Bad Journalism

Y'know sometimes how a story or a situation can just sit in the back of your mind all week? Well, it's been one of those weeks. In this case, the thing that's been pinging around my cranium for the last few days has been this article from the Guardian.

It's the worst piece of journalism I've seen in a while, and whilst two of those comics who have been misrepresented have been afforded a right-of-reply (Richard Herring's can be read here and Brendon Burns' can be read here) this is still too little too late in my book.

I've long been troubled by the idea of how the press can deliberately misrepresent a person, and to take an avowedly and outspokenly anti-racist such as Herring and use out of context quotes to portray him as the opposite is fundamentally depressing but nothing new.

Here's a fun game to play. Take a look around your house, and see what items could be misrepresented in some way by the tabloids were you ever to stand accused of a crime. Granted, my own house is full of a great deal of amassed paraphernalia from years of shooting straight-to-DVD splatter movies, so I have a head start. I've got an awful lot of bloodstained wedding dresses, gimp masks, surgical tools, cheerleader outfits and chainsaws sitting in my loft, which would pretty much mean that the tabloids would hang me without trial if they ever found the need to. But what about beyond that? Ok, let's have a rummage through a typical loft.

What do we have here?

"Films feature full-frontal footage of naked children, and real-life death and mutilation"

That'd be Superman: The Movie, Good Morning Vietnam and JFK..

"Publications featuring underage sexualised nudity"

That'd be back-issues of the tabloid newspapers themselves (!) from a few years ago before they raised the minimum age for Page 3 from 16 to 18.

"Audio recordings detailing mutilation, rape and murder"

That'd be the Eminem albums.

"Books detailing black magic rituals"

Harry Potter stand up and take a bow.

It sounds like I'm exaggerating for comic effect here, but I'm really not. The cumalative effect of listing a whole bunch of stuff completely out of context is a very powerful thing. If I'd never heard of Richard Herring prior to that article on Monday I would, frankly, have assumed that he was at best an idiot and at worst a fascist. The fact that he's actually one of the best stand-ups in the country and has strongly held and frequently articulated anti-racist views makes the article both incredibly irritating and also rather dangerous.

I still can't work out Brian Logan's motives, and in a way I'm past caring. If it was an article in the Daily Mail I'd be able to shrug it off easier (frankly, if you read that piece of shit and expect it to be anything other than incoherent lies then you deserve everything you get), but The Guardian turns up on my mat most mornings, and I'd credited them with a little more. Not a lot, just a little.

As Beck once so beautifully put it..

"Don't believe everything that you read,
You get.."

(Coughs.. Squints at lyrics sheet)

"..a parking violation and a maggot on your sleeve"

The Devil's Music Release

We're delighted to announce that The Devil's Music has signed with the excellent Lono Entertainment for US DVD release. Check out Lono's homepage at http://lonoentertainment.com/ and, while you're over there, order yourself a copy of James Eaves' fantastic movie Bane which Lono are also distributing.

We're hoping that the DVD will hit in time for Halloween, so I'd best stop typing this blog and get back to preparing our delivery list.

Hopefully we'll be making an announcement regarding a rather unconventional UK release in the next few weeks.

Colin and the BDT rough assembly

It's been a pretty amazing few weeks for our buddy Marc Price, who headed out to Cannes to promote his fantastic £45 epic Colin and ended up everywhere from CNN to The Sun. He was also all over TV that weekend. It's a fantastic example of what can happen in this crazy world of tiny budgets and big ideas..
Back at Jinx, we had the pleasure of sitting and watching the rough assembly of Bordello Death Tales last week. It was a cool experience and a really unusual one; it's not often that a filmmaker gets to sit down and watch a movie that he's directed a third of, yet hasn't seen the rest. I love the flick to bits. It's got a real energy to it, and hopefully delivers more or less everything genre fans are looking for. I can't wait to see it with a festival audience.

Hellbride Release Hits..

..and it's great. The DVD came through my door last week, and Midnight have done a terrific job on it. The movie has been remastered from the HD source and looks brighter and cleaner than any of the screeners. The extras are all good fun, including a commentary with myself and my esteemed DoP Al Ronald. It also hasn't been region locked, so it'll play in more or less any player that you put it into. This one's a must-buy, kids, so point your browser to;

THIS AMAZON LINK RIGHT HERE!!

..and pick up a copy now!

Elsewhere on the web, there's a new interview with me over at;

I LIKE HORROR MOVIES INTERVIEW

which is the first one I've done in a little while. Any other horror sites or blogs wanting to run interviews in support of Hellbride, get in touch and I'll be happy to help.

I've been trying to sort of the remastering of KillerKiller for a potential BluRay release.. It'll hopefully happen, but there just aren't enough hours in the day at the moment..

Release Strategies

As I've blogged about previously, the industry is in a state of flux and release strategies are changing all the time. New business models are cropping up all over the place; I humbly direct your attention through to Indie Movies Online who are offering free, streamed flicks (including Jake West's wonderfully splattery Evil Aliens) whenever you want them. Other folks have been grabbing the digital bull by the horns, and offering flicks in varied digital formats as well as burn-on-demand DVD.. (invest a few quid in Rob Pratten's MindFlesh or Al Ronald's Jesus vs the Messiah to check out cutting edge indie distribution).

Soooo.. Where does that leave us?

Well, Hellbride's going the traditional route to DVD but will also be avaailable for download within the US at least.. (URL to follow next update). We've been looking at the possibilities of initially launching The Devil's Music in a download format, but.. but..

To be honest, it's kind of scary. There's a comfort zone with DVD. It's an established format and we kind of know what to expect from it. The idea of taking the leap of a download/burn-on-demand release for a movie like TDM is slightly daunting; it's a great flick and we don't want to compromise the release in any way. We won't need to make a decision for another few months regardless; we want to give the Hellbride release room to breathe before unleashing TDM on a home format. But the decision will have to be made. And how long are tangible formats actually going to stick around for?

Hellbride Artwork

As the release date for Hellbride draws closer (May 5th, or May 12th depending on where you read it. I have no inside information either way), I thought you might dig a look at the artwork..




Don't forget you can preorder over at Amazon by following this funky link right here.

Hellbride BTS

He shoots, he scores..

The 'he' in question being the mighty Phil Sheldon, who has worked on the scores of all my movies since KillerKiller. This evening, I sat down with Phil and listened to his work thus far on Vice Day, (which, for those who haven't been paying attention, is my chapter of the forthcoming Bordello Death Tales).

It's a weird, dark art; the ability to accentuate, compliment and bring to life the images onscreen with sound palettes and music. Many times, I've gone on about how much I like scores that are a little counter-intuitive (the aforementioned KK score being my favourite example; instead of going for doom-laden bass, Phil opted for sparse acoustic guitar and completely changed the feel of the movie in a way that I absolutely loved). For Vice Day, Phil's opted for stabs of accentuation and some recurring motifs for the two main characters, along with the occasional wig-out for when onscreen action demands it. Watching the segment through with his rough work was a joy.. It brought a couple of moments that had felt a bit flat vividly back to life, and has filled me with a fire to raise my game on the final edit to wring every ounce of tension, sexiness and horror out of the final segment that I possibly can.

Music and sound is so vital. It's an area that I've been guilty of neglecting at times during shoots, leaving sound crew to work with twitchy equipment and insufficient set-up times, or simply hoping for the best under impossible conditions, (the KK shoot, with wildly varying dialogue volumes from different directions in an impossibly echoey environment, must have left our long-suffering sound man Magic weeping into his cans). Tonight was a vivid reminder as to how the audio is every bit as vital as the onscreen images, and I'm determined never to let the area go neglected again.

Can't wait to hear Phil's final version, and I'm itching to get back to the edit suite with a renewed enthusiasm for the project as a whole.

A great evening, all told.

Running up to Christmas..

Having a fun last couple of weeks before Christmas, mixing festive preparations with post-production on BDT. I delivered the mid-cut of my story over to our composer Phil last week, which is always an exciting turning-point in post. I love seeing what he comes up with; sometimes he ends up heading in a fairly counter-intuitive direction. Innumerable lesser talents would have scored KillerKiller with doomy chords, but Phil opted for a fragile acoustic melody which utterly altered the vibe of the flick for the better. We've chatted a little about possible directions for the BDT chapter, but now it's really a case of waiting to see what he comes up with whilst I sit and tweak shots here and there and gently edge the mid cut towards being a fine cut.
I think the other guys are at around the same point as me with their own respective post-production schedules. Can't wait to see the three fine cuts assembled as a movie sometime early in 2009. Be weird sitting down to watch a flick that I've only been a third responsible for.
Had another great review for The Devil's Music over at HorrorNews.Net (click 'reviews' and we're in there).
Fairly well prepped for Christmas, I reckon. We've got a good number of family heading over this year, and we've been trying to work out how to actually fit everybody in. Festive vibes definitely kicking in. And on that note, I'll take the opportunity to wish you all a very merry Christmas. Although knowing me that'll probably mean that I'll end up doing another blog entry this week and then have to do it all over again.

Peace n love,
Pat

Photos and Chainsaws

What you are looking at is the official image of the three directors from Bordello Death Tales. Handsome bunch, aren't we? (Left to Right: Al Ronald, myself, Jim Eaves). Weird to have 'official' photos, which seem to end up getting used over and over again for ages.

The black & white photo that's probably at the top of this blog, for example, (although may not be if you're reading a reskinned version within another site) is bloody ancient. It was actually a publicity photo from back when I was doing stand-up rather than directing horror movies. I was thinking of getting a new one but, frankly, who the hell do I think I am? I haven't stuck a photo onto my IMDB page either, and can't quite work out whether I should or not. On the 'not' side.. I'm a writer/director, so why the fuck should anybody actually care what I look like? On the 'should' side, most of the directors that I like best have carefully cultivated a public image, complete with wardrobe gimmics, and so I sort of feel like I can get away with it. Plus, let's be honest, I'm an attention junkie. If I wasn't an attention junkie I'd have never got involved in movies, let alone my prior stint in stand-up.

One of the reasons I've been thinking about photos.. The chainsaw from TrashHouse finally made its way back home to the Jinx office the other week. And it's almost impossible to resist the urge to pose with it. It's a hulking great thing, damn heavy and really looks like it means business. And I keep thinking, hey, maybe I can find an excuse to pose for a publicity photo with that sucker. I know it's pathetic and sad. But I make horror movies, for God's sake, so of course I want to pose with chainsaws. Maybe a chainsaw in one hand and a camera in the other. In an urban wasteland. Like I'm in Mad Max.

Please note; I think I'm safely into the realms of self-parody now. But when I look at the chainsaw I'm not too sure. The other odd thing, of course, is that I'm terrified of it. As an object. Even though it doesn't work any more, there's a part of me that feels like it's going to splutter into very real and dangerous life at any minute (hence the amusing 'trivia' that someone added to my aforementioned IMDB page) and start ripping up everything in the house. I'm not an outdoorsy kind of guy, and my only frame of reference for chainsaws is from my own and other people's horror movies. I don't associate them with gardening. I associate them with unpleasantness, so much so that it actually feels oddly transgressive to have one in the house.

Oh, and before I sign off, I was rather pleased last week to notice this blog quoted extensively over on The Melon-Farmers anti-censorship site. I've read that site for years, and is was strange to be reading it and suddenly realising that I was reading my own ramblings.

Rock on,
Pat

The industry

Hmm.. How do I dance around this subject? Is this something I even want to address? At the end of the day, what is the purpose of this blog? Am I basically just here to plug stuff, and say that everything's great? Because sometimes it ain't that great.

Because, as far as independents are concerned, the industry is broken.

A quick look around the shelves of my local Blockbuster (which, as a chain, has its own problems), reveals that very nearly all the straight-to-DVD horror on their shelves is put out by Sony or Lionsgate (oh, those tiny independents). Two years ago, when TrashHouse hit those shelves, there were at least a dozen distribution companies regularly putting out indie horror and getting decent distribution for it. Nowadays, they all seem to have either gone out of business or, at very best, gone into a kind of suspended animation whilst hoping to weather the storm. Companies are folding left and right; some of them, like Tartan, make headlines. Countless others have just quietly stopped putting out product and expired.

There will be a new system. It's not all doom and gloom. But the new major distribution system, which I presume will be some kind of complete video-on-demand package which will enable folks to watch any movie from any period straight onto their telly for either a monthly subscription or a per-movie charge, isn't here yet. It might be years away, and God knows whether it'll be indie-friendly or a totally closed loop.

So we're in a kind of limbo at the moment. The day a movie hits the shelves in a single territory it also hits the torrents worldwide, which can be fatal for an indie with no simultaneous worldwide release. There seems to be no way of making money on smaller movies. Obviously, the BBFC have done their very best to turn the knife by tightening their restrictions on things like commentaries, (which now have to be rated as a whole new work, thus adding vast amounts of money to the BBFC costs) and Behind The Scenes materials. Thus when an indie flick does manage to get out onto DVD in the current climate, it can't even afford to have the full extras on the UK disc which might actually persuade people to buy it. And without economies of scale working in it's favour, it's gonna end up costing the consumer twice as much as a 2-disc set of a blockbuster. For a vanilla disc. And the consumer, understandably, will vote with their wallet.

I've seen awesome movies that would have been snapped up two years ago fail to find even basic distribution. There are, of course, other options to be explored. There's a terrific blog over at Zen Films about their decision to self-distribute the movie MINDFLESH which is a really interesting read.. Tragically, though, the BBFC requirements as they currently stand would make a UK version of the Amazon Unbox scheme mentioned in the article completely non-viable. Thus driving yet more of our independent film business out of the country.

The whole thing's a total bummer for those who make and those who enjoy watching independent cinema.

Dammit, I've depressed myself.

Back to endlessly plugging my stuff next time, I promise.

Rock on,
Pat

Good Morning America

And thankyou.

Not one for going wildly off topic on this blog, but watching the US election last night was a pretty amazing experience. Pip & I finally turned in at about 7am, after a bottle of bubbly and a couple of cigars. Here's to a bright and fantastic future.

Oh, and just to keep this post on topic, there's a new interview with me over on indieflicks.co.uk..

More Bordello..

More coverage over at Fangoria (where their new site seems to sometimes glitch in IE for some reason; try Firefox if you have problems) where they also have some exclusive stills, including the first glimpse of Al's Stitchgirl chapter, which isn't actually seen in the teaser trailer..

Bordello Death Tales

So, you may have heard that BDT is Bordello Death Tales.

The project went public over the weekend, with a teaser trailer, teaser poster and everything. You can check them over at our good friends at HorrorTalk. It's a really exciting project and it's great to see the way that it's coming together; three very different stories all kind of bound up together as one movie. I think Jim, Al and I have come up with something really interesting, and I can't wait to see the film all together.

In other news..

The Devil's Music won Best Independent Feature at the Festival of Fantastic Films in Manchester over the weekend. We're chuffed to bits.. Our first UK screening and we end up with a great award like that. Thanks to everyone involved!

Hellbride signs

Hellbride has signed with those lovely folks over at Maxim Media/Brain Damage Films and should be hitting the US DVD shelves at the beginning of 2009, unless I miss my guess.

I've been insanely busy all week sorting out both the HB deal (completing a delivery list is always fun) and also dealing with post-production on the secret project, which I'm going to call BDT but can't quite tell you why yet. BDT was shooting last week, and is now wrapped apart from a couple of cutaways. I'm very excited about it; it's a very different project than I'm used to, but horror fans should certainly find it something to get excited about. It also gave me the chance to work with a few wonderful old friends again..

More soon. Sssshhhhh.

Secret projects again..

See, I'm spending a fair bit of my time at the moment working on a secret project. Again. Last time around, this was The Devil's Music. This time around, it's not. It's.. Ah, no, can't tell you yet. But soon. Very soon.

We had a Jinx Gathering last week, when 40-odd folks from Jinx's ten year history (that's not ten years of moviemaking, but ten years of doing stuff with the brand identity of 'Jinx'. Years before TrashHouse, I was above a pub in Essex compereing the Jinx Comedy Club). It was bloody brilliant to see folks we hadn't seen in years and share a pint or two with them, and I hope we get to do it again before long. It's always good to touch base. I set out with the clear objective of alternating pints of lager with pints of shandy, and succeeded except for the 'pints of shandy' bit. Despite that, I managed to avoid getting utterly bladdered (although I realise these things are relative) and thoroughly enjoyed the evening.

On a non-Jinx front, the weekend before the gathering we went to see The Faint playing in a tiny little venue called Cargo. I'd like to take this opportunity to say that The Faint are one of the best live bands I've ever seen, and to encourage everyone to run off and check their MySpace page at http://www.myspace.com/thefaint and check out new single The Geeks Were Right. That's my plug for the day..

Oh, and we've got a final contract for Hellbride sitting on the office table, which we expect to be signing in the next day or so. I'll keep you posted.

Rock on,
Pat

A review from Kim Newman

I've been a fan of Kim Newman's writing for a long time.. His book Nightmare Movies was one of the first overviews of the horror genre that I ever purchased, and I read it cover to cover more times than I can imagine.

A couple of years back, Kim Newman reviewed my first movie TrashHouse in this straight-to-DVD column for Empire. It was a brief but positive review, and felt like a real milestone.

Yesterday, we had a lengthy review, from Kim Newman himself, turn up for The Devil's Music. It's a really positive review, and scheduled to run in Empire as soon as we've got a UK release date. I obviously can't reproduce the whole review here, but he's kindly allowed us to run a quote from it over on the main site's page for The Devil's Music. It's over here.

Argentina...

Found out that KillerKiller was released in Argentina last month too. Had no idea whatsoever. The title has been changed to the rather funky if slightly unoriginal...



Can't work out how to use the Argentinian order sites yet (they don't seem to have an Amazon) so haven't successfully ordered it to add to my 'international copies of my movies' collection yet. Anyone feels like pointing me in the right direction I'd be extremely grateful.

I've also been working on a project that hasn't been announced properly, so I'm never sure how much I'm meant to say about it. I'm sure I'll just blurt it out myself before too long; I've never been too good with secrets. Except The Devil's Music, which I was very proud of myself for how long I kept it to myself.

Oh, and there are apparently more midnight screenings of KillerKiller in certain UCI cinemas in Germany this coming weekend, so keep an eye out if you're in the country.

I'm sure I'll get round to doing a proper detailed blog again soon. But I'm sure you love these little updates in the meantime!

German Cinema Release

KillerKiller somewhat unexpectedly hit German cinemas for midnight showing across the country at selected UCI theatres last weekend, which we were delighted about.

Oh, and the second part of the Micro Budget guide on Zone Horror is over here.

Lost Tales of Erika Spawn part 3