Project Wilson Phillips - Team Chynna: Day 1

If you want to read my explanation of the first ten pages, go HERE.

Download the Team Chynna draft of the script HERE

Brad Bauner (p. 11-21): My main goal was to not screw up the script for my team. I think when everyone has 10 pages, it's easy to want to do something big and splashy to make yours stand out, but, at least in the first position, that could be really detrimental to the group. I concentrated on steering the tone of the script to a mystery with some humor and on fleshing out the characters and their relationships. I wanted to answer some questions that were left in the first 10 pages and leave some different unanswered questions so those writing after me would have plot points to play with. Overall, I was happy with the character, relationship and plot development in my 10. And hopefully, I didn't screw it up.

Evan Shaw (p. 22-31): I felt fairly fortunate to be third in line for the script. TBSR mentioned that he thought he had the easiest job since he was starting with blank slate, but I felt that by having the characters and situations established, my only real job was to push the story forward in an interesting way. I was getting “bad guy” vibes (yes, that’s the technical term) from Chief O’Banion based on the previous pages. So, I wanted to solidify his place as a possible antagonist by having his press conference relay purposefully inaccurate information.

I also liked the contrasting personalities of Doug Taylor and Jackson Mack, so I wanted to create as much conflict between the two. There was some underlying sexual tension between both Taylor and Editor Keller and Mack and Editor Keller. So, I figured emasculating Taylor in front of Keller would give him the motivation to go balls out in an attempt to out-perform Mack. I really wanted to do something with the tattoo that was setup in the previous pages, so I figured a good opportunity for future twists and back-stabbings would be to give Katie the same tattoo. Is she out for vengeance? Is it a coincidence? I have no clue, but I was hoping it would be something the next writers would be able to work with.

I also wanted to make Katie the female version of Jackson Mack. It’s still unclear if she’s a good gal or a bad gal, but one thing is for sure: She’s got more balls than most men. It didn’t really contribute to the main story (at least not yet), but I liked the mini-story idea of the homeless man’s struggle to get a drink. It also helped tell more about Mack’s personality; the fact that he tossed a few bottles of liquor to the homeless guy instead of money -- He knows something about pain. The very first idea that came to me was that I wanted that body to go missing at the end of my pages. I thought it would create something tangible for the characters to look for, with the idea being that if you can find the body, you can find the person who’s really behind the crime (whatever that may be).

Rosie Claverton (p. 31-39): When I first saw the script so far, I was a bit stumped. It was outside my usual comfort zone and very American in style. I also wanted to explore the women in the story, who seemed competent but hadn't done much beyond sexing things up.

I wasn't sure if we'd really finished Act One off and there were so many characters to get my head round. Therefore, I decided to explode the police station and really shake things up as an Act One ender, which conveniently disappeared/incapacitated a fair few characters and created some angst.

Then, my writing buddy Laurence suggested that forcing two very different characters to work together might be a good way forward. Doug and The Intern were already heading to the mansion, so I put Viper and Katie there too. This could serve as a B story, I thought, and maybe reveal a bit more of their agendas. I tried to make sense of Viper and Katie's actions before this point and put my reasoning in Doug's mouth.

As an aside, I was convinced that the Homeless Person was Matthew Kidwell undercover, but I couldn't find a way to work that into my section.

Carlos M. Hernandez (p. 39-50): After reading the first 40 pages, I really wanted to bring the story back to the first scenes. The previous writers helped put the characters in different places and plugged in back story where necessary. Now, as we headed into the midpoint of the story, I wanted to narrow the focus on character motivation and push it forward.

Doug Taylor felt like the true protagonist of the story. It was his partner that was missing and he had the greatest motivation to get involved deeper because of that. He also came off as the guy at the lowest point with potential to grow.

The villains, on the other hand, while evil and willing to kill for any reason, did not grasp me as people with motivation to do evil. So, I wanted to establish the true antagonist and it made sense to me that defeating him would net Kidwell. I simply chose Trenton because he had been left alone for the most part and seemed to me the mirror of Taylor: Men longing for respect. I left subtle hints that Trenton could be motivated by wanting to be more than a geek, but left it vague enough for the future writers to take it whichever direction they wanted.

The chase scene had two major purposes: demonstrate the seriousness of their situation and to further establish Doug's propensity to do whatever it takes to find Kidwell. He fires a single bullet, makes one pull of the trigger, but I hoped it would show that Doug wasn't going to be this pushed-around journalist any longer. He had now done something he wouldn't have done a day ago and (because I like breaking parallels) something that Trenton had never been able to do.

Eric John Anderson (p. 51-61): I wasn't sure what to send you in regards to my pages, so I'll just tell you my experience:

For the most part, I was confused by the writing that I had received to that point. There were so many different plotlines and character arcs going that I couldn't figure out what to do next. Since I was in the middle of the screenplay, I had the opportunity to raise the stakes of the story with a twist, but the characters should have been on their way to their end goals and most of them weren't.

To make everything clearer, I decided to write a short outline for every scene. I also created a quick bio of each character thus far. The characters that I liked the least and that I thought were less important I decided to kill off or shun them from the script. I also wanted to clearly define the relationships thus-far, since it had not quite been expressed. And finally, I wanted to have a clearly defined goal for the characters.

Mostly I just wanted to blow it all up and start fresh without completely throwing off the main storyline thus far. We'll see if it was successful or not.

Project Wilson Phillips - Team Carnie: Day 2

Wrapping up our look at the first group to finish the Collaborative Writing Project dubbed "Project Wilson Phillips," here are the thoughts of the remaining members of Team Carnie reflecting on what they attempted to do with their pages.

Download the Team Carnie draft of the script.

Elena Ostroumova (p. 39-51): I was kind off baffled by the load of information and plots, and twists, and cliffhangers that were left for me after the 30 or so pages, that were written before me. There were the characters, the protags and the villains, and the poor guy, who gets (or doesn't get)
shot in the first scene, and the journalists, and the Russians (the latter two I was most surprised to see, because I'm a Russian journalist).

The story was twisted and action packed as much as it could be possibly done in the first 38 pages. I was going "Whoa!" on every page of the first reading. That was a good thing. I've clearly had the beginning of Act Two to write, so basically my idea was to slow down a bit, to get to know the characters a bit more, to get the insight into the reasons behind their actions, to give them names or tell something new about them, to give the next writers some leverage, so they could continue right on with the action. My ten pages were mostly talking, before the "doing" part, which I hoped would follow. I really wanted to explore the story about Editor Keller and how she was involved with this whole micro-chipping issue, hence the story of her mother and the secret files she passed on to her daughter before her disappearance.

Then I had the unsolved mystery of the note Doug found in the bar and how it lead him to the place where Nina was. And I also really wanted to play around the idea of Nina actually pretending to be VIPER on the island, not actually being zombied into it. So that's how the whole
"antidote" idea came to mind. I also really wanted to keep Jurgens in the story, who turned out to be Keller's long-time ally and friend.

And the most important thing, I really wanted to give some thought to the title - "Project Wilson Phillips". Who the hell is Wilson Phillips? And I sort of liked that intern guy character, and he was the right age, so I thought I'd through in a bit of mystery with the "Phi" clue. So they have to find the antidote, but they are going to go the long way, because he's actually right under their noses.

I also wanted to tell a bit more about A.J., why he turned out the way he did, so that's how I came about his childhood trauma, and long-time vendetta against his father, for not saving his mother, and marrying for a second time. The thing I didn't quite have place to really think
about, is what exactly was Vitaly's business in all this. He was obviously connected to A.J.'s research projects in Russia, and he was delivering the suspected "antidotes" to A.J. But I really wanted to know more, so I hope to find that out from what was written after me.

In the end of my ten pages I've formed an unlikely team of Doug Taylor - Nina Kidwell/Mack - Jackson Mack, with backup from Andy Keller and Jurges Hickey, with a hind that Jacksons partner Murphy could also join into the fun later on in the story.

Mr A (p. 51-60). I was happy to be apart of this experiment, most importantly, as in an exercise. I had intended to, on one hand, keep my segment interesting, and on the other, keep the flow and story intact. It was a concern of mine to continue what was already laid out, move it forward, but contribute to the overall story in my own way. I hoped to keep each aspect of the story intact in the way the previous contributors might appreciate.

I wanted to continue forward as the story had been unfolding, but also add a bit of interesting and revealing information as I fell midway through the story. It took some time, but I hope that the end result is as I intended.

Frank Livorsi (p. 61-70): Things that I tried to do with pages 61-70.

The scenario I was left with:

I was left with our group of commandos landing on an Island in the Pacific Ocean after Hi-jacking a helicopter. One other thing to deal with was the appearance of the “Behemoth” on the Island.

I tried to make it difficult for Nina, Jackson, and Doug. The Dogs, the Patrol boats, the chase. I wanted them worse off then when they got there. That’s why the helicopter was destroyed, stranding them there, with no means of escape. (All is lost.)

At this point it’s really kind of hard to determine who the protagonist is. Nina/Viper might be, but she has been killing off people throughout the script. Do we really like her? Jackson Mack, no. Doug, maybe.

The antagonist is easy, that’s AJ. So going off the earlier information that the newspaper editor, Andi Keller, is the half sister of AJ, I tried to give my team mates the option of making her the protagonist. Andi challenges AJ at page 70. She tells him she knows about , “The Chip.”

I also tried to give a possible explanation for “PHI,” making the intern, Phillips, the possible connection. I tried to tie in the “Fantasy Girls,” from the beginning of the script, using Vitaly to bring them there on a boat. The boat was a way to get Phillips on the Island, and an attempt to give them ( our commandos) a means of escape, if the writing team chose that route.

The Behemoth capturing Phillips, the intern, was a way of keeping both of them active in the script. Phillips handing AJ the phone was a way to introduce Andi Keller as the protagonist and next challenge.

Katy Quigley (p. 71-80): With my pages I tried to sort out a couple of the loose ends that were hanging around and sort out some of the confusion with regards to the relationships between some of the characters. I spent a fair while making notes on what had come before and had a couple of diagrams detailing what had been said by what characters and their relationships, this definitely came in handy when the plot began to get quite confusing. Having written scripts at college before, I thought it might be a fun way to get back in to the process, it was short and other people were relying on you to get it done, which definitely spurred me on.

Hank Pena (p. 80-90): I'll admit that I wrote my pages after a marathon of "N.C.I.S." and "Warehouse 13" the characters in those shows influenced this.

I wanted my pages to show a separation in the character's personalities, be (hopefully) a bit witty, and offer a good explanation to tie what I'd read together.

I searched the internet for examples of PHI and followed all that I read to the conclusions I wrote out. I chose not to write an escape scene and more action because I wanted to leave the final writer with an opportunity to write some cool action ending. Which, as an action writer, pained me. If I didn't take my pages up writing explanation and summation, the movie would have had to end like a Scooby-Doo episode...with everyone explaining what just occurred.

Patrick (p.90-99): I spent a day or so thinking, and had some ideas, but those ideas would take more than 10 pages. I'm a fan of brevity in film, so I decided to use my inability to provide an all inclusive, hit all the bases ending as my ending.

Also, while reading the script, I noticed as it went on, the tone shifted to a more comedic thing, so I figured I'd just end it on comedy.

It was an interesting experience, cuz, I was working two 10 hour a day jobs at the time. I had thought that would effect my writing, but, it didn't. It just gave me more time to think about writing, and play out my ending in my head, a million different ways before I got a chance to sit down and do any actual writing.

Good times.

Project Wilson Phillips - Team Carnie: Day 1

We're continuing our look at the results of the Collaborative Writing Project, with the first comments from the writers who picked up where I left off.

The Team Carnie version of the screenplay is available here.


Meg (p. 11-20): I really enjoyed the challenge in Operation Wilson Phillips (Team Carnie). Being in first (or is it technically second?) position allowed for some major freedom in terms of the direction I could take. I wanted to amp up the cheese factor and go for almost a cartoonized version of action characters. I hoped to begin to weave the different characters and scenes to one interlocking story. I wanted to, hopefully, add layers to the relationships between the characters and provide some fun reveals. My process is different on everything that I write. For this one, I brainstormed a lot, made a ton of notes on the pages Bitter provided, and then just tried to have fun with action and dialogue. I’m kicking myself now for some glaring typos. But I can’t wait to see how the story ended. Or how the other teams took the story.

Stephen (21-29): When I got the e-mail from the Bitter Script Reader on Sunday night, I decided not to look at the pages until I printed them out to read at the coffee shop where I do all my writing. I'm not a fan of reading scripts in PDF form on my monitor. I think it lowers the amount of attention you dedicate to reading. Printing off the script, I did notice that I would be writing pages 20-30. My first thought, "Great! I get to end Act I." Not a bad place to be. You get to decide the direction the rest of the script goes and ask the main question of the film. Sounded like a ton of fun.

Reading the pages, though, made me realize there was a lot more I'd have to do. There seemed to be a major shift at page 9, where I assume the 2nd writer took over, and I realized there were two issued I'd have to address. 1) Right at page 9, an entirely new protagonist appeared: Jackson Mack. Doug Taylor, who seemed to be the main character up to this point, only showed up for one scene in the second ten pages. 2) Viper became Nina, Doug's missing partner from the newspaper and Jackson's sister, but I couldn't get over the fact that in the opening scene, she killed a guy for no apparent reason.

When I sat down to write, my goals were to bring Doug back into the story without completely dismissing Jackson, explain the contradiction in Viper/Nina's actions, and hit a dramatic enough point that works as an act break. I came up with several possibilities, but my main idea ended up way to complicated to get across in just ten pages. In the end, I decided that my primary goal should be to give the next writer room to take the script where he/she wanted. I did my best to eliminate or explain the issues I saw, so whoever took over from me would have an open field to run and play. I think I accomplished that, though I'd be interested to see if that next writer agreed.

CTScanHollywood (p. 30-38): With my pages, I wanted to slow the pace just a tad because there was so much action at the beginning. I wanted to show the relationship between the guys more, and also to catch the reader up a bit on what was going on- who's who, what the hell just happened etc..

Tomorrow we'll hear from the rest of the writers, and please feel free to leave your comments about the screenplay in any of these threads!

Project Wilson Phillips - The First Ten Pages

Today I want to go scene-by-scene with my ten pages from Project Wilson Phillips in an effort to explain how I attempted to give the different groups a wide latitude to go in different directions.

Writing these ten pages proved harder than I expected because they still had to feel like the coherent beginning to a story. As any reader will tell you, the first ten pages of the script are the most important pages. In theory, those pages will lay out the tone and set up the major characters in such a way that a reader will have a sense of the kind of story they’re in for, even if the inciting incident hasn’t yet happened. Everything in these ten pages should be setting up something that’s paid off later.

And conversely, major points later in the film need to be set-up early on. As an example, in Back to the Future, it’s not until the second half hour that we find out that the one thing capable of generating enough power to send the time machine back to 1985 is a bolt of lightning. That means that Marty and Doc need to know where and when a bolt of lightning will strike. Fortunately, Marty happened to get some convenient exposition in the first ten pages about an historic lighting storm that will strike Hill Valley one week from now.

Unfortunately, I don’t know what’s coming on p. 40 of any of the Project Wilson Phillips scripts, so I have to create a set-up that I have no way of knowing how it will payoff.

p. 1-2: This scene is specifically designed to hint at some kind of larger revelation without telling anything at all. By the end of it, all we really know for certain is that Young Man has some very important information that Viper wants. In fact, it’s important enough to beat him and torture him over it. Despite Viper’s threatening nature, I tried to write the dialogue in a way that wouldn’t preclude a later writer from deciding that Young Man was a minion of the bad guys, and that Viper was a good guy of sorts going to extreme lengths to uncover and expose the truth.

I was very careful not to give either character a “real” name because I wanted the door to be open for later writers to reveal that, along with their agenda. Also, I deliberately didn’t show if Viper actually killed the Young Man.

p. 2-3: I liked the idea of using a homeless man to set the scene. It wasn’t until the car chase was barreling down on him that I remembered that I hate writing car chase scenes. Besides, I figured that to do that chase justice would be to burn most of my ten pages on mindless action. With that, it hit me that it might be more fun to see the chase from the Homeless Man’s POV.

The line “Wasn’t like this before the Vegans got here,” was another deliberate ambiguity. You could take it as the ramblings of a crazy man, sure. I also figured on at least two interpretations of that line. He could mean “Vee-Gans,” as in “people whose diets cause a lot of complications at cookouts,” or “Vay-Gans,” as in “aliens from another star system called “Vega.”

p. 3-4: Newspaper city room. This is pretty much just me doing some transitional stuff while I introduce Doug. I figured a reporter was a natural main character in a story about conspiracies. There’s also a little Daily Planet flavor here, and the name “Jurgens” is a reference to “Dan Jurgens,” one of my favorite Superman artists.

p. 4-6 : I went out of my way to make Andi a contrast to the screaming editors-in-chief we’ve seen in Superman and Spider-Man. Giving her a quiet energy seemed more interesting. The “sunspot activity” was another throwaway I hoped people would pick up on, and I did my best not to make the exposition about Taylor’s position in the doghouse too on-the-nose.

When they discuss Taylor’s partner Kidwell, I did my best to make it natural that they didn’t use that character’s first name or refer to his or her gender. I really wanted to leave that door open, and my thought was that either Viper or Young Man from the early scene could be revealed as Kidwell by later writers.

p. 6- 9: The week I wrote these pages, I’d read at least three human trafficking scripts in the previous two weeks and all of them had the Russians as bad guys. I figured if I set a particular plot up to “zig,” the next writers would be compelled to “zag,” so I wanted to see what they’d do with a semi-cliched set-up. I can’t count how many times I’ve read a scene where Russian brothel owners show off their wares to some man in power.

I couldn’t resist giving a twist to the “big client.” A.J. Trenton proved to be a fun character to write. Tell me that the image of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs in a brothel doesn’t make you giggle a little. Obviously I amped up the nerd qualities he had and I tried my damndest to get in some exposition about his character without resorting to someone directly comparing him to Gates or Jobs just so the audience would get the shorthand. (Granted, the Simpsons joke and his reference to having a smartphone a year ahead of the rest of the market ain’t exactly subtle either, but I hope they seemed organic.)

Naturally, once I had an uber-geek as the customer, it only made sense to dress the prostitutes as sci-fi sex-symbols. Vitaly’s line about not having a Princess Leia, followed by A.J. pointing out one is a pretty clear indication that girl isn’t supposed to be there. I figured I could set her up to be revealed as Kidwell too, working undercover.

Also, though this really is something that you shouldn’t do, I made sure not to specify if this “Leia” was wearing the slave girl outfit and braided hair from Return of the Jedi, or the white dress and bun hairdo of A New Hope. I wanted to leave that open to the interpretation of the latter writers. Obviously, in a “real” script, the character’s appearance should be clear to the reader as soon as they show up on-screen.

p. 9-10: I’ve always wanted to write a car chase that ended up smashing into another illegal deal, and use that to kick start the plot. I also like the image of the Russian bad guys taking out a guy we presume the police consider a big enough deal to chase all over the city.

This seemed like an appropriately over-the-top entrance for Jackson Mack. I was trying to ride the line when it came to tone. I wanted it to be just big enough so some groups could go broad with their story, yet grounded enough so if the next writer wanted to make it gritty, the tonal shift wouldn’t be completely inexplicable.

Download the Team Carnie draft of the script.

Tomorrow: Let’s hear how the first half of Team Carnie approached their pages.

Results of the Collaborative Writing Project aka "Project Wilson Phillips"

It started a few months ago. I had three teams of writers ready to participate in our round-robin style writing exercise. The rules were fairly simple. I’d kick things off with ten script pages, then throw those pages to the next person in the rotation of each team. When that person was done, they were to send me their pages and I would add them to the screenplay and pass that work forward to the next person.

As there were three teams, I tried to think of an appropriate code name for this little project, and immediately started thinking of various trios: Larry, Moe and Curly? Too obvious? Huey, Dewy and Louie? Better, but still not esoteric enough.

Wilson Phillips? Perfect. In the trio of second generation singers sired by members of The Beach Boys and the Mamas and the Papas, I’d found my team names: Carnie, Wendy and Chynna. Though many immediately identify them with their hit: “Hold On,” I tend to favor “Impulsive,” which I would say is one of the greatest forgotten songs of the early 90s. In fact, I like it so much that ages ago I tried to shoehorn it into my second script before I was smart enough to realize I shouldn’t do that.



Ah, the Nineties...

But back to the project. The rules were pretty basic. Each writer was supposed to add 10 pages. This ended up being a bit of a loose guideline. Some fell just short, while others ended up going slightly over. One or two even ran into trouble when the spacing in their program resulted in their submission being short when reformatted to match the others. Overall, everything more or less went to plan.

Each writer had a deadline of one week. Again, this mostly worked though one team in particular seemed cursed by delays brought on by illness and fickle spam folders. Everyone got a list of instructions, some of which are reprinted below:

“Yes, and?” style of improv rules is encouraged. A writer may not deny or unfairly undo details established by other writers in previous pages. However, shocking twists are encouraged so long as they don’t violate the spirit of this rule. In other words, it’s totally fair to reveal that a seemingly-paralyzed character has actually been faking all along (so long as the character’s paralysis isn’t reinforced in a scene where he’s alone and would have no reason to lie), but one cannot decide on p. 30 that the action really is taking place in Denver when early scenes have been written with it set in New York.

While I’m not going to tell you what you can’t do, try not to close any doors without opening some new ones. (In other words, don’t kill off all the characters and destroy the city in a nuclear bomb blast unless you’ve laid the groundwork for the story to continue somehow.)

I also warned them:

These first ten pages are not the greatest thing I’ve ever written. It’s hard to write the opening to a story without any idea where it’s going, and it’s just as hard to write a good opening that doesn’t box the story in too tightly in one direction. After all, since we have three teams, I wanted enough material established in the beginning so that we could end up with very disparate scripts.

So here’s a fair warning: these first few pages are laced with traps. You’re going to see things in there that you may have heard me rail against in the blog – or at least the suggestions of those things. It’s not my intention to have all of these turn out as compilations of the worst screenwriting clichés ala BALLS OUT, though. If that’s where the process takes us, so be it. But don’t forget that it’s totally fair to subvert those clichés and spin things into a completely original direction. My “cliché” set-up could play like brilliant misdirection if it’s followed by brilliant plot twists that go in a new direction.

In theory, I had the easiest job of this whole competition. I had a blank slate as I started my ten-pages and could set up anything without having to worry about the consequences.

In theory.

Over the next week plus, we’ll be taking a look at each of the three scripts that resulted. Tomorrow I’ll explain what I was trying to accomplish in my initial ten pages, and later in the week we’ll hear from many members of the teams as they talk about their goals for their pages.

Team Carnie is up first and you can find their script here.

Special thanks to Nate Winslow for helping me set up the file hosting for the scripts this week.

Friday Free-for-All: Classic horror trailers

In honor of Halloween, I wanted to offer the trailers to three of the greatest horror films of all-time: Home Alone, Mean Girls and Mary Poppins.

Thursday Throwback: Behind the Mask - The Rise of Leslie Vernon

This post first ran last year on Tuesday, October 20, 2009:

It's always really rewarding when my trips to Blockbuster, or my skimming through Netflix reveal an undiscovered gem of a movie. There's so much crap out there, that finding a good movie within the major releases is tricky - to say nothing of finding an excellent original film that's been left to wallow in obscurity. Finding good movies in this "slush pile" can often be like panning for gold.

There are probably hundreds of great films made each year that for one reason or another never find the audience they deserve. Usually the reason has something to do with a lack of distribution. There are only so many films that the studios and DVD distributors can put their weight behind, and the rest are often consigned to oblivion. Even then, once a film gets DVD distribution, it can still be a struggle to capture audience awareness.

A friend and I used to have a semi-regular weekend ritual. We'd go to Blockbuster and try to pick a winner of a "so bad it's good" movie based only on the box art and the synopsis. If the key art and the title made us laugh - it usually got snagged. And yes, there probably we probably grabbed more than one exploitation flick on the basis of cleavage.

Oh, and the other thing that guaranteed we'd take the movie home was the presence of a B, C or D-list actor slumming it. This sort of thinking led us to rent American Vampire, staring Carmen Electra and Adam West as an aging hippie vampire slayer living in a trailer off of Venice Beach.

Another great find? Santa's Slay - a holiday slasher starring wrestler Goldberg as an evil Santa now free to go on a killing spree after a curse forced him to be nice for 1000 years. Seriously, how can you say no to this box art?



But all of those pale compared to my one truly brilliant discovery - a part-mockumentary/part slasher horror thriller called Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon. As it happens, I didn't come across this one at Blockbuster. I had rented another "so bad it's good" film through Netflix. Unfortunately, this film only qualified for the "so bad" descriptor. In fact, it was terrible enough that I don't even recall what movie it was. What I DO remember is that had the following trailer before the movie. (I always watch DVD trailers when renting a bad movie - it's a great way to find other bad movies)

I almost feel like that's all I should tell you about this film. By the time the opening credits had rolled on the movie I rented, I had already added Behind the Mask to my Netflix queue and kicked it to the top. This was the sort of movie that my friend and I couldn't stop quoting for days after we saw it. In fact, that night he immediately went to Amazon.com and bought the DVD so we could make all of our friends watch it.

This is the sort of film that is so clever, you HAVE to share it with everyone you know. It's one of those movies that compels you to pull out the DVD mid-party and say, "You haven't seen this? Well that settles it, we're all gonna watch this right now." This is bar-none, the BEST self-aware horror film since the original Scream. Whether you like horror films or you roll your eyes at how stupid they are, you WILL enjoy this. My girlfriend hates violent movies and she loved this one.

The film is directed by Scott Glosserman, who manages to ablely pull off the two distinct styles the storytelling calls for - from a script by Glosserman and David J. Stieve. Glosserman's IMDB resume is limited, but based on this film, I'd be first in line for whatever he comes out with next,

The cast is rock solid. I don't know why Nathan Baesel isn't a bigger star, but for the sake of this film I'm glad he isn't because the movie works so much better with an unknown star. Trust me, though... this guy is gonna be well-known someday. He's absolutely on my list of actors I want to work with. Angela Goethals also does good work as the student documentarian hunting around slasher Leslie Vernon as he prepares to make his legacy legend. Horror fans will also enjoy cameos from icons Robert Englund aka Freddy Kruger and Poltergeist's Zelda Rubinstein.

It is nothing short of a crime that, according to IMDB.com, the film grossed a mere $38,500. This is a story that deserved to be a wide release, pushed to the limit. With all the horror crap Lions Gate puts out (seriously, their motto should be "We'll release anything") you'd think they'd have snapped this up and pumped it hard. Hell, I'm shocked that no major distributor saw this and didn't see it as an instant win. Instead, it landed at Anchor Bay, which really screwed up if they couldn't make this one a hit.

I'm telling you all about this one now so you can rush out and get the DVD in anticipation of your Halloween scary movie marathons. You'll thank me later.