Asylum Saturday on SyFy - THIS Saturday!

So this coming Saturday, a day I'm officially declaring a holiday, the fine, fine folks at SyFy are showing not one, not two, not even three but four Asylum films, and not a one of them at 3 in the morning! 

Things start off with the undisputed classic Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus at 1 p.m., then a little break followed by a six-hour mega-marathon that includes Mega Piranha at 5 p.m., Mega Python vs. Gatoroid at 7 and the world television premiere of 2010 Moby Dick, starring Barry Bostwick and Renee O'Connor, written by Paul Bales and directed by Trey Stokes, at 9 p.m. 

So whatever else it is you thought you were doing Saturday, cancel it; four of The Asylum's best are on the boob tube, and you, dear boob, simply can't afford to miss this rare alignment.

The Results Are In: Announcing the Winners of the 2010 Loonies!!!

That's right, my faithfully-committed, this is the day we've been waiting for: after six weeks of anticipation and more than 500 votes, it's at long last time to announce the winners of the first ever Looney Awards for Excellence in Asylum Films. This first class of winners will go down in history and their names will echo across time just like Wings, Emil Jannings and Janet Gaynor. In addition to winning the accolades of their fans and the envy of their contemporaries, Looney winners receive, well, nothing physical, but those other things really are pretty cool. A reminder that the Loonies were voted for solely by Committed readers, and you have my word as a Southerner, a gentleman and an Asylum fanatic that the results have been in no way modified. So get your screen maximized, pump something with a little pomp and circumstance on your iTunes (i chose lil wayne's "right above it") and scroll down, winners await you!

Best Supporting Actress - Lindsey McKeon - Airline Disaster

 

Best Supporting Actor - Jude Gerard-Prest - Mega Piranha

 

Best Performance by a Non-Human - Mega Piranha (collective) - Mega Piranha

 

Best Script - Shane Van Dyke - Titanic II

 

Best Actress - Tiffany - Mega Piranha

 

Best Actor - Barry Bostwick - 2010: Moby Dick

 

Best Director - Eric Forsberg - Mega Piranha

 

drum roll please...

Best Feature - Mega Piranha

 

I can assure you that each of these races came down to single-digit differentials, and for the most part every nominee got at least a handful of votes. I think this illustrates just how satisfied we as Asylum fans were with last year's output: they were all so good, we truly had a hard time deciding which one we liked best. But the results speak for themselves, and the big winner this first year is Mega Piranha, walking away with an astounding five of eight Loonies, and a slightly more astounding five of six nominations.

Big shout out to all the winners, and indeed all the nominees; this was the biggest, most spectacular year in The Asylum's history, and it was the contributions of all the nominees - and scores of others that I heartlessly left unnominated - who helped make it happen. So really they're all winners, and the prize is getting to work for the best independent studio in Hollywood.

Thanks to everybody who voted, who commented, and who helped spread the word. Special thanks, as always, to The Asylum for letting me draft off their success, and if any of the winners would like to post an acceptance speech in the comments below, feel free! No cut-off music! 

My Looney Picks: Committed's Favorties of 2010

I want it stated right off the bat and underlined for effect: these are NOT the official results for the 2010 Looney Awards. They ARE NOT. These are merely my personal picks in each category, and I should also add that though they are being posted today, I made my selections more than a month ago, so they have been in no way influenced by the actual results, which will be released tomorrow.

NOT THE LOONEY RESULTS!!!!!

I think I've made myself clear.





Now then, on to the festivities:


Best Supporting Actress

Lindsey McKeon - Airline Disaster

As Special Agent Gina Vitale, McKeon brought a ferocious capability to her character, crafting a complex woman who was simultaneously strong, severe, and sexy. McKeon is no stranger to Asylum films - see also The Land That Time Forgot - but hopefully now that she's an award-winning actress, they can boost her up from supporting roles to a full-on lead. 










Best Supporting Actor

Geoff Meed - 6 Guns

Easily this year's vilest (human) villain, Geoff Meed has made quite the name for himself over at The Asylum playing an array of gruff, tough, general badass characters (I Am Omega, 100 Million BC, Airline Disaster). In 6 Guns, his savagery is matched only by his intensity, and Mr. Meed transforms himself into a terror truly worth undertaking the drastic measures our widow heroine chooses to undertake; he is truly a villain worth killing.  







Best Script

 Paul Bales - Sherlock Holmes

Tackling a character like Sherlock Holmes is hard enough: easily one of the most beloved in all of literature, there is a disciplined intelligence to the stories of Holmes that is the character's own, and to write for such a man requires strict adherence to that intelligence. Well, Bales not only stayed true to the character, he infused the story with some of the author's other literary affectations - like dinosaurs - and even found a way to tie in a plot line resonant of Hollywood-Holmes Robert Downey Jr.'s other recent blockbuster franchise.






Best Nonhuman

Moby Dick - 2010: Moby Dick

Just as big as Mega Shark, just as ferocious as Crocosaurus, and laced with a mammalian intellect that dwarfs even the super-smart school mentality of the Mega Piranha, Moby Dick was a big ol' badass with a snowhilled hump riddled with centuries' worth of harpoons. Vengeful, merciless and damn-near unstoppable; in other words, the perfect villain.


Best Actress

Sage Mears - 6 Guns

More than any other female character this year, Ms. Mears' Selina Stevens, violated widow turned wrathful force of vengeance, carried the brunt of her film's emotional weight almost solely upon her own shoulders. And this was no easy weight to bear: over the films 95 minutes she's required to be a happy mother and loving wife, a victim of unimaginable horrors, a hopeless, reckless drunk, a petulant, impatient pupil and finally a cold, calm, calculated vigilante. Not bad for her first film.







Best Actor

Barry Bostwick - 2010: Moby Dick

Who else? As great as the other nominees in this category were, no one matched the on-screen intensity Bostwick brought to conflicted Captain Ahab. I mean, Gregory Peck played the role to near perfection, not to mention the likes of Patrick Stewart and (upcoming) William Hurt; these were no small shoes ("shoe," I guess is more appropriate) to step into. But Bostwick made the character his own, granting him a fevered passion the likes of which had never been captured by other actors. Plus, he made his own harpoon gun! There is nothing cooler than that. Nothing.





Best Director

Rachel Lee Goldenberg - Sherlock Holmes


This was the toughest category, in my estimation, but when all was said and done, it was the direction by Ms. Goldenberg I found to be the most enjoyable, the most thrilling, and the most stylish. Sherlock Holmes had a look all its own, delightfully Victorian with a healthy dash of steampunk aesthetics that set its helmer just ahead of the pack. Furthermore, her ability to pace and guide what could arguably have been the year's most serpentine and intricate plot is also worth touting. 


Best Feature

2010: Moby Dick

I suppose in the interest of total disclosure I should remind my readers that I have such a devotion to the novel by Herman Melville this film is based on - the greatest novel ever penned by an American - that I have a very tasteful scrimshaw-esque tattoo of said whale on my right forearm. But my body art aside, 2010: Moby Dick was easily the most enjoyable film - for me, at least - of the year. The plot was faithful to the original while establishing a wholly unique world, the acting was top-notch, the FX brutally awesome and the direction, by Mr. Trey Stokes, helped artfully tie all these elements together into a veritable bouquet of a killer whale movie (not Orca, but, you know...). An ambitious undertaking from the get-go, 2010: Moby Dick fired on all cylinders and succeeded on all fronts.



So there you have it, my personal picks for the best of Asylum's 2010 films. Agree with me? Disagree? If so, hold your tongue, because the real winners will be announced tomorrow, noontime here on the West Coast. See you then!

observation notes: 2010 Moby Dick

Man oh man have I been looking forward to this."Moby Dick" is my favorite novel of all time, and when I heard it was being adapted by my favorite studio, well, let's just say I've been beside myself with anticipation. I mean, as far as American writers go, Melville's pretty much the Godfather, and "Moby Dick" is his coup de grace, and, in my and many others' opinions, the finest work ever produced by an American novelist. So, some pretty big shoes to fill here. Or should I say "mega" shoes? Let's get into it.

The Asylum's version opens in the arctic in 1969 aboard a submarine on which there serves a young seaman by the name of Jonah Ahab (Jay Gillespie, #1 Cheerleader Camp)(love the addition of "Jonah," as in, that dude in the Bible lived in a whale for a while. in the book, it's just Ahab. but Bales, he's cross-referencing his whale lore. awesome!). On the young Ahab's sonar there is sensed something large and biological approaching the sub. He tries to inform the others, even records it's sound, or song, on a Maxell cassette, but his superior dismisses his suspicions as glitches of equipment and inexperience - that is until that something Ahab detected, a gigantic and ruthlessly aggressive white whale, attacks the sub and body slams it down on the ice shelf, killing the majority of the crew in an instant. Young Ahab, as you would expect, gets out alive, but loses a leg.

Cut to our modern era and the coast of California where Cetologist (whale scientist/actress Renee O'Connor, "Xena") Michelle Herman (get it? Ismael and the last name of the author. brilliant!) and her assistant Pip (Derrick Scott) are recording the songs of her specimens in a purple bikini on a boat cutely named "The Coffin," a reference, no doubt, to the buoyant slab of wood that saves Ismael's life in the novel. 

I'm going to tone down mentioning all the little references to the novel, promise, I just wanted to make the point that this script, whatever else it is, is firmly loyal to the original story. Back to it, now:

Said specimens are responding just fine until something below the surface spooks them and they take off. That something, it's revealed seconds later, is a U.S. Navy Nuclear Submarine, the Pequod, whose crew has breached to request - in a rather forceful manner - the services of our whale doctor and her associate. This request comes on behalf of the Pequod's unseen captain, Ahab, now forty years older.

Cut to a nice little scene here where a whale-watching tourist boat is crushed by the underbelly of the great white whale of sea-faring lore, Moby Dick. More on this in a bit.

Back in the sub, the doc is being briefed by first-mate Starbuck (easy BSG geeks, the name was ours first) about the incidents leading up to her specific, shall we say, acquisition by the sub. Seems there's been a lot of weird whale attacks lately, but not by any ordinary whale, oh no, but by a five-hundred-fucking-foot white whale, a whale like no other, a prehistoric megawhale freed from the arctic and now wreaking havoc off the coast of Southern California. Doc dismisses this as ridiculous, impossible, besides, it's a myth, a legend, no one's ever actually seen this thing. Enter modern-day Ahab (the great, gray Barry Bostwick, Animal House, "Spin City"). Not only has he seen the foul leviathan, he's still got its song on cassette (enter your own "Moby Dick" '69 bootleg/Zeppelin joke here). To Ahab, Moby Dick is no mere myth, no slight story made up and meant to scare sailors, oh no, this whale to Ahab is all too real, he feels it in his phantom leg, and over the last forty years he has become quite insane with vengeance (while still being able to hold down a skippership position with the Navy). He will stop at nothing short of this glorious creature's permanent extinction, and that's where the doc comes in: he's been following her work for years and knows that if anyone can use the song he has on cassette to track the real whale, it's her. Doc isn't too pleased about abetting this violent mission, but when Ahab convinces her all they want to do is stop the attacks on innocents, she's reluctantly in.

On shore, an old seaman buddy of Ahab's, and one who served all those years ago on the same sub Moby Dick made mincemeat of (he lost an arm) is being questioned by Navy higher-ups about Ahab's state of mind. Seems the Navy got pretty nervous when Ahab, on his own, tricked out his nuclear sub to become even more dangerous and formidable, and then they got even more nervous when he ceased to make regular check-ins. Navy realllllllllly doesn't like that. Futhermore, these attacks that have been happening, the ones we know Moby Dick is responsible for, well, no one else believes in a prehistoric whale freed from arctic stasis, so naturally, they're blaming these things on the rogue sub captain with the pimped out vessel. Ahab's buddy is commissioned the responsibility of finding his old friend and bringing him in.

In the meantime, however, another sub on the lookout for the Pequod conveniently chances upon the latter vessel, although before it can take action, in another ridiculously convenient chance encounter, Moby Dick is there as well, honing in on the pinging of the former sub's radar, and quickly making said sub no more. Now it's getting personal.

On shore again, Ahab's buddy interviews the only survivor of the whale-watching debacle, a Russian chick who dispels the rumor it was a sub that attacked them, instead blaming the tragedy on a massive white whale.

The Pequod is tracking that very whale at that very moment in the wake of its attack on the other sub. What it finds first is a truly chilling scene I won't give away here, I'll let you experience it on your own, but I will say it's the most illustrative scene - for me, at least - in regards to the sort of dark tone screenwriter Paul Bales establishes here; this is no mere creature feature, it is, as is the novel, a tale of violently irrational obsession, the most shadowed sector of the human soul, played out against a grandiose and horrific setting in which nature comes to personify man's basest attributes, or something like that. The whale kicks mad ass, takes out a bunch of impressive shit.

From here things only get more harrowing. Ahab accidentally invokes further hostilities from his own Navy, but then so does the whale. This does, however, produce the single greatest scene in cinema history involving a whale and a helicopter, undisputed. But after this, Ahab's battle is two-fold: get the whale before the Navy gets the Pequod.

I'm going to leave the rest for you to discover on your own, but I will say that thus far, Mega Shark vs. Crocosaurus still pending, this is easily my favorite Asylum production of 2010, and I say that honestly thinking this year has been their best so far. Everything is upped here - the script, the FX, the direction, the acting; The Asylum is just plain functioning on a higher level here. I loved the shit out of this movie, I honestly did.

Paul Bales' script honors the original, changing very little in the way of the story but to modernize it. The result is a story that maintains the venerability of the novel and blends that with the excitement, suspense and terror of an Asylum flick. It's a flawless thing, this blend, complete with inventive twists and imaginative reworkings of the source material - I'm thinking here of The Coffin, Ahab's second peg leg and the awesome harpoon gun Ahab uses (that, according to bonus features, Bostwick built himself one weekend out of shit in his garage. Awesome!) - that help this ambitious undertaking become realized.

As for FX, the whale looks great, really great: tremendous, vicious, formidable and frightening. The centuries' worth of harpoons embedded in its back is a particularly nice touch. The other FX also, the helicopters and subs and whatnot, look a lot cleaner, crisper, all around better, than they did even a year ago. This is not the work of Tiny Juggernaut, as I expected, but of visual effect supervisor Mark Kochinski, a veteran of "Star Trek" and "X-Files" and, yes, "Xena," who also worked on Titanic II and whose FX can next be seen in Mega Shark vs. Crocosaurus, Mega Python vs. Gatoroid and Battle of Los Angeles. Sounds like we're going to be hearing a lot about him in the next year. 

As for the actors, there wasn't a weak link in this chain. All of Melville's characters are here - Ahab, Ismael, Starbuck, Pip, Doughby, Bulkington, Queequeg - and the actors portraying them did so with loyalty to the original but also with the flexibility to make the roles their own. Particular standouts include Derrick Scott, Adam Grimes as Starbuck, Michael Teh (Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus) as Queequeg, and, in too brief an appearance, Mike Gaglio as an officer on younger Ahab's sub. Renee O'Connor is acceptable in her role, but truthfully it isn't big enough or given enough development to really judge. Overall, however, she's vibrant and urgent and it's great to see her in action again.

But the real standout, the irrefutable ace in this deck is Barry Bostwick as Ahab. In a word, the man is simply incredible, the best I have ever seen him, so impassioned, so violently desperate and insanely disciplined. He gets Ahab in a way no one else has, really sees the madman at the root of this guy and lets him run loose. Pound for pound, and I say this with the utmost respect and admiration to the eras of moviemaking that have come before us, Barry Bostwick captures the maniacal intensity of a man behind such a delirious quest at least as well as the late, great Gregory Peck (from the John Huston 1956 adaptation). Let the hate mail commence, but I say stovepipe hats off to the man for a truly wonderful and stirring performance.

Man, I feel bushed after all this. I knew I liked this movie when I sat down to write up these notes, but I don't think I knew exactly how much until just now. I've seen a lot of Asylum movies, quickly approaching all of them, and though I have my favorites - I Am Omega, The Beast of Bray Road, Titantic II - this one in time might take the cake as my absolute favorite. And again, I fully admit I'm biased because a) the book's my favorite, and b) so's the production company, but I truly believe this is a great action-adventure, above par when it comes to story and FX (barring a scene or two at the end when some crew are hiding from the whale behind a rock), and anchored with the utmost capability by a strong, fierce lead performance by Barry Bostwick, in my opinion, again, the best he's ever been. 

2010 Moby Dick  was directed by Trey Stokes, who makes his feature debut here. Mr. Stokes, I'd like to see a lot, lot more. A lot.

Kudos!

Big Asylum News Day! Tidbits Galore!

So The Asylum site is all abuzz today, and there are some real gems of information being bandied about. First off, we get the first official trailer for 2010 Moby Dick, starring Barry Bostwick (in what looks like the most intense performance of his career) and Renee "Xena" O'Connor. I'm a big "Moby DIck" fan (tattooed half-sleeve to come), so I've been anticipating this one like a mofo; from what I see, this could satisfy my irrational expectations. Dig the Mega Shark look to the whale. Check out the awesomeness right here.

Furthermore, it's been reported that Battle of Los Angeles has wrapped principal photography as of today, and the first stills from the film have been released, including this badass shot of the lovely Nia Peeples in a scene that would have looked perfectly in place in Machete. Check out the other stills here, where you can also dig on the poster, also released today.
















Also announced today, The Asylum is having a pumpkin carving contest, giving we committed fans the opportunity to memorialize our favorite Asylum films in the oh-so temporary medium of pumpkins. The prize is pretty awesome: an advance, autographed copy of the best film of the year, Mega Shark vs. Crocosaurus, complete with bonus behind-the-scenes footage. Check out the rules and entry information and get ye to carving! 


And finally, though there are no links or any info whatsoever, another title has appeared in the Coming Soon box in the bottom right corner of The Asylum's homepage: Born Bad. I can't imagine what this one's about, but it better be a Paul Logan or Geoff Meed vehicle. More info as soon as it's available, promise!