MicroCinema Scene

There’s an oft-repeated adage that the Velvet Underground’s first album only sold a couple of hundred copies, but everyone who bought a copy started a band the next day.

That’s how it was for me when I first picked up Kansas City, Missouri-based Todd Sheet’s shot-on-video zombie flick ZOMBIE RAMPAGE when I was in ninth grade, from a little mom ‘n’ pop video store in Oklahoma City. It was 1994, an important year in cinema, being the era that led to the rise and eventual mainstreaming success of independent film, with movies like CLERKS, PULP FICTION and the like becoming blockbusters, practically inspiring every filmmaker of the past ten years. Sure, I loved those classic aforementioned indie films, but it was the discovery of the backyard straight-to-video market that was my real influence. Filmmakers like Sheets, to me, were the real indie cinema. With no budgets, these people were just film fans armed with a primitive camcorder, a couple of gallons of red-dyed Kayro food coloring and a cadre of friends. That’s all. And, to a kid in a videography class with roughly the same backing, of course these guys are going to be superstars. Their gore-drenched horror outings would become the inspirado for whatever backyard masterpieces I shot over that weekend, much to my pacifist hippie teacher’s chagrin.

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In less than two minutes, the faux-trailer for Tank, a grindhouse revenge thriller that director Christian Cisneros entered into the Grindhouse 101 trailer contest, is better than most straight to video thrillers that are released on a weekly basis. Sorry Eric Roberts fans!

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In the year 2012 and due to global warming, the entire galaxy has been flooded with water, creating the Aquaverse. The only hope for mankind against the evil Ching Chang Fu are Webb Torpedo and Rusty Bolts, also known as the Aqua Rangers.

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Set in a post-apocalyptic future where, apparently, a disease has wiped out all emotion and people now live off a drug called “the drip.” Claire has been living in the outskirts of decimated Yerba City, reliving memories of her and Freddie Mercury (or a guy who looks like Freddie Mercury) before the disaster. Needing some sort of closure, Claire heads into the city, which is now one giant drug den, with hundreds of doped-up homeless-types being administered constant fixes, aided by “angels”, who are mindless drones whose only purpose is to serve without question.

Numb

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Since it’s rise to glory, the whole sub-genre of reality television has become fodder for countless, witless, utterly forgettable comedies (EdTV, anyone?) that try to pull double-duty, both as a timely yuk-fest and as a subtle commentary on the instant celebrity culture in America. At least that’s how they try to explain themselves.

But in the end, what it comes down to is that these films are not funny in the slightest. They’re tired, overwrought pieces of tripe designed to make a quick buck on the latest fad. Nothing more, nothing less.

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I probably need to rewatch Planetfall. I liked it as I was watching it, and I absolutely loved the concept — the spaghetti western as a sci-fi flick — but something just didn’t click with me that pushed me over the edge into “obsessive territory” about it. It should have been a fun movie, kind of like a really good Sci-Fi Channel Pictures Original that you catch late-night Friday night, but I just couldn’t get as into it as I wanted to.

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Last Rites of the Dead is the best zombie movie I’ve seen since Shaun of Dead, but even more than that, the first hour or so is also the most relevant since George Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead. It’s a real political allegory that is frighteningly real in this era of Mexican-hating Minutemen, as we’re introduced to a world where the dead come back to life. In a smart twist, they are not flesh-eating mindless monsters, but rotting humans who still retain all their brain functions, memories and mannerisms—they’re just like you and me except they have no heartbeat.

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You know those guys, clad in black trenchcoats that hang out at GameStop all day long, never buying anything but just hanging out talking about what they would have done differently in Lord of the Rings in-between calling each other “faggot”? Well, what if those guys decided to make a movie?

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Sheer pretension, The Votive Pit be thy name. For this website, I try my hardest to find the good in microcinema films. No matter how much I personally dislike a film, I try to find something supportive to say about it. I know what it’s like to put your heart and soul into a project and how much work goes into it. It takes every part of you.

But if a project is so utterly horrible, does that excuse it? Should the fact it’s a no-budget film give it an automatic write-off? No. You don’t send your film to a review site unless you want an honest review. And if I’m being honest, The Votive Pit pretty much sums up everything that is wrong about indie-film today: it looks good, but at the cost of the screenplay, resulting in an embarrassing fiasco of laughable dialog, ridiculous situations and liberalized self-importance, all under the façade of faux-depth.

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It took a little while to get into Die and Let Live. It has everything going for it—a punchy opening set-up and a great title sequence—but for the first twenty or so minutes, as main characters Smalls (Zane Crosby) and Benny (Josh Lively) hang out around a coffee-shop, speaking in highly-contrived Kevin Smith-approved youth-speak (with a constant wink of ironic delivery), it took every ounce of will-power not to turn it off. These two guys, sitting around, pining over girls and avoiding meathead boyfriends—it was tedious and wreaked of trying too hard to be clever. If there is one trend young filmmakers need to stop, it’s this shit.

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