor to be read not to mention an excruciating document of Harvey’s struggle with cancer in the form of Our Cancer Year, illustrated by Frank Stack and co-written with his wife, Joyce Brabner. If you’re only marginally aware or completely unfamiliar, I urge you to look into the work of one of the greatest minds of independent comics. Pekar was a poet at heart, one of the last of the beats and chose to express his fustrations and general observations about the ways that we choose to live out our lives in comic book form. Often dismissed as kid stuff, Pekar was a cornerstone in the argument in favor of comics as art. He was billiant and funny and will be missed. To honor his way out, here’s Harvey deep sixing his regular appearances on Late Night With David Letterman.
This one kind of came out of nowhere. I’ve been unaware of it until a Facebook friend linked another friend to it and I just happened to see the post. This is a deceptive trailer. At first, I thought it was some kind of low budget zombie thing because it certainly carries that vibe and in spite of zombies more or less running out of gas as a low budget vehicle, but there’s a lot more going on here and it’s looking pretty interesting.
Here’s a paraphrased version of the really long synopsis on the official site: By 2015 we’re out of oil and society breaks down in the face of overpopulation and not enough resources to go around. A giant and shadowy corporation introduces a depopulation program but a rebel crew of scientists introduce a drug, instead, that reduces the dosed humans to savage creatures without sight. One of the last survivors is a lone hunter-gatherer just trying to survive while staving off attacks from the post-humans, now called Biosyns. Meanwhile, the Corporations genetically engineered trackers are out to kill him, fearing that he may be the antidote to their drug.
Just watch the trailer. I’m oversimplifying things. Then head over the movie’s website and read the synopsis and see photos. This movie looks like a really cool piece of indie horror. If you’ve got a Netflix account, you can stream this flick right now. I’ll be checking it out tonight. Thanks for the tip, Andrea.
Infant Xenomorphs never really struck me as something that might be delicious. In fact, I think the biggest turn off would be the first bite when a sudden rush of acidic body fluids from the alien burn your head from the rest of your body. Then again, maybe something in the preparation process would drain the alien of those fluids but is it really safe? I mean, the blood of the one Xeno on the Nostromo burned through something like four bulkheads. Argh! I sure am getting anxious about something that’s not even real, aren’t I? Whatevs. Propmaster supreme on our currently on-hiatus web series, How To Survive The Strange, Sean O’Connell, linked this from his Facebook profile and I couldn’t resist. I don’t post about science fiction enough and with something this cool and original, I couldn’t resist. A French dude with a reputation for being grumpy and a blog to match posted the details and photos of a birthday party he threw for a friend of his with a menu boosted from classic science fiction novels, TV and movie themes.
The menu had the main course of chest burster (pictured above, from Alien/s), a pitcher of Slurm (Futurama), Klingon Gagh (worms from Star Trek), Bao (a chinese meat bun featured in Firefly) a myriad of spide-related items (Dune) and Soylent Green (from the novel Make Room! Make Room! or, if you must, the eponymous Heston flick).
There’s a series of killer photos to accompany this and explanations on how to do it, yourself. Do check it out!
I don’t know why I’ve been keeping mum about Machete. Every poster I see, every photo, every god damn trailer nearly makes me lost control of my bowels and bladder. Thing is, of all the Grindhouse faux-trailers, Machete wasn’t the one I most wanted to see. I was actually all about Don’t. From the looks of all marketing materials for Machete, it’s a movie about Danny Trejo killing everybody on Earth. And what a cast! Trejo, alone, is enough to make me want to watch the movie but somehow Robert Rodriguez talked Don Johnson, Cheech Marin, Stephen Seagal, Jessica Alba, Lindsay Lohan, Michelle Rodriguez and Robert fucking DeNiro into being in his gory action movie. Yes, you saw it here, people. There’s a scene where Mahete rips a man’s intestines out and swings out a window onto a level below! HOW AWESOME IS THAT???
