Really Awful Movies: Ep 68b – Fatal Pictures’ Zach Green and Richard Powell

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At Really Awful Movies, we love to shine a spotlight on emerging talent in the horror genre. So when one of us caught the short film Heir currently making the festival rounds, we thought “We’ve got to talk to these guys!”

Heir is the brainchild of Fatal Pictures and stars Robert Nolan and the hardest working man in indie-genre cinema, Bill Oberst Jr. It’s a singularly disturbing and powerful piece of art that accomplishes in 15 minutes what many feature films fail to do in 120.
Fatal Pictures, comprised of producer Zach Green and writer/director Richard Powell, have thus far made four shorts. Starting with Consumption in 2008, Fatal has also made the “boxcutter” trilogy – three films, Heir as well as its progenitors Worm and Familiar.  Each film stars Robert Nolan and is an unbelievably effective piece of psychological horror. Familiar is currently available for download on iTunes.
In this interview, we discuss the genesis of Fatal Pictures, the advantages of starting with shorts rather than jumping straight into features, funding and production, and of course, the films themselves. Fatal Pictures is one to watch – we can’t wait to see what they do next.

Really Awful Movies: Ep 68 – Birdemic

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Sitting at a woeful “1.8” out of 10 on IMDb (with 12,000 + votes cast), it was inevitable we’d turn our eyes to the heavens and examine the notorious Birdemic.

Not to be mistaken for The Birds, the Hitch masterpiece by which this poop was allegedly inspired, Birdemic (full title, Birdemic: Shock and Terror) is widely regarded by aficionados of terrible cinema as one of the worst films of all time.

Does it hold up?

This quirky “independent romantic horror film” was written, directed, and produced by James Nguyen, an auteur of the awful a la Ed Wood.

The somnambulist performances, uneven sound, memorably inane exposition and some of the weirder special effects you’ll ever encounter, makes Birdemic can’t miss material. It’s strangely hypnotic and so bad, it actually improves a bit with repeated viewings (but take that with a grain of salt: we’re rigorous defenders of Battlefield Earth).

What really makes this one a cut above (or is that below?) is the green-think Mother Earth moralizing. Al Gore, eat your heart out! (but make sure that heart is locally-sourced).

Really Awful Movies: Ep 67 – The Big Doll House

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Entering women’s prison territory in this week’s episode.

The Big Doll House is a 1971 American women in prison (WiP) film, produced by the one and only Roger Corman and starring the incomparable Pam Grier.

Filmed in the Philippines (one of our favorite locales) and directed by the talented Jack Hill (Coffy/Foxy Brown), Big Doll House also features the amazing Sid Haig (The Devil’s Rejects).

The plot is about as skimpy as the inmates’ attire: an inmate, Collier, is found guilty of murdering her husband and introduced to the joint. Therein is a cadre of some of the more beautiful jailbirds you’ll ever see – forget the gritty realism of Orange is the New Black. Collier’s cellies include a political dissident and an addict in the throes of heroin withdrawal. And this motley crew, which includes the domineering Pam Grier (as Grear) plots their escape with help from two dim-witted males inexplicably granted prison-wide access to deliver fruit.

Because this is a WiP, there’s a sadistic prison guard and inmates are hosed down, some would say unnecessarily (we won’t). Corman and Hill basically wrote the rules of the WiP genre with this one. Great stuff!