Blood On Your Popcorn

Since My Bloody Valentine week won’t truly be over until I review the new DVD release (hopefully this Friday), I submit to you this semi-related review. This one has stuff coming out of the screen as well, but things decidedly less harmless than 3-D effects. Check it out.

A group of theatregoers, taking in an old seventies-style horror flick, suddenly find they are being offed by the killer from the movie. Inexplicably locked inside the theatre, they must fend for themselves, or end up like their onscreen counterparts.

I had been looking forward to Midnight Movie for a while and it finally released on DVD last month. It’s a great idea, but ultimately falters a bit in its execution. I’ve definitely seen the movie-within-a-movie device handled better in films like Anguish, but what you do get is still a pretty fun slasher. Creators Jack Messitt & Mark Garbett of obvious horrorphiles, as the movie sports numerous references to the era it is aiming to emulate. I counted no less than six such shout-outs without even batting an eyelid – NOTLD, TCM, Psycho, NOES, Alien, plus a little kid who I’m sure was supposed to be Tommy Doyle.

That haircut looks strangely familiar.

This isn’t a knock however, as it was actually kind of fun seeing them pop up. I think a drinking game is in order! The killer’s mask and design were pretty cool, even if he was toting around one of the most impractical weapons ever used in a slasher.

I’m still not really sure how that works exactly.

The gore effects are well done and apart from a few shots here and there, they are top notch. Lastly, I have to say I was quite taken by cutie Rebekah Brandes, who plays Bridget. After looking her up on Imdb, it looks like she has clawed her way up from some pretty questionable fare that even I am in no hurry to seek out. You go girl!

Midnight Movie is a worthwhile venture that mostly succeeds in capturing that ol’ slasher feelin’.

Don't Kill The Messenger II

It's been a busy week around here. Now that all that MBV stuff is out of the way (at least until I can get my hands on the Uncut DVD), let's talk some news.

Canadian Connection

I have a couple of vids to show here. It looks like the defunct Picturehouse's horror project Amusement is finally going to get a release on DVD next week. It stars Canucks Kathryn Winnick (who first caught my eye in a little hidden gem called Satan's Little Helper) and Cloverfield's Jessica Lucas. Here is the trailer below and you can also see a newly released clip over at Bloody Disgusting by clicking here.



Also, a trailer for the Canadian production The Thaw has surfaced recently.



I can see many other films in this trailer, namely Larry Fessenden's The Last Winter. My only hope is that The Thaw's ending doesn't go into the shitter, like Winter's did. I'll defintely keep my eye out for it though. It has a good cast, solid effects and decent productions values. With Splice and Pontypool also coming out in '09, this could be an important year for Canadian horror.

Tokyo Gore Phalice?

Over at Twitch this week, they posted a still from the new Tokyo Gore Police prequel. It is an original short that will be packaged with the upcoming Japanese DVD release. Some I'm looking at this still, and I'm like 'It's kinda dark what is that? Is that? Are those? THEY ARE!'

Only the Japanese would think to replace Medusa's hair with cocks. I love those crazy cats.

Sad News Out of Japan.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Duck!

After shrugging off the bitter disappointment of the events Thursday night, I knocked off early from work and headed over to my local Cineplex to take in the new 3-D remake of My Bloody Valentine. Grabbing a pair of snazzy looking glasses from the bin, I sat down and waited for the spectacle to begin.

On the ten-year anniversary of the murders perpetrated by insane miner Harry Warden, the brutal killings begin again. Is Harry back from the dead, or has somebody else decided to finish what he started?

I’m glad to say that My Bloody Valentine 3-D delivers on what it promises. The 3-D effects are great fun and the technology is the best to date. Not only are there things coming out at you – the flashlight beams are an especially cool effect – but the whole picture appears raised, so things in the foreground actually look closer than those in the back. There is a slight problem with blurring sometimes, but at least the glasses don’t cause (at least me anyway) headaches.

Not your father's 3-D glasses.

Aside from the 3-D, is the movie good? Well, not really. The script, with its Scooby-Doo ending, seems like it was written in an afternoon and the last few minutes are especially ridiculous. I will say though, that it gets right to it, so at least the movie knows what it is. It certainly tries to hearken back to those old slashers and sometimes it even succeeds. The thing to remember here is that I wouldn’t have touched this movie if it weren’t in 3-D anyway, so it’s really a moot point. On the plus side, Valentine doesn’t skimp on the gore and nudity. In addition to displaying countless uses for a pick-ax, the character Irene (played by Betsy Rue) runs around completely naked for like, five minutes. It was great to see genre actor Tom Atkins again, as well as the referential uncertified use of a washing machine. And, following her roles in The Tripper and They Wait, Jaime King seems to be getting really comfortable playing the role of Final Girl.

So, the question is, will the appeal of the 3-D gimmick get tiring after a while? Well, it hasn’t yet. I’ll be better equipped to answer that by the time the inevitable Valentine sequel rolls out. I’ll have seen Final Destination 4, the Piranha remake and Avatar by then, thus 3-D will be less of a novelty. For me, with home theaters being what they are now, 3-D is one of the few unique experiences that the multiplexes offer.

My Bloody Valentine 3-D is good popcorn entertainment, with lots of gags and gore. To be honest though, the whole experience just made me want to see the original again, which makes me even sadder about what happened on Thursday.

The Night The Lights Went Out.

You ever have a night where things are going so well and just before the perfect climax, it all goes to shit? Well, allow me to relate to you my lament.

As I’ve been saying all week, I was super stoked to be taking in the original My Bloody Valentine in Toronto. I mean, look at this event!

Screening uncut for the first time with director George Mihalka in attendance! After picking up my ticket for Friday’s 3-D screening of the remake at the theatre by my house, I have a surprisingly smooth drive into Toronto. My first stop is my new favourite independent video retailer, Eyesore Cinema. I stroll in with a big smile on my face.

“Good evening! I’m here to pick up my copy of Tokyo Gore Police.”
-“Okay.”
“Are you still taking pre-orders for REC?”
-“Yes.”
“Then I will get one of those as well, kind sir!”

I am early, so I kill some time at the pub across the street from the Bloor. I sip from my pint of Moosehead (to properly prime for the Nova Scotian slasher I'm about to watch), while catching the extremely rare occurrence of the Leafs dominating on the TV above the bar. Inside the theatre, I meet up with a couple of buds and we shoot the shit while waiting for the event to start. A friend turns to me and says,

“Did you notice Edgar Wright?”

I look over and see Wright (Shaun Of The Dead, Grindhouse’s Don’t! trailer) standing a few rows up, looking very inconspicuous in a coat and black toque. Crazy. He’s here in town doing prep for his upcoming project Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and is eager to see Valentine as much as everyone else. The director George Mihalka comes onstage and is visibly touched that his twenty-eight-year-old movie has filled the house. He looks as excited as anybody to see it screened in its original form. The lights go down. The trailers start. Everyone is having a blast. Then…

The screen goes dark. The emergency lights come on. The theatre manager is running around trying to find out what’s going on. Someone says the power is out on the entire block. It must be the cold. I haven’t mentioned this enough, but for the last week or so; I’ve been meaning to post THIS

with some sort of sarcastic caption. It’s been excessively cold here, in all of Canada. I know, ha-ha, it’s Canada, igloos and dogsleds and all that shit. But seriously, we’re breaking records. Global warming my ass. Al Gore can suck it.

After a pause, moderator Richard Crouse decides to do the Q&A, while we’re waiting for more news. Mihalka returns to the stage, along with second unit director Ray Sager (?) and actor Neil Affleck, who played Axel in the movie. Mihalka talks about how the MPAA were exceptionally hard on My Bloody Valentine when he submitted it. His intention was to get away from the “Ken & Barbie” type slashers and really make the gore look painful and not like a sideshow. This caused the censors to be merciless, cutting and hacking up the film, like a proverbial Harry Warden. Mihalka says the final theatrical cut of the movie was more like “My Anaemic Valentine.” Crouse points out that the assassination of John Lennon happened just before that and led to a backlash against violence in media, which did not help the movie’s case either. Mihalka starts talking about some of things that have made MBV stay relevant, when we are told that we all have to evacuate the theatre. Out into the –20C cold. The night is over. A friend has the new uncut DVD with him, so we decide to go to a friend’s place to watch it. The night may be salvaged, after all. The only problem is that he lives fairly close and HIS power is out, too. It is just not meant to be.

Winter and I are officially at war. You can be cold all you want and make me shovel and scrape daily. I can begrudgingly handle that. But, last night, you fucked with my movies. Now, it’s personal. I know I’m being overdramatic and things could be worse - I COULD be a Palestinian in Gaza - but all I'm saying is that to have something you’ve been looking forward to snatched away at the very last second like that seems really offside.

Be Seeing You, Number Six.

I woke up to some sad news this morning. Actor Patrick McGoohan died Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 80. McGoohan was probably best known as the rebellious captive Number Six in the 1960's sci-fi show The Prisoner. I loved that friggin' show. Even though it only lasted one season and seventeen episodes, its influence on science fiction programming would be felt for years to come. In addition to The Prisoner, he also appeared in many movies, including A Time To Kill, Escape From Alcatraz and also played the villainous King Edward Longshanks in Braveheart. Happy trails, Mr. McGoohan. You will be missed.

THS In 3-D!

As you know, the My Bloody Valentine remake releases on Friday in glorious 3-D. The third dimension in film (as we know it currently anyway) has been with us for over fifty years now and I was fortunate to be a child when it had a revival in the eighties. Isn’t it funny that the majority of 3-D flicks back then were genre titles? Except The Stewardesses* of course, which I’ve seen screened in 3-D and it is as every bit as tremendous as you would expect three-dimensional boobage to be. Anywho, this Coverbox Wednesday, I’m featuring the ones that I had at my video store, as well as a few others that applied attention-grabbing techniques. I wish I could do some cheesy 3-D effect for you right now, but sadly, I am without pancakes and syrup at the present time.

That last one I caught downtown in 3-D about five years ago and it was an effing blast. I mean I’d seen the 2-D version a million times as a kid and didn’t really realize just HOW MANY gags were in it, until they were coming out of the screen at me. There’s apple-juggling, popcorn popping, yoyos… err… yoyo-ing, you name it. If you ever get an opportunity to catch this in 3-D, do it!

The climax was in 3-D, and I still have the Freddy’s Dead glasses to prove it. This movie came out in 1991, during a time when I was seeing restricted movies at the Drive-In because it was a lot easier for my older brother to sneak me in that way. I saw quite a few movies like that, the best of which being The Silence Of The Lambs. As for Freddy 6, I think we may have been too far away from the screen that particular occasion because I don’t recall the Nightmare 3-D sequence working too well. I never complained though, I mean I wasn’t even supposed to be there, right?


Okay, okay, that one isn’t horror. But I HAVE to mention it. I hadn’t thought of this movie for YEARS and I only remembered while I was fact checking for this post. My family got the Pay TV network First Choice (which eventually became TMN**) in 1985 and one of the first movies that I watched on it was this cheesy sci-fi flick starring a very young Molly Ringwald. Back then; the station only had a limited amount of movies on their schedule, which meant multiple journeys to The Forbidden Zone, if you know what I mean.

Okay, that’s all I got for 3-D, now onto the others. One of my most curious ‘acquisitions’ from my video store days is this little oddity.


This is a 1958 movie that employs Psycho-Rama, a devilish form of subliminal messaging that flashes images during the movie to unhinge the viewer’s mind. Or, at least I THINK that was the intention. See for yourself.

The distributor even gets in on the action later, slating in “Rent Rhino Videos Every Day!” Hilarious stuff!

This 1963 Francis Ford Coppola flick (which may technically be the first body count picture) originally screened with something called the “D-13 Test”. It was a questionnaire that tested your sanity and if you failed you were asked to leave the theatre. I still, to this day, have not been able to find the full test anywhere; otherwise I would have posted it here.

Lastly, I cannot end this little piece without mentioning the king of ‘interactive cinema’ Bill Castle. He was one of the first to come up with ingenious ways to pull people into his movies. He loved his craft, but was also a great businessman who knew how to get people into the seats. For more info on this schlock icon, there is an upcoming documentary about him aptly titled Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story. Here are just some of the unique gimmicks he employed. 13 Ghosts used Illusion-O. At certain parts of the films, you looked through provided glasses to see the ghosts in the movie. The Tingler utilized Percept-O, where selected seats in the theatre were rigged with joy buzzers to ‘shock’ patrons during parts of the movie. House On Haunted Hill had Emerg-O, where a fake skeleton was flown over the audience during scenes where one appeared onscreen. And that’s just the beginning. Oh, what a delightful time to be a moviegoer, eh?

Well, that’s it for my post on the ol’ red and blue. Until next time, see you in the next dimension.


*-The Stewardesses actually came out in 1969, well before the eighties revival, but I wanted to work it in somehow.
**-TMN (The Movie Network) is the Canadian equivalent of HBO.

MBV3-D on G4

The lovely Jaime King was on Attack Of The Show yesterday promoting the new My Bloody Valentine. Check it out below.