FrightFest News: Green & Lynch Announce Anthology Movie ‘Chillerama’
by Ben Bussey
Hey guys, your international correspondent coming to you once again from London’s Frightfest with a neat little scoop. Adam Green and Joe Lynch, two guys who really, really love Frightfest, announced today that they are collaborating with fellow writer/directors Adam Rifkin (Detroit Rock City) and Tim Sullivan (2001 Maniacs) on a horror anthology pastiche entitled Chillerama, which Green and Lynch describe as a tribute to the dying culture of the drive-in.
As Lynch (Wrong Turn 2) summed it up to the Frightfest audience, “It’s the last night in the final drive-in in America before it gets closed down by corporate America. And the owner of the drive-in – his name is Cecil Kaufman – decides that before the gate closes, that he would have one more night of showing the most fucked up, obscure, crazy films that no-one’s ever seen before.” The aim is for each film to be “reminscent of films from the heydays, from the 40′s to the 50′s to the 70′s to the 80′s.“
They proceeded to break down just what these movies would be: Adam Rifkin’s is a 50′s/60′s style monster movie called Wadzilla, about “a man who goes to get his sperm count raised, which goes tragically wrong” (Green let slip that we may see a gargantuan sperm assaulting a certain American monument); Tim Sullivan will be directing a film called Curse of the Were-Bears, from which it’s safe to expect gay jokes; Lynch is doing Zombie Movie, whose prosaic title is made up for by the tagline, “when there’s no more room in hell, the dead shall fuck the earth;” and Green’s is a black and white monster movie entitled The Diary of Anne Frankenstein, boasting Joel David Moore as Hitler and Kane Hodder as a Jewish Frankenstein monster. This last one, the only segment yet completed, was also screened for the Frightfest audience; and while it’s certainly not about to topple Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein (which Green acknowledged as a major influence), it’s still an amusing, affectionate and suitably absurd short, part tribute, part spoof, part just-random-humour. If the other chapters are in a similar vein, we can expect Chillerama to be thoroughly low-brow fun for fanboys. Green and Lynch pledge to screen it at Frightfest 2011.
This announcement and sneak preview were the highlight of what was otherwise a rather underwhelming day, from what I saw of it; the two afternoon movies We Are What We Are and Damned By Dawn were mostly unremarkable, whilst the surprise replacement for A Serbian Film turned out to be Buried, which didn’t turn out to be quite as daring or disturbing as hoped. Look out for more on these, and the other movies I haven’t yet mentioned, in a general report on the festival later in the week.
