B-Fest 2007 Poster Art

Mitch O'Connell supplies another amazing B-Fest poster!

There are only 57 days remaining until B-Fest.

Nintendo: first place, not third

When measured in terms of profitability, Nintendo is actually the most successful player in the video game market. Dig this New Yorker article about Nintendo's happy existence in "third place."

The Wii has few bells and whistles and much less processing power than its “competitors,” and it features less impressive graphics. It’s really well suited for just one thing: playing games. But this turns out to be an asset. The Wii’s simplicity means that Nintendo can make money selling consoles, while Sony is reportedly losing more than two hundred and forty dollars on each PlayStation 3 it sells—even though they are selling for almost six hundred dollars.

[via Daring Fireball]

Ultraman Mebius and Ultraman Brothers

Godzilla may be languishing in retirement, but the Ultraman franchise is still alive and kicking. And punching. And wrestling. And finally using that fancy beam weapon to destroy the monster. Why didn't he just do that in the first place?

The latest Ultraman TV series, Ultraman Mebius, is just as laughable as they've always been. Perhaps more so. However, the resulting movie features a whole gaggle of Ultramen as Mebius teams up with the Ultraman Brothers to put the hurt on some monsters.

Sci-Fi Japan does their usual kick-ass job of covering the latest film, which is due out on DVD in Japan in January. Before you fire up that multi-region player, however, you should know that there won't be English subtitles on that disc. Looks like they're going to make us suffer until a decent fan-sub comes out, and then maybe there will be a domestic release after a year or so. Maybe. It's hard being a fan of the giant monsters sometimes.

You laugh at cats now.

Those wacky cats - always yukking it up for the camera.

Andy Ihnatko reviews the Zune

"The Zune is a complete, humiliating failure."

Ouch.

Jackson's "The Hobbit" on again when rights revert?

As I am possibly the last person to report, last week's news that Peter Jackson wouldn't be directing The Hobbit may only be good so long as the rights remain with New Line. Saul Zaentz, who essentially owns the rights to the Tolkien estate, went on the record to say that when the rights to the film revert to his company, he'll be on the phone to Jackson first thing.

So all those proponents of a live-action companion film to the Lord of the Rings Trilogy may get your wish. Let's hope Sir Ian is alive and kicking at that point to play Gandalf. And also Sir Ian, since he did play Bilbo in the trilogy. Though perhaps a younger actor might be better suited to the role by that point . . . ?

Another great b-movie Threadless shirt

THIS Is How The World Ends. Zombies and dinosaurs and vampires, oh my!

B-Movie Nightmare shirt from Threadless

Normally I pimp products over at Film Buff Stuff (and I may yet duplicate this over there), but this Threadless shirt strikes close to my heart and features Godzilla and UFOs. There - I just did your holiday shopping for you. You may thank me now.

Telemarketer calls "crime scene"

If you need a good laugh, have a listen to this. One of the more imaginative ways to waste a telemarketer's oh-so-valuable time.

Film Threat's Frigid 50

A hit list of the 50 people/concepts/whatevers that the Film Threat staff consider to be "cold" in the industry. I dislike lists (and as we approach the end of the year there will be endless instances) but there are some interesting comments there if you can find them in between the snide rips on this year's more popular Hollywood personalities – and a few easy targets who have fallen from grace.

Peter Jackson and New Line part ways on "The Hobbit"

In an open letter to fans, Jackson and partner Fran Walsh describe why they won't be doing a feature film version of The Hobbit. It mostly hinges on a lawsuit they brought against studio New Line when there was an accounting audit on The Fellowship of the Ring - apparently there was some question as to whether New Line was treating Jackson's company, Wingnut Films, equitably. Here's the nut of it:

In other words, we would have to agree to make The Hobbit as a condition of New Line settling our lawsuit. In our minds this is not the right reason to make a film and if a film of The Hobbit went ahead on this basis, it would be doomed. Deciding to make a movie should come from the heart - it's not a matter of business convenience.

I've always been skeptical that this project was ever going to come together, and frankly I'm not convinced that it should. The Lord of the Rings is a story deserving of the epic style with which those films were imbued – The Hobbit is a smaller story that needs the sort of treatment it's already been given in the animated version.

Galactus is coming

Hilarious send-up of both Marvel comics mythology and Jack Chick comics.

Galactus is coming.

New stuff around the site

There's a new review up at Stomp Tokyo of a movie called Film Geek. I'll just let you guess why it caught our attention.

Ryan did his usual amazing job of reviewing the weekend's big releases over at Reel Opinions: Casino Royale, Let's Go to Prison, and Happy Feet are all on the docket.

And hey! Is that an update at Attack of the 50 Foot DVD? You bet your bippy! It's Dr. Freex reporting on The Ghoul.

In other news, I'm doing my best to keep fresh stuff rolling here at Blue Glow and over at Film Buff Stuff. Keep an eye on the ST front page for updates on these and other projects.

Kim Jong-Il approves of "The Host"

Twitch reports:

Kim Jong-il, North Korea's Stalinist leader who once threatened to turn the United States into a 'sea of fire', gave his seal of approval to The Host on Thursday, praising the blockbuster's critical stance toward U.S. troops stationed in South Korea and dubbing them the "monster of the Han River."

I need to get working on that review of The Host.

Read the rest of the Twitch article.

CNN disses the Zune

This is great - a CNN puff piece introducing the new Microsoft Zune player turns into a lovefest for the iPod Shuffle. Actual quotes:

"That's a lotta fine print there."

"So who do they think is gonna buy this?"

"Why can't they get some decent design people to make things look better?"

I'm not saying Microsoft can't make a product better than the iPod. I'm just saying they've tried twice and (unless my instincts are completely off on the Zune) failed twice. Plus, what kind of name is "Zune?" And what kind of slogan is "Welcome to the social?"

"The Simpsons" Movie trailer

It's here! It's here! It's here! It's here!

And it's funny.

I'll confess, I haven't been watching The Simpsons this season with all the other stuff competing for my attention, but this looks like it just might be worth the decades-long wait.

Scheduled to hit theaters July 27th, 2007.

Watch the trailer for The Simpsons Movie (in 2-D).

SciFi Japan previews D-War

Keith Aiken over at SciFi Japan has posted an in-depth profile and review of D-War, a new Korean giant monster movie from director Hyung-Rae Shim. Shim, you may recall, was the man responsible for the disappointing Yonggary (aka Reptilian) back in 1999. According to Aiken's review the director's second swing at the plate seems to have yielded a solid flick but:

The many story flaws knock D-WAR to the level of a typical Sci-Fi Channel original movie, albeit with a big budget. It’s certainly not a terrible film, but it’s not particularly good either considering it was more than five years in the making. D-WAR absolutely pales in comparison to THE HOST, which is a crowd-pleaser and a far superior movie in every way. The audience in attendance at the American Film Market seemed mostly bored and confused by D-WAR, which does not bode well for a major worldwide release.

We'll be reviewing The Host here at Stomp Tokyo in the near future, and looking forward (if not excitedly) to seeing D-War when it becomes available.

Get a sneak peek at what irks me

I've been holding this one back for a long time, people. But then I saw this in an e-mail from the iTunes Store:



"Sneak Peak?" The peak of what? Ignorance?

Please, people. Please. When you see something before other people do, you're getting a sneak peek. I don't care that the two words rhyme, or that it makes more "sense" to you that they be spelled the same. It's just wrong.

Rant ends.

"Tenacious D" and here come the holidays!

Hey, look. We're actually updating. Scott and I have agreed that trying to do all of our reviews in tandem just isn't working, so we'll be doing solo reviews in addition to our usual tag-team essays. My first solo review is Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny. It isn't my intention to do a lot of "mainstream" movies, but I'm a fan of the D and had the opportunity to see it early, so why not?

Sticking more in the genre vein, Scott has done a couple of solo reviews of episodes of the new Doctor Who spinoff series, Torchwood.

In the short term I'll be reviewing a lot of the stuff I saw at Fantastic Fest and (to a lesser extent) the Austin Film Festival, and then the holidays are upon us. Scott and I are running out of weird holiday movies to review, so if you have any suggestions we'd love to hear them. (E-mail theguys at stomptokyo dot com.) Here's a quick sample of some of the Christmas stuff we've done in the past:

The Magic Christmas Tree
Black Christmas
Don't Open 'Til Christmas
Christmas Evil

I suppose we could go back and review the rest of the Silent Night, Deadly Night series, but I don't really want to. Are there any creepy Hannukah movies? Kwaanza killers?

NBC commits to "Studio 60" for a full season

Like other people, I had my doubts about whether Aaron Sorkin's new series about a sketch comedy show would survive the full season, but apparently NBC has ordered the production of the remaining episodes of the season. The network could still yank the episodes from the air after they're produced but in that case we'd still get to see them on DVD at some point in the future. (One of the best cases of this was Wonderfalls, which had a disastrous first season but a miraculous story arc that achieved a measure of closure on DVD some time later.) This is an act of faith and perhaps contrition on NBC's part; Sorkin wrote and produced much of The West Wing, which was one the best shows in NBC's history until Sorkin was abruptly forced out after its fourth season. The series never really recovered.

I think NBC is giving Sorkin the remaining episodes of the season in the hopes that he'll figure out where he's going with this series and how to make it entertaining. The story's central allegory - the relationship between the characters played by Matt Perry and Sarah Paulson and how they represent the different cultural factions of the United States – is an interesting one, but in the context of a sketch comedy show it doesn't have a great deal of weight. Maybe it could, but it's a lot easier to wring pathos from a scene when it's taking place in the White House. The hour-long format and moody production design may be a part of the problem – I feel like this could be a great half-hour comedy with fast one-two dialogue punctuated by moments of drama, but for whatever reason Studio 60 has been given the West Wing treatment instead of being produced more like Sports Night (Sorkin's first TV series).

Meanwhile, NBC's other "behind the scenes at a sketch comedy show" series, 30 Rock, continues to flounder a bit. (It continues to teeter on the brink of cancellation until NBC makes up its mind.) This is a little disappointing because I have a huge entertainment-crush on Tina Fey, but at least it makes me laugh more often than Studio 60 – which, given the fact that it's half the length, isn't good. Hey - Studio 60 = 60 minutes, 30 Rock = 30 minutes. I just noticed that. I'm a moron.

B-Fest 2007 lineup announced!

Every year there's plenty of anticipation surrounding B-Fest (Chicago's annual 24-hour b-movie marathon in January), but this year is exceptional. Festival chair Wyatt Ollestad has gone out of his way to scour the film distributors for the stuff that makes B-Fest legendary, and he comes away with a phenomenal program. Given the way film prints are disappearing, I'm surprised he was able to conjure up such a variety of b-movie classics and rarities from so many different decades and genres. It is a thing of beauty.

The program lineup (which is always subject to change, naturally) went live on the B-Fest web site Wednesday night. I won't post it here because I'm aware there are people who prefer to be surprised on the weekend of B-Fest, but in the last week of January I will post a B-Fest preview as I did last year.

Stomp Tokyo: A look back at ten years of specialness

Back in 1996, the idea of reviewing cheesy movies and posting those reviews on the World Wide Web was a fairly novel one. The Internet was still a pretty small pond at that point and anything even mildly remarkable made the rounds pretty quickly, so within about three years Stomp Tokyo had been mentioned in The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, and The Wall Street Journal, not to mention dozens of "cool site of the day" sites of the type that don't really exist anymore. Nowadays with hundreds (thousands?) of movie review sites out there, the only things that make Stomp Tokyo stand out are our stunning good looks, our rapier wits, and the fact that we've been around for a freaking decade. Allow me to shake my virtual fist at the Web's whippersnappers for a few minutes while I recount some of Stomp Tokyo's greatest hits (in no particular order) with excerpts.

Twins of Evil: Our first review (as far as I can recall). I'd like to think that our writing has improved somewhat since we penned this, but even if it hasn't I can at least take comfort in the fact that our movie selection was dead-on from the start. I mean, Peter Cushing and twin Playboy playmates in a vintage vampire movie -- this is high-grade cheese.

[Twins of Evil] makes the most of the title characters. They get plenty of screen time, most of it in low-cut period dresses and flimsy nightgowns. "Play to your strengths" seems to be the motto of this film. Cushing carries most of the serious acting weight, and the girls mostly scream, make evil grimaces with fake fangs, and generally flounce around looking cute.

Godzilla vs King Ghidrah: It took us more than a month after launch to review something in which a character actually stomps Tokyo. Scandalous! Believe it or not, we had enough readers by that point that someone actually called us on it.

If you judge this film by the monsters (and what Godzilla fan doesn't?), this is our favorite movie of the new bunch. Though the story often has all the logic of a fever dream, the special effects are so inspired that this film is enormously enjoyable. From the obligatory scenes of the Japanese army mobilizing, to the final battle which destroys Tokyo's (then brand new) City Hall, Godzilla vs. King Ghidrah is one of the finest examples of that form of art known as the Godzilla movie.

Hmm. Reading that actually makes me want to see that movie again.

The Lonely Lady: After seeing it described as "the worst movie ever made" on an AOL message board (those were the days!), I bullied Scott into renting this movie with me. Judging from the vitriol in our review it may well have been the worst thing we'd seen up to that point. By now, however, its reputation is mostly undeserved - this movie has way too much entertainment value to be considered the worst flick of all time. (The most dreadful movie of all, we've long maintained, is the one that wastes your time by merely being boring.)

Zadora's acting has not much improved since she appeared in the classic Santa Claus Conquers the Martians 20 years earlier. As a matter of fact, the actress she reminds us of most is Kathy Ireland, whom the boys at MST3K described as being able to portray one emotion: dull surprise. Well, Pia was Kathy before Kathy. As Jerilee, Zadora gives dull surprise a workout you would not believe. The actor who got Jerilee pregnant refuses to have anything to do with her? Dull surprise. A weird Euro-trash couple proposition her sexually in exchange for producing her script? Dull surprise. And a producer compares her script to her aborted pregnancy? Dull surprise.

For a while after this review I had something of a fixation on Pia Zadora and even created the very first Internet fan site for her. (Occasionally imitated but never duplicated.) It's still around in all its purple 1990s glory.

Nads Infomercial: This may be the single funniest thing Scott and I ever wrote together. I say that with all the false modesty I can muster.

That's when Sue Ismiel, mother to Naomi, Natalie, and Nadine, decided that her motherly duties extended far beyond giving all of her daughters names that begin with "n." According to Sue's oldest daughter Naomi, "My mum decided to become a mad scientist and develop something." Apparently Sue's strategy was to mix random household substances together to see if the combination would remove hair. A similar process is used to create mixed drinks. The difference, however, is that Sue tested her concotions on her own children. So later in the program, when a big deal is made out of the fact that Nads is not tested on animals, keep in mind that they did human testing first. Besides, isn't it illegal to test your Nads on animals? Even in Australia?

Nukie - When people ask me to name the worst movie I've ever seen, I usually use Nukie as an example. Again, there's way too much goofiness going on here to cite it as the worst movie ever, but it is ridiculously painful to watch. Mere mortals burn at its touch.

As critics, we have to make some hard decisions. One of the hardest is to decide which is worse: the movie itself, or the fact that it took the cooperation of two countries to produce it. On the one hand, we feel it safe to say that test animals exposed to repeated viewings of Nukie would develop brain tumors. Our deep-seated feelings about animal abuse (and our lack of credit at the pet store) prevent us from performing these experiments. On the other hand, the sheer amount of money it must have taken to pay Steve Railsback's nightly bar tab, when weighed against the income of Nukie's assuredly miserable video sales, would probably cause even the most hardened Hollywood accountant to shed bitter, bitter tears.

Star Godzilla - From the very beginning Scott and I were determined to use the Web as our personal psychology lab, and Star Godzilla was our first major experiment. Using an unmade Godzilla project as the seed of an idea for a fictional movie we wrote a review of Star Godzilla - the giant monster movie every kaiju fan wanted to see but could never quite get his hands on - and released the article on April 1st 1998. Star Godzilla is the greatest contribution to Internet misinformation we could ever hope to create, and to this day we get e-mail asking us about how to obtain a copy.

The model cities are made of cardboard, and they aren't often stomped, but rather the destruction is limited to burning. The few exceptions to this (like the mansion that Godzilla stomps at one point, apparently some kind of landmark) look like they were stolen from some kid's model scale train set-up. As a matter of fact, we think you can hear that kid crying just off camera a couple of times.

I was particularly proud of the job we did exercising our primitive Photoshop skills (version 3 baby!) to remove the human figure from the shot from Inframan that we used in that review.

Star Godzilla was not the first April Fools review we wrote (that would be The Dellon Godhead, an extremely in-jokey fictional crossover episode of Doctor Who and The New Avengers) but it was certainly the most successful. We couldn't resist repeating the experiment in subsequent years, usually with a different twist - see Director's Cut, Nature Trail to Hell, A Very Star Wars Christmas, and Goliath and the Cheerleaders. In 2003 we pulled down our own front page, replacing it with the declaration that Hollywood obviously wasn't going to make any more bad movies, so it was time to quit. (If you fell for that one, give yourself a good flogging.) In 2004 we reviewed a film that actually exists but that is so obscure and bizarre that people would assume we made it up. That was the last year we pulled an April Fools stunt - they're so commonplace on web sites nowadays that it seems pointless to try. Or maybe we're just waiting for you to let your guard down . . . .

Rutger Hauer fan backlash - Our review of Nighthawks ended with the line "Plus it's got Rutger Hauer before he started to suck." The Web being a pretty small place at that point, it actually drew some attention from an online Rutger Hauer fan club and the e-mails poured in. Hauer devotees asked us how we could malign one of the world's greatest thespians and invited us to stick our review up our you-know-whats.

Needless to say, we had a ton of fun writing this response.

The Indian Superman - we looked a long time before we found this one, and we're so glad it eventually landed in our laps. When we go to our rewards, we feel sure we'll be remembered for providing the Web's first detailed synopsis of just what this film is all about.

But hey, we don't really care about Superman and all that flying jazz, right? Instead of showing Superman doing anything, uh, super, the film immediately dumps in a romantic subplot. Shekhar goes to Bombay and looks up Gita, who lives in a hostel for young female professionals and works as a reporter for the local Daily Times. Shekhar shows up at the hostel and, under the guise of looking for Gita, begins peeking in random doors to see what women really do when they're alone. It turns out that they get dressed and slow dance. Shekhar seems fascinated by this, which really makes us scratch our heads. He's Superman! If he's really into this kind of thing, why doesn't he just fly to the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders' dressing room and put his X-ray vision to good use?

The Star Wars Holiday Special - A classic. One of our most enduring and appreciated reviews, and really at the heart of that into which Stomp Tokyo evolved.

And just when you think this video couldn't hurt you any more unless it popped out of the VCR at high speed and hit you straight in the face, Carrie Fisher begins to sing. Yes, she sings. And for a second you'll think, "Hey, they're dubbing her," and then you'll think, "No, if they were dubbing her it would sound better."

It's a movie that should have been good but wasn't, a picture that fails so spectacularly and publicly that its creators spend the rest of their lives trying to pretend it didn't happen. God bless 'em. Every one.

Of course, I've ignored a lot of the things that made Stomp Tokyo's first decade great: our stupendous roster of departments and sister sites, the various side projects (like Reel Shame and B-Movies Quarterly) that distracted us from the core site but were fun nevertheless, subjecting our friends to hideous movies in the name of journalism, and of course a sensational group of readers whose praise, criticism, and outright threats have inspired us to keep writing. Please stick around for the next decade. It should be fun.

If you have a favorite Stomp Tokyo review or memory I didn't mention here, feel free to share it in the comments or send some e-mail to theguys at stomptokyo dot com. We're hoping to revive the Reader Mail page, so make it good and weird.

A decade of Stomp Tokyo

I had intended to post a longish Stomp Tokyo retrospective piece in this space, but I've had so much great input from readers over at the BMMB that I'm taking a little extra time with it. For now let me just say that as of today (or was it yesterday?), Stomp Tokyo has been around for ten years. We've had our ups (like those first few years, when a movie review site on the web was something novel and we could get national press) and downs (like the last year or so, when it's been hard to publish more than one review a month), but we're still here and we're still kicking.

You may have noticed the snazzy new look on the main page and in the reviews section, designed by the amazing Jason Morehead of Twitch. Jason's been working with us since April to reinvent the site's look and feel while revamping the underlying site structure with a customized version of WordPress, and I must say he did one helluva job. To do that work justice Scott and I now rededicate ourselves to Stomp Tokyo's original purpose: to watch the weirdest motion pictures we can find and make fun of them for your reading pleasure.

We hope you'll join us as we continue to illuminate the dark heart of video.

A new B-Fest tradition?

Chicago has a new restaurant called Rodan. The name is perfect for the B-Fest crowd, but I'm not so sure the cuisine would fly. Whatever B-Fest visitors end up having for dinner, however, I'm sure they'll end up back at Hala Kahiki for libations. Tropical paradise hidden away in Illinois in the dead of winter? You betcha.