Chopping Mall
Chopping Mall was my first blog, which I started way back in 2009. It was dedicated exlcusively to ridiculous and terrible films, which I watched a lot of back then. (So much time, so little work!)
I’ve resuced the posts from oblivion, to be preserved here for …uh… whatever.
It’s a pretty clunky process getting them out of blogspot (XML export, eww) and into here, so there may be a few formatting issues.
Women In Horror
….yeah. Despite what that banner says, we’re 3/4 of the way through Women in Horror recognition month and I’ve done nothing. Whoops :(
In lieu of me doing anything worthwhile about it, check out:
Official site: http://womeninhorrormonth.com/
Facebook page (updated regularly!)
The brilliant Day of the Woman blog
The ever-wonderful Lightning Bug’s Lair
And the fabulous Horror Digest
And there’s a whole tonne of other treats and goodies out there for you to find if you look around a bit!
CRUNCH CRUNCH BANG
[CC Licenced photo by Katerha]
Now, I love going to the cinema. And I take it pretty seriously. Your behaviour in the cinema should be determined by the kind of film you’re watching.
Tense psycho-drama? Don’t talk, mutter, mumble or make a noise.
Comedy? Laugh.
Splatter horror at a film festival? Laugh along with everyone else at all the inappropriate gory moments that you all love.
Ok? Are we agreed? Good.
Now let’s move ourselves swiftly along to the contentious topic of eating in the cinema. Here, I make no apologies: I am near-fascist in my hatred of noisy food. There’s a certain kind of action film (hello Die Hard 4.0!) that totally permits the slurp of mega-sized fizzy drinks and the crunching of popcorn but… in most other respects, it’s just irritating. I love popcorn. I love eating popcorn at the cinema. But I also love those tense moments of cinematic silence, as we wait with baited breath to see if… CRUNCH MUNCH CRUNCH GUZZLE CHOMP ..oh. You just ruined that moment by scoffing a faceful of popcorn. Thanks.
Sometimes I wish say to myself “I’m going to kill that guy if he keeps rustling those sweets”
I am, however, a moderate and restrained kind of person, and so have never actually followed through with this mental threat. Sadly not everyone is quite as calm! The Telegraph reports that a 27 year old Latvian shot a fellow cinema-goer dead for the volume of his popcorn munching!
Eesh! Now bear that in mind next time you eat noisily at the cinema!
(Thanks to Cineshock for alerting me to this!)
Matrices?
Ohhh my. The hot news - a cynic might say rumour at this stage - is Keanu Reeves and the Wachowskis being in talks about a two movie picture deal for sequels to the Matrix trilogy. See The Register, The Guardian, EmpireOnline and the news-breakers Ain’t It Cool.
Cue, of course, all manner of beard stroking and mumbling about Hollywood lack of imagination, about ruining beautiful things with unnecessary extensions but… wait a second, back up there. This is different, isn’t it? Normally when unnecessary sequels get added years after the originals, we’re concerned about protecting the originals. Indiana Jones is a perfect example: three glorious films and a sequel full of aliens some years later.
With the Matrix, however, we’re looking at a similar yet crucially different scenario. No-one likes the second Matrix film. No-one remembers the third Matrix film. They’ve already trampled mud all over the beautiful carpet. I played my vhs of the first copy to death. I watched it over and over again. I bought Empire magazine for the first time to read the previews of the sequel. And they broke it.
The first one was fantastic.
The second one was visually stunning but dire in narrative terms.
The third one… um… there was a bit with lots of computer generated people, right? And maybe some fighting? Yeah, definitely some fighting. Story? Hmmm…. something about Oracles. No wait, that was a different one… or…. wait… no, no, it’s completely gone. I’d re-watch it to remind myself but I remember already having been crushingly disappointed by it the one time.
So yes, I’m not worried about what they’ll do to the series as a whole and honestly believe they couldn’t possibly make a film that was even worse (could they?) but despite all this, my love for the first one still exists so, please Mr Reeves et al, don’t break it even more.
Of course, with such sketchy details, it could all still be a hoax.
Short Films: Treevenge
It’s hard to know what to say about a short film as funny, gory, mad and wonderful as Treevenge.
The short, clocking in at about 16 minutes, is a couple of years old and comes recommended by a sackful of film festival awards, including an honourable mention at Sundance and audience-fave short at Torronto After Dark, as well as Best Short from Rue Morgue magazine.
I can see why!
The premise, though nothing especially inventive, is enjoyable and clearly gave the film-makers enormous scope to have some fun. It’s Christgmas, the goose is getting fat, and all over Canada Christmas trees are being butchered by chainsaw-wielding, slack-jawed lumberjacks intent on inflicting maximum pain on the poor trees. After a very funny opening with snarling mencutting up hilariously subtitled and squealing trees, we see the trees brought into the typical family home, ready for the “best Christmas EVER!”
I think you know what follows. Several minutes of top-notch, tongue-in-cheek, laugh-out-loud slaughter, splatter and gore as the enraged trees go on a killing rampage, wreaking havoc upon their would-be tormentors.
It’s gory, it’s funny and it’s beautiful. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
The whole thing, in it’s 16minute glory, is available to watch on youtube here, or embedded below. I *presume* Yer Dead films don’t mind it being there, and I can’t see any purchase details on their website.
Treevenge Website
Yer Dead Productions Inc. website.
Looking Back: 2010 in VAMPIRES!
First were Zombies, next it’s Vampires! This is the first of my “Looking Back at 2010” posts, in which I plan to have a look at what I watched this year and see what was great (and not so great…). This is based on the list of films I watched in 2010, not necessarily (or at all!) on those released in 2010.
My 2010 count of Vampire flicks clocked in at some 27 different films, although the vast majority were Hammer films. Last year was the first time I really got to grips with Hammer Horror films and I certainly watched a lot of their Vampire outings! I’m a massive fan of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, so any of the films with them in leading roles were certainly winners. Dracula (1958), Dracula, Prince of Darkness and Taste The Blood of Dracula were particular favourites from the Dracula cycle, with an honorable mention due to Dracula AD 1972 for being so completely mad. Scars of Dracula was a pretty thin addition to the series and The Satanic Rights of Dracula was nice enough but decidedly underwhelming.
Amongst Hammer’s non-Dracula vampires there are some gems and some… well… not-so-gem-like films. At the crap end of the range were Lust for a Vampire and the Vampire Circus, whilst others such as The Brides of Dracula (yeah… it might say Dracula, but it’s not) and Kiss of the Vampire, both of which were fab. As for Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires, a Hammer-Shaw Brothers collaboration…. I have no idea what to say. It was certainly different but I think the basic premise looked a lot better on paper than it did on screen. This was certainly not a demonstration of how best to mix the gothic and the oriental!
Much more skilled at relocating the Vampire to the Far East was Chan-Wook Park, whose staggeringly wonderful film, Thirst, is surely a must for anyone who likes Vampires. Or Korean films. Or cinema. Chan-Wook Park seems a little cursed by the fact that everyone who’s seen his films seems to just want him to make Oldboy again. And again. And again. Thirst isn’t Oldboy. But it is brilliant. And you should watch it.
Similarly unmissable, although in a VERY different manner was the sublime Vampire Girl Vs. Frankenstein Girl. I hardly need to say very much about this. If the title entices you and/or you’ve seen (and liked) any of the Machine Girl, Tokyo Gore Police etc then this is definitely one for you. If not… well it might be better if you gave it a wide berth. This is definitely one for the bonkers, genre-horror fans.
Back in Western cinema, Let The Right One In and Dusk Till Dawn both entertained me this year, but everyone knows about them so I shan’t really bother banging on about them too much. Instead, I’ll come to the Vampire films that I watched shortly after the stars/directors died this year. Both Lesley Nielsen and Jean Rollins were (very different) losses for cinema this year and to commemorate I watched (amongst other, non-Vampire films) Nielsen’s Dracula, Dead and Loving It which was entertainingly mad and then Jean Rollin’s Requiem For A Vampire and The Nude Vampire, both of which were slow, poetic films with symbolist tendencies.
And that pretty much brings me to the end! There were a couple more, the oddball Blood and Doughnuts, the brooding English Vampyres and - possibly my favourite film, possibly to be reviewed shortly - the Spanish masterpiece Arrebato, but we’ll save them for later…