John Johnson--Your Movie Sucks! (Horrorfind 2007)
Horrorfind Weekend (or perhaps more accurately, one day of Horrorfind Weekend) has become a ritual among myself, Chii, and Lizard. That being said, the event becomes less and less satisfying with each passing year. Granted, this year was actually better than '06 (which was essentially spent looping around the Dealer's Room in a consumerist haze), since I was fairly excited to get an autograph/picture with Malcolm McDowell (see my avatar and add 38 years), who is sort of the English character-actor equivalent of Johnny Depp, best known for A Clockwork Orange and the upcoming Halloween remake.
We arrived later than usual, paid the five-bucks-higher Saturday entry fee, and stepped inside. After getting slapped with the requisite indestructible paper wristbands, we decided to get my autograph/photo opp with McDowell since the line was piddlingly short. We waited a few minutes as Lizard glanced over the program, reading off interesting-sounding events on the day's schedule. Though, if our Sunday visits to the convention were any indication, we'd all be spent by 5.
As 2-3 people were let through the door to the tabled-off area where McDowell and Udo Kier (Halloween remake, Suspiria, Andy Warhol's Frankenstein and Dracula) were seated, the little German could be seen/heard yelling "NEXT!!!" angrily when the patrons at his table fizzled out. The Horrorfind staff-person guarding the door wore a grin, a defeated "oh boy" expression on his otherwise silent face. Mr. Kier simply seemed so annoyed that I wouldn't have put it past him to stand up and walk out if people didn't come over and acknowledge his cult greatness right quick. While I can imagine that signing autographs and posing for photographs for 3 days straight--money aside--is an extremely dull feat where the same boring fan sentiments are repeated constantly ("I loved you in [insert movie title]!"), Malcolm McDowell was far more graceful (though he was knocking out autographs and photos with assembly-line precision); conversation was non-existent--get your autograph, get your photo, and--in the words of Amazon.com--"you're done." It may have been presumptuous of me, but I got him to autograph the Halloween remake poster...I'm looking forward to the movie, even though I'm not sure what to expect.
We visited the Art Show next, which is a small room down the hall from the Haunted House, and has plenty of cool stuff on display--most for sale, some priced at several hundred dollars or more (some prints were available, but I didn't pick up any). Afterward, we went to the Haunted House, where a tall grizzly bear of a guard(?) was cracking wise with those in line in dorky rent-a-cop fashion. The House itself was dimly lit and creepy in its setup--it had been years since I'd gone to a Halloween-themed attraction like that, but it made me realize how cleverly manipulative the shocks are administered through jagged angles and misdirection. In the first room, a life-size mannequin that looked nearly human stood in the left corner--by attracting our attention to that, it gives the actual person (hidden behind a partition perpendicular to the mannequin) a chance to jump out and yell while we're distracted; in a room covered with glow-in-the-dark mime masks, an extreme jagged alcove obscures the masked, black-clad person who jumps out before receding back into that spot, camouflaged (there was also the guy waiting right around the corner, but that was just cheating!).
We combed the Dealer's Room next...of course, there was little (if any) variation from previous years, except for the fact that an entire row of vendors were missing--instead of the uncomfortably crowded room we'd come to know since our first visit in 2004, there was a large, open space separating the last row from Tom Savini's booth against the back wall. I had a poster/print objective in mind, so I mentally marked down several items before we retreated upstairs, shared a particularly unappetizing turkey-bacon wrap, and decided to kill some time watching a movie in the indoor viewing room.
Understand that last time we watched a movie at Horrorfind, it was a snooze-worthy adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft story called The Thing on the Doorstep back in 2005. This year's offering was Skeleton Key 2, which had me confused--okay, was it an unofficial sequel to the Kate Hudson movie from a few years back? Earlier I'd picked up a promo card for the movie (somewhere), and the title read: 667 Neighbor of the Beast: Another Skeleton Key. As things unfolded, I came to the conclusion that it was just a different movie with the same title, something that would probably take itself a lot less seriously than that Lovecraft flick, so of course I was somewhat intrigued. The room (divided into two sections) was densely populated, and we secured seats in the second row on the right side, up close. The film was introduced by a cast/crew member who sang an amusing song, accompanied by acoustic guitar. I know one of the lines mentioned "let's get drunk," and...boy oh boy, I was wishing I had.
Writer/Producer/Director/Star "John Johnson" has made possibly the worst movie I have ever seen, and don't give me that bullshit about "not having a sense of humor"! He makes Ulli Lommel look like Uwe Boll...and Uwe Boll look like Orson Fucking Welles. Imagine a movie shot on a consumer-grade VHS camcorder, with no plot, no script, the most obnoxious characters to ever power-drill a migraine into your skull, and the misguided notion that Leprechauns, Pirates, Haitians, and references to Super Mario Bros. are the most hilarious things known to man. Heck, maybe they are the most hilarious things known to man, but goddamn if Johnson knows how to eke humor out of this excruciating, seemingly endless mess. Oh, yeah: for some ungodly reason (I'm thinking to torture the audience), the movie runs 110 minutes, and I felt every second as I shifted in my seat and tried to shoo away my migraine. (It didn't help matters that, halfway through, a Horrorfind staff-person cranked up the volume to 11, probably at the 'filmmakers' request.) The film starts of OK, but becomes so repetitive and pointless that it becomes an endurance test--oh, haha, they're doing song-and-dance numbers about shit...and Haiti!--filled with too many characters, lame gags, and a meandering plot that seems designed as an excuse for Johnson to screw a bunch of dumpy broads all too anxious to get topless for their 'art.' And the movie has about 10 false endings--just when you think the whole thing is going to come to a merciful halt, it jumps back to some characters/plot points we could give a rat's ass about. At some points, the director seems to think he's channeling the ghost of Monty Python with his dumb jabs at 'surrealism,' but the closest he ever gets is a really bad Benny Hill episode. I would normally be bitching about Skeleton Key 2 on the home of faceless film-cowards, the IMDb, but alas, the 'film' (hahaha) is not yet posted on their site.
There was supposed to be a Q&A afterward, but I made a beeline for the bathroom and came out to discover that the whole room had just got up and left (and rightly so). I had a hunch that most of the film's cast/crew were seated on the left side of the room, laughing loudly and frequently; there were also 2 guys seated behind us who seemed familiar with the previous film.
So, one final trip to the Dealer's Room. I picked up 3 prints as potential future apartment-decoration: Captivity, Day of the Dead, and The Hills Have Eyes (1977). I also got my hands on a 27x40 Meet the Feebles poster. And I picked up a bootleg of the backing tape used during Skinny Puppy's Too Dark Park Tour (Lizard picked it up first; I considered it, and eventually caved--it's great stuff).
We arrived later than usual, paid the five-bucks-higher Saturday entry fee, and stepped inside. After getting slapped with the requisite indestructible paper wristbands, we decided to get my autograph/photo opp with McDowell since the line was piddlingly short. We waited a few minutes as Lizard glanced over the program, reading off interesting-sounding events on the day's schedule. Though, if our Sunday visits to the convention were any indication, we'd all be spent by 5.
As 2-3 people were let through the door to the tabled-off area where McDowell and Udo Kier (Halloween remake, Suspiria, Andy Warhol's Frankenstein and Dracula) were seated, the little German could be seen/heard yelling "NEXT!!!" angrily when the patrons at his table fizzled out. The Horrorfind staff-person guarding the door wore a grin, a defeated "oh boy" expression on his otherwise silent face. Mr. Kier simply seemed so annoyed that I wouldn't have put it past him to stand up and walk out if people didn't come over and acknowledge his cult greatness right quick. While I can imagine that signing autographs and posing for photographs for 3 days straight--money aside--is an extremely dull feat where the same boring fan sentiments are repeated constantly ("I loved you in [insert movie title]!"), Malcolm McDowell was far more graceful (though he was knocking out autographs and photos with assembly-line precision); conversation was non-existent--get your autograph, get your photo, and--in the words of Amazon.com--"you're done." It may have been presumptuous of me, but I got him to autograph the Halloween remake poster...I'm looking forward to the movie, even though I'm not sure what to expect.
We visited the Art Show next, which is a small room down the hall from the Haunted House, and has plenty of cool stuff on display--most for sale, some priced at several hundred dollars or more (some prints were available, but I didn't pick up any). Afterward, we went to the Haunted House, where a tall grizzly bear of a guard(?) was cracking wise with those in line in dorky rent-a-cop fashion. The House itself was dimly lit and creepy in its setup--it had been years since I'd gone to a Halloween-themed attraction like that, but it made me realize how cleverly manipulative the shocks are administered through jagged angles and misdirection. In the first room, a life-size mannequin that looked nearly human stood in the left corner--by attracting our attention to that, it gives the actual person (hidden behind a partition perpendicular to the mannequin) a chance to jump out and yell while we're distracted; in a room covered with glow-in-the-dark mime masks, an extreme jagged alcove obscures the masked, black-clad person who jumps out before receding back into that spot, camouflaged (there was also the guy waiting right around the corner, but that was just cheating!).
We combed the Dealer's Room next...of course, there was little (if any) variation from previous years, except for the fact that an entire row of vendors were missing--instead of the uncomfortably crowded room we'd come to know since our first visit in 2004, there was a large, open space separating the last row from Tom Savini's booth against the back wall. I had a poster/print objective in mind, so I mentally marked down several items before we retreated upstairs, shared a particularly unappetizing turkey-bacon wrap, and decided to kill some time watching a movie in the indoor viewing room.
Understand that last time we watched a movie at Horrorfind, it was a snooze-worthy adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft story called The Thing on the Doorstep back in 2005. This year's offering was Skeleton Key 2, which had me confused--okay, was it an unofficial sequel to the Kate Hudson movie from a few years back? Earlier I'd picked up a promo card for the movie (somewhere), and the title read: 667 Neighbor of the Beast: Another Skeleton Key. As things unfolded, I came to the conclusion that it was just a different movie with the same title, something that would probably take itself a lot less seriously than that Lovecraft flick, so of course I was somewhat intrigued. The room (divided into two sections) was densely populated, and we secured seats in the second row on the right side, up close. The film was introduced by a cast/crew member who sang an amusing song, accompanied by acoustic guitar. I know one of the lines mentioned "let's get drunk," and...boy oh boy, I was wishing I had.
Writer/Producer/Director/Star "John Johnson" has made possibly the worst movie I have ever seen, and don't give me that bullshit about "not having a sense of humor"! He makes Ulli Lommel look like Uwe Boll...and Uwe Boll look like Orson Fucking Welles. Imagine a movie shot on a consumer-grade VHS camcorder, with no plot, no script, the most obnoxious characters to ever power-drill a migraine into your skull, and the misguided notion that Leprechauns, Pirates, Haitians, and references to Super Mario Bros. are the most hilarious things known to man. Heck, maybe they are the most hilarious things known to man, but goddamn if Johnson knows how to eke humor out of this excruciating, seemingly endless mess. Oh, yeah: for some ungodly reason (I'm thinking to torture the audience), the movie runs 110 minutes, and I felt every second as I shifted in my seat and tried to shoo away my migraine. (It didn't help matters that, halfway through, a Horrorfind staff-person cranked up the volume to 11, probably at the 'filmmakers' request.) The film starts of OK, but becomes so repetitive and pointless that it becomes an endurance test--oh, haha, they're doing song-and-dance numbers about shit...and Haiti!--filled with too many characters, lame gags, and a meandering plot that seems designed as an excuse for Johnson to screw a bunch of dumpy broads all too anxious to get topless for their 'art.' And the movie has about 10 false endings--just when you think the whole thing is going to come to a merciful halt, it jumps back to some characters/plot points we could give a rat's ass about. At some points, the director seems to think he's channeling the ghost of Monty Python with his dumb jabs at 'surrealism,' but the closest he ever gets is a really bad Benny Hill episode. I would normally be bitching about Skeleton Key 2 on the home of faceless film-cowards, the IMDb, but alas, the 'film' (hahaha) is not yet posted on their site.
There was supposed to be a Q&A afterward, but I made a beeline for the bathroom and came out to discover that the whole room had just got up and left (and rightly so). I had a hunch that most of the film's cast/crew were seated on the left side of the room, laughing loudly and frequently; there were also 2 guys seated behind us who seemed familiar with the previous film.
So, one final trip to the Dealer's Room. I picked up 3 prints as potential future apartment-decoration: Captivity, Day of the Dead, and The Hills Have Eyes (1977). I also got my hands on a 27x40 Meet the Feebles poster. And I picked up a bootleg of the backing tape used during Skinny Puppy's Too Dark Park Tour (Lizard picked it up first; I considered it, and eventually caved--it's great stuff).