May 25 is Now TOWEL DAY

May 25 has been declared Towel Day to mark the passing of Douglas Adams, creator of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and the funniest novelist ever to hitch a ride on a Vogon star cruiser. Here's the scoop.

Clerks II

On May 26, Clerks II will be making its premiere at The Cannes Film Festival, with its U.S. release following on July 21. The original Clerks was a masterful triumph of talent over budget, costing roughly $30,000 to produce and managing to be one of the funniest god damn things ever committed to celluloid. Thirty-seven? That's comedy gold, my friends.

Smith had announced that Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back would be his last film set in the View Askewniverse, a place whose most notable residents are the foul mouthed catch phrase spewing Jay (Snoogens!) played by Jason Mewes, and his little spoken Coffin Nail puffing compatriot Silent Bob, played by Smith himself. Sadly, Smith's next film Jersey Girl died faster than that first stormtrooper through the bulkhead at the beginning of Star Wars.

Since Smith has written and directed four great films plus the flawed but still fun Mallrats, I think View Askewnians everywhere should choose to ignore Jersey Girl and pretend it was made in some evil parallel universe in which Ben Affleck wears a black goatee like Spock did in...

Wait, Affleck had a black goatee in Chasing Amy, a film which definitely did not suck.

OK, screw the metaphor. Jersey Girl: let it go.

You're not likely to find a filmmaker more in touch with his fan base than Kevin Smith. If you haven't been following his video blog Train Wreck: The Making of Clerks II over at the Clerks II site, then you've got lots of cool stuff to catch up on.

Come on, Clerks II. Make me proud.

Ghost RiderTRAILER

I was never a big fan of Marvel's Ghost Rider comic book, but I can see how it might work as a film. It stars Nicholas Cage, and more often than not he seems to know how to pick a good project. Take a look at the newly posted trailer over on the Apple website.

The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961)DVD REVIEW

Tim Lucas recently reported on his Video Watchblog that director Val Guest had passed away on May 10 at the age of 94. Guest was a British writer/director with such films to his credit as The Quatermass Xperiment, Quatermass 2, Casino Royale, and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, among many others. Guest's end of the world masterpiece The Day the Earth Caught Fire, has long been a personal favorite.

Guest humanizes his apocalyptic tale by eliminating the genre stereotypes. The end of the world epics of the 1950s usually featured a scientist, a square jawed man of action, and a damsel in distress/love interest. The Day the Earth Caught Fire is told in the form of a newsroom drama, from the point of view of Pete Stenning (Edward Judd of Island of Terror and First Men in the Moon), a reporter for London's Daily Express. Stenning, once a great reporter, has given in to alcoholism and despair in the wake of his divorce.

The film opens with ominous images of a drought-stricken and seemingly deserted London, made all the more effective by two brilliant touches of subtlety. This portion of the otherwise black and white film is tinted orange, giving the viewer a vivid sense of the extreme heat, and even as the opening credits roll, we hear not a single note on the soundtrack. The world seems to be ending with not a bang, but a whimper.

Stenning makes his way from the sun blasted streets into the offices of The Daily Express. His typewriter has succumbed to the heat, so he gets a copy boy on the phone to take his story as he dictates it. “It is exactly thirty minutes since the corrective bombs were detonated,” he says. “Within the next few hours the world will know whether this is the end or another beginning.”

As Stenning speaks, the screen wavers into flashback, the orange tinted film giving way to glorious black and white. In the offices of The Daily Express sunspot activity and earthquakes fill recent issues, while the U.S. Hydrogen bomb test in the Antarctic ten days earlier has become old news. Some are blaming an unnatural increase in natural disasters on the bomb, though such ideas are dismissed as poppycock, that is until news comes over the wire that the Soviets have detonated a bomb in Siberia that is 20% more powerful than its U.S. counterpart. A quick comparison of dates shows that both nuclear tests were conducted more or less simultaneously, which makes for one hell of a news story.

Amidst all this, Stenning makes a new contact at the Meteorological Center. Jeannie Craig (Janet Munro of The Crawling Eye and Disney's Swiss Family Robinson), who first finds Stenning an overly aggressive boor eventually sees a worthwhile man beneath the booze and the bravado. The romance between Jeannie and Stenning provides both hope and tragedy in the face of humanity's possible extinction.

Conditions around the world worsen with rampant flooding, droughts, tornadoes, and a solar eclipse that occurs several days ahead of schedule. Science editor Bill Maguire (Leo McKern, star of the TV series Rumpole of the Bailey) has a hypothesis, backed up by information leaked from the Meteorological Center by Jeannie. The combined force of the twin nuclear tests have shifted the earth's axis, creating a new equator and shifting climates worldwide. The situation becomes even more grave, when Russian scientists announce that not only has earth's axis changed, but its orbit has also been altered, and the planet is heading toward the sun.

The distrust of authority seen here is not the sort of thing one would have seen in an American film from the period. Films in which the U.S. government lies to its citizens would not become common until the post Watergate period. The rapid fire speech common to newspaper films (His Girl Friday comes to mind) combined with the variety of British accents can make some of the dialog difficult to make out, but that's why you have a rewind button. Adding greatly to the realism is the casting of Arthur Christiansen as the editor of the Daily Express. Christiansen, though not an actor, was a recently retired London newspaper editor.

Special effects are minimal, with many of the worldwide catastrophes being portrayed with stock footage. It's the characters that sell this story, and they sell it well. The film's climax is haunting and is guaranteed to stay with you.

The Day the Earth Caught Fire's entry at IMDB.

Danger DiabolikTRAILER

I'm really getting hooked on YouTube.com. Witness the coolness that is the trailer for Mario Bava's Danger: Diabolik.

GRIND HOUSE Companion Book

Quention Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez have written a companion book for their upcoming film Grind House. Grind House: The Sleaze Filled Saga of an Exploitation Double Feature will provide background on the making of the film as well as a history of the grind house genre, and will no doubt be chock full of wholesome family values. Get the details at the official website of Rodriguez's Troublemaker Publishing.

Speaking of SCARECROWS

Remember I mentioned in my Dead Birds review a few days ago that the movie reminded me of a flick called Scarecrows? Well, Iloz Zoc from Zombos Closet of Horror saw the resemblance too and he has posted a review of this seemingly forgotten gore flick from the late 1980s.

Check it out.

Dawn of the Dead (1978)TRAILER

Once again, I'm overwhelmed by the need for a good trailer. If you're reading my RSS feed you'll need to click on over to my site to view this.

Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez collaborate on GRIND HOUSE

Bloody-Disgusting.com and The Horror Channel website have posted some interesting tidbits about the upcoming Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez collaboration Grind House. The movie is intended as an homage to exploitation cinema of the 70s. The film will consist of two one hour features (a slasher film directed by Tarantino and a zombie flick from Rodriguez) with fake trailers surrounding them.

Pretty much any project from either of these directors would grab my attention, but I'm salivating at the thought of seeing Grind House. I've mentioned my growing disillusionment with zombie sub-genre, and I've often described slasher films as creatively bankrupt, but in the hands of these two (dare I say it?) filmmaking geniuses, this movie holds quite a bit of promise.

PULSE website is online

The website for Pulse, the U.S. remake of the Japanese film Kairo, is up and running. It's an incredible design job, and it's creepy as hell.