Spooky Movie Festival Article

Here's a news article on the first Spooky Film Fest - Gory Movies to Spook Fairfax

Atlanta and Fairfax - Thanks!

I'd like to thank everyone who showed up for the showings of my film today. I'd heard that I freaked a few people out in Atlanta (which is good!) but I haven't heard anything about Spooky Movie.

Screenings in Washington and Atlanta Today

Here's a myspace bulletin I wrote about FBN a few days ago:

Frankensteins Bloody Nightmare will be screening on this Sunday, October 29 at:

Atlanta Horror Fest
4:00 pm - Atlanta, GA

Spooky Movie Film Festival
10:00 am - Fairfax, VA

This is probably the part of the message where I should talk about how this movie is the most violent and crazy film ever made, how it was banned in 20 countries and how this movie is probably so mean and scary that if it were a physical person it would kick you in the nuts and steal your lunch money. That is not my movie so I'm not going to lie to you; a mistake, possibly - I don't think anyone ever got poor by undersestimating an audience's intelligence.

So what is Frankensteins Bloody Nighmare? It's something that doesn't fit into a soundbyte. I think it's for people who like to keep their Peter Greenaway and Kenneth Anger VHS tapes next to their Retromedia DVD of The Alien Dead. It's for a kind of esoteric crowd that isn't afraid of a film that flirts with insanity, boredom and a purely visual narrative. It's for that one percent that doesn't complain about style over substance because they realize that style CAN BE the substance; it's the same one percent that might notice the weird little Marshall McCluhan references I threw in there along with the billion other references that last all of two or three frames, barely registering on the audience's radar. It's a film that I've seen annoy, confuse and put people to sleep, but rarely have I seen anyone walk out on it; it just plants one to the seat for one reason or another. Maybe if you're a little stoned the cosmic sensibility of it might appeal to you, though I'm not really an advocate of drug use. The film is enough of a drug for me.

I'm not sure if it's a movie for your happy-go-lucky Halloween crowd or maybe even for the myspace crowd, but if anyone wants to catch something totally weird in between the gory stuff and you live near Atlanta or Washington, you might want to check my film out. And I very much like the gory stuff too, but when I make films things just come out...weird, I guess.

Also, check it out when it hits dvd next year from Unearthed Films.

More Media Items

Of course there are the ever-changing IMDB pages along with the Rotten Tomatos listing which I think proves the whole thing I've been saying about the movie being very polarizing. Then of course there's Metacritic, very similar to RT but with the nice cheery photo of the night creature pointing a gun at you. The OnSuper8 blog also published a nice little bit on FBN.

FBN Dolby Pro-Logic version, finally...

One of the things which really annoyed me about showing FBN anywhere is that I can rarely get the sound presented in a format that I like. That little "5.1 Surround" logo on the poster and at the end of the credits is no joke - FBN was designed to be a multichannel experience but often it's only been a stereo one because most indie screenings venues aren't set-up for 5.1 (except Silver Screen). Ultimately it's okay because I think I've finally nailed down a decent dolby pro-logic II track that will serve me well through any subsequent screenings. I was actually semi-happy with the stereo version that played the Pioneer but there was a certain dimension that was missing which I think the DPII brings to it. It took me this long to make this new soundtrack because I couldn't find a decent pro-logic software encoder that wasn't super-expensive like the Minnetonka products but after checking out the free Azid DPII downmix from my original 5.1 dolby digital files I feel confident about the sound quality.

More thoughts on NY

I really didn't do much for the first few days of my New York shows. I wandered around East Village a little bit; the whole thing with the reviews for my film being everywhere (I mean in every major publication) really freaked me out so much that I think around the second day I was wandering around the Virgin Megastore in Times Square and nearly had this crippling panic attack from it. I think that also had something to do with completely starving myself, maybe just a little. But after a while I calmed down and came to my senses.

As far as other movies went, on the second day I got on the subway and somehow found myself in Brooklyn - exactly how or where or why is still a little hazy to me and it got slightly hazier after I visited the bar down the street, but just down from that bar there was a theater playing The Departed so I caught that showing. The next day Tideland opened at the IFC Center so I was required by state and federal law to attend the 11 a.m. show. I have no idea what all this weirdo negative hype surrounding the film is all about because I felt it was very much your standard Gilliameseque warped fairy tale and it contained all those creepy and antisocial elements which he always flirts with but I guess in this day and age we're so fucked up that we can't allow ourselves to gasp or cry or laugh at anything like Tideland. I was in New York for my inscrutible film so I thought I might see another inscrutible film.

Saturday I basically hung around the theater and caught (half of) the late-night showing of LoveCracked, an interesting anthology of satirical Lovecraft adaptations all sewn together by some nice fellow named Elias. In any case I was really messed-up (yet surprisingly coherent) by the time I wandered back into the theater to see the Re-Penetrator segment but LoveCracked looked like a solid work indeed, a lot more crowd-pleasing than FBN in many respects.

I don't remember Sunday - okay, that's a lie, I remembered that I went to the FBN screening and everyone seemed to enjoy it. Then on Monday I found myself doing the dead tour, visiting both ground zero (again, just found myself there) along with the Dakota. There's something about the twin towers site which is both very reverential and very disrespectful at the same time; the whole peanuts-and-balloon circus surrounding the whole thing just pissed me off so I ignored it. It's like my friend in Hawaii right now who just visited Pearl Harbor and kept going on about the Martin Sheen voice-over and the multi-channel surround audio representations of Pearl Harbor with "enhanced" audio effects. It's odd that people like my friend dislike the kind of surrealist world view that I try to cultivate in something like FBN because they're living a far more surreal existance than any I can offer them.

Pioneer Aftermath

Wow, that was a pretty busy week. I'd like to thank everyone who showed up for my New York theatrical showings at Two Boots Pioneer; there was a lot of love/hate/confusion coming out of that theater as the film ended each night, but I'd just like to thank Ray and everyone at the Pioneer for taking a big chance on a tiny film. Along with these NYC screenings came a number of really good pull-quotes from NY Press -

"Visually it's a perfect 10 . . . something beautiful . . . a handmade object that looks ravishing . . . the overall effect is like watching some kind of lost exploitation film from the 1970s cobbled together by a deranged grindhouse projectionist out of damaged film."
- Grady Hendrix, NY SUN

"A 1970’s-style horror oddity that could pass for a perverse experiment masterminded by a mad scientist."
- Laura Kern, NY TIMES

"Mystifying -- intentionally so -- and frustrating. But it's worth a look."
- V.A. Musetto, NY POST

“John R. Hand might just be America’s answer to Shinya Tsukamoto. Layered with a surreal theatricality, raw experimentation, a fixation on the intersection of humanity and technology, disturbing sexual overtones, a firm genre sensibility and a driving soundtrack.”
- Twitchfilm.net

I guess the Slant Magazine and NY Post reviews were the most positive while the most vehemently negative one came courtesy of Variety (you can find a link to it on the official FBN website), but I was really happy with all of it. Obviously this is a film which really polarizes people in a very strange way and frankly for me, trying to figure out the audience reaction has been akin to trying to figure out the motivation of the sentient ocean planet Solaris. I'm not an expert in Solaristics and/or audience reaction. I just know I wanted people to feel something and I suppose they did.

Within the last week it also seems as if my IMDB page has settled down and is now nearly complete, with a few omissions in cast (including myself) which should show up within the next few days.

I still have little more review-gathering work to do in addition to slightly updating and re-designing the website to be little more user-friendly.

New York Oct. 11-17

Well the shows at the Pioneer Theater begin tomorrow so the blog won't be updated until I get back. In the meantime, hop on over to the "news" section of the FBN Website and check out some of the early NYC reviews of my film from The Village Voice and NY Times; they're very polarized just as usual, but I guess I wouldn't have it any other way.

More Media Bits

FBN was mentioned in the Oct. 1st Greencine Daily and also in the recent post from The Reeler. Ed Gonzalez of Slant Magazine also just wrote a very complimentary review.