In a commentary track on Frankenhooker's DVD release with Frank Henenlotter (co-writer/director) and James Lorinz (actor), the problems the movie faced when going up against the MPAA were brought up. Henenlotter recalled a phone call with Richard Heffner who told him “Congratulations, you are the first film rated ‘S,’” When asked what that meant, he was told that 'S' stood for "sh*t." Henenlotter expressed that he was deeply hurt at the time, feeling that it was not their place to provide commentary on what they felt about the movie. This started a feud over the rating of the movie, and producer James Glickenhaus made it publicly known that he was fighting back.

The movie eventually got an X rating (which was in use before being phased out the same year, 1990, in favor of NC-17). Henenlotter and his team refused the rating and released the film uncut and unrated, which came with its own problems with distribution. Frankenhooker would eventually gain an R rating when they cut some of the scene of exploding sex workers to six minutes from its original seven; again reflecting how petty and shallow the MPAA can be in their decisions.

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Frankehooker, along with Henenlotter's Basketcase and Brain Damage, have earned a substantial cult following. It is easy to see why, with all the movies blending dark humor chocked with memorable lines of dialogue, gore-soaked horror, and over-the-top creature effects. For Frankenhooker, you have the wonderfully charismatic Patty Mullen as the titular monster roaming the streets of New York asking random strangers if they "Wanna date?" There is also the infamous scene where multiple sex workers blow up after taking "super crack." To name but a few of the scenes that have made Frankenhooker a fan favorite.

2024 marks the 75th anniversary of the iconic board game Clue, one of Hasbro's most recognizable properties throughout its existence. From fun nights with friends and family to the big screen with the surprising 1985 hit starring Tim Curry, Madeline Kahn, and Christopher Lloyd, among others, the tabletop deduction game has delighted with its simple yet effective cases, asking players to find the who, the what, and the where of a murder. Countless versions of the classic formula have been introduced throughout the years, including editions based on popular shows like Wednesday and Scooby-Doo. Now, The Op Games is bringing the Staten Island vampires into a whodunnit of their own with the new Clue: What We Do in the Shadows Edition and Collider can reveal an exclusive look at the game available now at major retailers.

Lest you fear that the vampire housemates and their familiar Guillermo are going to be killing each other in this edition, fret not, as the goal of the game is not to find the killer, but the hider. Laszlo's cursed 100% witch skin hat, a frequent target of Nick Kroll's Simon the Devious, has once again gone missing. With Simon not around, though, one of the housemates is responsible for stashing the hat away somewhere in the Vampire Residence, and it's up to players to figure out who hid it, where it's located, and with what object it's obscured. Nandor, Nadja, Laszlo, Colin Robinson, Guillermo, and The Guide are all potential suspects, while the board itself features locations from the show like the Fancy Room and the attic where Baron Afanas once stayed.

Everything from the board to the tokens, character movers, cards, and even the note sheets in the game is given a What We Do in the Shadows makeover, bringing the Vampire Residence to life as well as other iconic moments and locales from the series. The objects used to hide Laszlo's cursed hat are given grey and black etched pieces to place in each room and range from floorboards to the possessed Nadja doll. Intrigue cards also bring back memories from the show's five-season run thus far, with visits to the wellness club and invoking the classic "Bat!" granting players an advantage.

Ageing and death are perhaps the foundation of all horror, but this droll French chamber piece, adapted from an 1839 novella by Aleksey Tolstoy, puts a devious spin on that. The titular “vourdalak” – a kind of Mitteleuropean vampire – is Gorcha, wizened patriarch of a family of forest-dwelling peasants, who is driven to feed on the blood of those he loves the most. With the film incarnating this beastie in the form of a toothy puppet resembling Norman Tebbit (voiced by director Adrian Beau), it’s a cruel but funny metaphor for parental authority and late-life dependency. Obviously they didn’t have assisted living in early modern Bohemia.

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Beau could have adapted this as straight gothic. Instead, he opts for an enjoyable high-strung comedy that, with him often shooting through Hammer-style soft gauze, skims pastiche. D’Urfé’s court manners are ridiculously superfluous in the rustic setting, exposed as hypocritical when he roughly pursues Sdenka, and then redundant in the face of the ghoulish paterfamilias scoffing at him down the dinner table.

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Fresh off the film’s premiere at Sundance earlier this year, Netflix opened up their check book and shelled out a whopping $17 million to acquire worldwide rights to It’s What’s Inside, and the streaming service has released the upcoming movie’s official trailer this morning.

It’s What’s Inside premieres globally on Netflix on October 4, 2024.

Begin the twisted party game by watching the It’s What’s Inside official trailer below.

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Meagan Navarro writes in her Sundance review for BD, “Its irreverent tone and Jardin’s visual eye ensure a highly entertaining time, though it becomes prone to tangled knots.”

“The director pulls from his music video background for a vivacious, eye-catching feature that dazzles and lures you further into the tangled abyss, even as many of its central players frustrate,” Meagan continues. “Even still, It’s What’s Inside is pure fun. Moreover, it’s extremely funny. Jardin assembles an ensemble willing to push their frequently and intentionally insufferable characters past the point of insanity for our entertainment. On that front, Jardin’s debut is a stunning success. It’s a twisty puzzle box that demands your attention.”

Meagan adds, “Not all the pieces fully come together, but Jardin’s ambitious debut will easily earn a devout following for its creative setup and commitment to bonkers fun.”

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Writer/Director Coralie Fargeat set the bar high for herself in 2017, with her debut feature Revenge delivering a visceral, feminine twist to the rape-revenge thriller that climaxed in an epic bloodbath. So much that it seemed nearly impossible to top. Yet the filmmaker does just that with sophomore effort The Substance, transforming a familiar concept into something so entertaining and grotesquely over the top that it keeps you firmly in its grip until an epic, grand guignol finish.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/16589411

The old eat the young. That is the back-of-a-beermat pitch for new Channel 4 drama Generation Z. And because the Z stands for zombie, the eating is meant literally. “I loved the idea of a horror story about societal breakdown, told from the perspective of different generations,” says its writer-director Ben Wheatley. “Once I started writing it, I couldn’t stop.”

The film-maker’s first original series for TV begins with an army convoy crashing outside a care home. The subsequent chemical leak turns the residents into marauding monsters who attack local youngsters. “It’s a bit of a Brexit metaphor,” admits Wheatley. “But it’s by no means binary. We discuss it from each generation’s viewpoint, exploring the notion that boomers have ruined the lives of the young. Because it’s a genre piece, that’s basically by biting their hands and eating their brains.”

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“I love telly and watch a lot of it – Battlestar Galactica, The Sopranos and Deadwood were the golden age for me – so I was keen to play with a different train set,” he says. “It was exciting to write in longer form, rather than the sprint that is a film script. In terms of production values and cinematic scale, TV has closed the gap on film. It’s like the difference between a single and an album. Actors move freely between the two now. The skillset’s no different. Any stigma has long gone.”

Fittingly for a series punctuated by gruesome deaths, he’s assembled a killer cast. Playing the pensioners are veterans such as Sue Johnston and Anita Dobson. “Sue’s first day on set, she was biting someone’s nose off,” he says. “They got to do stuff they don’t usually do, running around covered in gore, and had a blast doing it.” The gore is created the old-fashioned way. “Everything is practical, with prosthetics or models. There are very few CG effects. When arms are ripped off and blood spurts, there are people pumping plasma just out of shot. We use jelly when organs need to be edible. It’s all very visceral.”

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Generation Z is coming to Channel 4 this autumn.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/16563475

John Carpenter's The Thing as performed by the claymated, Antarctic cast of the hit children's animation Pingu.

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cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/16411743

The first trailer for new vampire thriller The Radleys, starring Line of Duty's Kelly Macdonald, has been released.

Adapted from Matt Haig's novel of the same name, the film centres around a married couple who are hiding a dark secret from their children: they're vampires.

The film will receive its world premiere at the upcoming Edinburgh International Film Festival on Tuesday, August 20. Sky has also confirmed The Radleys will then be released on Sky Cinema and in cinemas on October 18.

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"The Radleys are an ordinary family who hold a dark secret... they are abstaining vampires," reads the official synopsis for the film.

"As if being a teenager wasn't bad enough, bloodthirsty instincts take over the teens of the family, revealing the terrifying truth and opening the door for an extended family member to re-enter and upend The Radleys' once perfect slice of suburbia."

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cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/16340845

The Laundry Files started with an element of situational comedy juxtaposed on a background of nightmarish horror: the government agency for protecting us from the likes of Cthulhu turns out to be just another secret civil service bureaucracy with forms, committee meetings, and an obsession with secrecy. Into which we inject a narrator who is a brash young hacker-nerd from the late 90s dot-com culture (who has been conscripted willy-nilly into something structured a lot like a very 1950s-ish Len Deighton spy agency, if updated in line with health and safety and HR legislation). “The inappropriate hero” is one of the classic humorous narrative forms because it gives us a sympathetic viewpoint from which to explore the lunacy of a situation, and there’s plenty of humor in any bureaucracy (as the early Dilbert cartoon strips illustrated, before it jumped the shark circa 1998).

By the eighth book in the Laundry Files, Bob isn’t an outsider anymore; indeed, he’s at the lower end of senior management, representing the agency in public. But there’s still plenty of situational humor to be extracted by watching how a government deals with a whole new bureaucracy it was hitherto unaware it possessed.

And then, of course, there’s the horror element. Like humor, horror is a tone you can apply to any other genre of fiction. (You can have a horror-spy crossover, or horror on top of SF, or horror on top of historical fiction, or . . .) And I find combining horror and humor particularly useful because the one contrasts with the other to great effect.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/16246386

This, though, is a very British journey into the macabre. The original title was “Tea Time of the Dead” (a spin on Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, Dawn, and Day of the Dead). It was easy to understand the wariness among industry observers in April 2003 when they heard that the project was finally going into production. The director had sold his film to nonplussed trade journalists as “a naturalistic comedy about the zombified existence of late twentysomethings, crossbred with a full-scale zombie invasion”.

That was a lot to devour. The director later elaborated on the Reel Feedback podcast that Shaun had been conceived in the manner of Mike Leigh’s Life is Sweet (1990). Its heroes Shaun and Ed (Nick Frost) aren’t trying to save the world. They’re ordinary Londoners who, when clear and present danger looms, immediately look for refuge in their favourite pub, the Winchester, where they can have a “nice cold pint and wait for all this to blow over”.

“Mostly in the American films, and even in 28 Days Later, it revolves around the military, or scientists, or people who can do something,” the director said. “What if it’s the least important people? What if it is two guys on the couch who are hungover and missed the news?”

Wright’s admirers were ready to cut him some slack. He already had a fervent following in the UK thanks to cult TV sitcom Spaced, which also starred Pegg alongside Jessica Hynes. Nonetheless, that was no guarantee that he could make a successful movie. His debut feature A Fistful of Fingers (1995), a spoof western made in Somerset when he was barely 20, had received one or two encouraging reviews without making any impact at all at the box office. One critic summed up its ingredients as being “budget £10,000, cardboard horses and a handful of sixth-formers”.

To certain foreign distributors, Shaun of the Dead didn’t seem a commercial proposition at all. It was far too quirky and sardonic. Senior managers at UIP, the company handling its international rollout, refused even to release it in some territories.

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A few weeks later, though, FilmFour went bust, and the funding for Shaun promptly vanished. There were many reasons why other industry executives were initially reluctant to bite on Shaun of the Dead. As Wright himself acknowledged in You’ve Got Red on You (2021), Clark Collis’s exhaustively researched book about the making of the film, British horror movies “died out” in the 1990s. The glory years of Hammer were a long way in the past.

There had never really been a tradition of British zombie films anyway – and Wright himself was doubtful that the market was big enough for two of them at once. When he and Pegg were working on the first draft of the Shaun of the Dead screenplay, they were utterly dismayed to discover that Trainspotting director Danny Boyle and author Alex Garland were already hard at work on their own London-set story about the undead, 28 Days Later. “I was like, “Argh, no! Oh, we’re f***ed!” Wright admitted to Collis.

Omens on the comedy front weren’t any brighter. In February 2004, only two months before Shaun of the Dead was due to hit cinemas, The Sex Lives of the Potato Men, about the amorous misadventures of a group of vegetable delivery guys, had been fried to a crisp by indignant critics. “Nauseous”, “inept”, “smut for morons”, “witless and repulsive”, “useless”, and “one of the worst films of all time” were some of the nicer remarks reviewers made about the ill-fated film, which, like Shaun, starred several popular TV comedians.

Archive

Perhaps it’s fitting that a film about a ragtag rabble of not-so-superheroes failed to take off at the box office. But, 25 years since its release, the Ben Stiller-starring Mystery Men is worth rescuing from obscurity. That it hasn’t generated the cult following of so many other slightly under-the-radar movies of 1999 – think the cannibal horror movie Ravenous, or the Kirsten Dunst Watergate comedy Dick – feels criminal to the point of super-villainy.

The first and to date last feature film by the TV commercial director Kinka Usher, Mystery Men now seems curiously placed within the history of comic book movies. Released on 6 August 1999 in the US, it spoofed the superheroes that came before it, while anticipating – or preemptively satirising, even – the yet-to-happen superhero boom with ideas as sharp as anything seen in almost two decades of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/14697456

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Story details are being kept hidden, but it is described as being set in a “post-post-apocalyptic” world where former zombies struggle to reintegrate. The project hit the market earlier in June.

Fallout star Ella Purnell has joined the cast of Craig Roberts’ comedy-horror The Scurry, which is now filming in the UK.

Purnell will play a leading role, of a park attendant who must use her unique skills and strength to survive a band of killer squirrels.

True Brit Entertainment is co-producer and UK distributor on the film, which is shooting on location and at Dragon Studios in South Wales.

Previously announced cast members include Rhys Ifans, Screen Star of Tomorrow Paapa Essiedu, and Antonia Thomas. The Mash Report writer Tim Telling penned the script. ...

The film follows two pest controllers called to a country park café to investigate a routine vermin problem, only for an avalanche of deranged squirrels to descend at nightfall, wreaking mayhem on the staff and visitors in the park.

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cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/12193828

Chuck Norris will battle the undead in the action-comedy Zombie Plane, THR reports this morning. The “nostalgia-soaked” film will also star Vanilla Ice and Sophie Monk.

THR details, “Zombie Plane centers on a secret government organization that recruits celebrities to be undercover agents, who together must save humanity from a zombie attack.”

IMDb

From Searchlight Pictures, the Amy Adams horror movie Nightbitch is coming to theaters December 6, 2024, and the film’s official poster has been unleashed this week.

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Nightbitch is rated “R” for “language and some sexuality.” The “darkly comic horror film” was directed by Marielle Heller (A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood).

Scoot McNairy (Blonde) and Mary Holland (Happiest Season) also star.

“Nightbitch tells the story of a woman thrown into the stay-at-home routine of raising a toddler in the suburbs, who slowly embraces the feral power deeply rooted in motherhood, as she becomes increasingly aware of the bizarre and undeniable signs that she may be turning into a canine.”

IMDb

Last year’s Cocaine Bear managed to spawn a trend even if it wasn’t a huge hit at the box office, with Cocaine Shark following and now Cocaine Werewolf howling our way soon.

Amityville Coke Den isn’t far behind, we assume…

Our friends over at Rue Morgue have provided us with a first look at the upcoming Cocaine Werewolf, which they reveal will be directed by Mark Polonia (director of Cocaine Shark!).

Here’s the synopsis from Cleopatra Entertainment: “Cocaine, cash and a crew filming a low-budget horror movie in the eerie woods of northern Pennsylvania clash when an unexpected visit from a bloodthirsty werewolf literally enters the picture–with deadly results.”

The beginnings of a serialized comedic novel. A multi-plot political epic.

Underrated and unforgettable, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension is a well-hidden superhero sci-fi comedy gem of the 80s. It combines sci-fi action with a healthy dose of absurdist humor making it my favorite movie, and it might become yours as well. This cult classic, written by Earl Mac Rauch and directed by W.D. Richter (of Invasion of the Body Snatchers fame) in his first-ever directorial effort, flopped at the box office but has since found a devoted fan following thanks to its outrageous premise.

Buckaroo Banzai is a neurosurgeon by day, a rock star by night with his rock band The Hong Kong Cavaliers, and an interdimensional alien fighter whenever duty calls. Perfectly portrayed by Peter Weller (pre-RoboCop fame), with such deadpan seriousness, I wonder how he and the rest of the cast kept a straight face while filming.

The plot of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai is best experienced, not explained, so I recommend you watch the film, after reading this.

When it comes to making a hit movie, studios tend to stick to the formula they know works. It’s rare that an original film actually makes a mark, and when it happens, it’s usually an independent feature with the freedom to think outside the box. Take Repo Man, the 1984 independent film that is one of the most original movies ever.

Repo Man marked the directorial debut of Alex Cox, who crafted a narrative that defies easy categorization. The film is a captivating blend of dark sci-fi, crime, and comedy. It all comes together in an original mix that still manages to enthrall audiences decades after its release, cementing the feature as a cult classic worthy for any cinephile’s watchlist.

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With a 98 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, not only is Repo Man Certified Fresh, but it’s gone down in cinematic history as one of the best cult classics of all time.

Famed critic Roger Ebert rated the film 3 out of 4 stars (a high praise from the often cynical gentleman), and stated, “Most of those bad movies were so cynically constructed out of formula ideas and “commercial” ingredients that watching them was an ordeal. Repo Man comes out of left field, has no big stars, didn’t cost much, takes chances, dares to be unconventional, is funny, and works. There is a lesson here.”

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Pete, a washed-up veteran comedian, must find an opener for his upcoming comedy tour. Pete is introduced to Ethan by his girlfriend Stephanie, who convinces him to take this young comedian on tour as his opener. Things start to take a wacky turn when Pete finds out Ethan is a vampire, and their tour goes from cheap motels, morning DJs, dive bars, and dinners to opening up for the Russell Peters special in Vegas. All while Ethan and Pete attempt to bridge the gap between being real and exploiting his vampirism.

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cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/10368294

While England is undoubtedly the target of criticism when it comes to the many facets of its cultural offerings – say cuisine, for example – there’s no denying that the country provides some truly breathtaking natural scenery. It’s equally valid that English people possess offbeat humour and sometimes outright weirdness. In very few movies is this combination as succinctly married as in Ben Wheatley’s 2012 black comedy Sightseers.

Sightseers focuses on the journey of an admittedly odd couple, Chris and Tina, played by Alice Lowe and Steve Oram, respectively, as they take a short holiday through the English countryside in a caravan. However, there’s a darkness to the pair that leads them to commit a series of violent murders, taking their inner turmoil out on a handful of unsuspecting victims.

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Throughout the film, Wheatley details the stranger side of life in rural England, beginning with the rather uncomfortable relationship between its protagonists. Weirdness drips throughout the runtime of Sightseers, whether it be in the sickening nostalgia of Tina’s needy mother or in the violent banality of Chris’ immoral actions, then made all the more bizarre by the pair’s aggressive lovemaking.