By far the best news I’ve heard all year.

Link.

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Some Canadians just can’t go outside anymore without finding severed feet lying around.

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Via Destructoid.com, a fun list of survival horror clichés. I like #5…

5: Architects are clinically insane:
Can we truly be sure that Raccoon City’s inhabitants were the victims of the T-Virus? My personal theory is that, rather than becoming infected by a biologically engineered disease, they were simply driven mad by years of having to use keys in the shape of helmets and pushing blocks around rooms just to open fucking doors.

It seems that most buildings in survival horror games were designed by schizophrenic lunatics who felt that it should take two hours to get from the kitchen to the bathroom, with a collected eighteen miles of backtracking in between. Why does a hotel need a working music box to open a door? How did the local council give that planning permission!? It doesn’t matter, because it’s part of why survival horror is awesome.

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Prevention months and awareness weeks. These are bullshit. Know why? Because anything worth preventing or being aware of should be prevented or brought to the forefront every day, not just 7 to 31 of them during the year.

Case in point, April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month. Now it’s no secret that I despise children and think the vast majority of them should be cast into some horrible pit of doom, fire, pain, and/or (but preferably) death. But lets just pretend for a moment that it is wrong to push a small child down a flight of stairs, or come home from the bar and slap it around a little bit, or put a lit cigarette out in the palm of its hand when they mess up on their math homework (remember, for the sake of this argument, we’re just pretending all this is wrong). If that’s really wrong, then it should be wrong EVERYDAY. Not just during April. Every year, month, week, day, hour, minute, and second should be child abuse prevention whatever. Not just one month, not just one week.

Also, awareness weeks/months are just fucking retarded. Awareness is when you’re too much of a pussy to attempt to even prevent something. There’s an AIDS awareness week/month every year. What a load of shit. For one thing, everyone is AWARE that AIDS exists. And if for some reason someone doesn’t know, shoot them in the face. They were a moron anyway. Being aware of something is pointless. If anything needs prevention it is AIDS. An AIDS awareness time would only work if it were changed to “People With AIDS Need to Stop Fucking Other Humans Without AIDS, Otherwise a Mob Will Set Your Dick on Fire and/or Fill Your Vag-hole With Boiling Hot Bleach Where Applicable” Awareness Random Time Frame. A PWANtSFOHWAOaMWSYDoFa/oFYVWBHBWA Awareness Century would be awesome. Most of these awareness campaigns are useless anyways or tell people something they already know. I’m pretty sure July is National Kellogg’s Raisin Bran has two full scoops of raisins in every box awareness month in town here. Your July may vary however.

At some point, the really important causes (I’m no longer talking about child abuse) have to graduate from awareness to prevention.

Douches.

By the way, in March there’s actually a no swearing week in South Pasadena, CA. Fuck no swearing week.

Filed under: Commentary, Rants | 15 Comments »

Hat-tip to Aaron for sending me this link about an online petition asking Uwe Boll to quit making movies. Mat posted a link to a CHUD commentary on the issue in our forum. I’ll also take the opportunity to dip back into the archives and plug Splattercast #50, where we watched several Boll films and Mat did a great interview with Uwe himself.

To lift the money line from the CHUD commentary: What if we had the internet back when Ed Wood & Roger Corman were churning out their stuff? It’s an interesting question. Me personally, I don’t get it. We have more choices in entertainment now than in any point in history. Why would anyone try to shut down someone else, just because they don’t like the guy’s work? It seems to me that it takes more effort to sign a petition (even a meaningless online one) than it would take to… oh, I don’t know… simply avoid Boll’s movies?

Seriously, who’s making these petitioners buy tickets to Boll’s movies? Who’s making them rent BloodRayne 2 if they really don’t want to? You’d think that Boll was actively harassing these people. I think it’s probably just a bunch of bitchy nerds with nothing better to do.

Filed under: Commentary | 5 Comments »

Most strippers are already dead inside so making them into zombies will do little more than make their vaginas smell worse. Greetings! This is T.J. from the Grand Horror and AvantTrash making my Dead Lantern guest-posting debut! In the past week I have noticed a new trend eating the coattails of the Zombie Horror genre… ZOMBIE STRIPPERS! Sure we can say that Planet Terror nearly combined these elements and most Zombie movies have one girl who is as dumb and hot as a stripper who is lucky to be alive but the threshold has officially been crossed.

On Monday I stumbled upon Zombie Strippers; set in Sartre, Nebraska (which I haven’t googled but am pretty sure doesn’t exist) where the standard Government experiment has gone awry and Zombies escape… and there are strippers, too! I know you are probably saying to yourself, wait a minute, you lost me with this complicated plot. But let’s move on to the actors who deliver this Oscar-bound opus: namely Jenna Jameson and Robert Englund. Somewhere in Las Vegas, a boat show is missing its headliners. (Sorry Freddy, apparently Hell is other Movies). See, that was a Sartre Reference. Its a good thing these girls honed their acting craft in porn, horror is just a half step down for them. The studio that did this poster is one of the best out there, unfortunately the production company must not have paid them enough to design more than this ho-hum Grindhouse knockoff.

Today I found Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! Which if the key art is any indication of the movie’s quality is bad, bad, bad. The trailer includes a chainsaw through the head (in and out) and some other delicious violence. Along with this epic dialogue “Whats the deal? They’re just crack whores!” “They’re Zombie Crack Whores!” And another terrible poster. The plot? You guessed it …science fucked up, zombies on the loose, strippers are hot and covered in blood. I have a fear that if we watch these films then the Zombies won’t have many brains left to eat! Who will feed those poor Zombies?

Steve, Deejay …There will be titty.

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So, New Line Cinema is officially dead. Many people are mourning the death of one of the last “Independent” film houses in Hollywood, but this one is a little personal to horror fans like myself.

When I was a kid, I used to LOVE seeing the New Line logo before a movie. As every horror fan knows, it was New Line that brought us Freddy Krueger and the ANOES series. The immense popularity of the franchise played an integral part in the horror boom of the 80’s and led the studio to the nickname “The House That Freddy Built”, because, literally, it was on the strength of ANOES that it stayed afloat.

But it wasn’t just Freddy that made me love and anticipate a New Line film. They gave us the Critters series, the 1982 flick Alone in the Dark, the third TCM flick, the Ninja Turtle movies, and though they were arguably worse, they “saved” Jason Voorhees from the hell of Paramount and put out all the later F13 flicks. Who can forget that great ending in Jason Goes to Hell when Freddy pulled Jason’s mask into the ground?

Horror was always a big thing with New Line and even though they misfired more than they connected, they still put out some stuff that I remember: Needful Things, Man’s Best Friend, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, In the Mouth of Madness, The Mangler, Embrace of the Vampire, Mortal Kombat, Seven, Spawn, Dark City, Blade Trilogy, American History X, Final Destination series, Snakes on a Plane etc.

The Lord of the Rings films only delayed the inevitable. They went all in and Peter Jackson, another horror vet, delivered for them in a big way, staving off bankruptcy for a few more years. It’s unfortunate that their current leadership seemed to neglect the very icon that put them on the map: Freddy Krueger.

Back in 2003, Freddy vs. Jason made $115 million dollars worldwide on a budget of $30. After all those years, Freddy Krueger was still a cashcow. So where was the next Freddy film? A remake is in the works, but the New Line leadership completely dropped the ball. Why invest zillions of dollars into garbage like Rush Hour 3 and The Last Mimzy when you could be developing your strengths? Perhaps they felt the TCM remake and the Final Destination films were good enough. But why not give the F13 and ANOES franchises to some young filmmakers and see what they can do? At the very least, you’ll know that you’ll get your money back and its not like they could hurt the characters since they’ve already become pop culture punchlines.

Ah well. We’ll no doubt see more of Freddy and Jason in the future, but it’s a sad day when a studio that rose to prominence on the foundation of the horror genre gets assimilated into the larger corporate conglomerate. It just won’t be the same the next time I see a New Line logo

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I just got done recording the Sleepy Cast.

 NAKED SUNSET FLIP, BITCHES!

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I am in Hell.  If you don’t think this is horror related then you have obviously never been to the South.

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What’s with all the Asian remakes of ghostly horror films? The New York Times tries to figure out the answer…

Comments?

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I’ve been very critical of the popular horror website Bloody Disgusting in the past. They have this nasty habit of posting wild rumors as “scoops” or “exclusives” and then after an easy bit of digging around for the truth, the scoops are exposed as the junk that they are. Now, this doesn’t happen all the time, mind you. It’s not like every single scoop they get is wrong, but for me anyway, it happens with alarming regularity.

Case in point: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Next Film to be Horror!!!!!

Just looking at the retarded way the accompanying “news story” is presented should show you how bogus the “story” is. The article starts out with the words “This is quite possibly the biggest news we’ve ever reported in the history of Bloody-Disgusting.” It goes on to mention a “well trusted insider” told them Anderson is “seriously contemplating” making a horror film. I’ll hold up there for a second. Compare that to the declarative news headline and already I smell something fishy. If that didn’t raise your suspicion flags, perhaps the next line will:

“As of right now the project is just a thought that has yet to be put down on paper, but hopefully in the next few months or so a decision will be made.”

Like mentally-handicapped people to a short bus, every horror news site on the planet seemed to pick up this article and spread this rumor like a plague. Funny thing is, nobody asked Anderson:

“News to me. I thought I just made a horror film…Wish I had something to report, but I’m dry as a bone…pta”

This goes to the heart of why I hate Bloody-Disgusting. Yeah, yeah, I know a lot of people like them, and I know they claim to be the most popular horror site on the internet, but I, for one, refuse to visit their site. These guys pretty consistently run bogus news stories and it just pisses me off. Look, it’s easy for an internet site to get “duped” every now and then or run with a rumor because they are overly excited, everybody has done it. It’s another thing altogether to make a headline stating in a declarative fashion that Anderson is making a horror film. You know what bullshit like this does for them? It gets them visitors to their site. When tons of other horror sites feel the need to spread the “news”, all those people eventually find their way to Bloody-Disgusting. It’s a good business model, I suppose. Release some explosive headline every few weeks, get lots of visitors, and then not care when everyone forgets about it.

I’m not saying that a site can’t post a rumor. That’s just the nature of the beast when it comes to the internet. But in my mind, there should be some sort of “ethics” here. State up front that it is nothing more than a rumor and that until more facts come out, the news should be taken with a grain of salt. I mean, if we here at Deadlantern started making bogus news stories (a well placed source in Colorado told me Sam Raimi is secretly filming Evil Dead 4 right now!!!), I’d expect our readers and listeners to say “you guys are stupid. I’m going elsewhere”. If you enjoy Bloody-Disgusting, more power to you. For me, this site has lost all credibility and they lost it a long time ago. You would think that after the first 20 times they’ve been proven wrong, they’d tighten their standards. Apparently not. I’ll continue to be the one horror fan shouting at how lame they are from the dark corner.

Filed under: Bloody-Disgusting is Retarded, Commentary, News | 9 Comments »

This show scared the piss out of me when I was a kid. That theme song still gives me goosebumps when I hear it, and Robert Stack had pretty much the scariest voice ever. I’m scared right now just thinking about it. Anyway, X-Entertainment has a really good blog that sums up pretty much everything. I agree with everything the author writes. I’d check out the DVD’s, but I want to sleep at night

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This flick is average at best.  Once you get a good look at the monster this allure of the movie goes way down.  It’s well acted and well done, but something about it just screams, “blah”.  So was the movie overhyped?  Or just average on its own?  Who knows, but look for this great debate as well as a full review on Splattercast #62…if anyone besides me saw the movie that is.

Filed under: Commentary, Movies, Splattercast | 5 Comments »

Horror films have always been easy targets as excuses for all manner of violent acts. Now comes a story about a millionaire who brutally murdered his daughter after, as one excuse goes, seeing William Friedkin’s Bug starring Ashley Judd and Harry Connick, Jr. We talked about this film on Splattercast #30. Jeff really dug it, while I hated it because of the last third of the movie. You can listen to the cast for our specific thoughts.

Again, just for kicks, can movies make you go crazy? I think it’s been pretty well proven that movies can have an intense and disturbing effect on many viewers (witness D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation and the subsequent comeback of the Ku Klux Klan in the south). The deal breaker, so to speak, is that any defender of film seems to draw the line in the sand: people influenced by film to murder were already nuts to begin with. Essentially, this argument claims that it is not the fault of the film or filmmaker for any action taken by a viewer. This line of thinking places sole blame upon the person who committed the act, which is a very logical and easy stance to take.

But let’s get hypothetical about this (I think we talked about this on a past Splattercast, but I don’t remember which episode it was): let’s say, for the sake of argument, that film does have the “power” to drive people crazy or make them kill. Let’s assume for a minute that the douchebag who killed his kid really wasn’t nuts. What if a movie could actually do something so fundamental as to cause a mind to “snap” and do something it otherwise would not do, in this case, murder a young girl? Understand, that I’m not necessarily advocating that this is a solid line of reasoning. I’m just trying to get some fun discussion going. So, if it could somehow be proved that Bug did indeed cause this dude to murder, what does that mean for film and the horror genre in general?

I don’t know how many of you read Sergei Eisenstein, but he tried to get people to do, think, and believe his point of view through specific film techniques (dialectical montage). Even in the early stages of cinema, filmmakers were trying to make movies that would change the way people think, and to a large extent, influence their very actions in day-to-day life. What if a director/editor found a way to do this? Of course, this is getting a little science fiction-y, but again, I’m just trying to throw out some questions and see if any of them strike some interest. Maybe a better question would be:

If a director “unlocked” a cinematic formula that would cause its viewers to act out violently, would and should he or she intentionally make that movie? Would only intentions matter? If the director didn’t know what would happen as opposed to purposely trying to make something that would drive people to kill, where does the responsibility lie then? Is it still upon the viewer, or does the director take the blame?

Once again, I’m not saying Bug is some magical equation that causes real life insanity (that would be La Fin Absolute de Monde ) I’m just saying…what if? If this post doesn’t make any sense, I apologize. I’m bored and thinking too hard

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In between saved episodes of Orangutan Island (my newest obsession) I caught the Terminator show on Fox. I was very unimpressed, to say the least. The acting is horrible (Lena Headey is good as a Spartan queen, as Linda Hamilton…not so much; and the guy playing John spends most of his time looking like a doe-eyed WB reject. Couldn’t they grab Edward Furlong off a skanky L.A. street corner or something?) and David Nutter (a veteran television director who has done a lot of horrorish stuff) directed a really ugly, cheap looking pilot. I’m also not sold at all on the Terminator’s. The Arnold wannabe doesn’t look menacing in the slightest and the token “hot-teenage-girl-Terminator-cuz-we-need-eye-candy-for-ratings” just isn’t believable (wasn’t this chick in Firefly?). I’m really hoping this gets better because if the first episode is any indication, this won’t be on the air very long.

If you want to see some hot T-800 sex, click right here.

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