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Goth Chick News: Traveling the YellowBrickRoad With Andy Mitton and Jesse Holland

Goth Chick News: Traveling the YellowBrickRoad With Andy Mitton and Jesse Holland

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image002Last week I had the pleasure of bringing you an early look at the new indy horror film YellowBrickRoad. But much like the elusive Great and Powerful Oz himself, YBR writers and directors Andy Mitton and Jesse Holland wished to remain firmly behind the curtain until the movie was released. YBR hit select AMC theaters nationwide on June 1st and true to their word, the magicians responsible for this amazing story have come over for a chat.

And a good thing to, because it wasn’t like the curiosity hadn’t already gotten to me when I picked up last weekend’s Chicago Tribune to find a sizable write up about YBR. After spending the first moment gloating over how I’d gotten there first, I spent the second moment amazed at how the local movie critic, who generally hates everything but foreign films with subtitles, seemed to have fallen breathlessly in love the YBR.

In the third moment I was manic with questions (how the heck does an indy film get a distribution deal with AMC and a Chicago Tribune accolade anyway?) and sprinting for the computer.

Thankfully, Jesse and Andy were ready to dish the deets on what is so far my favorite horror flick of 2011, indy and mass market included.

So grab a munchkin and a lollipop and come in a little closer; the men on the YellowBrickRoad have an interesting tale to tell.

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Supernatural Spotlight – Season 6 Finale!

Supernatural Spotlight – Season 6 Finale!

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SUPERNATURALIn this double episode finale, we get to the end of one of the best seasons. It started out a little rocky, but had some of the series’ best episodes, I think. The finale happened while I was a on a plane to Arizona for vacation, so I wasn’t able to review it until I got back this week. (Gotta love DVR!)

Things start out at a rapid clip, with a man at a typewriter in 1937. Shortly after finishing a manuscript, he is murdered. His blood splattered across the manuscript, revealing the man’s name: H.P. Lovecraft.

In the present, Bobby discovers that Castiel has stolen one of the Campbell family journals, by Moisha Campbell (of the New York Campbells). Fortunately, the paranoid Bobby had already made copies, so they’re able to figure out that Moisha Campbell had interviewed Lovecraft, who (as they explain to Dean) had a tendency to write stories about portals opening up and nasty stuff coming out.

Things change tack as demons break into Lisa and Ben’s house, killing Lisa’s boyfriend and capturing her. Ben is hiding in his room and calls Dean, but is caught. Crowley picks up the phone and demands a meeting with Dean. Dean goes to the meeting with Sam, but tells Bobby to keep looking into the Lovecraft connection.

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On Stranger Tides

On Stranger Tides

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Cover for the 1988 Ace MMPB.Extolling the virtues of Tim Powers to this audience is probably preaching to the choir, but if you haven’t yet read On Stranger Tides, get thee to Amazon. It was the first Powers I ever read. It’s still my favorite.

The fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie, neither based nor inspired but rather “suggested by the novel by Tim Powers,” is so-so. It has a clumsy first act, full of cameos and nudge-nudge references to the original film; and the leaden action and fighting choreography is wound into slow-motion by the editing. The biggest problem is POV: the story shouldn’t have had Jack as the main character but rather should have, like Curse of the Black Pearl, focused on the straight man (here, the missionary Philip) whose path intersects with Sparrow’s. That said, it’s not as bad as some of the reviews say. I found the mermaid sequence in Whitecap Bay delightful and I’ll gladly pay $9 to watch Geoffrey Rush channel Robert Newton (or to listen to Penelope Cruz’s accent) anytime. The film’s biggest stars are actually the percussive guitars of Rodrigo Y Gabriela who, along with Hans Zimmer, give the score a Spanish Main emotion missing from the previous installments.

If only the filmmakers had adapted Powers whole cloth! In the 1987 novel, 18th-century puppeteer John Chandagnac — or Jack Shandy, as he becomes known — accidentally falls in with pirates and thereby enters a heretofore unknown world of sorcery and West African animism. The buccaneers of the Caribbean, it turns out, are magicians who can manipulate spirits. Blackbeard himself is a master warlock, but having become infested with vodun loas, must seek out the Fountain of Youth to banish them; he keeps them at bay by drinking gunpowder and burning slow matches in his hair. And he’s not even the main antagonist. Shandy must meanwhile race to save his love from a horrific plot involving zombies and body swapping.

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Goth Chick News: Following the YellowBrickRoad

Goth Chick News: Following the YellowBrickRoad

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image0041Sometimes I feel a Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, only different.

I do have a dog (three actually) but even the smallest one wouldn’t fit into a wicker basket and they’d treat Toto like a chew toy. The ruby colored shoes I own are not constructed for long distance walking and if you ever catch me in poufy sleeves and gingham, please just put me out of my misery. Chicago does get the occasional tornado, but it would be an exceptional storm indeed that could pick up my house and set it down on a fortuitous target that I’d never, ever equate to my mother-in-law, at least not in writing.

However, I do have a few really cool friends who are exceptionally good at introducing me to very interesting people. They are wonderful traveling companions, knowing precisely the types of twisted adventures I enjoy. And though I’ve never exactly met a Great and Powerful Oz, generally when I agree to go with them somewhere, the results are often adrenaline-rushing, sometimes heart-thumping, and every once in awhile, mind-blowing.

In this particular case, my traveling companions are Brad Miska from Bloody Disgusting and film makers Jesse Holland and Andy Mitton. And yes, there’s even a real yellow brick road; but in this case it pretty much leads straight to Hell.

Though Brad runs the world’s most popular horror website, we actually became acquainted in such a ridiculously normal way that I’m actually embarrassed. Somehow it seems that “Mr. Disgusting” and Goth Chick should have met in some underground S&M bar in Taiwan (not that I have any independent knowledge of said S&M bar).

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Goth Chick News: Outpost 13 – A Very Early Peek at a New Film from Pirate Pictures

Goth Chick News: Outpost 13 – A Very Early Peek at a New Film from Pirate Pictures

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image010Welcome to the Cool Kids Club; you’ve officially arrived.

How do I know?

Because uber-edgy indy film maker Wyatt Weed (Pirate Pictures) has decided that Black Gate is where he wants to leak a little insider information about his upcoming sci-fi release, Outpost 13.

I’ve seen an amazing secret clip which I can’t share just yet, but allow me to assure you that snotty posers would never be allowed this kind of access.

I begged, pleaded and finally promised Wyatt that I’d send him my personal copy of Black Gate 15 (hey John, you’re not going to charge me for a replacement copy are you?) and he agreed to sneak us a little information about the project, along with some production stills.

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Goth Chick Crypt Notes: A Vincentenial in St. Louis

Goth Chick Crypt Notes: A Vincentenial in St. Louis

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image002Get ready for a shocker.

Vincent Price is my all-time favorite actor.

And not that I ever was delusional enough to think I had Vince (I’m sure he’d let me, of all people, call him “Vince”) all to myself, but I was surprised and excited to hear about a festival in St. Louis, MO celebrating his 100th birthday – the Vincentenial.

Ironic to think that at 100 years old, Vincent Price has finally achieved the exact look he had been berating Hollywood makeup artists to give him in many of his most classic movies.

Vincentenial is happening this month and my own favorite connection to Hollywood and all things indy-horror, writer and director Wyatt Weed, put me on to this fabulous event. He’s helping to organize the festival and many thanks to him for the information below.

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Conan Notes

Conan Notes

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Conan, the MovieA few days ago, the comics site Bleeding Cool put up a link to some press notes for the new Conan the Barbarian film, which had appeared on the web site for Lionsgate Entertainment. I read through them; they seemed pretty standard. Like most press notes, they’re relentlessly upbeat, and give strong lip service to the importance of fidelity to the source material for the production. Who knows? Maybe it’s honestly meant. But the more closely I looked at the notes, the less convinced I was by the approach they suggested the movie was taking, or by the reading they presented of Howard and Conan.

I understand the need to change elements in the process of adapting a work from one medium into another, but there comes a point where you wonder what the point of an adaptation is; what is it about the original work that the adaptation is seeking to convey? Or, conversely, would the work have been better served without the framework of the pre-existing story? Personally, I don’t see the character of Conan as I recognise it in these notes. I’m not a Howard scholar, but I’ve read the stories, and to me they were fairly consistent in the depiction of Conan across several decades of his life. That character isn’t in these notes. The film may still be good, of course, but if so I doubt it’ll be because of any fidelity to the themes of the source material.

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Goth Chick Crypt Notes: American Gods Come to HBO

Goth Chick Crypt Notes: American Gods Come to HBO

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image0024I have a special place in my Goth Chick heart for Neil Gaiman, due to a distinctly unique phenomenon for which he is responsible.

He is one of only two authors who have made me laugh out loud, and though South Park can elicit a hard core chuckle from me at times, it almost never happens when I’m reading.

Up high on this personal literary pedestal, along with Mr. Gaiman, is the one and only Douglas Adams; he who is responsible for The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy which I have read so often I can practically recite by heart, and which never, ever fails to crack me up. But honestly, I sort of take Mr. Adams as a given.

I was on vacation when I picked up a copy of Good Omens, having not been that familiar with Gaiman’s work. Hours later when I finally put it back down, I decided it was nothing short of genius on multiple levels, not the least of which was the humor.

And before I start getting letters, I realize that Terry Prachett co-authored Good Omens and Gaiman can’t be given full credit. However, I have read other Prachett stories and decided it must be the parts that Gaiman wrote in Good Omens which were the source of the hilarity; because as clever as Prachett is, he never caused me to make a public display of myself.

Gaiman followed with another classic, Neverwhere, in 1996 and Stardust in 1997. I have since adored every tale he has turned out. So it was with great interest I learned that nearly simultaneously with the premier of its epic Game of Thrones, HBO has announced that American Gods will be adapted into a new mini-series, with Gaiman himself co-piloting the writing, along with Robert Richardson.

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Goth Chick News: Now Here’s One We Can Probably All Live With…

Goth Chick News: Now Here’s One We Can Probably All Live With…

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image0101On Sunday I had the unpleasant task of informing you that remaking the Terry Gilliam classic Time Bandits was actually being contemplated somewhere in the universe.

This sent all of you scrambling for the map and the location of the closest hole in the universe whereby you could pop in on these Hollywood geniuses at the moment when they made their career choices, and steer them neatly toward dentistry.

On the other hand, merely delivering this news sent me straight into the deepest depths of the underground offices of Black Gate to curl up in a fetal position and weep about the state of the entertainment industry.

However, light does eventually shine, even if it’s in the form of an intern with a flashlight in one hand, and a freshly made quad-latte in the other.

He also had some very interesting pictures hot off the wire.

On occasion we’ve all agreed that there are some movies, much like some people you know, that could do with a make over. Perhaps the original script was sound but the acting was painful; or the acting and the script were OK but wow, wouldn’t it be great to see those early-attempts at special effects updated with some new computer-generated magic? True that the list of these movies is short, but we can all think of a very select few.

Remember Fright Night?

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Knight at the Movies: Pontypool

Knight at the Movies: Pontypool

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pontypoolZombies, zombies everywhere
But not a trope worth a think. . .

I’ll cop to languishing under a surfeit of zombies.

Zombie filmakers suffer under the same burden a Shakespearean director does. You want to do a new production of Richard III, but how do you make your mark on four hundred years of canon?

As I see it, you have three choices. You try and set a new gold-standard in casting, costumes, set, stage direction and so on. A fine way to go about it, if you have the money. Your second option is to do an adequate job with the above, but add a gimmick, like the 1930’s fascist take on the play by Ian McKellen. The third option is to toss Shakespeare out the window, or at least make drastic changes to the material — ferinstance, enhance the many curses the characters throw at each other until the effect’s more fantasy than history.

A would-be zombie moviemaker is in the same besieged mall as our Shakespearean. Everyone labors in the justifiably popular shadow of George Romero, who took zombies out of the D-list Universal monster era, added a ghoulish twist, and sprinkled on some Rousseau. Romero’s zombie mythos is the new canon.

Zack Snyder set the new gold standard with his remake of Dawn of the Dead. The genre-tripping triad of Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost created one of the best entries in zombie film-making by simply giving it all a Brit twist with Shaun of the Dead.

Then there’s 2008’s Pontypool, which tosses Romero out the window in a number of ways. I’d never heard of it until I happened to catch it on late-night cable, but then I’ve been living in a child-care submarine for the past couple of years, so it was a thrilling surprise.

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