This is just an 18 second clip, but it’s so cool I had to run it here on the main site. It’s from the upcoming “camera verité”, fake doco monster flick from Norway Trolljegeren [aka The Troll Hunter] (Norway-2010; dir. André Ovredal).
Clover-troll!
You can also see a three-headed troll in a clip from the film that I posted on Undead Brainspasm recently.
Previous Backbrain article, which includes the teaser trailer.
Thanks for the head’s up, Avery!
Be part of the ongoing collision between shark, octopus and the human quest for novelty monsters by celebrating Undead Backbrain’s 1001st post with the new extended trailer for the Roger Corman produced SyFy monster flick Sharktopus (US-2010; dir. Declan O’Brien).
What could be better than that?
But if it isn’t enough, io9 has three clips from the film, and RoboJapan offers an article on the excellently Blobbish music.
Though the South Korean giant boar flick, Chaw (directed by Jeong-won Shin), has already been released to DVD elsewhere in the Western world (such as here in Oz) under the title Chaw, it seems some folk want to “subtly” sledgehammer the connection with iconic bloody-monster-on-a-rampage flick Jaws by re-naming the film in US release as Chawz — even though the “z” doesn’t make much sense. To drive home the connection, a spokesperson from Magnet Releasing, which has acquired North American rights to the film, remarked: “If JAWS was looking to branch out to dry land, without a doubt he’d want to be CHAWZ!” (BD Horror).
Apparently the story pretty well follows the Jaws template, moving from random attacks through official denial to weekend tourist event gone wrong and the inevitable professional hunters — and proceedings are given the South Korean slapstick humour treatment, with added jokey scenes. Still, it’s a giant boar movie — and we’ve all loved them since Russell Mulcahy unleashed Razorback on the Australian outback in 1984, right?
Kaiju Search-Robot Avery has gathered together a huge collection of new images from the film and you can check them out in the gallery.
Here’s the Korean trailer, in HD with subtitles, courtesy of Madman Entertainment.
Sometimes it’s fun to re-imagine legendary heroes as bad guys and monsters. I recently did it myself, in a sci-fi horror story about the Assyrian hero Gilgamesh. Sometimes even superheroes become embittered and darken up their act. Superman did it in Superman III and Superman: Doomsday (sort of), and Spiderman in Spiderman 3.
Bunyan (US-2010; dir. Gary Jones) is a dark, contemporary take on the legend of lumberjack Paul Bunyan, who, among other things, was said to have dug the Grand Canyon as he lumbered along, dragging his axe behind him. He had a gigantic blue ox named Babe as a companion, and Bunyan excavated the Great Lakes because he needed a watering-hole large enough to satisfy the monstrous beast. He also created Mount Hood when he piled rocks on his campfire to put it out.
Here he is taking a breather in Akeley, Minnesota:
Bunyan the film sees things a bit differently.
Synopsis:
Kids at a first time offender’s boot camp in Minnesota discover that the legend of Paul Bunyan is real, but much more horrifying than they could have imagined. They incur the wrath of the 15-foot monstrous giant, who was banished from town 100 years ago and thought dead.
I wonder if he’ll have a blue ox?
Director Gary Jones has had experience wrangling ghosts and big monsters, having directed Boogeyman 3 (for Ghost House), as well as Mosquito, Spiders and Crocodile 2. Robert Kurtzman’s Creature Corps is handling the bulk of the FX work, with some additional stuff by Acme Effects, James Ojala, and Michael Kallio. The giant Bunyan will be, in the words of the director, “a real person in makeup, composited into scenes, not a CGI monster”.
Either way, it should be big!
Cast:
The movie stars genre vet Joe Estevez (as Meeks, above) and Tom Downey (as Sgt. Hoke, below).
Co-stars Tim Lovelace (Tanner), Amber Connor, Kristina Kopf and Cliff Williams face the monster lumberjack:
Here, Jesse Kove (as Zack) is in the foreground, with Kristina Kopf, Amber Connor and Cliff Williams keeping their distance.
Amber Connor as CB:
Jill Evyn as Trish:
Cliff Williams (Marty) and Victoria Ramos (Rosa):
Kristina Kopf as Ms K:
So it took James Cameron 15 years to make Avatar, eh? Big deal! Maybe he should have spent more time on the script. Jim Hardison worked on his cinematic magnum opus for 21 years, and it’s finally done.
The film is titled The Creature From Lake Michigan and is described as a “Comedy/Horror/Spoof”. Winner of the Longest Production Time Ever Award (ahem… according to their Facebook page), The Creature is about an environmental activist, a marine biologist and a band of surfers who get together to battle a hitman, low-budget filmmakers and a warrior from beyond the stars in order to help a mutant monster from the depths of Lake Michigan survive the greed and perfidy that plagues cryptozoological anomalies worldwide and has done so throughout history.
Ever vigilant, Kaiju Search-Robot Avery uploaded his cryptid software protocols and demanded clarification from Hardison, who was delighted to expose his obsession to the world.
But first… take a look at the newly finished Trailer!
Avery Guerra: Can start by giving us a little bit of history about yourself?
Jim Hardison: I’m a writer and the creative director for Character, a Portland-Oregon-based company that does story analysis for brands and entertainment properties. I’ve worked as a writer, animator and director in commercials and entertainment since graduating from Columbia College of Chicago in 1988.
I started my professional career by producing the super-low-budget film The Creature from Lake Michigan. The Creature cost $30,000 to shoot in 1989, most of that invested by various members of my family. It was intended to be the first in a series of direct-to-video feature-length films that would launch a movie studio in Chicago, Nocturnal Pictures. Things did not work out as planned. Instead, it was more like a slow-motion train wreck. The shoot was grueling, we got in trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission, we ran out of money during post-production and Nocturnal Pictures dissolved into in-fighting between its partners.
“A 21-year production period! Nooooo! Stay away!”
Ultimately, The Creature from Lake Michigan was put on hold as I scrambled to find a way to make enough money to finish the film. I wound up co-founding my own production company, Image Dynamics, with the cinematographer from The Creature. During Image Dynamics’ seven-year run, I wrote, directed and edited live-action and animation productions, including educational films, television commercials and television pilots. Instead of providing an opportunity to finish The Creature, running Image Dynamics kept me so busy I barely had time to think about the film.
By 1997, exhausted from running my own shop and interested in shifting my focus exclusively to animation, I moved to Portland, Oregon to join the world-renown dimensional animation company Will Vinton Studios, pioneers of Claymation and creators of the California Raisins. There I directed on the animated TV series Gary and Mike, as well as working on commercials, including spots for M&M’s, AT&T, Cingular Wireless, and Kellogg’s. While working at Vinton, I also co-wrote the television special/Lion’s Gate DVD release, Popeye’s Voyage: The Quest for Pappy with actor Paul Reiser.
I co-founded Character in 2000 to help brands get a better handle on their stories. While working at Character, I’ve given story advice to many of the world’s largest brands, including Discovery Networks, Target, Verizon, Samsung, McDonalds and Walmart, and helped to hone brand characters, including the Trix Rabbit, the Jolly Green Giant, Tony the Tiger, the Pillsbury Doughboy and Ronald McDonald. I’ve appeared on The Apprentice as an expert advisor on brand characters, I’ve written for the Emmy Award winning PBS children’s television series SeeMore’s Playhouse and I authored The Helm, a graphic novel for Dark Horse comics that was named one of 2010’s top ten Great Graphic Novels for Teens by YALSA, a branch of the American Library Association.
During all that time, I hung onto the 20,000 feet of negative and the original audio recordings for The Creature From Lake Michigan, not sure that I would ever get back to it, but unable to let it go. In 2005, a friend of mine got a job at a film transfer company in Portland and jokingly asked if I had any film I needed to transfer. I started right away, transferring after hours in order to get cheaper rates. From there, I began the painstaking process of re-cutting the film digitally. Now, five years later, I’m finally finished.
“My monster’s about this tall. Have you seen him?”
AG: Now can you tell us a bit about how this film came about and why we are just seeing it now?
JH: The Creature was basically a hair-brained scheme to break into the movie business without having to leave Chicago. I hatched the plan to make the film with three fellow students from Columbia College. Back in 1989, the home video market was very lucrative. A VHS cassette of a feature film sold for an average of $49,000 and we figured that if we could produce a good enough looking film cheaply enough, we could earn back the budget, plus enough to make a second film. With the benefit of hindsight, it was a pretty naive plan. We shot on 16mm film for 30 days in a row using mostly equipment from Columbia College. Our cast and crew worked on deferred compensation contracts, and we built or borrowed virtually everything that appears in the film.
Unfortunately, we didn’t really budget anything to post the film. Back in those days, films had to be cut on film, which was an expensive process because it was labor-intensive and required the renting of specialized editing equipment.
We’d all quit our jobs in order to focus on making The Creature, and we consequently ran out of money pretty quickly. On top of that, the four-person production team had a fairly major falling out that basically destroyed Nocturnal Pictures. Even broke and without a company, we managed to get The Creature From Lake Michigan edited and almost finished before we finally had to shelve it in order to get some real work and stay alive. Once it was on the shelf, it was incredibly hard to get back to it. I could never quite let it go though, because I felt this huge debt to everyone who had worked on, acted in and invested in the film.
The set was often visited by a distant cousin of the lead monster from Scotland…
AG: What inspired you to go back and revive the project? What has the experience been like?
JH: It always bothered me that the film was never finished. First, I’d spent several years of my life working on it, ruined some good friendships over it and exhausted my savings trying to complete it. Second, I’d spent a lot of my parents and my brothers’ and sisters’ money on it. When I hit the 15-year anniversary of the production, it just felt like time to get the thing done. Of course, I had no idea it was going to take me another five years and tens of thousands of dollars to complete.
“What? You’re filming?
It’s been a pretty strange experience, finishing the film. Not only is it like a flash-back to my youth, but there were so many hopes and dreams tied to it when we first started that it continually dredges up weird feelings for me. Ultimately though, it’s been a massive relief to finally get it done. Not having it finished was like carrying around a big load of guilt for 21 years. It’s good to be out from under that weight, and it’s very satisfying to have the film finished.
AG: Do you think it has stayed particularly relevant in today’s world?
JH: The film is dated looking. It was shot in 1989 and it looks like the ’80s in all their glory. At first, I thought of that as a negative, but the people who have seen the film all seem to get a kick out of its look and feel. They tell me that the clothes and the hairstyles add to the humor and charm of the movie. But getting past the look, it’s kind of funny how relevant the ideas still are, even though we came up with them two decades ago. First, the main character is an environmental activist who is fighting to clean up pollution in Lake Michigan. Those kinds of environmental issues have gotten more pronounced over the intervening years, and with the recent BP oil spill, it seems pretty on target for today. Next, there are themes of love, greed, betrayal and fame – and I think those story elements are universal and timeless.
Lenny Wilson hard at work
AG: Sounds very serious.
JH: Of course when I talk about it like this, it sounds like the movie is a serious film – or like the environmental aspect is a commentary. It’s not. The film isn’t serious. Not at all. It’s a super-low budget comedy/horror/spoof that was intended to look and feel like a “B” movie. It’s very over the top and ludicrous.
“Damn you, Hardison! I missed the last train…”
AG: What does it have to offer to today’s audiences and do you feel they will be able to enjoy and appreciate the film?
JH: Hopefully, people will enjoy it as a light, silly bit of entertainment. It’s not deep. It’s not a work of staggering genius. I look at it and mostly see the flaws, the sweat and the blood that went into it. It’s hard for me to get past that to assess how the film really is–but the folks I’ve shown it to seem to get a kick out of it–which is all that we intended from the start. It’s not great by any stretch, but hopefully, people will get a laugh out of it.
AG: What’s next — as in: what does the future hold for you and your filmmaking career?
JH: Apart from The Creature, I haven’t really done any film production work in about ten years. I’ve continued to write an occasional screenplay here and there, and I even wrote and produced a short film a few years back, but mostly I’m focused on other kinds of writing. In addition to my branding work – which is really my full time gig – I’m continuing to write comics and I’m putting the finishing touches on the manuscript for a novel. Of course, finishing The Creature has been like a second full-time job over the last five years. Who knows what I might get up to now that I’ve got it off my plate?
Erica Arvold and Chet Grissom were tied up for much of the 21-year production period
AG: Thanks for your time and generous consideration of these inquiries. In closing, is there anything you’d like to add?
JH: Just two final notes. The first is that, despite the fact that the film turned into a slow-motion disaster, that nothing turned out the way it was intended and that it killed some good friendships, I also met my future wife on The Creature. She was my production manager and I fell in love with her while sewing costumes for a musical number in the film. We’ve been together 21 years now and have two lovely kids. If it hadn’t been for The Creature, we never would have met.
The second is that, as I started to get close to finishing the film, I began tracking down as many of the cast and crew as I could find, just to tell them the film was done and to see if I could send them copies. As part of that effort, and with some serious trepidation, I managed to locate several of my old business partners, neither of whom I’d spoken to in over a decade. I’m happy to say that we’ve reconnected and put the past unpleasantness behind us. So, although it’s not the ending I was intending all those years ago, it’s still a happy one.
Sources: Jim Hardison; Official website; Facebook page
Addendum:
As the following gossip magazine covers indicate, while waiting for the film’s release, the Creature’s career has been patchy and he’s been the subject of considerable controversy:
Dear Readers,
You may have noticed (or at least I HOPE you noticed) that Undead Backbrain has been rather quiet for the past few weeks. This was partly due to writing commitments and (paid) work pressures on my part, but mostly it was a consequence of my attendance at the 68th World SF Convention in Melbourne, Australia — otherwise known as Aussiecon 4. The annual Worldcon has only been held in Australia once every decade or so (four times now) and is thus a significant event for the local writing (and fan) community. Apart from anything else, by forcing folk to come to us we get to meet up with distant friends, meet big-name authors and attend Worldcon without all the tedious business of traveling to the US (or wherever) ourselves.
One of the big events of a Worldcon is the Hugo Award ceremonies, where writers and editors paid and unpaid are ceremoniously celebrated for work felt to be the best of the previous year. Of considerably lesser significance globally, but of local interest, are the Ditmar Awards. These are similar to the Hugos, but limited to Australians — voted by members of the given year’s National Convention. As Worldcon was held on our shores this year and thus there is no Natcon as such, the Ditmar Awards took place during a side event nicknamed Dudcon III — a sort of official Natcon stand-in.
I’m happy to announce that I received a Best Fan [meaning, “unpaid”] Writer Ditmar Award for work on Undead Backbrain. This is the second year in a row I have won it, having also won the Best Fan Writer Award in 2009, again for scribblings on Undead Backbrain. I feel deeply honoured by this and sincerely thank everyone who voted for me. Below is a picture of my partner Cat Sparks, who won the Best Short Story Award for “Seventeen” from the anthology Masques; friend Kaaron Warren, who won the big one — the Best Novel Award — for Slights (published by Angry Robot); and myself, bathing in the combined glory at the hotel bar afterwards.
Other Ditmar winners are listed on the Locus website.
I would like to make a moment to acknowledge (as I did at the actual ceremony) the involvement of Avery Guerra (aka Kaiju Search-Robot Avery) in making Undead Backbrain the wonderful monster/zombie/low-budget exploitation resource that it is. Avery, who lives in the US, may not write for the Backbrain, but his search for cinema oddities of cryptozoological interest, low-budget monstrousness and the like is untiring, and he has ferreted out many great upcoming films. Thanks, Avery.
Best wishes,
Robert Hood
Want another mutant shark movie? A good one? Or would you prefer a ghost movie? Can’t decide? Well, we’re here to help. Check out this really cool trailer.
Yes, it’s Ghost Shark 2: Urban Jaws (NZ-[in development]; dir. Andrew Todd and Johnny Hall), one of the more bizarre, yet very cool, concepts I’ve come across lately.
The story goes like this:
When Ghost Shark escapes from his extradimensional prison to terrorize Auckland, Mayor Broody calls in an expert ghost shark hunter to protect the citizens and finally defeat the creature.
This first release from Mad Fox Films was shot on location in Auckland and Christchurch, New Zealand, by award-winning directors Andrew Todd and Johnny Hall. Kaiju Search-Robot Avery has hunted them down and, using one of Batman’s anti-shark sprays as an incentive, made them answer some questions.
Avery Guerra: Tell us about yourself, guys.
Andrew Todd: I’m a New Zealander, though I lived in Texas for my childhood (which means everyone in NZ thinks I’m an American). My parents raised me on films like Dirty Harry, Rocky Horror, A Clockwork Orange and Dawn of the Dead, so it wasn’t long before I started getting into things like NZ’s legendary Incredibly Strange Film Festival and the more bizarre cinema of the world. I’ve got a BFA in Film and I work as a general freelance media dude, making sweet-ass movies when I can.
Johnny Hall: I was born in New Zealand. When I was 7, I caught the last 20 minutes of Jaws; it scared the hell out of me. It was then that I developed a fascination with sharks and a deep fear of anything wet. Even now I can’t swim in a swimming pool without thinking about being mauled by a great white; especially in diving pools — they’re so goddamn deep and murky. This of course led to my lifelong obsession with shark films.
AG: How about influences?
AT: We’re both rabid lovers of pretty much all cinema, from high art to the trashiest of exploitation. But what inspired us for this was, I think, those movies that come along sometimes (too rarely, really) that totally deliver what they promise, scene after scene. The Indonesian actioner The Stabilizer [1986, directed by Arizal] stands out to me as a movie that never lets its foot off the gas — and that’s the kind of movie we want to make. Quotable, entertaining, and full of memorable scenes. So we’re setting a high bar for ourselves!
JH: Sometimes it’s important for a film to grab you by the balls and punch you in the face repeatedly.
AG: So what exactly is “Mad Fox Films” and what/who does it consists of?
AT: It’s a two-man filmmaking team of Awesome. Johnny and I have worked together on a few films before — the team we were in came second nationally in New Zealand’s V48HOURS Furious Filmmaking competition last year with a prison musical New Fish, and we’ve worked on each others’ films from time to time. I guess we just decided one day that, you know what, we work goddamn well together, so let’s make some movies. If we have a company motto, it’s that “If it ain’t awesome, it’s cut”.
JH: I’m a big fan of just grabbing a camera and doing something — doing anything. Mad Fox Films is a concept that embraces that.
AG: Where did the idea of “Ghost Shark” come from?
AT: The idea initially came to us on a road trip to see Antichrist in a film festival. We passed through this smallish town, Oamaru, which has a lot of old turn-of-the-century buildings, and is right on the coast. We thought it’d be a great place to do a ghost movie, then we saw some locations that were right out of Jaws, and we kinda just looked at each other and went “Ghost Shark! Awesome!”. The rest of that trip was spent coming up with the main characters, but it wasn’t until this year that we found ourselves in Auckland for a couple days and we just said “Y’ know, screw it — let’s shoot a Ghost Shark trailer, but do the sequel, set in the big city.”
JH: I remember the endless glee that the concept came with; just the idea was enough to turn me into a giggling school girl. I’d question any project that didn’t at some stage leave me feeling like that.
AG: There seem to be a lot of killer monster shark films these days, with each one offering a new twist on the old genre staple ever since The Asylum did Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus. What’s your take on the resurgence of mutant monster shark films?
AT: The most obvious difference is that it’s a ghost shark. ‘Nuff said. But the one thing that most of the recent mutant shark movies have had in common is that they’ve all been pretty arse — it’s always been title first, story and characters a distant second, audience enjoyment bringing up the rear. Is it too much to expect the same degree of story and characterisation from a monster shark movie that you do from any other movie? I don’t think so. Our goal isn’t to make a cheap buck off a ludicrous concept — it’s to use that concept to get people watching, then deliver not only on the concept but on the storytelling as well.
JH: Sharksploitation is nothing new. People have just become more aware of it.
AG: We’re seeing a lot of these short films and faux trailers being made into feature films now. Can we expect the same here? If so, when might we see the feature?
AT: Definitely a feature film. The response to the trailer has been great, and again, we’ve just kinda gone “Screw it, we’ll blunder our way through this as a feature.” We’re writing the story now — it’s going to some interesting and unexpected places I don’t think any other monster-shark movie has gone to. It’ll have to be done on a shoestring, but we’re pretty creative at doing things cheaply and effectively. All going well we’ll be shooting by the end of the year, with an aim to push the movie into festivals (yeah, that’s right — festivals) next year.
JH: I think I just wet myself.
AG: Is this a good method of obtaining funding for your feature film ideas, by making a short or faux film trailer?
AT: Ha! I don’t doubt for a second that this trailer will raise us a total of $0.00. Maybe we’ll get some people to work for free, but no, if we get any funding it’ll be through perseverance and asking around everywhere. We’ll make the movie for whatever budget we have — we just love the concept, love the cast and love making movies.
JH: I think that’s the idea: surrounding yourself by people that care about the project. I mean we’re not doing this for the money; we’re doing it for ourselves.
AG: Why make it as a sequel?
AT: At first, it was just a gag, and certainly there have been a lot of bemused people wondering what happened to the first installment. But in a way, doing a sequel liberates you a lot. The story we’ve written for the first installment will basically end up as the back story to this film, which enables us to populate the movie with characters who have pre-existing history and relationships. Plus we don’t need to do any of that messy “origin story” crap.
JH: Leonard Part 6 – just saying.
AG: So apart from the feature version of Ghost Shark 2, what does the future hold for Mad Fox Films and Ghost Shark?
AT: We’ve got several film concepts we’re mulling over, including a couple more trailer ideas, but currently we’re just focusing on getting Ghost Shark underway. What’s going to be really potentially heartrending is that Johnny is moving to the States early next year. What will we do then? Who knows …?
JH: I’ll probably be working in a 7-Eleven.
AG: [Pointing straight out the screen]: Say something to the fans!
AT: Thank you! We’re super-stoked with how the trailer’s been received and the fact that so many of you seem to get what we’re doing. It’s the online version of applause in a cinema.
JH: Thanks, fans. You’re the sweet filling of an already delicious cake.
Cast Pics:
Johnny Hall
Steve Austin
Campbell Cooley
Cooley and Hall
Details:
* if you don’t know what the Batman references are all about, see this video clip:
I’ve always thought of trolls as large and monstrous, but a new Norwegian monster film seems to have upped the ante considerably.
Apparently (as you can see from the trailer below) the filmmakers have hitherto been careful to keep the monster’s reality and appearance mysterious, suggesting that the documentary looks at a man who might be described as delusional — though the release of this image seems to have let the troll out of the bag.
The film is made in what I call a “camera verité” style. The style is sometimes referred to as “mockumentary”, that is, it mimics a documentary the way The Blair Witch Project did, encouraging audiences to suspend disbelief by adopting the conceit of it being actual footage.
Trolljegeren [aka The Troll Hunter] (Norway-2010; dir. André Ovredal)
It looks rather intriguing to me — and the daikaiju-sized troll is a definite plus.
Sources: TwitchFilm; via Avery. Written by Robert Hood.
Remember Them (US-1954; dir. Gordon Douglas)? One of the great scifi horror films of the Cold-War era — eerie desert locations, the stink of formic acid and a weird, high-pitched whine, James Arness hunting giant ants through the sewers of Los Angeles.
Well, now there’s Thems! However, Thems! — a low-budget, in-development sci-fi horror film — isn’t a sequel. Nor is it about ants. And it’s set in a ghetto rather than a desert. But it is going for the classic 50s black-and-white look of Them and works the monstrous insect theme, in this case cockroaches. Beyond that, director Eliab Alvarez de la Campa and production company ReelsurReal are keeping the details close to their chest. When quizzed on the topic, Eliab commented:
The film unites 50s sci-fi camp and 70s grindhouse, which we don’t believe has been done before. Beyond that we can’t reveal much more other than it involves mutant roaches taking over the ghetto.
What has just today been revealed is the full trailer for Thems! — “six months in the making!” It was premiered to an elite group of Facebook friends and now is available for all to see.
Full Trailer:
Looks good, eh? The trailer was greeted with considerable enthusiasm by attendees, following on as it did from the previous teaser, which includes elements that solidly identify its exploitative origins:
ReelsurReal was formed in the summer of 2009 by Eliab Alvarez de la Campa and Larry Bentley. “We are a film-production company that endeavors to put a spin on the independent filmmaking process,” they commented, then added enigmatically, “Unfortunately, we cannot reveal at this juncture how exactly we endeavor to do so. But we promise that it will differentiate us from what’s currently being done…”
Staff:
Eliab Alvarez de la Campa comes from a background in music and film having studied electric jazz bass and composition at the Manhattan School of Music and film at New York University. He spent nine years traveling the country as a video calibration specialist with his company Avical before deciding on a career as a writer and filmmaker. He wrote and directed Thems! and is a co-owner of ReelsurReal.
Larry Bentley is the owner of Cellar Dweller Productions and comes from a background in computer graphics and audio/video production. He is the co-owner and technical muscle behind ReelsurReal.
Mark Asch portrays El General Cohiba in Thems! (see picture below), provides the narration, and wrote the trailer’s orchestral score. Mark studied jazz theory and piano at Miami University and composition at Julliard. His band StarFish is one of the premier “children’s” rock bands.
Other cast members include Natalie Nine and Jay Rodriguez:
ReelsurReal’s YouTube Channel contains several production videos for your amusement and edification, such as this one on compositing a 3-second sequence, which really brings home the grueling and detailed work necessary to make the films we so easily take for granted:
And you can go out to the inspiring sound of Mark Asch’s musical score — where you will hear nods to classic scifi and exploitation scores, including at least one snippet much beloved of Looney Tunes’ Carl Stalling and crew.
In the previous Backbrain post, we revealed the Asylum’s modernised take on Herman Melville’s iconic novel, Moby Dick. Now we get the first trailer for Ryan Little’s draconic remix of the same story, starring Danny Glover as the medieval dragon-hunting Ahab-equivalent. (For more details, check out the article on our sub-site Undead Brainspasm.)
Age of the Dragons [aka Dragon Fire] (US-2010; dir. Ryan Little)
In a medieval realm where Captain Ahab and crew hunt dragons for the vitriol that powers their world, Ishmael, a charismatic harpooner, joins their quest. Ahab’s adopted daughter Rachel, beautiful and tough, runs the hunting vessel. Ahab’s obsession to seek revenge on a great “White Dragon” that slaughtered his family when he was young and left his body scarred and mauled drives the crew deeper into the heart of darkness. In the White Dragon’s lair, Ahab’s secrets are revealed and Rachel must choose between following him on his dark quest or escaping to a new life with Ishmael.
Trailer:
