YouTube's just launched Horrorfest 2006, and is soliciting entries from amateur film-makers, among them Spike and Raychul Moore, whose Carpenter clone Halloween Thriller scarcely sets the bar very high. Strip away the tech and little to choose between it and the cliche-drenched fanboy videos which proliferated in the mid-1990s, aside from the fact that few of those guys had access to a flesh-'n'-blood woman prepared to parade around in her panties. I'll be keeping an eye on the contest over the next month, but there's certainly bugger all to get excited about at this stage of the game.
09/25/2006
09/05/2006
Feel the Force
As mentioned in an earlier posting, this weekend's Delta Award shortlist included the first instalment in Trey Stokes' latest Star Wars parody, Return of Pink Five, with Amy Earhart back as feisty Jedi valley girl Stacey. Hopefully, he'll have wrapped the third and final chapter by next year's festival, but the second is already playing selected events in the United States. Enjoy the trailers.
What Dreams May Come
The one thing you could never accuse the British director Mike Figgis of is getting stuck in a rut. One moment he's working on a Newcastle gangland drama, the next it's a Los Angeles police thriller, a portrait of human decay or playing with real time via the latest video technology.
His latest project sees Figgis following in the footsteps of Baz Luhrmann and the 2004 Chanel No.5 advertising campaign, although I doubt 4 Dreams of Miss X has anything like the multi-million-dollar budget Luhrmann wangled. Nor is Kate Moss quite as striking a screen presence as Nicole Kidman, but her fans will no doubt be tuning in for the third instalment this January, in which - rumour has it - the model will perversely promote Agent Provocateur's lingerie by neglecting to wear any.
Edit: Curiously, Vox appears to have stripped the audio stream out of the file during uploading.
09/04/2006
Fantastic Stories
I'll be commenting in due course upon the various events in Manchester this weekend, during the 17th Festival of Fantastic Films (of which Ann and I have attended at least fifteen), but I'll content myself for a moment by posting a selection of pix from the closing night's quiz, when our team (collectively known, for reasons far too odd to recount, as "Barrie Holland's Satanic Love Children") came a very creditable fourth out of seven.
Ann's and my team-mates were: Mark Redfield, Baltimore-based director / star of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, with his delightful companion and Death of Poe co-star Jennifer Rouse; freelance horror journo Calum Waddell and FAB Press boss Harvey Fenton (just back from a fruitless attempt to get home via the M6); Dawn of the Dead star Ken Foree and festival co-chair (together with Tony Edwards) Gil Lane-Young.
A Guy Walks Into a Bar...
Much as I enjoy a healthy dose of originality in my movie-viewing, there are occasions - such as Scott Quigley's 2001 spoof of the long-running Barclaycard ad campaign, Indecent Proposal - when even the oldest gag benefits from a little dusting-off and shining-up...
Edit: There appears to be a problem with uploading video to Vox at present. I may have to try this again later; in the meantime, it's available to watch here.
Edit 2: I've now replaced my file with a YouTube version of the same ad.
08/17/2006
08/16/2006
08/15/2006
Unheavenly Creatures
As evident from the briefest comparison between, say, the superlative Toy Story and the workmanlike but ultimately tiresome Madagascar, a successful animation depends even more upon creative flair and heart than the latest computer technology. The French short Vampz (directed by Adrien Annesley, Adrien Barbier-Lambert and Lam Le Thanh) has all three, with more than a nod to Charles Addams' classic New Yorker cartoons.
Check the Fine Print
Most film fans seem to have caught up with Jason Reitman via his political satire Thank You For Smoking, but those of us on the AtomFilms mailing list were already well familiar with his earlier works: Gulp, In God We Trust and the rather super Consent, which I now offer for your enjoyment.
Incidentally, Seattle-born female lead Rachel Vacca e-mailed me on 8 April: "[Consent] was a lot of fun to film and it's given me tons of great exposure. I just wrapped another independent film about a month ago that will travel to a lot of film festivals like Consent did. It's untitled right now, they should determine a title in a couple weeks." Following month, she appeared on US tv in "The Darkness is Light Enough", episode 2.20 of Medium.
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