I’m happy to see that the Bring Back Mystery Science Theater 3000 Kickstarter has hit $3.3 million, meaning they’ll produce at least six episodes.
At $4.4 million they’ll make nine episodes, but at this point $5.5 million (twelve episodes) is looking like it might be a stretch.
Also Patton Oswalt is joining the cast as TV’s Son of TV’s Frank, a move I’m pretty “meh” on (though I can see the physical resemblance between Frank Conniff and Oswalt).
Sunday I saw Kung Fury, the crowd-funded parody of every cheesy 80s cop show, science fiction movie, and fighting video game, rolled into one absurdist package.
It has everything you could ever ask for in a short film featuring a kung fu cop traveling back in time to stop Hitler, including dinosaurs, Tron-era grid computer graphics, obviously fake video compositing, and a soundtrack that sounds like it was composed by Giorgio Moroder after a 72-hour Jolt Cola binge.
Rael Bob says check it out…
The Bring Back Mystery Science Theater 3000 Kickstarter has hit their $2 million goal, which means it’s funded and they’ll do at least three new episodes.
Everybody Smile!
And they still have 25 days to go! Now let’s hope they make it all they way to their 12 episode $5.5 million stretch goal…
Here’s Lantern, a very cool historical research tool that searches “1.3 million pages of digitized books and magazines from the histories of film, broadcasting, and recorded sound.”
How extensive is it? I did a search for Tod Browning and turned up a whopping 2346 pages that reference him.
If you’re doing any research on the early history of film, it’s a real treasure trove.
The New York Times offers up a look at Guillermo del Toro’s collection of horror movie props, which is fairly impressive.
Who else do you know has a lifesize figure of H.P. Lovecraft reading one of his own books?
His library also includes at least one book with one of my stories in it (Horrors: 365 Scary Stories)…
(Hat tip: Liz Hand’s Facebook page.)
It’s one thing for there to be a legal battle over the rights for a good movie, but it’s quite another when the battle is over Manos: The Hands of Fate, one of the worst films of all time. (Note: That article is up on Playboy.com, so it might be blocked at your place of work.)
In 2011, a collector of film prints uncovered the original negative of Manos and embarked on an inexplicable project to restore the film with all the white-glove attention archivists give to Hollywood classics. His efforts would incur the wrath of a mysterious man with a fake New Zealand accent named Rupert, as well as Joe Warren, Hal Warren’s embittered son, who intends to preserve the Manos legacy at all costs.
Hal Warren’s son comes off as more than a bit of a jerk. “I’m the director’s son! I’m entitled to a cut even if the work is out of copyright!”
Fortunately for “fans” of the films, the restored Blu-Ray of Manos: The Hands of Fate is finally coming out October 13. More information on the restoration can be found here.
Quick impressions from a movie viewing party yesterday:
Guardians of the Galaxy: Yep! Not my favorite Marvel, but in the top 10.
The Lego Movie: A whole lot better than you had any right to expect it to be.
Coherence: Eh. Ends better than it begins, but shallow California Yuppies sort of spoil the quantum mechanical creepiness.
Also, congratulations to whoever cut the trailer for The Frame: You’ve managed to craft a trailer so stylistically annoying that I never want to see the movie just to spite you…
Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett is one of the world’s premiere collectors of horror movie posters and memorabilia (toys, games, masks, etc.). After reading about the Hammett collection in Heritage Auction’s Intelligent Collector magazine, I’d been interested in the book documenting it, so I picked one up from the Cold Tonnage 40% off sale.
Hammett, Kirk. Too Much Horror Business. Abrams, 2012. First edition oversized hardback, a Fine- copy with wear at points, sans dust jacket, as issued. (Note: The wear on the front cover lettering is faux-wear, as you can tell from the same faux-wear on the title and half-title page.) Hammett has a truly amazing poster collection, possibly on par with that of Robert V. Borst (documented in Graven Images), whose range of collection included more science fiction and fantasy than Hammett. Bought for £12 marked down from £20.
Here’s a video on the book and Hammett’s collection:
And now I pretty much have to see Deadpool…
“Deadpool: The movie that touches you in totally inappropriate ways…”
Glancing through the top 25 films in the the IMDB Top 250 list, it occurred to me that most involved crime as the central subject, and a few more peripherally:
That’s 15 of the top 25 films which involve crime as either a primary or secondary feature.
Surely crime dramas offer plenty of conflict, but so do war movies, but none of them (save the SF/F entries, and Schindler’s List) make the list, nor do any sports films. (Perpetual favorite Casablanca, which would qualify as a war film, comes in at 30, while Saving Private Ryan comes in at 31.)
Anyone care to speculate on why crime dominates the top of the list?