Projects
Fantastic Fest Bumpers
08/17/09 01:26 PM
Shot some Fantastic Fest bumpers and could use some votes for them! Check ‘em out!!!!
All films had to have a child, a monster and end with the word “Fantastic”
The Weiner Dog Gang
A Werewolf in My Bedroom
Monster Energy
A Big Day
I could really use the votes, I’m up against some steep competition...
All films had to have a child, a monster and end with the word “Fantastic”
The Weiner Dog Gang
A Werewolf in My Bedroom
Monster Energy
A Big Day
I could really use the votes, I’m up against some steep competition...
Comments
Claudio Fragasso Challenge Pt. 2: White Apache
05/04/09 05:12 AM
[My apologies for having this come so late after the last one, I’ve been sick recently - no, not the swine flu; I’m pretty much sicker of people asking if it’s swine flu than being sick...]
The Claudio Fragasso Challenge, for me, isn't really about having the strength to sit down and watch a handful of bad movies. Anybody can do that. No, at it's heart, the goal of the challenge is to come to an understanding - what lead Fragasso to make such a bizarrely fascinating film like Troll 2 - where did it come from? Was he always making strange films and only Troll 2 took off in popularity? Was Troll 2 the movie that he always wanted to make, but kept pent up inside of him, waiting to burst free in a moment of what some would call pure artistic expression? There's been a lot of research and thousands, if not millions, of words written about the development of the greats like Bergman, Fellini, Godard, etc. I've got a book on my shelf chronicling the development of Woody Allen and his opinions on various subjects over the years.
But not every filmmaker is of that caliber.
Perhaps there's something to learn in the development (Or devolution) of a lesser filmmaker. We study the greats to in striving to be like them, but maybe we should be learning from the mistakes of those who failed to avoid their pitfalls. Maybe we should study the mediocre to see what the genius idols could have been if the right circumstances didn't pop up.
White Apache
This barebones and mechanical description of the film implies a movie about understanding differences, overcoming racial boundaries, and finding your place in the world. Sadly, none of these things actually describe the content in White Apache.
To put things in perspective, this film comes early in Fragasso's career (Troll 2 actually serves as a mid-point), he's directed on his own before, but still continues to partner with Italian trash king Bruno Mattei. Fragasso's involvement on this film is a bit hard to decipher, as it's a film that he co-directed/assistant directed.
Even more confusing is trying to figure out what exactly an Italian Assistant Director does, exactly. In America, the term AD is a bit of a misnomer, it's not a position that traditionally leads to directing, instead it's more about keeping the production on-time/organized. Looking at a bit of Italian film history (Bertolucci was AD to Pasolini, Leone AD'd for De Sica) the title seems to be more of what's referred to in the states as a Second Unit Director - the guy who shoots establishing shots, time-lapse sequences, anything that either needs to be done concurrently or that the primary director doesn't want to bother with. That said, I can't find any source that details explicitly what the position does in Italy, particularly in the assembly-line film houses. (If anybody has an expertise and wants to chime in, I'd be grateful).
So, all of that said, White Apache feels like it has split-brain disease - that different parts were handled by different people. The vast majority of the film seems to be directed by somebody who just didn't really care, as long as the scene's purpose was achieved (or close enough). Then there's some parts that seem to be a little more bizarre... which I can only hope are the early manifestations of the Fragasso style.
The film begins oddly, with an Indian, Crazy Bull, looking into the camera, breaking the fourth wall, telling the audience that the story they're about to watch is one of great importance to the Apache people, however, in order to make the story more palatable, "The Apaches in our story will be speaking our language". If the film was made under more masterful hands, it'd be upheld as a great avant-garde moment in Italian westerns, both in putting the narration in the hands of the Indians whom speaking directly to the audience, and having the Indians call English "our" language... but under Mattei/Fragasso it can only be described as sloppy, it’s a mistake that nobody cared enough to correct. The character of Crazy Bull is an interesting one - he serves as a post-modern narrator, often telling you exactly that, "this is where our story takes a turn" and whatnot. He serves as a reliable narrator to the audience, when inside the narrative, he's regarded as a joke and a loon. Usually if a narrator character is placed inside a story, it's a bit role, or that of a wise or caring elder... in this film he takes the narrator's omniscience to whole new level - at one point Shining Sky, the titular White Apache, is hanged from a tree. Crazy Bull just walks up to him and cuts him down - there's not even a "lucky for you I was just passing by" or "I heard all the commotion and came to check things out"... No, he just walks up to him and cuts him down. If the writers (who weren’t Mattei and Fragasso, but typical Italian film industry workers at the time – they have dozens of credits in a slew of positions) were more clever or playful with the character and this dynamic, it could have been a really interesting experiment in storytelling, instead, it's just simply bad storytelling.
Soon after the introduction of Crazy Bull comes the killing of the fur hunters - a sequence so mind boggling that everything in me wants to be able to credit it to Fragasso. I had to watch it a couple times to piece what I could together - Somehow the fur hunters are made up of both pioneers and Indians (which completely contradicts the themes in the movie past this segment) who are attacked when this guy just appears in their camp. He just shows up, they panic and they start getting shot and slashed with machetes. The bandits are a rag-tag bunch and there's no way to discriminate them from the pioneers - when I first watched it, I thought it was about a group of settlers being attacked by Indians - you can't tell anybody apart. What makes the segment even more confusing is that is has no sort of sense of reality - a gun pointed right in the foreground shot off would cause a person in the background to keel over, even though there is absolutely no way that the person could have been shot with that weapon. To say that it's poorly directed is only the beginning.
The split-brainness of the film continues, as it moves from this oddball fight, to boring exposition where the films inconsistencies deepen - Shining Sky, the son of white settlers being raised by Apaches, is told (as a grown man) that he's a white man, after everybody jokes about him being white. Then he goes around screaming "I am a white man!" which causes him to land the prettiest maiden in the tribe. However, the rest of the time his whiteness is a source of shame for him. He's discriminated against because of it. The Indians generally hate the white people, and vice versa, but Crazy Bull's sage advice to Shining Sky is, "Learn from the white man, they do not kill"... This comes late into the movie after white people have killed off 90% of the Indians in the film.
As Shining Sky is exodused into white society for accidently killing his brother, it leads to another oddball sequence - his first visit to town. Sky is told to remain mute and try to blend in with white society and keep his Apache identity a secret. Shining Sky then walks into a bar (stop me if you've heard this one), and gets a shot of whiskey, which he downs, and then begins choking as he's never encountered booze before. He's then promptly arrested for not paying the drink. The sheriff roughs him up and takes him outside where a lady asks Shining Sky, while in police custody, if he can help break her horse. Sky does and is hired by the lady to be her stableboy. It happens in about as much time as it took to read that. While not as completely bonkers as anything in Troll 2, it certainly shows some roots that would grow into what would become legend.
Unfortunately, the film does not have many notable points - it's a very, very sprawling film. Poorly structured as well - it pretty much goes from Shining Sky being captured by evil whites and him having to escape, to Rising Sun (his girlfriend) being captured by evil whites and her needing rescue... over and over and over again. Every time you think that he's learned his lesson, the whites get a hold of somebody and the cycle begins again. It's downright tedious at times. The final sequence where Shining Sky faces off against the last of the whites lasts about 15 minutes... of mostly crawling and grunting. No, White Apache doesn't feature some of that "so bad it's good", it features a lot of the "It's so bad, it's painful to watch".
Watching the ending of the film (which I won't spoil even though I never really cared at all and just wanted it to end) is, however, made worth it to watch one sequence that comes out of nowhere. Shining Sky escapes into the woods with a pregnant Rising Sun and the film just cuts to stock footage. A lot of stock footage. Wolves, time lapse clouds over the desert, birds, and, of all things, the ocean. A lot of the ocean in fact. What is it supposed to mean? I have no idea.
Where it fits
When I'm writing about these movies, I'm not trying to be a film critic, or be cooler than the movies or anything like that, but I just gotta say that this is one lousy movie. Where Monster Dog was offensive in being just plain boring and an aggressively mediocre entry into a saturated genre, White Apache suffers from a lot of bad storytelling devices, bad directing, bad acting, but at least has seeds of the insanity that we'd see in the crown gem of the Fragasso collection.
As White Apache comes early in Fragasso's career and early in his tutelage under Mattei, we have to assume that Mattei did most of the heavy lifting here. Which is fine because most of the film is really dull and frankly uninteresting. And while I'd love to attribute most of the crazy bits to Fragasso and claim that this is him starting to peek out of his shell, it would mostly a jump to wishful conclusions. No, this is Mattei's film through and through, but Fragasso was training under Mattei during this time, so while Fragasso may not be responsible for the whole going into town sequence, it definitely seems like, at the very least, a large part of it rubbed off on him.
What’s truly frustrating about this film, and films like it, is that it seems to be made without any care. While it’s understandable to have the mode of production so regimented that the film is basically made as quickly as possible, as cheaply as possible, and as close-to-a-hit as possible, there are many films out there that had somebody simply give a damn and they turned out much better, some are amazing. When taking a film like this apart and trying to assign blame, the place where it truly falls on is the apathy of the production. Was either Mattei or Fragasso really thinking about this movie while making it? No – they were concerned about delivering the film on time and getting the next piece of work into production as soon as possible. So, was there a film that made Fragasso ever really care about what he did, made him refine his craft and make something that he really believed in?
I don’t know. I’m looking – maybe I’ll find it.
Maybe I won’t.
The Claudio Fragasso Challenge, for me, isn't really about having the strength to sit down and watch a handful of bad movies. Anybody can do that. No, at it's heart, the goal of the challenge is to come to an understanding - what lead Fragasso to make such a bizarrely fascinating film like Troll 2 - where did it come from? Was he always making strange films and only Troll 2 took off in popularity? Was Troll 2 the movie that he always wanted to make, but kept pent up inside of him, waiting to burst free in a moment of what some would call pure artistic expression? There's been a lot of research and thousands, if not millions, of words written about the development of the greats like Bergman, Fellini, Godard, etc. I've got a book on my shelf chronicling the development of Woody Allen and his opinions on various subjects over the years.
But not every filmmaker is of that caliber.
Perhaps there's something to learn in the development (Or devolution) of a lesser filmmaker. We study the greats to in striving to be like them, but maybe we should be learning from the mistakes of those who failed to avoid their pitfalls. Maybe we should study the mediocre to see what the genius idols could have been if the right circumstances didn't pop up.
White Apache
A wagon train of unsuspecting fur hunters is attacked by a horde of merciless outlaws, killing all except a pregnant woman. Miraculously, with the assistance of an Apache Chief, she gives birth to a child before dying. The boy is adopted and raised by the Chief and becomes part of the tribe until a tragic twist of fate causes him to accidently kill his Indian brother.Distraught, he leaves the tribe and ventures into the world of the white man. There is no place for a "White Apache" in a society where deception is commonplace, and being different only prompts violence and undeserved prejudice. - The back of the VHS (Typographical errors intact)
This barebones and mechanical description of the film implies a movie about understanding differences, overcoming racial boundaries, and finding your place in the world. Sadly, none of these things actually describe the content in White Apache.
To put things in perspective, this film comes early in Fragasso's career (Troll 2 actually serves as a mid-point), he's directed on his own before, but still continues to partner with Italian trash king Bruno Mattei. Fragasso's involvement on this film is a bit hard to decipher, as it's a film that he co-directed/assistant directed.
Even more confusing is trying to figure out what exactly an Italian Assistant Director does, exactly. In America, the term AD is a bit of a misnomer, it's not a position that traditionally leads to directing, instead it's more about keeping the production on-time/organized. Looking at a bit of Italian film history (Bertolucci was AD to Pasolini, Leone AD'd for De Sica) the title seems to be more of what's referred to in the states as a Second Unit Director - the guy who shoots establishing shots, time-lapse sequences, anything that either needs to be done concurrently or that the primary director doesn't want to bother with. That said, I can't find any source that details explicitly what the position does in Italy, particularly in the assembly-line film houses. (If anybody has an expertise and wants to chime in, I'd be grateful).
So, all of that said, White Apache feels like it has split-brain disease - that different parts were handled by different people. The vast majority of the film seems to be directed by somebody who just didn't really care, as long as the scene's purpose was achieved (or close enough). Then there's some parts that seem to be a little more bizarre... which I can only hope are the early manifestations of the Fragasso style.
The film begins oddly, with an Indian, Crazy Bull, looking into the camera, breaking the fourth wall, telling the audience that the story they're about to watch is one of great importance to the Apache people, however, in order to make the story more palatable, "The Apaches in our story will be speaking our language". If the film was made under more masterful hands, it'd be upheld as a great avant-garde moment in Italian westerns, both in putting the narration in the hands of the Indians whom speaking directly to the audience, and having the Indians call English "our" language... but under Mattei/Fragasso it can only be described as sloppy, it’s a mistake that nobody cared enough to correct. The character of Crazy Bull is an interesting one - he serves as a post-modern narrator, often telling you exactly that, "this is where our story takes a turn" and whatnot. He serves as a reliable narrator to the audience, when inside the narrative, he's regarded as a joke and a loon. Usually if a narrator character is placed inside a story, it's a bit role, or that of a wise or caring elder... in this film he takes the narrator's omniscience to whole new level - at one point Shining Sky, the titular White Apache, is hanged from a tree. Crazy Bull just walks up to him and cuts him down - there's not even a "lucky for you I was just passing by" or "I heard all the commotion and came to check things out"... No, he just walks up to him and cuts him down. If the writers (who weren’t Mattei and Fragasso, but typical Italian film industry workers at the time – they have dozens of credits in a slew of positions) were more clever or playful with the character and this dynamic, it could have been a really interesting experiment in storytelling, instead, it's just simply bad storytelling.
Soon after the introduction of Crazy Bull comes the killing of the fur hunters - a sequence so mind boggling that everything in me wants to be able to credit it to Fragasso. I had to watch it a couple times to piece what I could together - Somehow the fur hunters are made up of both pioneers and Indians (which completely contradicts the themes in the movie past this segment) who are attacked when this guy just appears in their camp. He just shows up, they panic and they start getting shot and slashed with machetes. The bandits are a rag-tag bunch and there's no way to discriminate them from the pioneers - when I first watched it, I thought it was about a group of settlers being attacked by Indians - you can't tell anybody apart. What makes the segment even more confusing is that is has no sort of sense of reality - a gun pointed right in the foreground shot off would cause a person in the background to keel over, even though there is absolutely no way that the person could have been shot with that weapon. To say that it's poorly directed is only the beginning.
The split-brainness of the film continues, as it moves from this oddball fight, to boring exposition where the films inconsistencies deepen - Shining Sky, the son of white settlers being raised by Apaches, is told (as a grown man) that he's a white man, after everybody jokes about him being white. Then he goes around screaming "I am a white man!" which causes him to land the prettiest maiden in the tribe. However, the rest of the time his whiteness is a source of shame for him. He's discriminated against because of it. The Indians generally hate the white people, and vice versa, but Crazy Bull's sage advice to Shining Sky is, "Learn from the white man, they do not kill"... This comes late into the movie after white people have killed off 90% of the Indians in the film.
As Shining Sky is exodused into white society for accidently killing his brother, it leads to another oddball sequence - his first visit to town. Sky is told to remain mute and try to blend in with white society and keep his Apache identity a secret. Shining Sky then walks into a bar (stop me if you've heard this one), and gets a shot of whiskey, which he downs, and then begins choking as he's never encountered booze before. He's then promptly arrested for not paying the drink. The sheriff roughs him up and takes him outside where a lady asks Shining Sky, while in police custody, if he can help break her horse. Sky does and is hired by the lady to be her stableboy. It happens in about as much time as it took to read that. While not as completely bonkers as anything in Troll 2, it certainly shows some roots that would grow into what would become legend.
Unfortunately, the film does not have many notable points - it's a very, very sprawling film. Poorly structured as well - it pretty much goes from Shining Sky being captured by evil whites and him having to escape, to Rising Sun (his girlfriend) being captured by evil whites and her needing rescue... over and over and over again. Every time you think that he's learned his lesson, the whites get a hold of somebody and the cycle begins again. It's downright tedious at times. The final sequence where Shining Sky faces off against the last of the whites lasts about 15 minutes... of mostly crawling and grunting. No, White Apache doesn't feature some of that "so bad it's good", it features a lot of the "It's so bad, it's painful to watch".
Watching the ending of the film (which I won't spoil even though I never really cared at all and just wanted it to end) is, however, made worth it to watch one sequence that comes out of nowhere. Shining Sky escapes into the woods with a pregnant Rising Sun and the film just cuts to stock footage. A lot of stock footage. Wolves, time lapse clouds over the desert, birds, and, of all things, the ocean. A lot of the ocean in fact. What is it supposed to mean? I have no idea.
Where it fits
When I'm writing about these movies, I'm not trying to be a film critic, or be cooler than the movies or anything like that, but I just gotta say that this is one lousy movie. Where Monster Dog was offensive in being just plain boring and an aggressively mediocre entry into a saturated genre, White Apache suffers from a lot of bad storytelling devices, bad directing, bad acting, but at least has seeds of the insanity that we'd see in the crown gem of the Fragasso collection.
As White Apache comes early in Fragasso's career and early in his tutelage under Mattei, we have to assume that Mattei did most of the heavy lifting here. Which is fine because most of the film is really dull and frankly uninteresting. And while I'd love to attribute most of the crazy bits to Fragasso and claim that this is him starting to peek out of his shell, it would mostly a jump to wishful conclusions. No, this is Mattei's film through and through, but Fragasso was training under Mattei during this time, so while Fragasso may not be responsible for the whole going into town sequence, it definitely seems like, at the very least, a large part of it rubbed off on him.
What’s truly frustrating about this film, and films like it, is that it seems to be made without any care. While it’s understandable to have the mode of production so regimented that the film is basically made as quickly as possible, as cheaply as possible, and as close-to-a-hit as possible, there are many films out there that had somebody simply give a damn and they turned out much better, some are amazing. When taking a film like this apart and trying to assign blame, the place where it truly falls on is the apathy of the production. Was either Mattei or Fragasso really thinking about this movie while making it? No – they were concerned about delivering the film on time and getting the next piece of work into production as soon as possible. So, was there a film that made Fragasso ever really care about what he did, made him refine his craft and make something that he really believed in?
I don’t know. I’m looking – maybe I’ll find it.
Maybe I won’t.
The Claudio Fragasso Challenge: Monster Dog
04/09/09 03:19 AM
Unquestionably the breakout hit of this year's SXSW was the documentary "Best Worst Movie" covering the stars and cult phenomenon that surrounds the movie Troll 2. The documentary is very deserving of the praise, it's surprisingly emotional, you really connect with the characters and it's just better than any movie on the subject of Troll 2 has any right to be.
Oh, and I'm not just saying this because I appear in the film.
One event that I ended up attending during the fest was the SXSW BBQ run, where they took a van full of people out to Lockhart to get the real authentic stuff... After 2-and-a-half months of living in LA, I couldn't wait for it. On the ride over, I shared a van with Troll 2 actor/Best Worst Movie director Michael Paul Stephenson and Cinematical/FearNet writer Scott Weinberg. While many things were discussed, movies at the fest, Twitter, that sort of thing. Eventually the subject of Claudio Fragasso, director of Troll 2 came up. In Best Worst Movie Claduio makes great claims to be a great film director, and that Troll 2 is a great, political film that fans are embracing because it's so good. While it's easy to refute the stuff pertaining to Troll 2, it soon became clear that nobody in the van had ever seen another Claudio Fragasso film.
Thus, the challenge. Scott Weinberg put it up (naming me specifically) and going with the whole, "Wow, that's a terrible idea, it's going to be hilarious when I do it" vibe that inhabits a lot of my life, I soon began crawling the internet to find the rest of Claduio's catalogue.
The Problem
The filmography of Claudio Fragrasso is deceptively long, IMDB lists him as the director of 22 films, but looking further into them, most of them he co-directed with prolific schlock director Bruno Mattei. Mattei is infamous, himself, for just churning out low-budget films in the 70s, mostly dealing in rip-offs and "sequels" to movies that he had nothing to do with, both of which are staples of Italian cinema at the time. Mattei's work mostly covers zombie films, Black Emanuelle films (the unauthorized Emmanuelle films starring Laura Gemser, the beauty who would end up doing costume design for Troll 2), and even ended up doing a rip-off film called Terminator 2 (which, of course, had nothing to do with the series we all know and love).
Mattei would frequently team up with Fragrasso or other filmmakers such as Joe D'amato (who would end up doing a movie called Troll 3), so that he could churn out movies back-to-back just to get more products out into the marketplace. Fragasso is additionally credited on his Mattei team-ups as Assistant Director, making his function on these films much less clear.
Out of the 22 films Fragasso has credit for, he only did 14 on his own. Of those 14, only 2 are readily available in the United States (Monster Dog and Troll 2). I'm working on figuring out which Italian DVDs have English subtitles, but it's very difficult, as even finding the Italian versions is proving to be very difficult, and they're not consistent in their feature listing. Some don't even have official Italian releases, only living on in the grey market DVD-R world.
This is proving more difficult than I had anticipated.
Monster Dog
Monster Dog is the first film both written and directed by Claudio Fragasso (using the pseudonym "Clyde Anderson" for the directing credit)- no co-writer, no co-director, nothing. It's the only film that he would both write and direct on his own, leaving it the only "pure" example of what Fragasso was trying to accomplish in his film career.
While nothing that compares to the cult phenomenon that encircles Troll 2, Monster Dog, surprisingly, has its own cult following - mainly because the lead role is played by none other than Alice Cooper. Cooper, of course, one of the innovators of "shock rock", seems like a fitting person to head up a low-budget Spanish film directed by an Italian. The film features two songs by Cooper that would not be available otherwise until 1999 - these would also be the only times that Cooper's voice is in the film. For whatever reason (either Cooper's refusal, money concerns, or Fragasso's simple not caring) Cooper did not dub his line for the English version of the film.
Here's the song that begins the movie:
Now, let's be fair about this video - immediately following it Cooper's character of Vincent Raven (Not a bad rock name for any aspiring rockers out there) comments on the video, saying that it's awful and the reason for their road trip (hence the long drawn out shots of the van) is to make a new video (which they end up shooting, but to a completely different song). [The Texan Film Nerd in me wants to point out really quick just how wrong it is to have his James Bond iteration using a revolver, thus proving that some stereotypes about Texans are true.]
So how does the movie compare to Troll 2?
It's an utter disappointment.
While Troll 2 is by most every metric a bad movie, it has a certain charm, a certain "what the fuck?" factor to it - scenes that are out of nowhere, a plot that makes little-to-no-sense, irrational actions by characters... it's completely foreign to all of our senses and it leaves us wondering what kind of nutball made it. No, Monster Dog fails in the worst way it could have - it's completely generic and forgettable. Instead of being another piece of bizarre fascination for us, it serves as just another bad horror movie that would find it's home in a stack of VHS movies just like it at a 1995 pre-teen sleepover.
The movie disappoints in such a unique way, I picked up hoping that I'd neither be able to make heads nor tails of it, but instead... it's a straightforward "teens"-in-a-cabin-in-the-woods movie. Yes, it's supposed to be in a small town, but they never leave the house (which is a Nosferatu-esque mansion for reasons that are never addressed in the movie). It has all the tropes you would expect in a nameless movie from the genre: a forewarning from a mysterious stranger, a nightmare sequence, something trying to get inside, somebody hiding their sinister secret... but nothing done in any sort of new or interesting way, even for the time. It is completely indistinguishable from anything else in this genre from this time period.
Monster Dog also disappoints by actually having some funny exchanges - some intentionally funny exchanges - between Cooper and the rest of his crew. Nobody says anything completely outlandish, it all makes relative sense. Sure, some of the stuff doesn't make perfect sense - but in relation to the genre, it falls in line... For instance, when first arriving at the house and searching for the caretaker Raven takes along a fully-loaded shotgun, where other times when it would be more appropriate to be armed, he goes without. It's not quite logical human behavior, but with the standard set so high... it's hardly worth noting.
No, with watching Monster Dog, we have to re-examine our look at Claudio Fragasso. Sure, he's not a great director by any means - the performances are terrible, technically it's not that well made (The dubbing is bad for even an Italian film of the era), but he's not the complete psycho that we were all hoping for. Instead, he's just another guy who put out lame movies.
The Upside
This leaves us in an interesting position - if Claudio Fragasso is not the sheer lunatic that we were hoping for, why is Troll 2 so insane? Fragasso establishes himself as a completely competent writer in this film, making us ask things like "Where did things like the popcorn-laden sex scene come from? How did the whole 'Row-Row-Row Your Boat' being 'that song I like so much' exchange originate?" Looking over this film and its construction makes me wonder if Rossella Drudi, Fragasso's co-writer on Troll 2 and wife, is the real source of the lunacy.
That's not to say that it doesn't explain some aspects of Troll 2, the Monster Dog itself is a poorly made puppet that has basically cannot move besides its mouth and needs to be mostly obstructed. The setup of the two films is essentially the same - a group of people out in the middle-of-nowhere who become attacked by some sort of unnatural beast that inhabits the area. But these similarities aren't enough to connect the two in any real meaningful sort of way. Basically put: If I didn't know that Claudio Fragasso had directed both movies, I would have never made the connection.
Usually when a film leaves us asking questions it's a good thing, it's caused us to examine some part of ourself, to take another look at a value that we hold dear, but no, Monster Dog leaves us asking questions because it has accomplished pretty much nothing.
Oh, and I'm not just saying this because I appear in the film.
One event that I ended up attending during the fest was the SXSW BBQ run, where they took a van full of people out to Lockhart to get the real authentic stuff... After 2-and-a-half months of living in LA, I couldn't wait for it. On the ride over, I shared a van with Troll 2 actor/Best Worst Movie director Michael Paul Stephenson and Cinematical/FearNet writer Scott Weinberg. While many things were discussed, movies at the fest, Twitter, that sort of thing. Eventually the subject of Claudio Fragasso, director of Troll 2 came up. In Best Worst Movie Claduio makes great claims to be a great film director, and that Troll 2 is a great, political film that fans are embracing because it's so good. While it's easy to refute the stuff pertaining to Troll 2, it soon became clear that nobody in the van had ever seen another Claudio Fragasso film.
Thus, the challenge. Scott Weinberg put it up (naming me specifically) and going with the whole, "Wow, that's a terrible idea, it's going to be hilarious when I do it" vibe that inhabits a lot of my life, I soon began crawling the internet to find the rest of Claduio's catalogue.
The Problem
The filmography of Claudio Fragrasso is deceptively long, IMDB lists him as the director of 22 films, but looking further into them, most of them he co-directed with prolific schlock director Bruno Mattei. Mattei is infamous, himself, for just churning out low-budget films in the 70s, mostly dealing in rip-offs and "sequels" to movies that he had nothing to do with, both of which are staples of Italian cinema at the time. Mattei's work mostly covers zombie films, Black Emanuelle films (the unauthorized Emmanuelle films starring Laura Gemser, the beauty who would end up doing costume design for Troll 2), and even ended up doing a rip-off film called Terminator 2 (which, of course, had nothing to do with the series we all know and love).
Mattei would frequently team up with Fragrasso or other filmmakers such as Joe D'amato (who would end up doing a movie called Troll 3), so that he could churn out movies back-to-back just to get more products out into the marketplace. Fragasso is additionally credited on his Mattei team-ups as Assistant Director, making his function on these films much less clear.
Out of the 22 films Fragasso has credit for, he only did 14 on his own. Of those 14, only 2 are readily available in the United States (Monster Dog and Troll 2). I'm working on figuring out which Italian DVDs have English subtitles, but it's very difficult, as even finding the Italian versions is proving to be very difficult, and they're not consistent in their feature listing. Some don't even have official Italian releases, only living on in the grey market DVD-R world.
This is proving more difficult than I had anticipated.
Monster Dog
Monster Dog is the first film both written and directed by Claudio Fragasso (using the pseudonym "Clyde Anderson" for the directing credit)- no co-writer, no co-director, nothing. It's the only film that he would both write and direct on his own, leaving it the only "pure" example of what Fragasso was trying to accomplish in his film career.
While nothing that compares to the cult phenomenon that encircles Troll 2, Monster Dog, surprisingly, has its own cult following - mainly because the lead role is played by none other than Alice Cooper. Cooper, of course, one of the innovators of "shock rock", seems like a fitting person to head up a low-budget Spanish film directed by an Italian. The film features two songs by Cooper that would not be available otherwise until 1999 - these would also be the only times that Cooper's voice is in the film. For whatever reason (either Cooper's refusal, money concerns, or Fragasso's simple not caring) Cooper did not dub his line for the English version of the film.
Here's the song that begins the movie:
Now, let's be fair about this video - immediately following it Cooper's character of Vincent Raven (Not a bad rock name for any aspiring rockers out there) comments on the video, saying that it's awful and the reason for their road trip (hence the long drawn out shots of the van) is to make a new video (which they end up shooting, but to a completely different song). [The Texan Film Nerd in me wants to point out really quick just how wrong it is to have his James Bond iteration using a revolver, thus proving that some stereotypes about Texans are true.]
So how does the movie compare to Troll 2?
It's an utter disappointment.
While Troll 2 is by most every metric a bad movie, it has a certain charm, a certain "what the fuck?" factor to it - scenes that are out of nowhere, a plot that makes little-to-no-sense, irrational actions by characters... it's completely foreign to all of our senses and it leaves us wondering what kind of nutball made it. No, Monster Dog fails in the worst way it could have - it's completely generic and forgettable. Instead of being another piece of bizarre fascination for us, it serves as just another bad horror movie that would find it's home in a stack of VHS movies just like it at a 1995 pre-teen sleepover.
The movie disappoints in such a unique way, I picked up hoping that I'd neither be able to make heads nor tails of it, but instead... it's a straightforward "teens"-in-a-cabin-in-the-woods movie. Yes, it's supposed to be in a small town, but they never leave the house (which is a Nosferatu-esque mansion for reasons that are never addressed in the movie). It has all the tropes you would expect in a nameless movie from the genre: a forewarning from a mysterious stranger, a nightmare sequence, something trying to get inside, somebody hiding their sinister secret... but nothing done in any sort of new or interesting way, even for the time. It is completely indistinguishable from anything else in this genre from this time period.
Monster Dog also disappoints by actually having some funny exchanges - some intentionally funny exchanges - between Cooper and the rest of his crew. Nobody says anything completely outlandish, it all makes relative sense. Sure, some of the stuff doesn't make perfect sense - but in relation to the genre, it falls in line... For instance, when first arriving at the house and searching for the caretaker Raven takes along a fully-loaded shotgun, where other times when it would be more appropriate to be armed, he goes without. It's not quite logical human behavior, but with the standard set so high... it's hardly worth noting.
No, with watching Monster Dog, we have to re-examine our look at Claudio Fragasso. Sure, he's not a great director by any means - the performances are terrible, technically it's not that well made (The dubbing is bad for even an Italian film of the era), but he's not the complete psycho that we were all hoping for. Instead, he's just another guy who put out lame movies.
The Upside
This leaves us in an interesting position - if Claudio Fragasso is not the sheer lunatic that we were hoping for, why is Troll 2 so insane? Fragasso establishes himself as a completely competent writer in this film, making us ask things like "Where did things like the popcorn-laden sex scene come from? How did the whole 'Row-Row-Row Your Boat' being 'that song I like so much' exchange originate?" Looking over this film and its construction makes me wonder if Rossella Drudi, Fragasso's co-writer on Troll 2 and wife, is the real source of the lunacy.
That's not to say that it doesn't explain some aspects of Troll 2, the Monster Dog itself is a poorly made puppet that has basically cannot move besides its mouth and needs to be mostly obstructed. The setup of the two films is essentially the same - a group of people out in the middle-of-nowhere who become attacked by some sort of unnatural beast that inhabits the area. But these similarities aren't enough to connect the two in any real meaningful sort of way. Basically put: If I didn't know that Claudio Fragasso had directed both movies, I would have never made the connection.
Usually when a film leaves us asking questions it's a good thing, it's caused us to examine some part of ourself, to take another look at a value that we hold dear, but no, Monster Dog leaves us asking questions because it has accomplished pretty much nothing.
From Hired to Fired in two-and-a-half hours.
02/01/09 10:42 AM
I was trying to sleep in a little bit. A little bit of drinking and such lead to a late, late, late night and I was catching up on some sleep. So, I was kinda surprised that I even heard the phone ring (I tend to not to, especially since now my ringtone is the instrumental to C.R.E.A.M.) But seeing who was calling, I answered, we'd been talking about seeing Che, maybe today was the day.
Instead, he offered me up a job PA'ing on a photo shoot. Sure, I'm not doing anything. A couple of phone calls later, I'm all set up and have my instructions. I was to knock around for a couple of hours, then go to a hotel in Beverly Hills, pick up a car and drive it 5 miles downtown and then hang out for the rest of the day. For $200 (Day rate) I could certainly do that.
The waiting around part was easy, a little bit more sleep, caught up on Battlestar Gallactica, ate some food, etc. No problem. I went down to the hotel and found a neighborhood that I could park in for free (I wasn't sure if they'd reimburse me for parking, so might as well play it safe) and got to the hotel. I told them the car I wanted, and they sent somebody for it - security was pretty lax, I didn't even tell them the name that the person on the phone. Maybe if this movie business goes south I can work boosting cars using this method.
They pull the car around and things are going great. I have a full hour to get downtown. I've never seen traffic that bad, I'll probably be early for once in my life, things are great. That is, until I get down and see the car is a stick shift. I can't drive stick. I even told the person on the phone that I can't and they assured me it was a stick (turns out every other car involved was an automatic, I just got the luck of the draw). Panic sets in. I called up a friend who lived nearby to see if he could drive stick, just grasping at straws. No go. I'm out of options. So, I make the call and, yup, lose the job as quickly as I got it. (Thank God that I didn't pay for parking!)
So a pretty funny story. But that's not the only reason I'm writing this up.
Like so many, I'm an avid Twitterer. I pretty much got addicted to it as soon as I started it. So as the events unfolded I kept the twitterstream updated. Looking back, it's kind of an interesting well to tell a story:
Things kick off:
I waste some time:
It was a really good episode. Shut up.
Then things go south...
and finally...
The story told in real-time and as it happened. Its concise, to-the-point, funny, and doesn't make too much of it (unlike this blog post. Haha.) Basically put: For this story, the twitter feed is perhaps the best way to tell the story. While Twitter is useful for a lot of things, I haven't seen it being tapped for storytelling besides the fictional MadMen accounts (which was fun until they became too self-indulgent and involved the outside world too much).
We've all been told by pundits that new media would result in new ways of storytelling, but so far that's mostly proven false. YouTube was changed access, but not storytelling method. The choose-your-own-adventure-type webpages are exercises in patience, and interactive movies are still fun little gimmicks until you get five choices in and see why interactivity in storytelling isn't necessarily a good thing.
With Twitter, a story is condensed (form changes), delivered differently (accessibility changes), interactive without being interactive (Communication changes - readers can send replies that can be addressed or dismissed), it's everything that we've been promised.
So could this be something? Or am I just excited over nothing?
Instead, he offered me up a job PA'ing on a photo shoot. Sure, I'm not doing anything. A couple of phone calls later, I'm all set up and have my instructions. I was to knock around for a couple of hours, then go to a hotel in Beverly Hills, pick up a car and drive it 5 miles downtown and then hang out for the rest of the day. For $200 (Day rate) I could certainly do that.
The waiting around part was easy, a little bit more sleep, caught up on Battlestar Gallactica, ate some food, etc. No problem. I went down to the hotel and found a neighborhood that I could park in for free (I wasn't sure if they'd reimburse me for parking, so might as well play it safe) and got to the hotel. I told them the car I wanted, and they sent somebody for it - security was pretty lax, I didn't even tell them the name that the person on the phone. Maybe if this movie business goes south I can work boosting cars using this method.
They pull the car around and things are going great. I have a full hour to get downtown. I've never seen traffic that bad, I'll probably be early for once in my life, things are great. That is, until I get down and see the car is a stick shift. I can't drive stick. I even told the person on the phone that I can't and they assured me it was a stick (turns out every other car involved was an automatic, I just got the luck of the draw). Panic sets in. I called up a friend who lived nearby to see if he could drive stick, just grasping at straws. No go. I'm out of options. So, I make the call and, yup, lose the job as quickly as I got it. (Thank God that I didn't pay for parking!)
So a pretty funny story. But that's not the only reason I'm writing this up.
Like so many, I'm an avid Twitterer. I pretty much got addicted to it as soon as I started it. So as the events unfolded I kept the twitterstream updated. Looking back, it's kind of an interesting well to tell a story:
Things kick off:
Picked up a job for the day. Damn things happen out here!
2:59 PM Jan 31st from twhirl
I waste some time:
oh jesus christ gallactica
4:38 PM Jan 31st from twhirl
Going to work now, but I have to admit, I'm a little emotional after watching Battlestar Galactica.
4:51 PM Jan 31st from twhirl
It was a really good episode. Shut up.
Then things go south...
So I was supposed to just drive this car to the shoot... But it's a stick... I don't think this is gonna work out.
5:21 PM Jan 31st from TwitterFon
and finally...
Ok. Lost this job. Who drives stick these days? We invented computers for a reason.
5:32 PM Jan 31st from TwitterFon
The story told in real-time and as it happened. Its concise, to-the-point, funny, and doesn't make too much of it (unlike this blog post. Haha.) Basically put: For this story, the twitter feed is perhaps the best way to tell the story. While Twitter is useful for a lot of things, I haven't seen it being tapped for storytelling besides the fictional MadMen accounts (which was fun until they became too self-indulgent and involved the outside world too much).
We've all been told by pundits that new media would result in new ways of storytelling, but so far that's mostly proven false. YouTube was changed access, but not storytelling method. The choose-your-own-adventure-type webpages are exercises in patience, and interactive movies are still fun little gimmicks until you get five choices in and see why interactivity in storytelling isn't necessarily a good thing.
With Twitter, a story is condensed (form changes), delivered differently (accessibility changes), interactive without being interactive (Communication changes - readers can send replies that can be addressed or dismissed), it's everything that we've been promised.
So could this be something? Or am I just excited over nothing?
Viral Videos: From the other side.
01/09/09 05:41 PM
I never set out to make a viral video. Really, I think a lot of the stuff caches on for just the wrong reason. Taking a look at the top videos on YouTube always seems to be a race to the bottom. Looking at the all-time top YouTube videos doesn't get much better. Don't get me wrong, it's really funny to see somebody make a complete idiot out of themselves or a crazy commercial from Japan, but since the advent of YouTube and the whole coining of the term, we're in a complete sea of these sorts of videos. How many three-year-olds dancing to pop songs and cats falling off of shelves can you watch? There's also the glut of YouTube celebrities, which I really don't even pretend to understand that bit. It kinda makes me feel old.
So of course when a video that I co-directed with Thomas Humphreys starts to go viral (go to 3:25)... I can't help but try to push it along, get it out there. Being on the other side of the viral video gives an interesting perspective on the whole situation - it's hard to get stuff out there. A complete uphill struggle if you're trying to get things moving. I think now that we're trying to push the video that it's slowing down the viral progression. When we didn't do anything, it caught on.
The irony of the situation is that the video that we always felt had the most potential to go viral, to spread, to be a joy in people's lives - Beastmaster, Jr - has never caught on. Powder 2: Powder 2 The People had a limited scope and took off to a limited degree - people got it or they didn't, I Love You, Jean Claude (which, funnily enough, is a title that none of the websites featuring it has used) has the sort of pop-culture baiting that people love, so I can see it's spreading around. The Steve Wiebe "Don't Talk" trailer has a celebrated icon in the Donkey Kong world (I'm not making that up) doing his thing. Beastmaster is just family friendly fun, has some pop culture, even has a celebrity cameo, and, I think, is a really good video. But so far it sits at around seven thousand hits on YouTube.
Now, I have to point out, my life doesn't revolve around YouTube hits. I had this conversation with a friend of mine who put it simply - "They're not your audience, Nick. Don't worry about them." He's right, of course, but... with these videos, I kind of feel they are in some little way. Long term, wide scope of things, yeah, it's not important, but I would like for people to see these videos. A lot of work went into them, and they're better than somebody's crappy Batman fan film.
So, with our JCVD video getting attention, we're trying to segue that attention to Beastmaster, which stars the same kid, Eli, who's becoming a pretty great actor. (Although, when we asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he said that he'd like to act in movies. I feel bad about sending him towards this difficult life.) So, you'd think that people who liked one video would be willing to check out the next, right? Well... it's not quite so easy. Here's the challenges we're running into:
1.) Time - As we all know it's hard to get your friends to sit down and watch anything that you ask them to. I still have friends who haven't started on Mad Men despite hearing me talk about it endlessly. I'm the same way - I've been told about some movies that I know that I would love that I just haven't gotten around to for whatever reason. It's difficult to get a friend to watch something - getting a stranger to see something is nigh-on impossible.
Now that said, this is the internet, which has become the de-facto place to go when you're bored, which leads to...
2.) The finicky nature of link sites: You know the sites, the BuzzFeeds and IamBoreds of the world. It's interesting when it's just a random video that's pretty fun, they're quick to put it up. However as soon as you try to follow it up, they see you as trying to use them as a promotion tool... Which is, basically, what they are in the first place. They need links, they need content, but will only take it to a certain point. If I was trying to sell a product, I could understand a "No Free Advertising" policy, but I'm just trying to get people to watch a kid shoot fireballs that set a man's jacket on fire.
Of course, with the link sites comes the...
3.) The Rebranders. Some sites will feature your video, but host it on their site and with their logo. So people are seeing it, but you're not getting the hits that you deserve and it looks like they produced it. We've found a site doing that and just aren't really sure what to do. Yes, they've given us some eyeballs, but they've basically hijacked it. I'm told we can get a free t-shirt by contacting them. I guess the desire for free advertising goes both ways.
There's a lot of difficulties in the viral process. I've started to read up on the process more. Granted, it's not something I really want to be pursuing for a while, but it's an interesting world and interesting process behind it all.
So of course when a video that I co-directed with Thomas Humphreys starts to go viral (go to 3:25)... I can't help but try to push it along, get it out there. Being on the other side of the viral video gives an interesting perspective on the whole situation - it's hard to get stuff out there. A complete uphill struggle if you're trying to get things moving. I think now that we're trying to push the video that it's slowing down the viral progression. When we didn't do anything, it caught on.
The irony of the situation is that the video that we always felt had the most potential to go viral, to spread, to be a joy in people's lives - Beastmaster, Jr - has never caught on. Powder 2: Powder 2 The People had a limited scope and took off to a limited degree - people got it or they didn't, I Love You, Jean Claude (which, funnily enough, is a title that none of the websites featuring it has used) has the sort of pop-culture baiting that people love, so I can see it's spreading around. The Steve Wiebe "Don't Talk" trailer has a celebrated icon in the Donkey Kong world (I'm not making that up) doing his thing. Beastmaster is just family friendly fun, has some pop culture, even has a celebrity cameo, and, I think, is a really good video. But so far it sits at around seven thousand hits on YouTube.
Now, I have to point out, my life doesn't revolve around YouTube hits. I had this conversation with a friend of mine who put it simply - "They're not your audience, Nick. Don't worry about them." He's right, of course, but... with these videos, I kind of feel they are in some little way. Long term, wide scope of things, yeah, it's not important, but I would like for people to see these videos. A lot of work went into them, and they're better than somebody's crappy Batman fan film.
So, with our JCVD video getting attention, we're trying to segue that attention to Beastmaster, which stars the same kid, Eli, who's becoming a pretty great actor. (Although, when we asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he said that he'd like to act in movies. I feel bad about sending him towards this difficult life.) So, you'd think that people who liked one video would be willing to check out the next, right? Well... it's not quite so easy. Here's the challenges we're running into:
1.) Time - As we all know it's hard to get your friends to sit down and watch anything that you ask them to. I still have friends who haven't started on Mad Men despite hearing me talk about it endlessly. I'm the same way - I've been told about some movies that I know that I would love that I just haven't gotten around to for whatever reason. It's difficult to get a friend to watch something - getting a stranger to see something is nigh-on impossible.
Now that said, this is the internet, which has become the de-facto place to go when you're bored, which leads to...
2.) The finicky nature of link sites: You know the sites, the BuzzFeeds and IamBoreds of the world. It's interesting when it's just a random video that's pretty fun, they're quick to put it up. However as soon as you try to follow it up, they see you as trying to use them as a promotion tool... Which is, basically, what they are in the first place. They need links, they need content, but will only take it to a certain point. If I was trying to sell a product, I could understand a "No Free Advertising" policy, but I'm just trying to get people to watch a kid shoot fireballs that set a man's jacket on fire.
Of course, with the link sites comes the...
3.) The Rebranders. Some sites will feature your video, but host it on their site and with their logo. So people are seeing it, but you're not getting the hits that you deserve and it looks like they produced it. We've found a site doing that and just aren't really sure what to do. Yes, they've given us some eyeballs, but they've basically hijacked it. I'm told we can get a free t-shirt by contacting them. I guess the desire for free advertising goes both ways.
There's a lot of difficulties in the viral process. I've started to read up on the process more. Granted, it's not something I really want to be pursuing for a while, but it's an interesting world and interesting process behind it all.