After directing the cult films Hardware and Dust Devil, Richard Stanley seemed to have fallen off the face of the earth popping up occassionally with a few shorts and documentaries. Now it looks like he’s ready to make the leap back into feature-length horror, with a short called The Sea of Perdition that serves as a calling card for his re-entry into the game. The short concerns a cosmonaut lost on the surface of Mars who stumbles across a horrific discovery. Be warned, it’s NSFW and it’s also a little… odd. In an interview with Suicide Girls, Stanley reveals that Warren comics were an inspiration for the piece. Hopefully that will put you in the right mindset. Link courtesy of Fangoria.

Michael I. Cohen of the film blog FLICKHEAD (it’s so much better capitalized) shares the kind of strange tale of obsession that most movie buffs can relate to. In his case, the nearly-decade long hunt for a song that accompanied a Kenneth Anger short.

“What impressed me about Rabbit’s Moon wasn’t the film itself — a seven-minute, black-and-white affair in which three clowns prance around in a moon-lit forest. No, what really caught my attention was the soundtrack — a demonic laugh kicked off a jaunty, organ-driven Beatlesque song that sounded like some half-forgotten top forty hit from the glam-rock era.”

The entire twisted tale, along with an mp3 of the song in question, can be found here.

I’ve always been attracted to good backyard filmmaking, be it Criterion’s recent release of Equinox, M. Night Shyamalan’s home movie clips or even Plaga Zombie. One DVD that I would like to own but I haven’t had a chance to track down yet is Monster Kid Home Movies, which is a collection of creature-filled shorts directed by kids and teens on 8mm from back in the day. The trailer above is for that release, and it’s a hell of a lot of fun all on its own.

Horror directors Adam Green and Ryan Schifrin have collaborated on a special Halloween treat, a short film entitled King In The Box, which takes a harsh look at the sordid world of fast-food franchise mascots and what they’ll do to get ahead. It wasn’t even a question of whether The King was going to end up murdering someone, it was only a matter of when.

Via Bloody Disgusting, though the more reliable You Tube link was brought to you by Cinematical, which is rocking the face off of Halloween this year. Go check them out.

The Hollywood Reporter has posted a lengthy article/interview with Sage Stallone, Sylvester’s son. I was only going to skim over it to see if there was anything half-interesting but found myself reading the entire article from start to finish. It’s filled with great anecdotes and reminicises about Stallone’s childhood forays into exploitation cinema and how those films informed his first attempt at directing.

After seeing and enjoying “Vic” recently I was happy to be able to catch up with Stallone to explore how he managed to get it made. ” ‘Vic’ came about when I was 16 years old, believe it or not,” he explained. “Around that time I was watching a lot of movies. I was a video junkie, a video-holic. I would go to the video stores and rent everything I could find that was pre-1980. So I started learning about older films and actors and so on. I’d watch these great movies and then somehow I worked my way into exploitation films. The same actors that I saw that were my heroes in these ’50s war movies and cowboy movies were in these (exploitation) movies for five minutes — getting beat up and killed.”

He also discusses the origins of his company, Grindhouse Releasing, and how his father disapproved of the subject matter for his first film. And hey, anyone that can namedrop Fellini and Fulci in the same breath has my complete attention.

Not long ago various horror blogs engaged in a debate regarding increasing “realism” in current theatrical horror films. This blog came into the debate a bit late, but one thing I noticed is that the attributes attached to the films in question didn’t really pertain to them at all (and they probably wouldn’t have reached the neighbourhood multiplex if they did), but could probably be applied to lesser-known indie films. Another area in which this hyper-realism in horror movies occurs is in educational shorts, like the California Highway Patrol’s Red Asphalt series which was recently profiled in the Los Angeles Times.

“This is not a Hollywood movie as can be readily seen. The quality is below their standards. However … nothing has been staged. These are actual scenes taken immediately after the accidents occurred. Also, unlike Hollywood, our actors are paid nothing. Most of the actors in these movies are bad actors and received top billing only on a tombstone. They paid a terrific price to be in these movies, they paid with their lives.”

It’s funny that educational films are among the few things I can’t stomach to watch.