Why I'm a Farmhand and not a Filmmaker...

My fellow farmhand MGX and I had a lively text conversation this afternoon, which degenerated into a brainstorm on farm-related book and movie titles... mostly horror. You may have to be a farmhand to get the true horror of these, but then again, you might not.


Farm horror stories:
The Garden of Shame (ok, this is an actual location on the farm, though it's no longer shameful)
The Land of the Foresaken Brassicas (MGX)
I Can't Get Up After Kneeling On The Cold Ground So Long (a drama)
Corpse of a Thousand Cabbages (MGX)
Revenge of the Runty Potatoes (MGX... might be a comedy)
The Fields Have Eyes! (MGX... recommends Rob Zombie for director)
The Clutching Fingers of Angry Zombie Housewives (MGX... Vincent Price as lead... nobody will get the Angry Housewife reference)
Compost Pile of the Dead
I Think the Ducks Are Stealing My Sanity...
Man With The Screaming Sorrel (this has to have Bruce Campbell in it!)
I Know You Dusted the Beets Last Summer
Cock (Rooster) of the Damned
Satan's Chicken Flock
The Birds (MGX... remake of the Hitchcock film with the Muppet chickens)
He Who Picks the Beans (MGX... based on a Stephen King novel)
The Chickweed Has Eyes (must have tentacles per MGX)
Can't Sleep, The Cows Will Eat Me

New additions (thanks MGX!):
The Turnips That Time Forgot
The Root Maggot That Ate New York


I hope these made you laugh. They made my day totally awesome!


I leave you with the Homicidal Squash, farm mascot and friend to all...

These messages brought to you by...

Intruder

Happy Monday, everyone!

Today's selection from the awesome obscure movie vault is Intruder. This film features some of my favorite people: Danny Hicks, Ted Raimi and Sam Raimi, with a Bruce Campbell cameo for good measure. Don't blink, you'll miss him!

The premise behind this one is...

Creepy douchebag is harassing the employees of a local grocery store...

Starts a huge scuffle...

And may still be lurking in the store...

That's when people start dying...

This film really has it all. Not only is this one of the very few examples of Sam Raimi (above, on the meat hook) acting, but Danny Hicks is amazing! It's got plenty of suspense and an equal dose of gratuitous gore. This film will keep you watching as you try to determine who's killing who. Intruder rates a 5 out of 5 on the obscurefilm-o-meter.

More Sam Raimi:

More Sam Raimi:

Ted Raimi eating watermelon:

Danny Hicks, one of the nicest actors I've met:

I'm not going to give away where the Bruce Campbell appearance is. You'll have to look for him yourself.
Intruder IMDB here.

Why Bruce Campbell is my favorite actor...

In re-reading my older posts, I seem to have neglected pointing out what people who know me know to be the obvious. I adore Bruce Campbell. I'll watch him in anything, even if it is a pile of crap. Luckily, most Bruce Campbell films have enough redeeming qualities for me to overlook poor plots, poor writing, terrible effects, poor production, a overload of lame humor or anything else that I would point out as a flaw in a non-BC film.

I met Bruce Campbell. It was awesome. For being very brief and very rushed and considering that I was terribly tongue-tied. I went in with a plan. I was going to buy several autograph tickets so I could buy a few minutes in the hopes of attempting a real conversation with the man, whom I admire for more than his acting skills. In arriving, my friend and I were pretty annoyed to find out that it was a one autograph per person deal. There would be no bribery and no quick conversation with Bruce in my future.

Photos of Bruce from ZomBcon 2010:

How I partied down at ZomBcon 2010:

Closer...

There was also the awesome Evil Dead Wedding...

But even for all of the above awesomeness, none of those are the reason that Bruce is my favorite actor. Not as Ash...

Not as Sam Axe...

Or Chuck Finley...

Or even as Bruce Campbell...

The biggest reason I love Bruce Campbell is because he's real. I used to state that actors aren't real people; that their jobs are based in unreality and therefore, they don't even know who they really are. Therefore, actors aren't real people. Bruce proved me wrong.

1) Bruce doesn't browbeat his fans with his politcal opinions. Thank you, Bruce, for not being guilty of my number one pet peeve with celebrities. I'll probably end up ranting about this very subject at a later time, as I try so very hard to not unfollow peeps on Twitter for posting political crapfest after political crapfest.

2) Bruce treats his fans with respect. You might question that if you've seen some of his Q&A's, but it's pretty obvious that any shit-flipping he does in that setting is just in fun... even if he does seem like a douche at the time. Having had all of six seconds to speak with the man, I can say that he really appreciates his fans. And he doesn't have one of those overboard egos where all he can talk about is himself.

3) Bruce made his own success. He stuck his neck out there and did the thing that he loved. And he succeeded. The man is an inspiration for up and coming artists and business people. It's nice to look at an example of someone who stuck his neck out and didn't get it cut off.

4) He can laugh at himself. Watch My Name Is Bruce sometime. I'm pretty sure that "real" Bruce doesn't drink liquor out of a dog bowl, but he can make it pretty convincing... in a side-splitting, I-just-hurt-myself kind of way.

I love this quote he gave Starbucks for their cups...

If the print is too small to read, it says:
"If you're worried about getting a job - or keeping one - start a company of your own. By doing so, you'll reap the rewards of your hard work and you'll only get fired if you fail. This is the land of opportunity. Live in it."

My apologies...

First, my apologies to my readers. I know I had planned on putting some movie reviews up here this weekend. I'm still screencapping the films, so it's on the list. I figured I needed some photos to help me review obscure movies that nobody has seen but me.

Second, I owe a very belated apology to my older cousin, LD. She was the victim of so much musical abuse from me over the years and rarely complained. I dragged her to a ridiculous amount of concerts that she would have never gone to willingly otherwise, made her part of every ridiculous scheme I ever came up with, all of which were designed to get us in trouble. For every gig involving buck ass naked men painted blue and playing indescribable noise that could be construed as music, I am truly sorry. She was also my guinea pig for watching really, really, really bad movies. To the woman who cheerfully tolerated Hard Rock Zombies, Return of the Living Dead, Black Roses and a million more terrible films alongside me: Thank you and I'm sorry.

Some concerts I dragged cousin LD to:
Duran Duran (ok, this might have been forgiveable considering her musical taste)
My Sister's Machine with The Pleasure Elite (blue-painted men)
Queensryche (three times, twice with Type O Negative)
Lollapalooza 1994. (so sorry I dragged you into the mosh pit... no water, dust flying everywhere, super hot and you had to put up with me fangirling about Alice in Chains)

On notoriously bad taste and Bruce Campbell:

I have always liked odd movies. Obscure and hard to find movies. Movies with bizarre dark humor.

Some childhood favorites, a few of which you’ve heard of:

- Evil Dead, Evil Dead 2, Army of Darkness. They are so awesome, they are like one big, long movie that should be watched all together. Bruce Campbell, ironically, was not a childhood crush of mine. The Brucey fangirling came later. I accidentally came upon Bruce years later, in Alien Apocalypse. Somehow that lead to me keying in on his career, which has lead to where I am now.

- A Nightmare on Elm Street. The original and Dream Warriors are the best of the franchise. Would love to shake Robert Englund’s hand. Bonus points for good soundtracks.

- Return of the Living Dead. Not to be confused with the ground-breaking films of George Romero, this film is an immensely watchable b-movie from beginning to end. As an aside: I wonder if the appearance of Clu Gulager in a film is a good guarantee of camp-factor?

- Black Roses. The effects in this were surprisingly good for the time period and likely low budget that this film was constrained by. Evil rock band: yes, it’s been done a million times, but not too many people have seen this one. This also gets props from me because it actually had a really good soundtrack. Which I purchased. On cassette. Hello, shades of 1990.

- Hard Rock Zombies. A movie that I suspect nobody loves but me. This time, inexplicably, given the name of the film, the musicians are the good guys. I loaned this DVD to a friend, who commented daily for a couple weeks that he had started watching it and couldn’t continue because it was so bad. He kept trying, though, if for no other reason than to be able to review it to the chagrin of everyone in his Facebook horror group. Will leave you going, “Huh???” many times throughout. The super-jealous girlfriend character is worth watching closely. I think the people who made this film were practicing for a career making music videos. I wish they had released the soundtrack for this puppy, I would have been all over it. Heck, I’d buy it even today, though it is a little buttrock, a little candypop.

- The Amityville Horror (with an honorable mention for Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes). The original was one of the first horror films that scared the living daylights out of me. I’ve always been a little more frightened by the subtle horror than the gratuitous gore films. To this day, people still argue about whether or not this film was based on a true story. As an adult, I realize that “based” on a true story can still be a far cry from what really happened, but as a 7 or 8 year old kid who was allowed to watch almost anything, I took it as canon truth.

My choices in literature are equally mainstream to odd…

- Dean Koontz. I think I’ve read everything he did from the beginning of his career until about 2003. I don’t have the luxury of much reading time anymore, and it seems like when I do, it’s non-fiction. I started reading at adult level when I was about 7. For that reason, my mom stopped censoring my entertainment choices. Life was good. If someone didn’t know what to get for me for a holiday or occasion, it would be the default Dean Koontz novel. Phantoms was the only novel of his made into a film which wasn’t totally raped by the studio. I’d still like to see Dragon Tears made into a film. With Bruce Campbell. Perfection. Or Dark Rivers of the Heart. That would be Bruce-worthy as well.

- Stephen King. I don’t think Stephen King can be avoided. While I consider his writing to be slightly more crass and unrefined than Koontz, I still love some of his work. And he has spawned such a lovely number of B-movies for me to enjoy. Here’s where my taste goes a little strange. Favorite King stories: Needful Things, Dreamcatcher, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon and Insomnia. Looking at a list of his work, I could continue, but I’ll restrain myself.

- William W. Johnstone. This was one of my many author discoveries from the time in my youth where I would ride my bike to the used bookstore and choose reading material based on the cover art and brief description on the back of the cover. If it wasn’t for Johnstone and Too $hort, my mastery of curse words would be lacking. Severely. Johnstone’s works ranged from tales of satanic cults to a love story (What The Heart Knows) to stories of political dissent and societal collapse. Love them all. If I was looking for ideas for the next Sci-fi channel movie, I’d go with The Uninvited. Chemically-enhanced cockroaches who eat flesh. Awesome.