Posts Tagged ‘Planet Terror’
4 items.
In honor of Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse opening in theaters this Friday, I’m doing a series of strips detailing the advantages and disadvantages of having a girlfriend with a high-powered machine gun for a leg. I hope you find it enlightening.
Not much to say about Grindhouse right now except that I’ve heard Rodriguez’s first half – the zombie romp called “Planet Terror” – is a hyper-violent, ultra-gory disorganized mess. Apparently production was thrown into upheaval when the crew reported back to Rodriguez’s wife of 14 years that he was having an affair with Rose McGowan. On-set flings happen all the time and it’s probably not the business of the crew to tattle on the director. That is, except when the director’s wife is PRODUCING THE FILM! That’s 15 kinds of stupid. Talk about don’t poop where you eat!
At any rate, I didn’t have high hopes for “Planet Terror” anyway. I’m not a big zombie fan. Never was. I don’t think people have to belong to a group of the walking damned to show great inhumanity to another man. Sure, they weren’t eating brains on the sands of Iwa Jima, but comb through history sometime and you’ll find a few close seconds.
Pretty much at this point Rodriguez’s contribution to Grindhouse is the striking visual of Rose McGowan’s leg having been replaced with a machine gun. I don’t care how much the movie sucks – it’s wormed it’s way into geekdom’s heart with that brilliant juxtaposition. Say all you want about these guys regurgitating content from the obscure recesses of pop culture’s dark corners… You’ve never seen a girl with a machine gun leg before.
Tonight is another Triple Feature talk cast and I hope all of you who came to check us out last week as part of our Copying Beethoven DVD giveaway will come back to check us out tonight. This week we’ll be talking about Blades of Glory, The Lookout and a funny little tale of woe from Joe Love’s Crappy Movies’s Joe Dunn about seeing movies for free. Oh, and Gordon McAlpin from Multiplex will be there, too.
Log in to TalkShoe tonight at 9:00 PM CST and we’ll be taking your calls!
Oh, and don’t forget – Copying Beethoven comes out on DVD tomorrow, April 3. I haven’t received copies from Fox Entertainment yet, so I guess we’re still accepting submissions! Just download last week’s Triple Feature for the first half of the clue and then check out last Wednesday’s blog for the second half!
By the way, you guys might have noticed that I’ve switched up my advertising options through Project Wonderful on the right hand side of the blog. I decided to give a little more prominence to the ads since there is usually a lot of empty space to the right. If you want to get your ad on Theater Hopper for the cheap, check us out through Project Wonderful!
That’s about it for me tonight. Sorry, but I’m kind of dragging today. I spent pretty much all day Sunday cleaning out my basement and juggling Henry.
I’ll catch up with you soon!
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I hope you guys enjoyed the second installment of our dissertation on the advantages and disadvantages of having a girlfriend with a gun for a leg. It’s a serious debate. Compliments to Grindhouse for the inspiration. Stay tuned for Friday’s exciting conclusion that will put the discussion to rest once and for all!
Sadly, not a lot of movie news for you today. But if you want to get my opinion on Blades of Glory, you should download Monday’s episode of The Triple Feature. Gordon, Joe and I rave about it for nearly half an hour. Yeah, we liked it.
We also discussed The Lookout, getting into movies for free and the annoying trend of releasing DVDs with added features shortly before the next installment in a franchise is about to hit theaters. There’s a Fantastic Four extended cut coming soon and I think Spider-Man 2.1 is already available. What a crock. We hit the issues head-on over at The Triple Feature. Download Monday’s show and you’ll see what I mean.
Can I solicit you guys for a little feedback? I was thinking about the comic book conventions I planned on attending this year as part of my initiative to sell of my remaining stock of Theater Hopper: Year One and Theater Hopper: Year Two. With Henry now in our lives, it’s really difficult for me to imagine being away from him for that long. Now I’m worried that I’m not going to be able to sell off what I have before producing Theater Hopper: Year Three – which I had hoped to do by August of this year.
The first book sold great for me. I was able to build a lot of buzz around it and got a lot of orders out the door. I still have plenty of copies left over, but not as many copies as I have of the second book.
I think after the success of the first book, I bit off a little more than I could chew and dove head-first into the second, thinking orders could be matched before the holidays. By that point, I think people were burnt out on me talking about the books all the time and orders weren’t as strong.
I don’t want to dive back into those self-promotional heydays, but I gotta unload some of these books!
Price cuts aren’t an option. They’re as cheap as I can make them and still turn a profit. I’ve flirted with distribution through Diamond Comics to get the books into comic book stores. But the problem is, they want too big of a cut. Again, no way to turn a profit if I go through them. The only way the books can succeed financially is if I sell them on a one-to-one basis either through the site or going door-to-door at my local comic book shops and book stores. I’ve tried to make them enticing by discounting bundled orders and a few of you seem to like that. But there’s still more work to be done.
So let me pose the question to you – what kind of incentives would you like to see to buy copies of my books? Right now, each book that’s shipped includes my signature and a word of thanks. But maybe I need to do more? For people who pre-ordered the first book, I included a one-of-a-kind sketch and people really seemed to like it. Should I try to do the same thing for Year Two? What would you like to see?
I’d really appreciate any feedback you guys can give me in the comments section. Seems like a great opportunity to get a discussion going. Typically in the past I would ask you guys to send in e-mails. Now that we have this new feature, we can really do some brainstorming together. So what do you say?
Thanks and have a great Wednesday!
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As I was drawing today’s comic, I actually thought to myself "Have I crossed the line?" But here’s the thing – when I started thinking up comic ideas for Grindhouse, this was the FIRST idea that came to mind. All the other comics this week I had worked backwards from that original thought. So, by this point, even if I was going too far, I didn’t care. I’d come to far to give up now! This was the big payoff, baby!
I don’t care what you say – I think it’s one of the funnier comics I’ve written. I like this one a lot.
At any rate, Grindhouse comes out this weekend and it’s been getting crazy good reviews. It’s funny, too – because oddly enough, the critics seem to like it, but the blogosphere has already gotten sick of the hype. Oh, when will critics and the blogosphere learn to get along?
Personally, I find it the same kind of contemptible “;too cool for the room” atmosphere that makes reading most blogs 90% unbearable.
Incidentally, Theater Hopper falls comfortably within the remaining 10%…
As much as I wish it weren’t the case, I probably won’t be seeing Grindhouse this weekend. It’s a shame, because I know this is one film everyone is going to be talking about. I’m not really blaming it on the fact that I have a 6 week old baby, thought. I’m blaming it on Cami entirely. Yeah, she has no desire to see it. ;-D
I’m just havin’ fun. It’s not like I can blame her for not wanting to see it. Zombies, blood, gore… not her bag. It’s not really my bag, either. I just want to hear some whip-smart Tarantino dialogue and see the homage to the 70’s in full effect. She said I could go see a matinee if I wanted. But underneath you could tell there was a line of venom. “If you take off for three hours to see this movie, so help me…” that’s what the look she shot me said in an instant. Sometimes to be an effective communicator, you gotta read the non-verbals.
Remiss as I am about the situation, I know you guys will have fun seeing Grindhouse this weekend and I want you to report back to me. Certainly it can’t be an more depraved than today’s comic!
Have a great weekend!
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Oct16
When Grindhouse came out in theaters back in April, I wasn’t able to see it in theaters as I was busy taking care of a newborn son. At the the time I felt badly that I wasn’t able to participate in what was supposed to be the great film geek-out of the spring. But as word spread, I was actually kind of relieved. Not because neither of the two films that made up the double feature were bad movies. But from everything I heard, the fim’s first half – Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror – was a goopy, gory mess and I wasn’t enchanted by the idea of being trapped in the theater for an hour and a half before getting to see Quentin Tarantino’s contribution in Death Proof.
I’m not a great fan of zombie movies, excessive gore or things that jump out of you looking for a cheap scare. Familiar with Rodriguez’s work in Sin City and From Dusk Till Dawn, I knew that there wasn’t the explicit whim of his inner 14 year-old that Rodriguez wasn’t adverse to indulging. You can imagine my anxiety sitting down to watch Planet Terror – available extended and unrated on DVD today, October 16.
The plot is typical zombie fare. A greedy bio-chemist played by Lost’s Naveen Andrews unleashes a chemical agent on a small Texas town that turns it’s residents into the walking dead. It’s up to a rag-tag group of misfits to fight their way to safety.
True to form, Rodriguez heaps on the carnage and mayhem. There isn’t an explosion too large or a sound effect to squishy or crunchy to be used in his arsenal. Everything in this movie is turned up to 11. When zombies are shot at, they explode like ripe water baloons filled with plasma.
What the movie lacks in subtlety, it more than makes up for with it’s excellent cast. Six Feet Under’s Freddy Rodriguez turns in a surprising and commanding performance as the mysterious El Wray. Michael Biehn shows up as the town’s true-grit sherrif and Jeff Fahey shows up as his BBQ-obsessed brother. Bruce Willis plays it straight as a tough-talking army general and Rose McGowan, her acting somewhat wooden, creates one of modern cinema’s most indelible heroines in Cherry Darling – the go-go dancer/amputee with a high-powered machine gun for a leg.
In terms of visual excess alone, Rodriguez delivers the spirit of Grindhouse cinema. I can’t compare this extended version to the theatrical release because the DVD fails to include both. But nothing here feels overtly extrenious or draining to the film’s running time.
The DVD comes with an excellent collection of extras on the second disc including Rodriguez’s traditional “10 Minute Film School.” In it, he reveals a lot of the tricks used in the film to achieve it’s large number of practical effects. Everything from the explosions, the car wrecks, to composit shots and the CG magic behind the infamous machine-gun leg.
In “The Badass Babes and Tough Guys of Planet Terror,” we get to see how the casting of each of the roles influenced Rodriguez’s script as he was writing it. There is some slight discomfort listening to Rodriguez effusive praise of star Rose McGowan’s prowess performing her own stunts as well as what personality quirks she added to Cherry Darling in her ad libs. Considering the on-set affair the two of them had that resulted in the end of Rodriguez’s marriage to his wife and co-producer, Elizabeth Avellan, it feels like some of that could have been scaled back.
It gets more unsettling still as an entire bonus feature titled “Casting Rebel” focuses entirely on Rodriguez’s casting of his youngest son Rebel in the role of Marley Shelton and Josh Brolin’s son. “Meet your new Mommy, Rebel! She has a machine gun for a leg!”
All in all, those looking for a visceral thrill will find more than enough to wrestle with in Planet Terror. While the movie is intense, my initial fears of the movie being TOO intense were unfounded. Rodriguez injects just enough humor into the script to keep the scales from tipping over completely – All the while pushing the film into greater and greater parody of itself. At the point that Quentin Tarantino’s infected solider affectionally credited as “The Rapist” comes on screen, you’ve pretty much given yourself over to the cartoonish ridiculousness of things and just enjoy the ride.
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