Amazing Video: Car Parking Champ

Posted Aug 9, 2011 by Walt Belcher

Updated Aug 9, 2011 at 04:36 PM

Guinness World Records has released a video of a German man who set a new world record for the tightest parallel parking job.

Stuntman Ronny Wechselberger squeezed his Volkswagen Polo into a parking space that was only 10.26 inches longer than his car. He did it for a German TV show in April.

However, the record has since been topped on a Chinese TV show, where Zhang Hua squeezed a car into a tighter space - just 9.4 inches longer than that of the vehicle, Guinness reported.

Guinness said a video of that record-setting performance will be released later this year.

Watch Wechselberger’s amazing skills

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Fox News Scores Big Weekend Victory for Cost of Freedom

Posted Aug 9, 2011 by Walt Belcher

Updated Aug 9, 2011 at 02:20 PM

  The downgrading of U.S. credit by S&P last week must have sent viewers flocking to cable news outlets.  On Saturday, the morning following the credit downgrade, Fox News’ Neil Cavuto anchored the highest-rated program on cable news for the entire weekend.

It was record setting. His two-hour financial special, “The Cost of Freedom,” from 10 a.m. to noon, averaged 1. 5 million viewers. This was the second highest Cost of Freedom in all of 2011 to date – only behind the Cost of Freedom on 3/12/11 which followed the Japan earthquake.

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ABC’s ‘Bachelor Pad’ Scores With Ratings

Posted Aug 9, 2011 by Walt Belcher

Updated Aug 9, 2011 at 11:56 AM

 
  ABC’s “Bachelor Pad” opened its second season Monday night with big ratings:  Here is the release from ABC:

  With Bachelor Pad opening its second season at series-highs, ABC finished as the most-watched network on Monday night for the 5th week in a row, leading runner up Fox by nearly 1 million viewers.  In fact, ABC has been Monday’s most-watched net on 21 of the past 22 weeks.  In addition, ABC dominated the night across all key Women demos (W18-34/W18-49/W25-54).

ABC was up over the same night last year (8/9/10), also a night of all-original programming, by 21% in Total Viewers and by 5% in Adults 18-49.

Leading its 3-hour time period from 8-11pm, ABC’s 2nd-season premiere of Bachelor Pad emerged as the most-watched TV show overall on Monday night, as well as the #1 program across all key Women demos.  The ABC unscripted series ranked #1 in 5 of 6 half-hours of the evening with viewers and in 4 of 6 half-hours among young adults.

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A Conversation With: Jim Mickle

Posted Aug 7, 2011 by John Allman

Updated Aug 7, 2011 at 01:19 PM

You ever watch a movie and think, wow, the people responsible for this really went all-out. They made the movie they wanted to make with no apologies, no excuses, no regrets. That’s pretty damn cool.

It’s rare to come across that kind of film.

“Stake Land” is that kind of film.

It’s the best post-apocalyptic, vampire plague, coming of age story you’re likely to see. It has moments of gory good inspiration and moments that you can just tell were thought through carefully to achieve maximum impact. It has Hollywood-style action, a cool ‘80s-era training montage, wickedly nasty vampires the likes of which haven’t been seen since “30 Days of Night” and a stone-cold creepy religious cult that figures out how to use the vamps to their advantage.

It’s the second collaboration between director Jim Mickle and actor Nick Damici, who share writing credit on “Stake Land.”

Mickle, who lives in Manhattan, NY, took time to talk by phone recently to BVB: Blood, Violence and Babes about making his second feature film, about pulling together an all-star supporting cast and about making homemade crossbows.

Check it out:

For lack of a better analogy, it really felt like you swung for the fences with this film, and completely killed it, by the way.

JM: Awesome. I think in a lot of ways, we did kind of swing for the fences. Some of it was slight frustration at not being able to pull stuff off the first time with ‘Mulberry.’ That’s great to hear.

“Stake Land” is the second film co-written by Mickle and star Nick Damici. The pair penned Mickle’s directorial debut, “Mulberry Street,” which was one of After Dark’s 8 Films to Die For back during the film festival’s second run in 2007. It was arguably the standout film of that year’s After Dark collection, a gritty, low-budget thrill ride about a pandemic in New York City set off by rats. The infected slowly turned into rat-like creatures, terrorizing the remaining survivors trapped in a brownstone apartment building.

Mickle said the seed for “Stake Land” grew out of the weeks and months after “Mulberry Street” was released that he and Damici went looking for the next project to collaborate on together. They had optioned the rights to a book, but that process had stalled.

JM: This one is much more his baby in a lot of ways. After “Mulberry Street” we optioned a book. It was kind of frustrating, having a hard time pushing forward. Then at some point, out of desperation, I came to him and said, ‘Let’s do another ‘Mulberry’ type thing, kind of low-budget.

Mickle said the idea initially was to create a web feature. Damici took it from there.

JM: Really, we sort of shot some ideas around and the next morning, I woke up and he sent me the first 10 pages. It wound up changing a ton, [but] the first 10 pages were almost always the same – the kid’s in the car, the creature’s in the trunk, going with the flashback. We worked with what we wanted it to be over time. He would send me these little episodes. It wasn’t until the idea for the feature come around, we ended up finding the post-apocalyptic vibe. It was right around the presidential election, how the country seemed so divided. It gave us some glue. We had tons of great little episodes, like 30. Some of them we hung onto.

Some of the best scenes in “Stake Land” are moments that other directors might have focused on as a money shot. Here, Mickle and Co. treat them as something happening in the background, merely a piece of the bigger picture.

There’s a scene early on when the vampires are first exposed and one of the nasty, feral creatures has just feasted on a family, and Mister and Martin shine a light up into a corner of a barn and you get just a glimpse of a vamp sucking the last bit of life from an infant before casually dropping the baby to the ground. It’s one of those ‘did I just see that?’ moments that you have to rewind because it’s so cool.

Much of that was intentional, Mickle said.

JM: Pretty soon after, the scene where they kill the two Brotherhood guys in the street – in the barn we wanted to have a little Hollywood flair – [but] the one with human on human violence, [we] tried to play a lot of it wide shots, long lens, give it a feel of you happened to walk down the street and all of a sudden this was a scene you wandered up onto. After ‘Mulberry,’ I wanted to show I can do these action scenes. Give me some money. We can compete.

Another such moment comes after Mister and Martin have rescued Sister. They are taking part in a town celebration, one of the few moments of levity in the film. Suddenly, all hell breaks loose and the Brotherhood attacks, dropping vampires out of the sky like feral clusterbombs that immediately hit the ground and begin ripping out throats.

Much of the scene is shot in one continuous take, which is fairly remarkable given the complexity of the shot and the skill needed to pull it off. Most seasoned directors wouldn’t even consider it.

JM: Ryan the DP (Ryan Samul, director of photography) and I had listed like 40 set-ups, then we wound up and said, ‘Let’s try to pull this off in one long take.’ That was a 3-minute take. Originally, I was going to go all Michael Bay. We wound up saying this is about the emotional peaks.

That’s the captivating thing about “Stake Land,” that it does have those moments, whole scenes, that seem very personal. Little slices of film that you can sense the time and care that went into the creation of that singular instance. Like a painter making sure his composition is perfect.

Mickle said many of those moments came from Damici’s first, fevered draft as the excitement over the idea became infectious and details began to take form.

JM: Some of them existed from the very beginning. As soon as I read, I said ‘This is perfect, don’t touch it.’ He was writing them and I was still working. He was sending me pictures. He was making his own costume. We didn’t even have a greenlight yet.

Some of those moments made it onto the “Stake Land” DVD extras – scenes of Damici making his own working crossbow and firing it into his wall.

JM: He fleshed out his own world, and I think that became very contagious. The other actors followed suit. I think it’s interesting people set out to make an apocalyptic movie. This started out as a coming of age story, a mentor and pupil story, and the end of the world aspect almost became the dressing on top.

One of the surprising elements of “Stake Land” is the strength of its supporting cast. Each of the roles seemed perfectly picked for the actor portraying it. Danielle Harris, in particular, who has become such an iconic scream queen, really excelled in a role unlike any she’s recently played. And she has this amazing scene when she is first introduced where she is singing at a café. Was that really her singing?

JM: That was really her. She actually did it on set and was very good on set. When she got there, she said I’ve never sang outside my own shower. Weirdly enough, she will kind of go for anything.

Harris helped him and Damici discover a different side of her character, Belle, who is pregnant and alone, living at an outpost when she first encounters Mister and Martin.

JM: Her character is much different in the script. There was a romantic thing. Then she (Harris) got there and realized her character meant something else, a breath of fresh air, a sign of hope.

Mickle said he recently saw the film in Brazil with an audience. It was a chance to step outside himself and watch it objectively. He said it struck him again how much Harris understood Belle’s role, her purpose.

JM: I think she found that even before Nick and I did.

Another remarkable supporting performance comes from Kelly McGillis, who is completely unrecognizable in the role of Sister, a nun struggling to hold onto her faith as the vampire plague spreads.

JM: She’s great. She’s awesome. I really hope this is a start of a rebirth for her.

McGillis has been noticeably absent from feature films for quite some time since her heyday in the 1980s with “Top Gun” and “Witness.”

JM: We couldn’t cast the part to save our lives. Nobody wanted to read it. The first time you see her, she’s running away from rapists. Not the role that jumps off the page for an actress in her 40s or 50s. A couple of days into shooting, the casting director, who I relied very heavily on, said what about Kelly? I remember laughing at the time, come on. [But] we did throw this Hail Mary. I wrote a letter to her that was very sweet.

Mickle said McGillis actually lived not far from his family’s farm where he shot much of the film. He played up the proximity in his letter asking her to accept the role.

JM: It was 20 minutes away from where she was living. I know that had a lot to do with it.

Another key role in the film is Jebedia Loven, the leader of the Brotherhood, the religious movement using the vampire plague as its chance to establish dominance. Michael Cerveris plays Jebedia, and genre fans will instantly recognize him from the popular TV show “Fringe,” where he plays The Observer, the bald watcher who keeps the balance of time and history in place.

JM: I had never seen “Fringe.” He’s mostly known for…he’s been nominated for three or four Tonys. He was Hedwig. He was Tommy on stage. I think he’s best known for Sweeny Todd with Patti Lupone. Most people in New York know him as a lion of Broadway. I don’t see a lot of Broadway and I’d never seen “Fringe,” but I met him and really liked his vibe.

The character that holds “Stake Land” together though is Mister, played by Damici. He comes across at different points as a cross between Snake Plissken and The Man with No Name, but he never feels contrived or cobbled together. He is in the end a wholly original character driven by demons that never get fully explained.

JM: That was another evolving thing too. I think a lot of the good stuff came from the fact that we were basically in pre-production for a year. I think a lot of the character stuff came from there. Early on, we went really cartoony. We went very far with him. As we started to flesh it out, it became more interesting to underplay him. Both of us are fans of losing dialogue if you don’t need it.

So what’s next for Mickle? Another horror film? Or a stab at a different genre?There is a project in sight, he said. Financing is about complete and he’s hoping to begin production soon.

JM: It’s sort of a violent dark thriller, no monsters. Southern noir, Texas noir. Much closer to films like “Blood Simple” or “Red Rock West.” Sort of a genre I really liked in addition to horror movies. They don’t make them a lot anymore. Knock on wood that’s the next.

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New Releases for Tuesday, Aug. 2, 2011

Posted Aug 2, 2011 by John Allman

Updated Aug 2, 2011 at 09:25 PM

What’s new in stores and on video shelves this week:

Stake Land
Genre: Horror
Directed by: Jim Mickle
Run time: 98 minutes
Rating: Unrated
Format: Blu-Ray

The Lowdown: It must be incredibly difficult these days to come up with an original way to convey an apocalyptic future, a nation ravaged by an epidemic and reduced to basic, primal needs.

Lord knows, many films have tried of late: “The Road” likely came closest, with its bleak and pitch-black portrait of a grey world left smoldering after an unidentified series of disasters, but the soul-sucking tone left me drained and weary. “The Book of Eli” played too much like a self-aware genre mash-up with Denzel Washington unable to shed his unique Denzel Washington-ness in order to transform into a blind messiah. Even “I Am Legend,” for all its exciting set pieces and big-budget price tag still left me wanting more.

How funny then that a small independent film, financed for less than $1 million, co-written by its director (Jim Mickle) and star (Nick Damici), could somehow do the improbable and completely nail the post-modern wasteland that might remain following a ravenous vampire scourge.

But damn if “Stake Land” isn’t the best genre film of its type that you’ve seen since “The Road Warrior,” deftly balancing rich character development with taunt action scenes and some genuinely chilling creatures to contend with.

Following up on the promise of “Mulberry Street,” his infestation-#####-zombies-in-NYC debut, Mickle puts it all out there, swinging hard and fast right from the jump, and it works. Oh boy, does it work.

This is not just an apocalyptic road movie where the protagonist is striving to reach some mythical safe haven. It’s a coming of age story about one young man’s maturation from innocent child to vampire-slaying protector. It’s a social commentary that considers what factions might be left after some terrible global disaster, and what might those factions be motivated to do. And, above all, it’s a full-throttle horror movie filled with small, but brilliant, details that most directors would save for a money shot. Not Mickle and Damici. They pepper their movie with so many little flourishes that it’s nearly impossible to catch them all on a first viewing.

In a perfect world, one devoid of Smurfs and threequels about giant robots, “Stake Land” would be a major studio tentpole release.

On second thought, maybe this is better. This way the fans who come by this film will do so honestly because they have to seek it out.  And they will follow Mickle and Damici from here on out because they will recognize their talent and appreciate the intelligence, the care and the obvious love they have for the genre.

The Stuff You Care About:
Hot chicks – Hello, Danielle Harris, even pregnant and dirty, you’re still hot.
Nudity – Brief.
Gore – Yes.
Drug use – No.
Bad Guys/Killers – It’s a tough call between the vampires, nasty feral things, or the religious cult that tries to use them to wipe out the resistance.
Buy/Rent – Buy. It. Now.
On the Web – http://www.scareflix.net/stakesite.html

YellowBrickRoad (The Collective, 98 minutes, R, DVD): The second film from the new Bloody Disgusting Selects shingle is a thoroughly unsettling ghost story called “YellowBrickRoad.”

First-time writer/directors Jesse Holland and Andy Mitton have concocted a chilling tale of paranoia and isolation that, quite frankly, bothered the hell out of me. I actually woke up several hours after watching it, thinking about “YellowBrickRoad,” and feeling scared and disturbed laying there in the dark.

That doesn’t happen often, but then, few films that I watch actually creep under my skin and burrow their way deep into my subconscious. This one did, and I honestly can’t tell you exactly why.

Part of the explanation, I think, lies with the fact that there are few answers provided. And part of the reason has to do with the very nature of urban legends – the best ones scare you because they pray on fears you don’t like to think about, the crazy person under your bed licking your finger or the malevolent spirit in the mirror you might conjure simply by saying her name three times, in the dark.

“YellowBrickRoad” is an urban legends-style flick. It deals with an unexplained phenomena – the disappearance 70 years before of an entire New Hampshire town, which suddenly walked, en masse, into the woods. There was one survivor, and he literally had been driven insane by what he experienced.

Into this town now comes an accomplished married couple, both writers and photographers, along with a close friend/psychologist, brother and sister cartologists, an intern and a state wildlife officer. The group plan to walk the same road, ominously marked ‘yellowbrickroad’ by the locals, to determine, if possible, what happened to the townsfolk so many years before.

Taking a cue from recent retro-horror films like “House of the Devil,” Holland and Mitton opt for a slow burn, allowing the characters to gradually develop. Thankfully, they avoid stereotypes, and create real people who you are believable. Suffice to say, there’s no jock, tramp, nerd, etc.

After several days of hiking, the crew makes a chilling discovery, or I should say, they suddenly find themselves enveloped by a chilling development. Miles from town, away from any recognizable urban structure, music begins to fill the woods. As if that wasn’t creepy enough, the music is from the early 40s, the same time period when the town’s residents went missing. And it keeps escalating until it reaches eardrum-bursting decibel levels that immobilize the group.

The first actual blast of gore is so sudden, so shocking, so unexpected in its ferocity, that it feels like a hard, open-palm slap.

And from there, “YellowBrickRoad,” with its odd, obtuse references to “The Wizard of Oz,” its purposefully vague plot progression and its ever-present sense of anything can and might happen, just pushes north, striding forward on a mission to shock and confuse the viewer, almost the same way that the eerie music disorientates the team and slowly, slowly, slowly drives them mad.

Also Available:

Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Destroyer – I was there, opening night, May 14, 1982. My favorite comic book hero of all time finally had his own movie. It was bloody, brutal, epic. I was 12 years old. The sequel that followed in 1984 was good, not great, but enjoyable like a solid issue of the comic. And now, almost 30 years later, the original “Conan the Barbarian,” as well as “Conan the Destroyer,” are coming to high definition. Just in time for the remake. Sigh.

Exit 33 – Kane Hodder, the man responsible for Jason Voorhees in four films, plus Victor Crowley, tops a low-budget throwback to slasher films. Sadly, this one isn’t all that much to get excited about, but Hodder’s fans – and there are many – should enjoy.

Better Off Dead – I want my three dollars. French fries, French toast, French dressing. Go that way, really fast. If something gets in your way, turn. The quotes just don’t stop coming in the 1985 cult classic that launched John Cusack into the collective conscience of America. Cusack’s Lane Myer was a comic creation the likes of which we had never seen. The original cool geek. Until “Say Anything,” four years later, that is.

Strigoi: The Undead – A vampire film so unique and original that you will forget you’re watching a vampire film. And these days, that’s saying something.

Streetwalkin’ – This 1985 exploitation flick stars recent Oscar-winning actress Melissa Leo in a Roger Corman Cult Classic about girls, guns and life on the street.

Eastbound and Down: The Complete Season 2 – Danny McBride owns the role of Kenny Powers, a once-great Major League pitcher who got derailed by the excesses of fame. No one else but McBride could make you sympathize with such a schmuck. And for that, we are grateful.

The United States of Tara: The Third Season – The third season of this now-canceled Showtime series starring the amazing Toni Collette.

Spy Kids, Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams, Spy Kids 3: Game Over – Robert Rodriguez’s popular kid’s franchise gets a Blu-Ray upgrade just in time for the fourth installment to hit theaters.

Zen: Vendetta, Cabal, Ratking – BBC series about an Italian detective Aurelio Zen (Rufus Sewell). Good stuff.

Outside the Law – Historical drama, and Academy Award nominee, about Algerian soldiers fighting to free their country from French colonization.

The Music Never Stopped – J.K. Simmons and Lou Taylor Pucci star in this true story about the healing power of music and the bond that exists between father and son.

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