Still seeking Euro Festivals and Distributors

I'd just like to remind everyone that Frankensteins Bloody Nightmare does not have a foreign distributor yet, so any interested parties can contact my sales agent Cine Sales for more details on that.

More importantly, FBN has yet to have a European premiere so if anyone's interested in booking the film outside of the US they should let me know.

Jodorowsky Resurfaced

I spent most of the weekend getting hoplessly entangled within the new Alejandro Jodorowsky DVD box set and, to say the least, I really loved the hell out of it. The set contains excellent remastered versions of El Topo and The Holy Mountain along with a copy of Fando Y Lis which look roughly the same as the old Fantoma DVD and a version of Mouchet's documentary La Constellation Jodorowsky which actually looks a hair better than that old Fantoma release. After all these years, the mole has finally found the light.

Movie Database Fun

The first internet-based film database which listed FBN was most likely OFDb. I'm not sure where they got the details from; most likely the official website or possibly from some early review.

After I was able to secure the New York showings for FBN I found myself listed on the IMDB and I also found a Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes entry for the film, along with the requisite Amazon entry after Unearthed/Anthem announced the title for pre-order around February of this year. Then came the page at All Movie Guide, which I think many other databases extract their synopsis and cast/crew details from. For quite some time the only synopsis on Amazon was from the AMG but after I was able to connect the IMDB page with the Amazon DVD lisitng it automatically updated with itself with IMDB details and synopsis, though the non-North American variants of Amazon appear to be lisitng FBN in different ways - Amazon.ca still has the AMG details while Amazon UK

Then very recently I accidently found the DevilDead.com DVD entry, which was fun. The Encyklopedie hororových filmů lists FBN in it's database along with a bunch of stills; Horroweb.nl and MovieMeter.nl just have the poster designs. Also it appears that Blockbuster has a listing for the title though I'm unsure of whether they're going to order any actual copies. Somewhere along the lines it appears as if Yahoo Movies picked up on FBN as well. There's also these other websites such as Spout, Hollywood.com and Flixster which also have FBN pages.

One element which terribly complicates matters is the issue with the apostrophe in the title and the fact that I wanted it to be spelled without one but it's often added anyway. I don't really care either way (well I do but life's too short to rant and rave about this stuff) but the only problem is that if you search for "Frankensteins Bloody Nightmare" versus "Frankenstein's Bloody Nightmare" you will often get a whole different set of results. However, the important pages seem to list both title variants so I don't think it's a huge problem.

A Touch-up And New Review

I just posted a slightly-revised version of JRHFilms.com with some cleaner graphics, a very short bio and a few other goodies.

Also, I'd like to thank Corporatedemon for his BisforBrains.com review of FBN which was posted last week.

Review In Hacker's Source #23

Yesterday I was doing some searches and out of the blue I noticed that FBN is getting reviewed in the upcoming issue of the fine horror mag Hacker's Source.

A Bumper Crop of Weirdo Movies

I was just thinking recently about how, strangely enough, there's a large amount of truly strange movies being released onto home video this year. We started off the year with a ton of films by Kenneth Anger out on on Fantoma and pretty soon we're going to see the first legitimate US video release of Jodorowsky's El Topo and Holy Mountain (and the first EVER release of his Severed Heads) then Criterion is going to release Lindsay Anderson's If..., Melville's Army of Shadows, Dusan Makavejev's Sweet Movie and WR - Mysteries of the Organism, Shohei Imamura's Vengeance is Mine (though the Criterion LD cover was cooler) along with a ton of other notable releases such as La Haine and the debut of little gems like Border Radio and Stuart Cooper's Overlord on DVD. Tartan is already threatening to release a bunch of cool movies in the UK ( such as an Eisenstein Box Set and a PAL Jodorowsky Box Set with neat cover art) and I'm sure that Masters of Cinema, Kino, Facets and many other niche labels also have some interesting titles up their sleeves. Donald Cammell's groundbreaking Performance also managed to slip out earlier this year on DVD from Warner Brothers. Amazing.

Along with these heavy-hitters we've got oddball stuff like FBN, The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai and probably a dozen other weirdo titles. If you want to add the Blue Underground Argento re-releases and Anchor Bay's Mario Bava collection along with Rabid Dogs (along with Darky Sky Film's possibly-scrapped Kill Baby Kill DVD) then do that as well. So we've got major Jodorowsky, Anderson and Cammell releases already and the release of Lynch's Inland Empire is waiting in the wings for possibly this year as well. Some of these release (such as the Anger collection) have been "in the making" for literally years so when you think about it all coming out within the same calender year it can seem quite astounding.

Thoughts on Trailers

It seems like everyone wants something different from a film's trailer. Some viewers will yell at you if you show too much of the movie's plot - "don't give me any SPOILERS!" No spoilers. God, I can sympathize with people wanting to come into a film with fresh perceptions but I think some people get a little too ridiculous with their rantings about this stuff. They seem to argue so much about it that I begin to wonder whether they really even care what they're arguing about or whether they're just those type of people that like to argue, people who just need something to rail against. Also, with trailers I think there's this naive sense that they've progressively gotten more explicit or revealing when I think if you take a very wide survey of trailers throughout American film history you'll find that the majority of them reveal major plot points and key bits of dialog. In fact, one might even presume that trailers have actually gotten more "flashy" yet less revealing in modern years since once upon a time the trailer was a fundamental promotional tool while now it's just another small part of a monolithic promotional landscape which includes all kind of different electronic avenues. If you track down many trailers for the seventies you'll be surprised to even see what are practically "mini-movies" such as the one for The Getaway and many others. So it's a very romantic notions to want to go back to "olden days" but I think in this case those days simply don't exist, it's a big myth.

I'm rather sensitive to this issue of trailers and their specific promotional purpose because I recieved many mixed opinions from the viewers of my primary Frankensteins Bloody Nightmare trailer. Here's my bias: I like trailers which are simply collections of resonant imagery, interconnected on a certain visual level which goes beyond simply connecting the dots like some rudimentary plot outline. I think trailers are inherently visual and should engage one in a very direct visual way. Also, my movie Frankenstein is a very visual film so it's not as if I'm pulling a hat trick on you; I mean, if you don't like the way the trailer is cut you'll probably end up wanting to make a voodoo doll of me after you watch the entire film. So my primariy directive when making the FBN trailer was to go for the visual, weird, and at the same time communicate this retro element which the film has by perhaps mimicing some of the editorial conventions of seventies "head" cinema. Also, I cut that first trailer way back in 2005 while I was still shooting the film; I just gotten this big bunch of Super-8 on miniDV back from Cinepost and was very excited to play around with it, so that's what came out. Also I was playing around with the Mini-Moog and a few other audio synthesizers so I was also beginning to get that insanity going. So the visual imperative intermingled with the film-to-tape enthusiasm and the audio excitement to create something very interesting. Later, I edited another trailer which some people like a little better. It's the one posted to ifilm. I personally like both of them very, very much.