Larry Blamire has just announced that he is starting on a 3rd entry into the Lost Skeleton chronicles, titled "The Lost Skeleton Walks Among Us."
While Blamire has spoken against chaining a bunch sequels onto a franchise, he also seems to be a fan of great ideas, so for now I'll just trust him on this one.
Elvira's long-awaited return to television is nearly upon us, but until it airs, here's a brief teaser by way of the show's new intro.
After taking all that in for the first time, let's take a closer look at a few things.
What I first recognized was the theme music, an instrumental version of The Black Belles' song, What Can I Do. I'd been thinking that The Black Belles were creating an original song for some reason... but the instrumental track actually works pretty well on its own.
Probably the most surprising thing about the intro is that a character from Peaches Christ's film, All About Evil, pops up about 15 seconds in...
Initially I wasn't too sure that this was really an exact match, but upon my second viewing I decided that this probably wasn't just a coincidence.
Take note of the cast listings up there...
As for the other featured one-sheet on the right, I have no idea what it might be. If you happen to recognize it then by all means, leave me a comment below.
Last weekend I got a copy of the Hobgoblins soundtrack in the mail. Because this isn't the 90's, the first thing I did was rip digital versions of my all my new Fontanelles tracks into iTunes. Unfortunately, upon doing so I discovered that I couldn't find a picture of the cover anywhere online...
So today I hauled out the camera and just took my own picture. Hopefully Google will get itself over here and index it before anyone else runs into the problem I did.
Michael Paul Stephenson’s award-winning documentary film about the creation of Claudio Fragasso's TROLL 2 (and subsequent fallout left in its wake) has been picked up by New Video Group and will be available on DVD and digital platforms on November 16.
DVD extras include:
• Director commentary.
• More than an hour of deleted scenes and interviews.
• Fan contributions, including music videos, mash-up trailers, and scenes from screenings.
• Filmmaker Q&A with Creative Screenwriting magazine
Michael Paul Stephenson has hinted at some of the other extra content already. Most interestingly, he's mentioned material with the Goblin Queen herself, Deborah Reed, who was conspicuously absent in the documentary.
Stepenson stated “We didn’t get enough time with her early on. It was hard to coordinate. As we got a little bit further down the road, we had shot a few things with her, but by that time, it had become very clear to us that the story was so much more about George and Claudio and a few of the other people we had been focusing on. There was no intention [to exclude Reed]; it was just that we were happy with this story the way it was, and anything additional at that stage felt like a distraction, or a deviation of where we were going with this movie.”
When asked if fans will actually get to see this material, Stephenson answers, “Absolutely! ... There’s so much great material that is perfect for them ... It depends on how much space they’re going to give us, but I’ll do everything I can to get as much extra material in there as possible.”
The DVD retails for $19.99 but can be preordered on Amazon now for $17.99.
Three new Sharktopus clips were released yesterday (via Syfy's Blastr). Our first clip is the wonderfully ridiculous bungee-jumping bit that we see at the end of the trailer... only now it's in context. Nothing too new or interesting here, although the fairly slow and silly tone of the buildup makes the sudden attack even better.
The second clip shows Roger Corman's cameo scene and that a sharktopus can hide in only a couple of inches of water...
And finally, the last clip gives a glimpse at some of the other characters and shows us the surprisingly simple way in which the experimentally weaponized sharktopus gets off his leash and escapes into the wild.
Mark your calendars folks. Sharktopus airs on September 25th on SyFy.
Last weekend I managed to catch Peaches Christ's directorial debut, All About Evil, as it stopped off at the Midtown Art Cinema in Atlanta, Georgia.
The event, (described by Peaches as a "spooktacular"), includes a pre-screening live show that features a couple of song and dance numbers perfomed by Peaches Christ and an assortment of local drag-monsters. The film is touring through 20 or so stops across the country, featuring one or more cast members at each stop. In my case, I got veteran John Waters actress, Mink Stole...
and I can't say that I would've had it any other way.
For any not familiar with Peaches Christ, she is the stage persona of Joshua Grannell and regular host of "Midnight Mass" shows. In appearance, she's a sort of glittery drag-Elvira with just a dash of Divine.
Probably not a coincidence.
After the song and dance bits, "Gore Gore Girl" and "Female Trouble" (that was still stuck in my head when I woke up this morning), and a brief clip-show introduction piece revisiting famous Mink Stole scenes, the lights went down and the real fun began.
All About Evil is the story of a mousy assistant-librarian named Deborah (Natasha Lyonne) who has inherited her recently-deceased father's beloved old movie house, the Victoria Theatre. When we meet her she's grieving over her father, but is particularly upset that her father has died without getting to see her succeed at "the business of show," as she's never had any luck getting work as an actress.
When her cold-hearted mother (Julie Caitlin Brown) comes in to try threatening Deborah into selling the theater, she snaps, killing her with a stab to the neck... and then giving her a few more for good measure.
What she doesn't realize until later is that the murder has been captured by surveillance cameras and, as luck would have it, almost immediately gets accidentally played back to the entire theater.
The attending cult-horror fans mistake the CCTV snuff film for a well-acted homemade cult film and embrace it wholeheartedly. When Deborah realizes what's happened, she seizes the opportunity to rejuvenate the independent theater and, most of all, to finally get her moment in the spotlight.
Short after grisly short is filmed and screened like this, seemingly daily in a very quick sort of macabre Be Kind Rewind fashion and the theater's popularity swells nearly as quickly as Deborah's growing ego.
The diva-directress (now pronouncing her name De Bor'a) finds she can't do all this on her own however, so she and the projectionist (Jack Donner) round up the twisted twins, Vera and Veva (Jade and Nikita Ramsey)...
...and a murderous young drifter (played by Noah Seegan, who you've probably last seen in Dead Girl)...
...to round up these victims a bit more efficiently. The shorts this little team produce really are brilliant, and with names like Gore and Peace, A Tale of Two Titties and The Diary of Ann Frankenstein I'm sure that will come as no surprise.
Seriously.
Their first team production takes them to the library Deborah had worked at earlier, to have a go at the librarian, Evelyn (Mink Stole), to create a very persuasive video about keeping quiet during movies. I'm not going to give away what exactly they do to her, but Mink Stole's version of the All About Evil poster gives a little bit of a hint...
Things eventually hit a snag for Deborah when her biggest fan, Steven (Thomas Dekker, from the Terminator TV series and the Nightmare on Elm Street remake), starts noticing that all the young folks appearing in her films happen to overlap with the growing number of students going missing from school. Steven doesn't have an easy time looking into this though, as he's constantly interrupted at school by the faculty who are convinced that his horror-interests mean that he's going to "Columbine" the place at any second... And things don't go too much smoother at home where he's got his concerned mother (Cassandra Peterson) to deal with.
Freud would have a field-day with this kid. Thisis what's on his wall just to the right of the frame there.
The murder-movies get bigger and better until they culminate in the biggest show at the theater, which pretty much involves the whole town. I won't spoil any details regarding the climactic ending, but it manages to be even more over-the-top than the rest of the movie thus far.
Since the Victoria is in San Francisco, "the whole town" includes Peaches Christ herself in one of her several cameos.
Low-budget, independent horror movies are often either so horribly acted as to become unwatchable, or so financially restricted that their silly effects prevent the movie from being taken seriously... but All About Evil suffers from none of that. The production values really shine throughout, and with such a surprisingly strong cast, there's never any bad line-reads that take you out of the scene or anything of that sort.
Long-time Elvira fans may find themselves pleasantly surprised and impressed by Cassandra's Peterson's ability to change tones and actually play a "straight" character role for a change, but she makes the transition look easy. Vera and Veva, the evil twins, were even more surprising. They're genuinely creepy throughout, in a sort of slasher-Wednesday Addams way, but all their other work seems to be stuff like this:
Those "Brit twins" were not exactly an obvious choice for this sort of role by any means, but the result speaks for itself.
Ultimately, what I think I was most impressed with was the tasteful handling of wink/nod distribution concerning all the little genre references sprinkled throughout.
The logo's font is a derivative of the Evil Dead font for example...
While not everything is quite as subtle as all that, you get the idea. Considering that such subtlety usually seems out of reach to horror-comedies (and, come to think of it, drag queens too for that matter...) this reserved sort of homage-handling was one of the most surprising and appreciated aspects for me.
As I recall, there was only one small technical detail that bothered me with this movie. There were a couple of times (one of which I remember was in the very beginning when Deborah's mother comes by) when the hand-held camera shot was uncomfortably wobbly to me. That only happens about two or three times as I recall, but it just always bothers me when tiny things like that pull my attention away from a story that I'm really enjoying otherwise.
I don't think enough good things can be said about Joshua Grannell's first attempt at direction here. I left this thinking that it's pretty much exactly the sort of thing that any genre-respecting filmmaker trying for a horror-comedy should aim for, and that's certainly not a bad standard to set with your first try at making a film.
I can't wait to hear more about Grannell's possible upcoming new project that may be in the works. In the meantime, if the All About Evil spooktacular extravaganza comes through your area, be sure not to miss out. Tour information can be found at the film's website, AllAboutEvilTheMovie.com.
Queen of Outer Space is a campy sci-fi film about a spaceship crew that, while on a routine trip out to a space station, gets thoroughly lasered and crash-lands on Venus.
As it turns out, Venus is inhabited solely by women, whose queen, Yllana (Laurie Mitchell), had destroyed the space station with a death ray and now wants to destroy the planet earth before its inhabitants destroy Venus.
"But how could a WOMAN be smart enough to create such a powerful weapon?"
Queen Yllana's opinion of the earth-men is colored by the fact that her face was disfigured by radiation during an earlier war waged against men from another planet.
I'd guess that she also has a little bit of pent up anger from a lifetime of being named Yllana...
Psst... that's "Anally" spelled backwards.
As it turns out, Yllana's beliefs aren't shared by all the Venutian "Glamazons." In particular, someone in her royal court, Talleah (Zsa Zsa Gabor), actually leads a secret resistance force that quickly decides to help the captured earthmen escape.
"I HATE HER! I HATE ZAT QUEEN!"
Because it's the 50's, the men quickly take charge of the revolt force by virtue of their overwhelming charisma and the resistance force is no longer much use for anything but swooning.
Of course, eventually everything culminates in a giant catfight... and those silly dames get easily overwhelmed by the side that includes men.
The queen is easily dethroned and the men get their opportunity to communicate back to earth to schedule a rescue mission to pick them up... in one year so they'll have plenty of time to do a little repopulating with the locals.
The men reluctantly accept their duty.
It probably won't surprise you to learn that the first third of this movie was actually shot in only one day. The movie gives us a few intro shots of the space-crew to introduce their personalities and let us see the interior of their ship (which looks strangely like the ship-interior set in World Without End ... which is also where the men's uniforms were last seen).
Right away the men blast off and we're shown stock footage of an actual rocket launch of a completely different looking rocket.
Moments later, we're given a shot of their transforming ship flying through space... Only now it's actually the spaceship model from Flight to Mars.
While I'm on the subject of borrowed props, the little rayguns the Glamazons use are lifted out of Forbidden Planet.
Anyway, my point is that the movie wastes no time at all getting to the point, even if that requires taking a few shortcuts. A lot of old movies are paced so slowly that they can be hard to watch today... but not this one. Within five minutes or so we're already on Venus with the Glamazons and things are actually happening. The movie keeps a nice novelty-to-pacing balance, doesn't go on for longer than it needs to, and makes a real effort to keep itself entertaining throughout.
Actually, it might have tried a little too hard to keep things interesting...
"There's been nothing but calm dialog against a boring backdrop for the last 60 seconds! Quick, throw the giant paper-mâché bug into the scene!"
"Yeah, the one we found in the prop box we got those uniforms out of."
Queen of Outer Space has a reputation for being among the cheesiest, campiest relics of 50's sci-fi, and for good reason. While the cardboard sets and misogyny don't hold up, the entertainment value definitely does.
Syfy has released a trailer to it's latest batch of TV-movie craziness by way of its gritty sequel to The Little Red Riding Hood, simply titled "Red."
In the Syfy universe, the descendants of Little Red Riding Hood became werewolf hunters, and judging by Red's trailer time shooting giant harpoons at and karate-kicking giant werewolves, it looks like she's in the family business.
The plot involves Red (Felicia Day) bringing her fiance home to meet her family and explain to him what it is that they do. Though he's initially skeptical, he gets were-bitten himself soon enough. Red finds herself now having to fight back both the werewolves and her family as she attempts to keep her fiance safe.
It's good to see Felicia Day (whose been busy creating/ starring-in her web series The Guild) returning to the small-screen... even if it is to fight this weird mixture of CGI werewolves and creatures from The Howling.
If the music sounded familiar to you, you probably played a lot of Quake II.
"Art (photo of sexy blond woman being cooked alive by native cannibal women)"
I love that it seems the person first searched for "Art," and then decided that maybe he could use a parenthetical to clarify his favorite art style...
From the first scenes of Sleepaway Camp it's pretty apparent that we're setting off down the heavily-trodden path to the Friday the 13th cloning summer camp. Pretty soon though, we start to get hints that things are going to be a little different with this one.
First of all there's eerie Aunt Martha (Ricky's mother) who Angela lives with after her father dies. Her character seems to fall somewhere between "Generic high school acting teacher" and "creepiest thing you've ever seen."
Soon enough we leave Aunt Martha's house and follow Angela and Ricky to camp. As soon as they arrive, we start to realize that shy Angela, who's been very quiet thus far, is a little odder than your average socially awkward teenager and doesn't talk to anyone... ever.
These are the sorts of things that work pretty effectively to lend us a sense of uneasiness that I wasn't really expecting out of what I'd anticipated to be such a formulaic summer camp setup. The movie progresses along like this, introducing us to the other campers and counselors, and gradually starting to work in a few pretty creative slasher kills.
Notice that the guy who looks like a cross between Lloyd Kaufman and Mel Brooks gets an appropriately ridiculous death scene.
They're all shot from the killer's point of view so that you can't see who it is and we're obviously being set up for the usual Scooby-Doo reveal ending. Before we get there though, we need to take a detour into the strange sexual aspect of Sleepaway Camp.
Whereas you'd ordinarily just pepper your slasher with a few breasts and call it a day, Hiltzik did things a little differently and cranked the homoeroticism all the way up. First of all there's Aunt Martha. By the end of the film I still hadn't figured out the gender there. Then we have all the male counselors and older campers not bothering with the camp uniform everyone else wears, in favor of these sorts of skimpy outfits.
I'd be willing to doubt the intention of that and just write it off as an 80's dress-anomaly, except the female counselors and all the young campers pretty much just stick to their regular Camp Arawak uniforms. After a while with that, the focus shifts away from the men's bodies and turns back toward the murders... which give Angela flashbacks of seeing her father with his boyfriend.
If these things were all part of some sort of weird, homophobic, "gay people cause murder" message, it would at least make more sense. As it stands, they just serve as more of the strange story anomalies that constantly pop up to defy the otherwise standard summer-camp slasher formula we're working with.
If you've heard vague descriptions of the movie from anyone, they'll probably just be about how shocking it is or how the climax is something that you will never forget... something along those lines. At least, those are the sorts of things I'd heard. But up to this point, aside from the entertaining little abnormalities I've been mentioning, there really hasn't been anything too mind-blowing to speak of and I didn't really see how things were going to suddenly turn around and suddenly fulfill all that had been promised. Soon enough though, the big reveal comes and whether you've figured out who it is or not (you probably have) is completely irrelevant. The execution of the final scene is something that was engineered to be burned into the brain forever, while just incidentally communicating the plot resolution on the side.
The characters catch the killer, the killer turns to face them, and then the characters all just stop what they're doing and freeze in place so as to not distract you from the scene's hypnotic effects until the movie's finished having its way with your eyeballs... not to mention that terrible noise...
The first time I saw it, I was still making that face halfway through the credits.
I'm not willing to give away any more details about the ending here, but this movie is definitely shocking and does turn out to have a conclusion that you'll never ever forget.
If you've not seen it yet, what the hell are you waiting for? Go ahead and give yourself a new favorite slasher.
Like Reefer Madness, Mazes and Monsters is obviously meant to be a cautionary tale, but is centered on such a flawed and silly premise that its message is just laughable.
Reefer Madness is a little more interesting in most ways due to it's overwhelming jazz-era kitschiness, but Mazes and Monsters makes up for it as well as it can by starring Tom Hanks.
While I actually posted the cover image from the VHS version that I watched, as it turns out the DVD cover art is even weirder.
Contains: A hedge-maze (not in the movie), a dragon-monster (not in the movie), and a Tom Hanks from the future (not in the movie).
The movie starts off showing us a few home-life vignettes of our characters. Actually, scratch that, the movie starts off with very long scenes of taxis set to the first song of the awful soundtrack. After that though, introductions.
First, there's silly hat guy. He's wearing something ridiculous in every scene. In his first scene, a man outside his building compliments him on this "hat," but it's the last time anyone even mentions the crazy nonsense he keeps on his head.
Next we meet our token girl-gamer. She has a quick scene which only serves as a setup for her to complain that she "can't be herself," to which her mother tells her to "use her imagination." Sounds like this girl's psyche is ripe for a satanic Dungeons & Dragons reprogramming.
Our next character is a wholesome generic jock type. His hidden depravity is shown by his unwillingness to enroll in the classes in "computers" that his parents suggest, and his suggestion that he'd prefer to take classes about making games... on computers... instead. The parents are of course outraged.
We finally meet Tom Hanks, sort of. Mostly he just sits in the back while his parents argue about how drunk his mother is.
Funny-hat shows up for school wearing a cowboy hat and quickly meets up with the girl, who he apparently already knows. As an aside, although the film is shot on a college campus and in urban cityscapes, I'm pretty sure this is the only scene that contains a black person in the whole movie, so watch out for that. Anyway, these kids apparently play Dunge... er... Mazes & Monsters regularly along with jock-guy, but at the moment they're stuck looking for a fourth player. This is where Tom comes in. All of them end up at some sort of tuxedo party (with funny-hat wearing a yellow hard hat). And they quickly convince Tom to play with them.
Finally the next scene actually introduces us to the Mazes and the Monsters. The players all gather around a boardgame and light lots of candles. This game ends almost immediately. The movie says that it's because one of the characters has died, but I think it's because there's candle wax oozing all over their boardgame.
That, along with the terrible soundtrack that kicks in again here, is enough to end any party.
We get a couple of minutes of "college life" montage, hat-guy is passingly referred to as both a college sophomore and a 16 year-old, and then we're back to their next game. This time they decide to step it up a notch, so hat-guy puts on his safari hat and they invent LARPing. They "borrow" costumes from the theater department and head to some nearby caverns. As soon as they make it down there Tom decides to go off on his own.
Since his character is a healer, this makes perfect sense.
Everyone bumbles around a bit, mostly uneventfully, but as soon as Tom gets nearly out of earshot, he runs into a "Gorvil." After a lot of screaming, he ends up killing it with his sword.
About the time of this odd little hallucination, we start to realize that Tom's actually a little bit insane. Things start falling apart for him pretty quickly after this. He almost never completely breaks from his "Bardeux" character and he pretty much spends the rest of the movie either as Bardeux or just sad/confused.
Pictured: Sad / Confused Note the sad mouth that's so confused that it starts looking happy again... the undecided popped/unpopped collar... This guy's obviously had too many RPGs.
They all leave the "maze" for the night, then Tom goes home to commune with the great glowing hallway. The hallway gives him a new quest, to head to Tolkien's "Two Towers," so he breaks up with his girlfriend, and sets off for New York to go to the World Trade Center.
Once he finally gets to NY, he first decides to wander the alleys for a while. Of course, soon enough he runs into a gang member, confuses him with another one of those Gorvil monsters, and stabs him with his "sword" too.
Now that Tom has hallucinated and killed someone, the next important anti-drug-propaganda analogue is going to the top of a building and trying to fly. So he heads to the top of the World Trade Center to do that. His friends find him up there and convince him that he doesn't have enough points for his flying spells, so he comes back down instead.
Nothing seems to happen as a result of Tom having stabbed that guy, so Tom's just taken back to his parents' place, and everyone goes back to their lives. Some time later the 3 friends go back to visit Tom and find him still stuck as Bardeux, presumably forever.
It's obvious that the ending is meant to be a somber look at a sad and serious situation, but the whole premise is so ridiculous that it doesn't even come close. The moral of the movie is supposed to be that role-playing games are evil, will take over your impressionable children, and can only get them hurt or killed. Unfortunately for the movie, this idea is so silly that to even make it work in the story the character has to be given a serious preexisting mental-illness to make any of the things that happen remotely plausible... and that of course cancels out any point the movie could have hoped to make.
This thing is basically a failure all around, but Tom Hanks' trademark likability really works wonders for the film, so it ends up not being completely unwatchable. You will need to keep your mute button readied for that soundtrack though...
I didn't see a trailer on Youtube, but this is probably better:
I sleep now!
Take note of the cast listings up there...
Michael Paul Stephenson’s award-winning documentary film about the creation of Claudio Fragasso's TROLL 2 (and subsequent fallout left in its wake) has been picked up by New Video Group and will be available on DVD and digital platforms on November 16.
now for $17.99.
Last weekend I managed to catch Peaches Christ's directorial debut, All About Evil, as it stopped off at the Midtown Art Cinema in Atlanta, Georgia.
and I can't say that I would've had it any other way.
Probably not a coincidence.
Seriously.
Freud would have a field-day with this kid.
Since the Victoria is in San Francisco, "the whole town" includes Peaches Christ herself in one of her several cameos.
Queen of Outer Space is a campy sci-fi film about a spaceship crew that, while on a routine trip out to a space station, gets thoroughly lasered and crash-lands on Venus.
The men reluctantly accept their duty.
Anyway, my point is that the movie wastes no time at all getting to the point, even if that requires taking a few shortcuts. A lot of old movies are paced so slowly that they can be hard to watch today... but not this one. Within five minutes or so we're already on Venus with the Glamazons and things are actually happening. The movie keeps a nice novelty-to-pacing balance, doesn't go on for longer than it needs to, and makes a real effort to keep itself entertaining throughout.
Actually, it might have tried a little too hard to keep things interesting...
"Yeah, the one we found in the prop box we got those uniforms out of."
From the first scenes of Sleepaway Camp it's pretty apparent that we're setting off down the heavily-trodden path to the Friday the 13th cloning summer camp. Pretty soon though, we start to get hints that things are going to be a little different with this one.
Notice that the guy who looks like a cross between Lloyd Kaufman and Mel Brooks 
The first time I saw it, I was still making that face halfway through the credits.
Contains: A hedge-maze (not in the movie), a dragon-monster (not in the movie),
That, along with the terrible soundtrack that kicks in again here,
Since his character is a healer, this makes perfect sense.
About the time of this odd little hallucination, we start to realize that Tom's actually a little bit insane. Things start falling apart for him pretty quickly after this. He almost never completely breaks from his "Bardeux" character and he pretty much spends the rest of the movie either as Bardeux or just sad/confused.
Pictured: Sad / Confused
