We’re entering a weird new era in cult film. The way it used to be was that some smarmy business man would declare himself a producer and make a movie that was intended to make the most money on the least amount of effort. To do that, the script he came up with would be loaded with the most id-satisfying elements. If you gave the audience enough roaring engines, bullet wounds and tits, they’d tell their friends and the movie that cost ten grand to make would turn around and make a million. Between the 50’s right to the mid-80’s, this was a monstrous industry of exploitation that turned out thousands of pictures so shitty that they were charming. Home video comes along and dozens of botique VHS labels immortalize these pictures. The video store culture spreads the word through word of mouth. Voila! An unlikely fan culture is born. That fan culture then grows up and goes to film school. They make a couple of indie pictures in the early 90’s that are heavily inspired by Roger Corman, Russ Meyer and Lucio Fulci (and in Tarantino’s case almost directly ripped off of Ringo Lam) and then graduate to make bigger budget movies with the same trashy elements. Time marches on and these former fanboys turned Hollywood powerhouses amass a dedicated cult of college age assholes thanks in part to their movies’ inclusion of lap dances, decapitation and gangsters. Those assholes then go to film school with the vaguest notion of what a grindhouse picture actually is. They also grew up with the internet. Their idea of exploitation is this warped concept that has been filtered through a second generation of filmmakers only now these guys feel obligated to flood their scripts with video game sensibilities and shit they saw in Bang Brothers videos.
In the end you wind up with something like Bitch Slap.
It’s been several days. I owe you suckas a post. I’ve been spending most of my free time this week working on something big. By that I mean the new Cinema Suicide design. It’s going to be freakin’ sweet. Before that crazy-ass undertaking, I spent several days without power thanks to this seemingly new trend of annual catastrophic weather in New England. Just so no one out there starts feeling like I’m throwing in the towel, I offer you this slightly off-beat post and a reminder of my real inner nerd that I only reveal every once in a while.
I do so many reviews of new releases up in here that I feel like I’ve lost perspective. Back when I started up this blog, my reviews were of whatever I watched the night prior. I started to gain a reputation, though, and it wasn’t long before I was reviewing next week’s new releases on the dime of some home video distributor looking for a little press. Since then I haven’t done a whole lot of these Wabac machine reviews where I dig into the vault and produce something of such remarkable cheese that I’m beside myself when the credits roll. However, with Supervan, I get the best of both worlds.
You know? Even though it deviated wildly from the original comics and butchered my favorite scene, V For Vendetta could have been a lot worse. I actually liked it. It completely downplayed the political angle and I can sort of understand why. It was no longer the 80’s and it wasn’t produced in England. Context is everything when it came to V. Director James McTiegue had a good eye for style and even though I think his lens sterilized a movie that should have been a little murky, he came off like one to watch. Then they announced his next project.
A friend of mine went down to that 24 hour sci fi film fest they hold in Boston every year and he came back raving about this weirdo short film that he called something like “Coolio, paranormal drug dealer”. Turns out he was close on the name. Coolio has nothing to do with the picture and its title is actually Frank Dancoolo: Paranormal Drug Dealer. A little research turned up a couple of leads and before you knew it, director Andrew Jones was showing me to the website where you can watch the movie. At almost 8 minutes in length, Frank Dancoolo proves to the world what you can do with a green screen, a little know how with Adobe After Effects and a really weird-ass idea.
I have been meaning to do a review of The Room for a while. I’d been hearing mentions of it here and there but nothing about it stuck out to me as something I needed to see. Word was, it was a particularly awful melodrama. I didn’t really know anyone who had caught whiff of its awful scent until 
Imagine my confusion for a moment. The solicitation for review copies of The Dead by Mark E. Rogers looked, upon first inspection, like a comic book. I took one look at that cover and was sold. I’m always up for zombie horror, particularly indie zombie horror when it sports sweet artwork like that. Then the book arrived. It’s a novel. No matter. I’m'a read this bitch anyway. It took me some time as novels tend to do. Book reviews are hard business when you’re the world’s slowest reader but I got around to it. The confusion didn’t end with the format, though.
