Cinema Suicide

Pax Romano’s blog, Billy Loves Stu, is one of the more interesting horror blogs out there. The title is a reference to the homoerotic implications of the relationship between the killers from the first Scream picture and it should clue you in to what Pax’s blog is dedicated to. He writes about horror from the perspective of a gay fan and it makes for some of the more unique takes on horror blogging be you straight or gay. He and I don’t have a lot of contact, though. We share a syndication in the form of the League of Tana Tea Drinkers, though. I saw BJ-C’s run on his questionnaire at Day of the Woman and thought I’d take a swing at it since I’ve exhausted the Walking Dead Comic Con material and don’t have much else to write about right now.

1: In Ten Words or Less, Describe Your Blog:
It’s more than just a horror blog, damn it!

2: During What Cinematic Era Where you Born?
E: The Exorcism Era (Early to mid 70′s)

3: The Carrie Compatibility Question: (Sue Snell or Chris Hargensen, who would you take to the prom?)
Chris Hargensen – I even thought Nancy Allen looked good in body armor in Robocop.

4: You have been given an ungodly amount of money, and total control of a major motion picture studio – what would your dream Horror project be?
This is the sort of question that makes me seize up. Complete creative control and enough money to lure anyone I want into the picture? It would have to be a visually striking; Fritz Lang meets Chris Cunningham striking, with a script collaboration by Paul Schrader and Thomas Harris, based on an original story by me, a sort of true-crime serial killer manhunt by the FBI on a D.W. Griffith scale starring Leonardo Di Caprio.

5: What horror film “franchise” that others have embraced, left you cold?
A Nightmare On Elm Street. I could never connect with it. I don’t care for a funny, quipping killer, no matter how original and surreal the kill scenes are.

6: Is Michael Bay the Antichrist?
I can think of far worse directors working today. McG and Roland Emerich deserve to be dragged to death by monster trucks, if you ask me. Every medium of entertainment has its fast food variety and it just so happens that the current trends in film make a rock star out of Michael Bay because his movies are all spectacle and require zero thought. Quite frankly, if he were working in the 70′s, he’d be making trashy cops and robbers movies and car chase flicks. I’m surprised the exploitation movie fanbase aren’t writing love letters to the guy since the movies he makes are low-rent exploitation flicks with ridiculous fucking budgets! I think his movies suck cocks in hell, but he is a far cry from the cancer that is killing Hollywood.

7: Dracula, The Wolf Man, The Frankenstein Monster – which one of these classic villains scares you, and why?
Sorry. None of the above. I want to be Dracula, I wish I had the license to let my id run wild in public like The Wolfman and I feel bad for Frankenstein’s Monster. None of the classic Universals really scare me because each one is a direct reflection of something hidden in our subconscious that is already a part of us. I’m just a little more transparent than most people in that I readily admit that I’d love to be a sexually alluring parasite, a wild animal and that I have a sympathetic loner streak that allows me to understand and sympathize with a monster.

8: Tell me about a scene from a NON HORROR Film that scares the crap out of you:
The answer: Any one of the sex scenes from The Room prominently featuring Tommy Wiseau’s ass. But seriously, folks. I have thought and thought about this and have come to the conclusion that while I’m sure there’s one out there, I can’t think of it. Truth is, there aren’t a whole lot of horror movies that scare me so if you make some non-genre flick and something is either intended to make me jump or it comes off awkward enough to be spooky, it’s probably not registering with me because I’m just not turned for it.

9: Baby Jane Hudson invites you over to her house for lunch. What do you bring?
LSD.

10: So, between you and me, do you have any ulterior motives for blogging? Come, on you can tell me, it will be our little secret, I won’t tell a soul.
I started Cinema Suicide back in 2007 because I was tired of having my pitches to Rue Morgue and Fango rejected or ignored on the grounds that I had never been published before. In a passive-aggressive move to tell them all to go fuck themselves, I started up this site and became my own editor. But somewhere along the lines I actually caught on and started living with the fantasy that I could turn this site into a full-time job so I didn’t have to write code for a living. In 2008 I made a pretty hard push to make that happen and when it all came apart, I ditched the fantasy and kept this as a means to get free stuff from movie distributors looking for press. Now that doesn’t happen all that often, so I honestly don’t know why I keep doing this. As far as I’m concered, the only thing that sets me apart from your average horror blog is that I say fuck 50% more than anyone else. Also, the animosity that I feel toward the horror reporting powerhouses is gone since I’m friendly with Dread Central’s Steve Barton and I have an article running in the September issue of Rue Morgue.

11: What would you have brought to Rosemary Woodhouse’s baby shower?
Diapers and wipes. It doesn’t matter if you’re having your garden variety baby or the antichrist, nobody ever brings diapers and wipes to a baby shower and they ought to because them shits ain’t cheap and parents are always running out of them at the worst of times.

12: Godzilla vs The Cloverfield Monster, who wins?
Godzilla would rock the Cloverfield Monster’s ass so hard his feelings would be hurt. Seriously. It wouldn’t even be a fair fight and the battle would have wound up in that montage in the middle of Final Wars where G makes short work of every monster he’s ever battled in the past.

13: If you found out that Rob Zombie was reading your blog, what would you post in hopes that he read it?
I’d probably be flattered. I don’t have a beef with Rob Zombie. I don’t much like his movies and I think he makes music for people who don’t like good music but I certainly wouldn’t call him out here hoping to start a bro-down or a fight. He seems like an alright guy and I’m sure that with the sort of resources he has at his disposal, I’d probably fulfill my own fantasy of being Alice Cooper and John Carpenter simultaneously.

14: What is your favorite NON HORROR FILM, and why?
Escape From New York. Growing up in the 80′s, it was hard not to notice that we were all living on the precipice of nuclear oblivion or complete social collapse because it was at the top of everyone’s mind, even a ten year old’s. Escape From New York made it look like fun, though. Snake Plissken was the first time I’d seen anyone in a movie who was pure anti-hero and I got the feeling that I shouldn’t be rooting for him because he was actually a bad guy doing a good thing because he had no choice in the interest of self-preservation. The setting was really awesome and I think Carpenter’s score for the movie is the greatest score of any movie ever made ever. EVER.

15: If blogging technology did not exist, what would you be doing?
If blogging software or the internet in general? If there was no WordPress or anything like it, this would probably be a custom CMS of my own design because I’m capable of building that sort of thing but that’s not the answer you’re looking for is it, Pax? Let’s say there were no internet at all. Cinema Suicide was an inevitability in my life and would have wound up a low-tech fanzine of the xerox variety. I grew up punk and I loved zines. They’re still out there floating around in the U.S. Postal system and places elsewhere, but the golden days of the zine are gone and keeping up with them is a real pain in the ass now that we can spend the entire publishing budget of one issue on a year’s worth of hosting and publish daily rather than a couple of times a year, you know?

Every now and then I go on a vampire kick. Can you blame me? They’re pretty sexy monsters. I also wrote a short piece about how Dracula is my favorite vampire movie for The Vault of Horror/Brutal As Hell collaboration, Lucky 13, so I’m sort of in that mode right now. Movies are one thing, but if there’s another place that the vampire allure has also proliferated, it’s music. The idea of young and sexy forever is extremely compatible with rock. So for your enjoyment, here’s 10 songs about vampires.

The Pretty Reckless -- Make Me Wanna Die

My wife, Denise, turned me on to this one. Prior to her mentioning the band, I’d never heard of them or their singer, Taylor Momsen, who I guess is some kind of actress on Gossip Girl. Never seen the show but she turns out a fairly smoky performance of a song full of veiled references to vampires.

Concrete Blonde -- Bloodletting

By the time Concrete Blonde released Bloodletting, they’d been at it a while without making much of an impact on the rock world. They had a brief hit with their single Joey but that was about it and it’s a shame because they’re pretty good and singer, Johnette Napolitano puts on a hell of a show. This song lifts a lot of themes from Anne Rice novels.

Bauhaus -- Bela Lugosi’s Dead

Chances are if you’re reading this, you know who Bauhaus is and if that’s the case then you definitely know Bela Lugosi’s Dead. It’s not entirely clear what the song is actually about and even though the band is on record about how the song was some kind of obtuse joke, they unwittingly spawned an entire genre of music with devotees clad head to toe in black, silver jewelry and white makeup to get that vampire look just right.

Roky Erickson -- Night of the Vampire

Roky Erickson made his name as the frontman for The 13th Floor Elevators, allgedly the first band to coin the term psychedelic rock. Heavy acid use and some troubles with the law in native Texas wound Roky up in a mental facility where he went even crazier and when he came out, he released a collection of songs with a heavy horror bent.

Wesley Willis -- Vampire Bat

Continuing with the theme of vampirism and mental illness, here’s Wesley Willis. The late Chicago schizophrenic “musician” was known for a shit ton of songs about whatever happened to be on his mind at the time and were often performed to the preset songs on his keyboard. Most of them began with the words “once upon a time”. Wesley is confused about the differences between bats and birds and exactly how a bat might extract blood from a human but then again, Wesley was confused about most things.

Mazzy Star -- Taste of Blood

It’s a shame that Mazzy Star never broke out bigger than they did. Back when radio was hungry for anything moody and “alternative”, their single Fade Into You popped into MTV rotation and then they were never heard from again, leaving most people with the impression that Mazzy Star was the name of the singer, whose name is actually Hope Sandoval. In actuality, they released three really good albums full of moody, jangly pop songs, combining shoegaze with The Doors. Among those pop songs is this one about being killed by a vampire.

Slayer -- At Dawn They Sleep

It’s actually kind of alarming to me that Slayer has a song about vampires. The horror of their lyrics has often been relegated to Satan and true-crime death metal variations on horror. This one’s from their second album, Hell Awaits, an album that I really don’t care much for. Show No Mercy hasn’t exactly aged well, but it’s still a killer album and a tough one to follow and in my opinion, Hell Awaits doesn’t really stand up, but here’s what it sounds like when a thrash band takes on the vampire thing. See? It’s not just for goths!

Outkast -- Dracula’s Wedding

Speaking of not just for goths. Here’s what happens when hip-hop takes on vampires. Dracula’s Wedding appears on The Love Below half of the Outkast double album with Speakerboxxx, that is, Andre 3000′s half of the album. Outkast has always been on the edge of hip-hop conventions but without Big Boi to tether him, Andre 3000 released what basically amounts to his interpretation of Purple Rain. The whole album is abstract and silly but everything lived in the shadow of Hey Ya, a single so strong that is absorbed just about everything else on the album.

Calabrese -- Vampires Don’t Exist

I really wanted to avoid writing about a horror punk band because just about every one of them has a song about a vampire and just about every one of them sounds like The Misfits but Calabrese is the official band of Cinema Suicide and I fucking love this song.

Type O Negative -- Black No. 1

I hate to speak ill of the dead but I always hated Peter Steele’s lyrics. The guy had a great voice, for sure, but the melodrama of “happy Halloween, baby” gives me eye strain from rolling them so hard and let’s not even approach the lyric, “boo bitch craft”. What the fuck is that? What would a list of vampire music be without at least one Type O Negative song, though? That was pretty much their thing and sometimes Peter Steele’s issues with enunciation in the vocals department led me to believe that he was singing with a pair of plastic fangs capping his canines.

Man, I was all set to roll out some sweet Psycho shit for this occasion until I realized that B-Sol had already done so with a distinctly Danzig twist on his magnificent Vault of Horror blog. So here’s something else, entirely.

Here we are 25 years later and my mom still doesn’t get my fascination with horror but instead of having me committed all those years ago, she introduced me to H.P. Lovecraft and that has to stand for something.

My lovely wife, Nise, mother to our crazy daughter (who I caught rocking out to Goin’ Blind by KISS today) also has to put up with my bullshit and has sat through some absolutely repellent garbage in the name of movie criticism. So to the both of you, I love you very much you play a huge role in the founding and continuation of Cinema Suicide.

So to all you righteous moms out there, morbid or not, here’s a big thanks to you all.

Today I received an invitation to a screening. I get these things all the time, not to sound snobby or anything, but I can never attend them because no one books sweet, subversive cultural screenings in Buttfuck, New Hampshire. This screening was a retrospective dedicated to the director, J.X. Williams whose films today only exist in truncated pieces. Some of them have been circulating in the bootleg VHS circuit since the 80′s, others can be found on Youtube, but series curator, Noel Lawrence has assembled the greatest collection of J.X. Williams’ work in the world and is now ready to show it as he prepares a documentary about Williams.

Who is this guy, I hear you ask yourself. I thought the name sounded familiar, too, but I couldn’t place it. Turns out I’d seen one of Williams’ more notorious social experiments, Satan Claus, as part of the Experiments In Terror 3 (Review) short films collection. See, J.X. Williams was one of Hollywood’s fatal commie blacklist victims. Hollywood tends to hang to the left unless you’re John Milius or Walt Disney, and among those left leaning Hollywoodites was one J.X. Williams, a mail room flunky at RKO who managed to rise through the ranks and write a couple of features. But the blacklist hit and all he could do after he was direct some mob-backed stag films. It was in this setting, however, that Williams was able to flex his creativity and make sweet bank. By the time Williams had worked up to his notorious lost feature, Peep Show, he had developed a freaky film style that crossed pieces of  Roger Corman with The Kuchar Brothers and Kenneth Anger. After stewing for a decade  making dirty pictures, Williams returned to the Hollywood set and cranked out the aforementioned feature, Peep Show. Peep Show was a documentary of found footage mixed with narrative that made sweeping allegations about the role of organized crime in Washington, the assassination of John F. Kennedy and a plot to get Frank Sinatra hooked on dope. This was released only two years following the death of JFK and was way ahead of the conspiracy theory curve.

Williams always seemed to wear his Andy Milligan hat, though, and this kind of dedication to low culture and a self-imposed slavery to vice led to Williams shooting a ton of garbage. Some of it released, most of it left out to rot in settings unsuitable for storing film. Because of this, not much of Williams’ filmography has survived and what has is in really bad shape or is only screenable in fragments. For instance, Psych-Burn, a hearty fuck you television pilot that was intended to cash in on the burgeoning love-in hippie set but came off more like Laugh-In mixed with the acid trip sequence from Easy Rider. The most ambitious of Williams’ pictures, however, was The Virgin Sacrifice, a trashy Christian scare flick about Satanists living in the suburbs, among the rest of you God-fearing lot. Intended to be an avant approach to Rosemary’s Baby or The Devil’s Rain, the picture is among some of the most legendary cursed movies. Like Poltergeist or The Exorcist, the production was troubled to put it lightly. Williams barely survived a car bombing, thought to be left by mobsters he owed money to and there were numerous deaths from drug overdoses. In the end, the three hour horror epic did a few festivals before it was destroyed in a fire. These days, only a mere nine minutes remain. This curse is thought to have been placed on the picture when Williams had a falling-out with the film’s financier, a high-profile member of The Church of Satan whom many believe to have been Sammy Davis Jr.

There were other features but suffice to say, ensuing decades weren’t kind to Williams, who wound up directing a few new wave music videos before disappearing into a villa in the Alps where he paints landscapes these days. Curator of the J.X. Williams project, Noel Lawrence grabbed his attention when he started asking people questions about the Williams filmography in preparation for his documentary, The Big Footnote, coined from a Williams quote about all you can hope for in film history. Lawrence’s show is starting to make the rounds now. If you happen to be in the Philadelphia or New York City area, you can make it out and see what this psychedelic lunatic was up to at the height of his potency during the reigning era of American Parallel Cinema:

Friday, May 7
The Secret Cinema
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Program Details

Saturday, May 8
Anthology Film Archives
New York, New York
Program Details

Of course, I’m just giving you the nutshell version of the story. All the details, some clips, images are over at the J.X. Williams Archive. Here’s a taste:

I owe you a post. Last week was a tough one. Fought a cold. My laptop shit the bed and I’m way behind on writing this article for Screem. So in order to allocate personal resources accordingly, I sacrificed this here blog and I’m sorry for that. Truthfully, I didn’t see much worth talking about last week.

To make up for it, I’ll hook you up with this nugget and a piece of personal information that is probably not terribly valuable to anyone: I write code by day. As much as I’d love to go pro with Cinema Suicide, that’s just not in the cards. Available real estate for professional bloggery in the realm of movies is pretty much taken up and getting into that world means going back in time to a point when only a handful of writers were doing it and there weren’t four or five massive websites out there hogging all the press releases and ad duckets. So to keep a roof over my head, I write code. Web code, but code nonetheless. Cory Doctorow and I are probably the only guys on the internets right now who get a kick out of this short story, but bear with me. All this talk of code is actually going to tie into H.P. Lovecraft in the end.

In computer science, recursion is a function that calls itself to work out an integer or a condition by going over itself again and again and again until the condition is met. It can be tough to wrap your head around and I’m not nearly the kind of programmer that can parse that kind of bullcrap. I was raised on while and for loops (a vastly simplified form of recursion). Real software engineers, however, work out recursion to dizzying degrees of madness that can only be described as “Lovecraftian”. It’s only appropriate, then, that some smart ass software engineer out there with a solid grasp of Lovecraft Country and the C programming language write a short story that reads like The Shadow Over Innsmouth while describing the blasphemy of recursive programming. It’s quite funny.

I had heard tales of the… thing that C.A.R. Hoare had summoned up in ’62– dark hints of choosing one element from an array, and partitioning the rest into lesser and greater sets, and hellishly recursing until the data were twisted into a sorted list– but nothing I could have imagined would be in any way comparable to the daemoniac, blasphemous reality that I saw.

And yet I saw them in a limitless stream– flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating– sorting themselves inhumanly through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant saraband of fantastic nightmare. Their croaking, baying voices called out in the hideous language of the Old Ones:

void Rlyeh
(int mene[], int wgah, int nagl) {
int Ia, fhtagn;
if (wgah>=nagl) return;
swap (mene,wgah,(wgah+nagl)/2);
fhtagn = wgah;
for (Ia=wgah+1; Ia<=nagl; Ia++)
if (mene[Ia]<mene[wgah])
swap (mene,++fhtagn,Ia);
swap (mene,wgah,fhtagn);
Rlyeh (mene,wgah,fhtagn-1);
Rlyeh (mene,fhtagn+1,nagl);

} // PH’NGLUI MGLW’NAFH CTHULHU!

Read the rest. Maybe you’ll get the joke, maybe not. Either way, you have to agree, that shit reads exactly like Lovecraft, minus any disparaging commentary about jews and black people.

The C Programming Language 4.10 by Brian W Kernighan, Dennis M Ritchie & HP Lovecraft

I’m probably going to be too drunk in the next couple of days to so much as spell my name out so I figure I should get this out of the way now. It means a lot to me that anyone comes around and reads my stupid bullshit here and by my web metrics alone, I know that a lot of you at least read a little bit of it so that amounts to a pretty sweet gift all year long. It’s encouraging and a lot of you folks keep up with me and leave nice messages directed toward me on the Twitter feed and my personal Facebook.

I know that we have several days left in the year but looking ahead, 2010 holds some big fun. There’s a Cinema Suicide Facebook group in process that my lovely assistant (Glorious Wife Supreme, Nise) has been bugging me to set up. I have to follow up with Mike Schneider about it, but it’s looking like there will be a print article, my first, coming up in a near-future issue of Screem about Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated. There’s the much touted self-penned script coming up in the Zombie Bomb comic and a series of scripts have been written with the magnanimous John Herman for an upcoming web series that is such a cool idea that I won’t even describe it. As for Cinema Suicide, I will continue to publish stupid bullshit here as regularly as possible and with luck, you will continue to read it.

So Happy Holidays to all of you! Even you jerkoffs who continue to leave stupid comments in the Red Dawn and Ghost Adventures articles.

I didn’t do this last year because I’m a cynical dick and I’m way too skeptical of everything. I was pretty excited about Black Dynamite (review) and thankfully it didn’t disappoint but I was pretty much resigned to a year’s worth of disappointment everywhere else. I couldn’t have cared less for Drag Me To Hell and Friday the 13th, two movies the horror community was going apeshit about and in the end I wound up liking both quite a bit. So my resolution for this new year is a simple one: Stop being such an asshole and try to be a little more open minded about projects coming down the line. So here’s the official line for Cinema Suicide. 2010 is already shaping up to be a lot of fun and here’s why.

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World
Edgar Wright’s trickle down approach to promoting this movie while still in production is nothing short of infuriating. This is probably why I’m on the edge of my seat to see the final product. That and my discovery of these books earlier this year led to a sudden and minor obsession with the maddening genius of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s American-style manga about a Canadian slacker and the bullshit he has to endure in order to date the girl of his dreams. Oh. And also the insane fight scenes that involve power ups and Scott leveling up as though his world is a video game. It’s really just a goofy romance that has preoccupations with 8-bit videogames and garage rock but every act of the story is punctuated with consciousness altering bursts of crazy. It’s really something. Wright has a tall order to fill as filming Scott’s ordeal without all the flying around and dragon punches would be disingenuous and would misrepresent the books in a big way. Also, it’s a chance for Michael Cera to be something other than “the awkward guy” as Scott isn’t really in over his head like other Cera roles tend to be and is more in the way of the biggest alpha doofus you’ve ever seen. The only solid piece of intel about the release is 2010. I have no idea where it will land next year but this is looking like a summer flick if I’ve ever seen one.

Kick-Ass
They’ve been teasing us with pieces of Kick-Ass since the last San Diego Comic Con and with the release date in April, Lions Gate keeps dropping more posters and clips as if to keep us hanging on. I’m not sure that after all this hype they’re going to have needed the viral word of mouth buzz in the first place. The December 13th Alamo Draft House screening as part of the Ain’t It Cool film festival (I refuse to call it by its actual stupid fucking name) ran to wild praise and left an awful lot of bloggers in attendance pining for a repeat viewing. Word so far is that Matthew Vaughn’s adaptation of the Mark Millar/John Romita Jr. book is as an inspired piece of mayhem and is as good a representation as you could ask for of this blindingly violent comic book. From all the bloggery flying around since the screening, it’s looking like 12 year old Chloe Moretz is going to wind up walking away with this picture as her character, Hit Girl, is repeatedly noted as the movie’s highest point. I want to see this movie so bad right now that I can taste it. They just need to do something about that trailer. It’s a real piece of crap.

Atomic Brain Invasion
I’ve been romancing the shit out of Richard Griffin’s movies since 2008 when we picked up on the story of Beyond The Dunwich Horror and ever since then I’ve been singing the high praises of Scorpio Film Releasing, their relentless work schedule and uncanny dedication to the craft of b-movie production. Griffin is the future of the midnight movie circuit and the heir-apparent to the throne of Tromaville and coming this summer you can expect to find a positive review of his latest feature, Atomic Brain Invasion. The guy just can’t lose,  I tell you. Aided by his troupe of actors and wingman/producer, Ted Marr, they continue to crank out quality cheese that has a uniquely Rhode Island kind of flavor to it. Atomic Brain Invasion, as you can probably guess, spoofs 50′s rock and roll movies as well as wonky low budget drive-in science fiction as a race of aliens invade Earth with the intention of kidnapping Elvis.

Iron Man 2
I fully realize that Iron Man 2 marks the third comic book adaptation on this list and I’m also aware that I have a habit of pissing all over Hollywood popcorn flicks but I really liked Iron Man. Favreau’s picture could have easily wound up in the same bargain bin as other Marvel properties that don’t feature mutants or radioactive spiders but it floated on the charm of Robert Downey Jr. who can’t seem to lose on his comeback trail. Also, I was blown away when Jeff “The Dude” Bridges went to the press and talked about how Iron Man didn’t really have a script and they more or less made it up as they went along on the set. For summer 2008 it was basically the anti-Dark Knight and I was fine with that because I also really liked that movie. So here comes more summer popcorn cheese with Mickey Rourke looking bad as hell in a hacked up Whiplash outfit and Scarlet Johansen in a latex catsuit. I’m a little disappointed that Terence Howard backed out but Don Cheadle in the War Machine armor ought to be the shit, y’all!

Ong Bak 3
I had my problems with Ong Bak 2 (review), namely that the story was shit even by Thailand standards and that it ended on a frustrating cliffhanger but had Tony Jaa not had a complete mental breakdown on the set, basically trying to do everything himself, the resultant picture could have been one of the finest martial arts movies of all time as Tony not only blew asses out with the realness but he also incorporated Chinese and Japanese martial arts into his movie to create one of the most colorful ass kick pictures of the last decade. A lot more focus and 100% less Chernobyl grade mental freak out and he could have it all. But all is not lost and this coming year we’ll get to see what happens when all seems lost. I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that Tony probably kills all those dudes who have him pinned on the ground with spears.

Daybreakers
I really hope that Daybreakers becomes the movie that I Am Legend should have been because it’s the only horror movie on my list unless you count Atomic Brain Invasion. 2010 isn’t looking too hot if you’re a horror movie and there’s not a lot to look forward to but given the current context of vampires, it’s going to be nice to see them as a predatory and tragic creature rather a soft-spoken pussy with a romantic streak for what it should be stalking and killing. Out  of 2010′s menu of horror movies, this is probably the most interesting one. We’re getting more sequels of reboots and The Killer Inside Me as well as Stake Land both look promising but this one here is the most ambitious of the bunch and boasts a pretty sweet cast with the likes of Sam Neill, Ethan Hawle and Willem Dafoe.

Boogie Town
Bear with me. I know how absolutely fucking insane this is going to sound but have you read the plot synopsis for Boogie Town? Do you even know what it is? This on par with Death Wish 3 crazy. It takes place a few years in the future where dance battles are outlawed and crews still get together for illegal dances. As is typical with these sorts of movies, the main story lifts all of its plot elements right out of West Side Story but there’s an angle about a secret government agency that wants New York’s best dancers because they want to make super soldiers out of their DNA or something to that effect. So you basically sit in for your stock You Got Served/Step Up kind of number and get some cyberpunk near-future dystopian setting with sprinkles of Universal Soldier all set to a modern hip-hop soundtrack and a Broadway foundation. Game. Set. Match. Oh yeah, the main characters also have super dancing powers and the special detail that busts dancers is called The Boogie Police. I swear to god, I am not making this up.

You know? I’ve seen a lot of silly videos. But I’ve never seen anything like this. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to put on Zeppelin and eat cheddar cheese.

Trust me. Christmas shopping sucks a dong. This year, in the spirit of giving, I’m here to offer you some advice about what to buy the people in your life who like nerdy, spooky stuff. My gift to you: A little stress relief. I’m not the kind of blog that gets a lot of substantial freebies so in some cases, these are items that I have reviewed based on freebies sent to me by the companies, but I wouldn’t recommend them to you unless I actually endorsed them as a quality product. Others are some shit that I happen to think are sweet based on personal interactions. All links below will take you to Amazon where you can order these items and in the interest of disclosure, I do get a piece of the action if you choose to do this, so buy something sweet and support Cinema Suicide. Happy holidays!

Badass: A Relentless Onslaught of the Toughest Warlords, Vikings, Samurai, Pirates, Gunfighters, and Military Commanders to Ever Live by Ben Thompson

Recently reviewed in the Suicidal Book Club, Badass is a catalog of the personalities noted in the title above written using the language of your average 12 year old male on the internet. Short of using actual internet shorthand, the book recounts the lives of the most intense individuals ever to live and subjugate entire cultures. It’s absolutely hilarious from cover to cover and as well as detailing the deeds of well-known conquerors, it also features people you may not be familiar with.

Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game from Fantasy Flight Games

Product tie-ins for movies and TV shows are typically poor representatives of the vibe and appeal of the show they’re tied into but the Battlestar Galactica boardgame, based on the hit Sci-Fi channel series is as close as you get, which is saying quite a bit. Each playthrough is a perfect emulation of the drama and paranoia of the original series thanks to a set of tight rules and cooperative play that seems overwhelming at first but is, in fact, pretty easy. Players assume the roles of the show’s major characters and pool their resources to overcome crises as they are presented but from the start, hidden among your ranks, are secret Cylons out to remain hidden while sabotaging the Galactica’s progress. Games last, typically, 2 to 3 hours and are tense from start to finish. It’s an outstanding game that made me finally get off my ass and watch the series.

DMZ Vol. 1: On the Ground by Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli

I’ve been calling DMZ by Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli one of the best ongoing comics of this decade. It’s the story of Matt Roth, an intern photojournalist for a big news organization. When the chopper dropping him in the the DMZ, aka the lower east side of Manhattan, during America’s second civil war, is attacked and destroyed, he is left with no guide, no sense of the streets and what little equipment managed to survive the wreck in order to tell the story of life inside the DMZ. It’s an allegory for people trying to make their way and resume their lives in warzone no-man’s lands like Baghdad and Kabul and is one of the most compelling reads of the decade. The storytelling is sharp and the art is appropriately urban. It’s a little bit Escape From New York, a little bit The Warriors with dialog straight out of The Wire and it would make a killer TV series. I cannot recommend this comic enough. Buy the collected trades. They come with all sorts of cool extras and you won’t have to wait an agonizing month between monthlies to see how the story turns out.

The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic by Martin Grams

This book won a Rondo Award last year for being the final word on a well trodden path. There has been no shortage of examination of Rod Serling’s seminal series, The Twilight Zone, but assembled here for the first time ever is the ultimate tome of knowledge for that friend of yours who thinks they know it all about this shit. The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic will prove them wrong and teach them  thing or two about what really went down in those early days. For fans of the Twilight Zone, this is an absolute must have.

Left 4 Dead 2 by Valve (for Xbox 360 and Windows)

The original Left 4 Dead was one of the finest online experiences I’ve ever had. Typical public gaming over Xbox Live is an exercise in agony and the Live social experience is a collective chatroom akin to Lord of the Flies having been rewritten by T-Pain but Left 4 Dead took this wasteland of wasted braincells and leveraged it to create something more than a game about shooting zombies in the head. The sequel took that four strangers survival horror trope and elevated it to new heights with new maps, new weapons and new thrills. It also adds a new dynamic world building system to make sure that you never play the same game twice. It is the king of replay and I couldn’t get enough versus mode play.

Saga of the Swamp Thing by Alan Moore and Stephen Bissette

You can either hunt these books down at comic shows or on Ebay and pay out the nose for them or you can spring for the trade paperbacks, which is the only way to go unless you’re a diehard. Thanks to the enduring popularity of these iconic horror comics made legend by comic book madman, Alan Moore and a name as synonymous with Moore as Dave Gibbons, I speak of Stephen Bissette, DC has issued two of these great collections in beautiful hardback editions and I cannot recommend them enough. The only comic to ever bring a tear to my eye, Swamp Thing retcons the original Swamp Thing story and tells a series of stories so mature, so complex that DC didn’t know what to do with them. Their popularity ushered in a new age for comics and helped established the Vertigo range of books proving to the world that yes, adults can like comic books. Beautifully penciled with a series of stories that are horrifying, funny and tragically romantic. Edward and Bella have nothing on the former Alec Holland and Abby Arcane.

Shock Festival by Stephen Romano

There was a lot of confusion last year when Shock Festival was released as to what it actually was. Billed as a coffee table book, it cataloged, exhaustively, data and anecdotes about some of the grindhouse’s filthiest treasures but in fact, it a pure work of fiction by horror artist, Stephen Romano. The catch is that not one word of it is true. This is a work of obsessive madness, a love letter to theaters with sticky floors having nothing to do with spilled cola. It embraces the decay of fifty seat theaters and dilapidated drive-ins where double features were both b-movies. Everyone who reads this site with any kind of regularity should buy this book and make love to every page.

Monster Kid Home Movies

A gigantic collection of home movies made in their childhood by people you may know as movers and shakers in the horror genre today, Monster Kid Home Movies is the ultimate homage to those formative years where horror wrapped its claws around us all and never let go. Monster Kid Home Movies showcases the schlocky amateur offerings of young kids making their own horror movies and more times than not, doing a better job with make up and special effects than they had any right doing. Most of the time, the result is silly, but it’s cute and it’s fun and it makes you wish you could go back to being a kid again.