Dinner With the Family

I’m unexpectedly bound for Texas this week due to some unfortunate circumstances, but I’m looking forward to spending time with the lady’s family (end even more time with a plate of breakfast tacos).

Should we lose our way, though, I’m glad to know we need not starve out on the backroads; we’ll just do dinner Sawyer Family style, at the farm house from the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I learned about the house’s second life as a restaurant while in college (you’d be surprised what kind of term paper topics you can get away with when your instructors are more concerned with their smoke breaks than their syllabus), but it wasn’t until recently that a visit actually seemed plausible. Now I just need to sell my traveling companions, who watch horror movies about as often as I read Cosmo, on the plan.

I’ve got an idea, though…



Be back in a week.

Public Display of Affection

Baseball. Gardening. Senioritis. Allergy headaches. The dawn of spring wears many faces.

But if you’re a fan of distinct film-viewing experiences (or just distinct viewing experiences), the arrival of tolerable temps always translate to one thing: drive-in season.

As the ‘70s sweep into town this weekend, it’s hard to resist a night under the stars with some flick – ideally a horror movie, but it really doesn’t matter what it is (my nearby movie lot is packing Cloverfield and The Ruins back-to-back – unspooling several rows of cars up ahead. Preferably without any moans coming from the car next door.

If you’re lucky enough to have one in your area, dump your DVDs this weekend and cruise on out to the local o-zoner. Before the mosquitoes get there.

Snack Bar:

• Drive-In.com -- It ain’t pretty, but neither is a drive-in restroom; you’ve still gotta go there eventually. Find your nearest drive-in here.

• Brian’s Drive-In Theater -- Don’t know John Agar from John Saxon? Countdown the hours till sunset by doing some homework.

• DVD Drive-In -- If you absolutely can’t make it out to a drive-in, just knock down the wall between your living room and your garage and take in a recommendation from this trusted joint.

If I Only Had 18 Bucks

For the first time ever, tax season has come and gone without a check from the government hitting my mailbox. This year Washington plucked a few bucks from my bank account instead, which is unfortunate, because if I did have a few extra bones lying around, I’d be stimulating the economy over at Busted Tees by picking up the best T-shirt this side of the rainbow.

A Tale of Two Layouts (and One Aging, Narcissistic Intercessor)

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Some people call it a space cowboy, but I call it April.

We shouldn’t complain about three new theatrical genre releases in as many Fridays, but the last few weeks haven’t exactly delivered the most potent 1-2-3 punch. The Ruins got fooled on April 4; more kids turned out last week for the Prom, but hardly had a night to remember; a killer paints with body parts in this week’s Anamorph, but only on select screens.

Half-hearted horror is typical for this time of year, with studios emptying out their junk drawers to make room for more prints of Iron Man and Indiana Jones -- which makes it as good a time as any to stay in and freshen things up around here. All four frequent readers will notice a new layout, still evolving as I try to decide between functionality and form (and figure out a good place to hide some surprise Jon Mikl-Thor pictures -- found one!).

Much cooler stuff is coming soon, including an interview with the trinity of soul-stealing awesomeness that is Calabrese, and a tribute to sex in conversion vans. If the RSS feed’s a-rockin…

I Want Uwe!

Or, "Keep the Boll Rolling!"

Monsterfest passed along word of a new FEARnet interview with German director/cerebral sadist Uwe Boll posted last week. Like Boll’s films, it’s full of unintentional humor (including a quote in which Boll attempts to position himself as a satirist while in the same breath referencing The Naked Gun).

Most amusing, however, is Boll’s acknowledgement of an online petition requesting that he retire from filmmaking. At the time of the interview it held 18,000 signatures, which Boll deemed inadequate, claiming it would take a million signatures before he’d stop making shitty movies. As of today, not even five days after the interview was posted, more than 120,000 people have signed it. The joke’s on Uwe.

One signature you won’t find on that roster is mine -- not because I disagree with the undersigned’s assertions of Boll’s “complete lack of comprehension” and “ham-fisted approach to horror,” but because those same characteristics make Boll one of the most reliable filmmakers working today. With any other director, there’s a certain degree of quality variance from product to product. Only with Boll can you count on crap, which is why I encourage everyone to think beyond his or her gut reaction and imagine what the world would be like if Claudio Fragasso’s career had been squelched before he’d been able to make Troll II.

Miss Horrorless

The Revenge of the Day Job buried all my attempts to post last week, but I did find a sliver of free time this weekend to get reacquainted with the couch and some friends and catch up on the 2007 After Dark Horrorfest films that eluded me on the festival weekend. Now out on DVD, the ’07 alumni aren’t nearly as bad as I’d been led to believe; just undermined by a misguided promotion and After Dark’s apparent insistence that horror fans are all goth idiots.

In addition to fest flick trailers and some film-related bonus features, each of the Horrorfest DVDs includes some webisodes from the 2007 Miss Horrorfest competition, potentially the most heinous use of the video medium since the debut of Crystal Pepsi. I’d previously thought the “contest” was strictly a one-round vote kind of thing with YouTube viewers picking their favorite audition video from the country’s finest crop of cabaret dancers with dyed black hair and tattoos. What I didn’t realize was that After Dark had crafted an entire pseudo-reality series around the concept, with the girls subjected to an episodically broadcast series of tests and scenarios from which one unlucky contestant was eliminated each week. The only thing that kept the series from fulfilling its aspirations completely was the absence of Flava Flav in a jack-o-lantern costume.

Within seconds of watching Countess Bathory and the Morbid Sisters prance around the Queen Mary, I witnessed a second competition in the confines of my viewing quarters as young adults of varying age, gender, and intoxication level battled for the chance to desecrate the DVD.



After screening the final episode and learning the outcome, I’m still a little unclear on what benefits the Miss Horrorfest moniker grants to the winner, though based on what I’ve seen I’d say acting lessons and a gift card to Anne Taylor would be universally valuable. This seems to be an annual thing for After Dark, so assuming Horrorfest ’08 is still going to happen (the ’07 round licked box-office carpet last November), any interested candidates have about six months to stockpile eyeliner and come up with a macabre alliterative nickname. First person to e-mail me with synonym for “evil” that begins with “J” gets a Horrorfest DVD only slightly caked with kitty litter.

Wicked Lame

By this point, I suppose it should come as no surprise when adamant horror fans become moderately professional filmmakers only to produce unabashed crap.

Bubbling up late last week, the key art for the feature screenwriting debut of Going to Pieces author Adam Rockoff failed to accomplish much of anything except reinforcing my assumption that Wicked Lake will be every bit as negligible as it sounds. I’d like to maintain hope that whatever Rockoff has rocked off in this flick will benefit from his knowledge of the genre and therefore not be an insult to it, but the film’s promo material does little to shake the I Spit on Your Craft vibe I’ve been getting. It makes the film look like something scripted by Kevin Williamson, not the guy who literally wrote the book on slasher movies.