Cinema Suicide

We’ve been talking about doing this for a few months now and we’re finally ready to roll it out.

As well as being fans of great horror/exploitation/cult movies, a few of us here are also fans of the music that accompanies those movies.  To such an extent that we wanted to include that content here but not necessarily in the flow of the movies page.  To accomodate, I created a sister site.  Soundtrack Apocalisse, primarily the vehicle for Cinema S regular, Tim Fife, will follow the C Suicide formula but with a musical slant.  You’ll get all the news, reviews and interviews that you could possibly want.  Tim kicks the series off right with an interview with legendary Italian composer and frequent Lucio Fulci collaborator, Fabio Frizzi!

Check it out!

Before I sat down to pen this late-night review of writer/director Daisuke Yamanouchi’s nauseating Japanese torture flick Red Room 2, I was forced to pay a quick visit to the write-up I’d concocted about the first entry early last year. Not surprisingly, my thoughts and feelings regarding this admittedly unnecessary sequel is pretty much exactly the same, albeit for a completely different set of stomach-churning reasons. And, yes, I do still feel more than a wee bit guilty for spending roughly 80 minutes of my unadventurous life watching a sad collection of individuals humiliate one another for a few million yen. What that says about my mental well-being probably isn’t too good.

The setup for Red Room 2 hasn’t changed much since last time: Four pathetic individuals, each acting on their own free will, play an extremely twisted game entitled “King” inside a room illuminated by cherry red light bulbs. After each seedy contestant has taken a seat at a cheap all-purpose table, four crude playing cards are dealt, one for each player. The lucky boy or girl holding the card marked with a black crown gets to order the others around; think “truth or dare” without the option to cough up an embarrassing anecdote regarding your masturbatory habits. The poor bastard who loses the round is usually covered in blood and gore and screaming bloody murder, especially once things get a bit personal between the combatants.

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It’s been a very long time since I’ve seen anything as unapologetically violent and deliriously enjoyable as Noboru Iguchi’s stylish 2008 super-heroine epic The Machine Girl. From the picture’s over-the-top blood-spattered opening to its slightly ambiguous sequel-ready conclusion, yours truly sat in complete awe, slack-jawed and astonished. To be perfectly honest, I’ve never seen anything quite like it — except, of course, for the 2005 splatter flick Meatball Machine, yet another ridiculous Japanese oddity specifically designed to overload your fragile cinematic senses with copious amounts of grue and gore. If this is where Asian genre filmmaking is headed, color me tickled pink and pulsating.

Let’s get one thing perfectly clear before we begin: The Machine Girl isn’t an overly complicated affair, nor does it strive to be. The central premise has been used time and time again in various forms of Eastern cinema, almost to the point that even casual fans can recite the formula by heart to anyone within earshot. It’s a clothesline for filleted flesh and massacred muscle, nothing more. However, were you to carefully peel back those meaty layers of dismembered limbs and congealed blood, you would come face-to-face with an ordinary, everyday revenge tale mired in cliche and familiar ideas. Which is a good thing, mind you, since the plot never gets in the way of the one element that keeps us from finding more constructive ways to pass the time.

That element, of course, is wanton bloodshed.

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I passed up an opportunity a while back to see Blood Car but I’m told it’s pretty awesome in a completely ridiculous way. The new poster, which I’m told more or less conveys the tone of the movie perfectly, it starting to circulate around the web and it’s a gas (no pun intended, or was it?).

It’s good to see a lot of indies taking up the painted posters cause. It used to be that they couldn’t afford it so you’d get the horror movie equivalent of a No Limit Records album cover full of bad photoshopping and excessive use of filters.

Click the image for a closer look.  Also keep an eye out. Blood Car is available on DVD now.

Since the bulk of the Cinema S staff is located up here in New England, we have a tendency to go house over our regional horror con, Rock and Shock. In particular, I’ve been to three of these shows, had to skip last year’s for personal reasons but I vow to be in attendance this time around (maybe even with a table of our own). Every year leading up to the first announcement of the show’s guests is a period of great anticipation. They get some great folks up in there and they finally updated their site with the first announcement!

Rock and Shock 2008 is a Hellraiser reunion show with guests Doug Bradley (Pinhead), Simon Bamford (Butterball) and Barbie Wilde (Female Cenobyte) as well as Ashley Laurence (Kirsty).

Also on hand is “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, who I believe had to cancel last year as well as Tom Savini, Gremlins’ Zach Galligan, R&S regular Bill Moseley and Ken Foree.

Rock and Shock gets better year after year so this time around will undoubtedly be a blast.

Stay on top of things at their site: http://www.rockandshock.com/guests2008.html

There’s truth in advertising and then there’s “Tokyo Gore Police.” It’s a movie so gory, violent and outrageous, so thoroughly soaked in blood and covered in thick coating of fleshy-bits and bone matter that simply putting “gore” in the title doesn’t quite cut it. In fact, the proverbial 1,000 monkeys at 1,000 typewriters could spend 1,000 years filling 1,000 thesauruses with synonyms for “gore”, “blood”, “disembowelment” and so on and still not have enough words to describe “Tokyo Gore Police.” There is so much gore in “Tokyo Gore Police” that someone floats around on a giant spewing, splattering cloud of gore. Yes, it’s that excessive—and, thankfully, it’s good, too.

In the Tokyo of the future, the police force has been privatized and the armor-clad cops have traded in “to serve and protect” for “to sever and impale” as a policing motto. But even deadlier than the cops are the “engineers,” psychotic genetically mutated killers whose bodies can morph into grotesque weapons. They’re so dangerous that a special team of cops has been created to hunt down and kill engineers. Chief among the hunters is Ruka (Eihi Shiina, best known as the piano-wire-wielding femme fatale in Takashi Miike’s “Audition”), a demure young lass with a penchant for cutting herself with a utility knife and slicing bad guys in half with her samurai sword.

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Hope you weren’t banking on checking out Ryhuei Kitamura’s American debut, the adaptation of Clive Barker’s gory short story, Midnight Meat Train. Word came down from Lionsgate yet again that the release date was being pushed back again, this time to coincide with the release of The Mummy 3 on August 1st but that’s not the part that sucks. For reasons that Barker doesn’t specify, the film has been relegated to a minor release of only 100 theaters. Clive Barker, whose company, Midnight Picture Show co-produced the movie, is vocally pissed about this move:

As you may or may not have heard, due to certain politics, MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN is in danger of Lionsgate not giving it a wide release. I’m asking you to please help spread the word in order for all to enjoy this film. I want to passionately encourage everybody who cares about my work to use this chance to change the minds of the folks at Lionsgate.

Anything any of you can do—be it e-mails, web postings, word of mouth and the like—to help encourage this movement would be deeply appreciated. The film is worth the effort in my mind, and I do not want to see my work fall by the wayside.

So pass it on, folks. Send an email, make a phone call, whatever you feel moved to do. Midnight Meat Train makes its premier at the upcoming Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal.

Update: To contact Lionsgate about this matter use the following contact information (please be civil and courteous, I know how you animals can be):

2700 Colorado Ave.
Santa Monica, CA 90404
Telephone (310) 449-9200
Facsimile (310) 255-3870
general-inquiries@lionsgate.com

Sad news is spreading around the various genre movie sites right now that yesterday, June 15th, special effects pioneer, Stan Winston died.  Details have yet to come down.  Stan was the guy who brought you some of the most immediately recognizable practical special effects in the history of movies.  He is responsible for the The Terminator and its iconic endoskeleton as well as the Xenomorph suits in Aliens, The Predator and most recently, Iron Man. The man was the king of latex and plastic and sat on the top shelf of Hollywood’s effects men along with guys like Rob Botin and Rick Baker.  He will be missed.

It’s been a while since I’ve done a Turkish movie. It’s not often that I come across them but thanks to Onar Films, a Greek outfit specializing in some of Turkey’s worst cinematic offenses, I have some new titles in stock. Though many aware of Turkish movies are familiar with that period of superhero movies and bizarre Turkish takes on popular Hollywood movies, there is a legitimate face to Turkey’s movie scene. In recent times, they’ve been responsible for some really good genre movies. A while back, I reviewed Son Osmanli favorably and I’m on track to add Karanlik Sular to that short list, too.

I don’t have much experience with middle eastern movies, but I’m fascinated by the genre fare that I’ve seen. As I stated in my review of Seytan, the differences in what scares westerners and people from the middle east are often so great that each culture’s fears seem entirely alien to one another. In Seytan, an easy example, the Catholic panic over Satan, evident in movie’s inspiration, doesn’t translate to the Muslim world at all and the result is a stilted, awkward adaptation that attempts to translate those fears into something that the Turkish can understand. It doesn’t work out so well in the end. Karanlik Sular doesn’t exactly share that misunderstanding that made Seytan so entertaining but their take on the traditionally European legend of the Vampire is something else, entirely.

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Fuck! I am so late on this shit. Busy weekend and all that.  Appropriately enough, they saw fit to his us with another bit of news from the production of the Friday the 13th remake which I am not as hostile to as I should be.  To the left, you can see the mask from the set.  I guess the only thing that really surprises me about it is that they didn’t take any kind of ridiculous liberties with it.  I was sort of half-expecting some slick, modern production version.  Something akin to the Jason X reconstruction.  You know?  That space-age slasher mask with all the metal?  This looks like the same old Red Wings mask that you have come to know so well, minus the axe notch where he took the hit in the finale of part 3.

One of the legendary Cat III movies out of Hong Kong back in the 90’s tape trading circuit was a movie called The Men Behind The Sun which was a dramatic recreation of the World War 2 atrocities committed against Russian and Chinese prisoners of war at the Unit 731 compund. It is an uncomfortable, angry movie full of the sort of shit you associate with movies that carry that Category III black mark. Guts explode through a man’s anus, rats eat an actual live cat and the body of a real dead child is cut up in an autopsy. The very existence of this movie is amazing to me. Though, I understand. T. F. Mou, the director, is a crazed Chinese nationalist and the very idea of these sorts of crimes committed against his countrymen drove him to make a movie that casts the Japanese in a very vicious light. Unsurprisingly, Mou would follow it up a few years later with another historical gore epic, Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre which more or less puts the Japanese in the same position, but can you blame the guy? Do you know anything about these episodes in World War 2 history? It’s fucked up.

Apparently, one excessive movie about Unit 731 isn’t enough and Andrey Iskanov not only set out to make an English language movie about this horrifying piece of Asian history, but he thought that standard feature length wasn’t even remotely enough time to tell the story and decided that if anything, your senses needed to be bombarded by senseless, graphic brutality for four fucking hours!

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Maybe you’ve seen the ads. There’s probably one on this page somewhere. Ryan and the Lost Zombies crew hit me up last week about their site and I loved it. I’ve been vocal about my personal burnout when it comes to zombies but let’s face it, they’re probably the easiest, most fun monster in the entire horror movie world so I’m always willing to give them a break, particularly when the idea is fresh. I recommend you take a little time to familiarize yourself with their site.

The social media bug is catching on quickly and becoming the new eCommerce with more Myspace clones than you can shake a stick at but what sets Lost Zombies apart from the pack is that not only are they creating a place for you to put up your own profile and share video with other zombie hounds, they’re crowdsourcing a zombie movie with all the submitted footage. Under the pretense that zombies are real and that there’s an outbreak in progress right now, you are invited to drop by and toss your hat in the ring. Your footage of zombie attacks could possibly wind up in their documentary.

You really don’t need a reason to throw buckets of corn syrup colored with food coloring at your buddies and make your own squibs but The Lost Zombies offers a great opportunity for aspiring filmmakers and special effects artists to get off their asses and come up with some fun footage of head shots, neck-bites and gut rips. As the zombie “thing” grows stale, The Lost Zombies are poised to breathe a little life into the beast and make it fun and innovative again.

Stop what you’re doing right now and check out their website

I’ve been a pretty big advocate of Ghost Adventures since the documentary premiered on The Sci-Fi channel. A few of us are actually pretty big fans of the paranormal and if you’ve been around long enough you can see me praise Ghost Adventures and TAPS and shit on Paranormal State. I try to put my fondness for haunted house movies into words, but I can never seem to quantify my exciement for that sort of thing. Some of the most effective horror movies I’ve seen are spooky ghost flicks. These days, a quality haunted house movie is hard to come by. Producers and directors are obsessed with showing you too much. They don’t build tension or establish atmosphere, they cut to the chase and show you fucked up ghostly people floating around, raising hell. So the reason that the recent rash of ghost hunter shows appeal to me so much has something to do with their alleged nonfiction. They DON’T show you too much because they can’t and in the case of Ghost Adventures, whether you believe in ghosts or not is irrelevant. They pull off a perfectly spooky presentation with the documentary.

Zak Bagans, head of the Ghost Adventures Crew, is pretty busy right now with his current project but not too busy to have a chat with Cinema Suicide about the documentary, the paranormal and the development of the upcoming Ghost Adventures series for The Travel Channel. The interview continues after the jump.

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Animal House was important to American cinema for not only making a profound satire on college life, but also for spawning the toilet humor classic King Frat. Released in 1979, one year after John Landis’ film arrived, King Frat not only tries to rip off Animal House, but tries to shamelessly outdo the competition using the most tasteless, brainless, gross-out humor one could imagine.

Instead of using a continuous storyline throughout the movie, King Frat is divided into little vignettes about the antics of the Phi Kappa Delta house at Yellowstream University. In the first scene they accidentally kill the President of Yellowstream by mooning him and giving him a heart attack. At his funeral, they light off a giant stick of hash (which more or less resembles a slab of meatloaf) and light it in the ventilator system causing the crowd (including small children) to get high, as the Delta’s steal his body and drive away in their hearse. The Dean, who used to be the warden at the State Pen, decides to take revenge and become the new President.

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One year ago, today, probably around the time of this post, I launched Cinema Suicide.  It was just me and my many ridiculous opinions about movies.  It seemed strange for a professional web developer not to have his own website and after many frustrations of websites and magazines telling me that they only published reviews from published reviewers, I set out to create a repository for reviews.  The next time an editor asked me if I had ever been published, I could point to this site and say, “Why, yes! Cinema Suicide publishes my wiriting,” but it didn’t take long for this place to take on a life of its own.  My creation was growing out of my control.  Movies were quoting my reviews in their press materials, producers and directors were asking me to cover their productions.

This site has grown steadily since day one (a total of 7 visitors) and a year later we’re in a place that I couldn’t possibly have predicted.  I’ve added an actual staff of writers and a marketer.  We’re out here producing a film series in New Hampshire to screen cult favorites at one of the oldest theaters in the country. We’re preparing to produce a webisodic series of paranormal investigations and in the next couple of weeks you’ll all get a look at our line of silk screened posters and t-shirts featuring original art from a handful of talented artists, soon to be on sale here at Cinema Suicide.  Staff writer, Tim Fife, is also about to kick off a series of articles, reviews and interviews focusing on the music of the movies that we love so much here starting with interviews with frequent Lucio Fulci collaborator, Fabio Frizzi and Goblin mastermind, Claudio Simonetti.

So, in closing, I want to thank every one of you for coming by.  It means a lot to us here and your continued support means that we’ll keep on cranking out the quality articles that you have come to expect from us.  We’re standing on the precipice of huge changes and in the coming months, this place is going to blow up.

The Guest Starring series has been off to a slow start. I’ve approached a dozen people about submitting a quick 800 word essay on their opinion of the perfect b-movie and those people who didn’t ignore my proposals explained that they were too busy to chime in. So to those of you who were too busy, I want to confront you with this. Andrew W.K. is a successful musician, producer, public speaker and performance artist. He is easily the hardest man working in rock music today. He’ll do four speaking engagements in four states in two days and then shoot over to Tokyo for live performances only to come back to the States and produce an avant-garde album.

He had time to contribute. What’s your excuse? I am beyond excited to bring you, Andrew WK’s Perfect B-Movie.

The Perfect B-Movie
By Andrew WK

I was invited to write a column about B-movies, and what I consider an ideal example of a B-movie (thank you Cinema Suicide!), . I want to start by saying that in no way am I an authority on cinema, nor am I a particularly avid movie-watcher. However, I love movies as much as anyone, and I figured I could write something worthwhile. Then I realized I wasn’t sure what a “B-movie” was. I’d heard the term many times before, and some of my friends collected what they called “B-movies”, but I wasn’t certain what they were talking about. Is it a genre? A classification? An aesthetic? My first thought was that a B-movie is how people rate a slightly less than perfect film - like, “A-movies”, “B-movies”, “C-movies”, all the way down to “F-movies”. But I realized I haven’t heard people refer to F-movies, or even A-movies for that matter. Then I thought maybe B-movies refer to a film’s obscurity, but when I did some research, quite a few B-movies were actually famous and successful motion pictures. Further research told me that B-movies were sort of like “B-sides” in recorded music - a perfectly good and valid piece of artistic work, but maybe without the production, the purpose, or the presentation of an A-movie (or an A-side)

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I wish I could attach a title to this post since the clips I’m about to link you to are obviously promotional clips for something but the problem is, I don’t know what it is.  Yet.  In the past, I’ve tossed my hat into the ring in this or that alternate reality game (ARG) but I find that the pace moves too quickly for me and between the times when I’m sleeping, eating, working, doing stuff in real life, I have to spend twice as long to get caught up.  So I don’t bother anymore, but I’m fascinated by the ARG culture.  As a matter of fact, I already contributed to the comments at Bloody Disgusting where most people are just trying to covince the others that the kill videos aren’t real.

Well, no kidding.

In spite of your suspension of disbelief, being part of even the most convincing ARG is always interrupted by the occasional reminder that what you’re investigating isn’t real.  But these are kind of cool, particularly the video labeled Carolina.  That one is a riot.

So here’s the trailhead.  Run wild on this and if you can figure it out, let me know where this is going.  Someone at Bloody D suspects that it’s promo for The Poughkeepsie Tapes.

Go to http://www.holytaco.com/2008/06/05/link-time-45/ and at the bottom of the list of links, you will see the statement “Sad news, just got word that Brooke Marks, the taco belle this week passed away yesterday.”

Then go check out who this Brooke Marks girl is:
http://www.holytaco.com/2008/06/04/brooke-marks/

And if you click on the link “video blog on Break.com” you will get to her video entitled “Brooke Marks Speaks Out!” A reply to the top comment “I think im in love” is from a user named “IntellTinkerer” who says “STAY AWAY: or this will happen to u IP ADDRESS 72.167.205.77”.

Go to that IP ADDRESS.

I have some experience with servers and few are set up to just allow folder browsing so what you’re actually looking at is an image map.  If anyone knows what this is, please let me know.

Suck the nub. Three words have never so easily summed up the tone and theme of a single movie. A film so patently unpleasant that even this jaded writer felt a little unprepared for it. Wicked Lake represents an uncommon occasion for me. See, I don’t have time to fuck around so when I watch something, I usually have a pretty good idea what it’s about and whether or not I’m going to like it. It doesn’t take much to entertain me, either, but I went in to Wicked Lake with no idea what to expect aside from the trailer that I had seen. The trailer suggests a home invasion movie. Four girls play victim to four lunatics and turn the tables, but it’s not as simple as that.

Splatter hounds are going to go nuts for Wicked Lake. It’s the sort of movie that can only happen in the independent horror scene. Just as Hollywood is catching up to what horror fiends have been thrilling to for years, someone has to come along and raise the bar. August Underground this is not, but it has all the splatter that matters. Impalements, arterial spray, heads in microwaves. Just when it looks like the girls are out of people to kill, they add some more characters to the mix and someone winds up with a load of buckshot in the crotch.

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Scorpio Film Releasing’s Richard Griffin, director of the recent indie H.P. Lovecraft/Lucio Fulci mashup, Beyond The Dunwich Horror just dropped a dime and hit me with the following press release. Word on the street was that following Dunwich, Griffin and company were going to roll cameras on a post-nuke send up called Fists of Karma but an interruption hit earlier this week when the word came down that something was going to be announced later in the week about a new production and the only hint was that it wasn’t Fists of Karma. How about I shut up and let Richard Explain? Details continue after the jump.

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