Perhaps because I deal so closely with horror fandom and its peculiar “When did you first see Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man?” mindset that I find myself wondering about the way people tend to cling to their childhood through pop culture more often than I should.
Lights! Camera! Explosions! Bloodletting! The Asheville Actionfest Film Festival (April 15-18) is upon us — and with it come more than a few surprises of the pleasant kind.
Nearly everything this week is action-oriented—whether it’s the Actionfest Film Festival at the Carolina or the arrival of the highly anticipated release of Kick-Ass—and the one release that isn’t, Death at a Funeral, would seem to scale the heights of superfluousness.
It’s rare that I have actual news in the Screening Room, but this time I do because starting on Thursday, April 22 at 8 p.m. my partner in cinematic doings, Justin Souther, and I will be screening Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator (1985) in the mezzanine lounge of the Carolina Asheville to kick off our weekly Thursday Night Horror Picture Show. Yes, that’s right. Every Thursday at 8 p.m. we will be introducing and screening horror pictures at the Carolina.
If it weren’t for Floria Sigismondi’s The Runaways opening at the Fine Arts and the Carolina on Friday, this would be one of those weeks where renting a movie, catching up on that stack of DVDs you’ve been meaning to watch, or finally taking in something that’s been around for a while would probably be your best bets.
We all have them—whether as as professionals or general film fans (which, hopefully, most professionals are). There are just certain types of movies that inherently do not appeal to us. It’s human nature. Not everyone likes everything. And that’s as it should be. It’s called diversity.
It may not be the grudge match of the century, but there are few more evenly matched opponents than Greek gods, Tyler Perry and Miley Cyrus—all of whom will be slugging it out for top spot at the box office this week. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a lineup—Clash of the Titans, Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married Too? and Last Song—with so little in the way of crossover audiences.
Yes, I know—it’s only barely spring, but that’s becoming less and less related to the somewhat peculiar way in which the motion picture industry views the world. The winter (post-Christmas) is still the major repository of the worst the movies have to offer—with audiences finding relief only in films from the previous year that are only filtering into the provinces in the dead winter time. That looked a little different this year with the February release of Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island and the early March opening of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland.
