Ripvanryan Digressions of a Listless Film School Drop Out
20 Years Later: Michael Myers' House From Halloween 5 5:00am, October 30, 2009
Earlier today I took a detour through The Avenues of Salt Lake City, Utah, to take a few photos of Michael Myers' house as featured in the universally loathed Halloween 5:The Revenge of Michael Myers. (Halloweens 4, 5, and 6 were shot in Salt Lake. I guess you could say the franchise suffered its mid-life crisis here.)
Here’s a still of Michael Myers’ house taken from the 1989 movie (with Dr. Loomis [Dr. Sam Loomis!] limping up the front steps):
And Michael Myers’ house today:
Yeah, nice colors, right? I guess Miley Cyrus must have moved in at some point. Oh, and in case you can’t get enough reminiscing about the incomparable Halloween 5, here’s a shot of Rachel’s house from the movie:
And Rachel’s house today:
A fat, juicy Happy Halloween to all you B-D Readers! Get out there and scare somebody this weekend!
Indie Horror + Fine Dining = Awesome 11:37pm, October 26, 2009
My wife spotted the ad in the paper: ”Independent Scary Film Night, October 23, 7:00pm…this intimate evening will include appetizers, dinner, dessert, discussion, and film.” The venue? Diva’s Cupcakes and Coffee. Um…okay, I guess. Intriguing maybe, but my expectations weren’t particularly high. I imagined a grainy VHS screening of Carnival of Souls followed by a round of day-old butterscotch crunch cupcakes, like something you might experience for free at the local library. But at $30 a ticket, I was desperately hoping for so much more.
"Diva’s Cupcakes and Coffee, Exterior”
Diva’s Cupcakes turned out to be a quaint but spacious hang-out. Once we’d picked up our tickets from the girl working the cupcake register, the wife and I were herded outdoors to a lovingly decorated porch. There were several dining tables set with glass and silverware, with seating for about 60. A half-dozen plasma televisions were meticulously placed around the perimeter. A handful of heat lamps whooshed fire. Lit Jack-o-Lanterns filled every nook and cranny. Quite frankly, it was horror movie nirvana. And I started to get excited.
"The Porch"
After a couple of fistfuls of harvest bruschetta, I noticed one of my tablemates return with a couple of glasses of wine. Where the hell had that come from? Directed to the upper corner of the porch, where a girl clad in funereal black was somberly serving goblets of wine, I happily put in my order (one red, one white) and inquired as to the cost.
“No charge,” she said.
What is this strange and wonderful place?, I wondered to myself, briefly questioning my own earthly existence. The harvest bruschetta was followed by a hearty vegetable soup, and then poached salmon with asparagus and squash. Then apple crème brulee. And (it goes without saying) more wine.
"Harvest Bruschetta"
Before long the entire porch was bloated and happy, swimming in its own juices, and it was totally time to start the flicks. Yeah, there were a couple of negligible horror shorts from our local branch of the 48-Hour Film Project.
(Sorry, quick digression: If you manage to actually crank out a movie in two days as some sort of sadistic local filmmaking exercise, well, good for you. But do you really want to embarrass yourself by making that piece-of-shit rush job your calling card at future film festivals? What, you haven’t made anything better in the past year?)
There was also an amusing piece called A Refreshing Sensation—about a man’s attempts to relieve stress through self-mutilation—that seemed to share DNA with Douglas Buck’s Cutting Moments. The finale was from director Spanky Ward, a possession/mystery story called Whispers in the Dark. Quite frankly, I was blown away. It was an extremely accomplished piece of auteur filmmaking, smooth and scary, and I immediately assumed it was cruising the festival route. But surprisingly, Ward admitted during the Q&A: “You’re the first audience to see this movie.” He claims a budget of under $500. I’m dubious. The movie looked too damned good. Whatever the case, Spanky Ward is one to watch.
So thanks to Diva’s Cupcakes and Coffee for an indie horror night well done. As a horror fan, I couldn’t have asked for anything more. Well played, Diva’s. Well played.
Stallone's The Expendables: Request for an Alternate Title 2:08am, October 17, 2009
I’m sure everybody’s heard about Stallone’s next directorial gig. From HSX.com:
“Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Randy Couture, Steve Austin and Dolph Lundgren team up for an action-packed journey in THE EXPENDABLES. Written and directed by Stallone, the film follows a team of mercenaries who goes to a Latin American country to overthrow a crazed dictator.”
Also starring Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts. Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzannager make cameos.
Sounds pretty dope, but in my humble opinion, The Expendables is a shitty title. I was thinking something more along the lines of:
Grumpy Old Gunmen
Or Stop! Or My Grandpa Will Shoot
If you can come up with a better title, Stallone will personally come over to your house and teach your kids to read.
So, a midnight screening of a 35mm print of Evil Dead 2. Groovy.
Instead of the 50-something people that attended The Shining on October 2nd, I counted more than 110 in attendance at Friday night’s showing of Evil Dead 2. Before the flick I actually spotted Ash and Bubba Ho-Tep casually browsing through the Gay Mummy section of The Tower’s rental DVDs. Get a room, lovebirds!
The screening was a smash. Although more than 20 years old, Raimi’s magnum opus—from the somehow comforting Rosebud Releasing Corporation logo that begins the film, to the pleasantly wonky time travel twist that ends it—is still deliriously fun. Revisiting the film on Friday night, I was happy to discover that the hand possession scene still makes me laugh hard enough to choke on popcorn.
After the flick was over, I headed down a set of narrow, creaky stairs to the cramped men’s room, which is located in the pipe-riddled basement of the theater. I was standing at the urinal, shoulder-to-shoulder with this unfamiliar bearded dude, who turned his head and spontaneously confessed that he was tripping on mushrooms. “My friends always said that if they screened Evil Dead 2 again," he told me, "we’d have to see it on ‘shrooms. And so we did.”
“And how was it?” I asked.
“Amazing,” he gushed.
Having refrained from eating mushrooms in movie theaters since I once fried balls during an opening night screening of Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (a Myers mind-rape that left me shaken for days), I was jealous of his life-changing experience. Viewed with a completely open mind, Evil Dead 2 has the power to turn men into gods. And this mysterious ‘shroomer had somehow harnessed that power. I’ll bet Bruce Campbell himself even spoke to him from the screen, offering sage life coaching.
Later, as I was standing outside the theater talking to a few friends, I saw the ‘shroomer one last time. He walked by me, gave my arm a stoned squeeze, and settled into the back seat of a cab. Smiling vacantly through the back seat window, I could tell that he was changed somehow. Different. Better. A dose of Bruce can do that for you.
Midnight Movie: The Shining 8:58pm, October 4, 2009
“No sir, you are the caretaker. You have always been the caretaker.”—Albert Grady
The bloated corpse of October has bobbed once again to the surface. Let the midnight movies begin!
I smashed my proverbial bottle on the hull of the Halloween season by checking out a Friday @ Midnight screening of The Shining at my local independent movie theater, The Tower. Those hoping for a rare exhibition of the Steven Weber Made-For-TV interpretation of King’s novel were sorely disappointed.
At 2 hours 22 minutes long, the American cut of The Shining is undoubtedly an endurance test, especially when screened at midnight. Although I entered the theater readily equipped with a heavily-salted popcorn and a vodka-enriched bottle of lemonade, I found myself woefully unprepared for the long, stringy scenes centered around Dick Halloran’s glacially-paced attempts to rescue Danny. I had forgotten that Halloran spends what seems like hours looking horrified while stretched out underneath his nudie paintings, that he places a startlingly long phone call to the Durkin’s service station in search of a spare Sno-Cat, and that he lodges not one, but two gratingly boring phone calls to the forest service. I’m not necessarily pro-circumcision, but Dick certainly needs some cuts.
Having seen The Shining about 50 times before, I didn’t get particularly scared during the screening. But the dude sitting in front of me—a 20-something loner sporting an uneven ‘stache and a skull cap—certainly did. On TWO occasions I watched him duck down low in his seat and hide behind his coat lapels:
1) When Danny cranks around the corner on his plastic trike to discover the pale ghosty twinner girls standing in the hall.
2) When Wendy administers a brutal knife chop to Jack’s hand as he’s reaching for the bathroom doorknob.
As I’ve noticed with previous midnight screenings of Kubrick’s classic, Nicholson’s hard-core eyebrow action in the first half elicits some heavy-duty laughs, even more than the heavy-handed psychosis he displays in the latter half. His most popular line came as he was driving his family to the Overlook:
“See honey, it’s O.K. He saw it on the television.”
The 35mm print looked damned good, with the minor exception of a few pocks and cigarette burns that came with the reel changes. Brewvies, my local cinema/pub, is also screening horror films through the month of October. Problem is, at Brewvies they don’t bother to rent original prints, all of their screenings are digital projections. But on the flip side, you can drink beer at Brewvies. I’m personally dedicated to the exhibition of vintage prints, but fuck, what a conundrum.
I believe that 35mm film screenings are a rarity, and I want to take advantage of them while they still exist. 10 years from now, a screening of a 35mm print will be as uncommon as drive-in movie theaters or a visit from the ice cream man. But maybe I’m in the minority. What do you think? Have you hit any midnight movies yet this season? If so, share your story in the comments, or drop me an email. I’d love to hear from you. And send pics if you’ve got ‘em. I might want to post them.
