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Showing posts with label Seth Cassell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Seth Cassell. Show all posts

Exclusive Interview with #HoldYourBreath Director Jared Cohn!


Tomorrow, October 5th, The Asylum ventures into brand new territory: the land of theatrical distribution. And leading the charge is the horror film #HoldYourBreath, starring 30 Rock's Katrina Bowden and The Lying Game's Randy Wayne. The story comes from uber-talented Asylum regular Geoff Meed (6 Guns, I Am Omega, Amittyville Haunting) and is directed by none other than Jared Cohn, a man who needs no introduction to Committed readers or Asylum fans at large, as Mr. Cohn has directed not one, not two, not even three but four films for The Asylum in the last 18 months - thriller Born Bad, comedy Bikini Spring Break, upcoming apocalyptic thriller 12/12/12 and now #HoldYourBreath. Cohn wrote the script for the first three projects, and rounds out his impressive resume by being a certifiably stellar actor, not to mention a stand-up dude and, in my meager experience, one of the most enthusiastic and devoted filmmakers at The Asylum right now. Mr. Cohn was kind enough to sit down for his second interview with Committed to give us all the 411 on #HoldYourBreath.

COMMITTED: What can you tell us about #holdyourbreath?


JARED COHN: Breath is cool, serial killer, evil spirit, body jumping movie! Lots of suspense, excitement, and you never know who is the killer. In a similar vein as Fallen, starring Denzel W. It's the first movie with a # in the title, and I thought that was very innovative and zeitgeist. I am happy because the feedback from the trailer and from some of those who have actually seen the entire, completed movie has been very positive!  I can say it is a badass movie that people should definitely check out. http://holdyourbreathmovie.com Also, enter the Midnight Madness contest where the winner gets killed in a movie!

Katrina Bowden stars

C: When did you realize it was going to get a theatrical debut, and how was that decided? Did that effect the filmmaking process at all?

JC: I made sure to get some big theatrical, epic shots in the movie. There are certainly some wide, beautiful shots we had. It has a nice look to it, the lighting looks very cool for some of the shots. My Director of Photography, Stuart Breton did a good job. Plus, they got 2 big stars in the show, Katrina Bowden and Randy Wayne. We also had some awesome sets and production design.





C: What kind of theatrical distribution is the film getting? How many theaters, where, et cetera?

JC: Nationwide, major cities! The list and all the information and the contest is on the site: http://holdyourbreathmovie.com EVERYONE NEEDS TO SEE IT!!!! or I will come and kill you ;)



C: This is your third directoral effort for The Asylum. How was directing horror different from a thriller, or comedy?

JC: I like making horror movies, killing people on screen is great for me because I am sick in the head. I would either be a filmmaker or a serial killer, or perhaps an assassin or ninja.. or a Marine. I have a lot of respect for the Marines and those who serve. Doing Bikini Spring Break was cool though, it was very successful. Born Bad was cool too, that was my spec, so that was my break!  I love movie making and acting and writing, so as long as I am working I am a happy camper. It's my passion my hobby my career... just fortunate. Hard work helps too! So does a good night of sleep. 



C: This was also your first direction for The Asylum not based on a script you wrote. Any challenges there?

JC: First of all, props to The Asylum, those guys are awesome. Latt, Rimawi and Bales. Mad genius, cool dudes. Yes, there are challenges when you direct a movie that was not written by the director. You must familiarize yourself with the story like crazy. On set there is no script supervisor, so my challenge was reading the script over and over and over and over. I knew that story inside and out. If you attempt to direct without knowing the story, then you will probably be in some trouble! 


C: What was it like working with Katrina Bowden and Randy Wayne? Any other standouts in the cast we should be looking for?

JC: Katrina was great, very cool, very professional, smoking hot, she had a lil cute dog with her. Was extremely talented and she is a fellow east coaster. Randy Wayne is a really cool guy, turns out we had some mutual friends... He is a talented guy, has a bright future. Be on the lookout for Stevie Hanks. He plays in #HOLDYOURBREATH, a large role and he kicks some serious ass. So interesting to watch. Erin Marie Hogan and Brad Slaughter and Jordan Pratt and Seth Cassell, those guys all got chops. We had a solid cast with us. It's a good movie.



C: What can you tell us about your upcoming projects, including, of course, 12/12/12, out from The Asylum in December?

Director/Dodger fan on set of 12/12/12
JC: 12/12/12 is a masterpiece. I love that movie. So cool, original, disturbing, killer baby, psychological... it's fucked up. But great. I really think and hope the fans will like it. The movie stars the beautiful and talented Sara Malakul Lane and Steve Hanks and they are both great in it. Sara is a big star in Thailand and it will be soon when she is big star here! The Asylum has been putting out some really cool flicks lately, including some written by Mr. Perry Horton himself, so with the talent pool filled with high quality creative juices, the caliber of cinema creation has been incredible as of lately. 

It's good to be apart of an industry filled with talented  folks!  The Asylum rocks! www.JaredCohn.com www.TrapLightMedia.com

#HoldYourBreath Gets a Trailer!!!

#HoldYourBreath, the first theatrical release by the fine folks at The Asylum, finally showed us the goods today via this trailer:


In case you couldn't tell, the basic plot is as follows: "A group of friends on a roadtrip explore a cemetery where the ghost of a notorious serial killer jumps from body to body, killing his victims one by one."

The film, written by Geoff Meed (I Am Omega, 6 Guns) and directed by Jared Cohn (Born Bad, Bikini Spring Break, upcoming 12/12/12) stars 30 Rock's Katrina Bowden and Grizzly Park's Randy Wayne, and is set to premiere October 5th.

Mega Shark vs. Giant Dorito!

So you guys gotta check this out. I got an email today from Brandon over at The Asylum, in marketing, with a link to a video the guys shot while Mega Shark Deuce was in production that has been entered in the Dortios/Pepsi "Crash the Super Bowl" ad campaign contest. 

Bottom line, this thing is awesome. Check out Asylum regulars Mike Gagli and Seth Cassell and, of course, everyone's favorite prehistoric shark, hamming it up in the commercial right here, then, just like I asked you yesterday regarding your Netflix cues, tell everyone you know, bombard the shit out of this thing and show The Asylum that we committed are out in full force!

Voting for ads begins in January. Stay tuned here for details!

977's Unsolicited Yet Copyrighted Pitch #4: CASUAL ENCOUNTERS

In the tradition of Sex Pot, The 18 Year Old Virgin and, most recently, MILF, I humbly present this raucous sex comedy that I'm calling Casual Encounters. Like many other Asylum comedies, it centers around two friends, young men in their mid-20's, tentatively named Walt and Roddy (the latter name alone should provide three to five minutes of jokes, easy). Walt is our lead, a clean-cut nice-guy who's too nice for his own good. Roddy is his best friend, the more crass, vivacious and stoned of the two (Seth Cassel could be good here.).

Our film opens on graduation night, Walt and Roddy both having graduated that day, Walt from a journalism Master's program and Roddy from his 7-year Art History program (insert "it's where the chicks are" jokes here). Roddy has convinced a reluctant Walt to come with him to the big party that night, a thing Walt never does, being the quiet, bookish, stay-at-home, mild-mannered sort he is. But, since his girlfriend Jessica, another graduate, is busy with her girlfriends that night, and on account of the cajoling he's getting from Roddy in reference to his impending desertion of Roddy and this town for Jessica and the big city, Walt concedes. 

The party is an affair of debauchery, a mixture of college kids, grad students and the like, all enjoying a well-deserved break. While Roddy is revealed to be a natural reveler, Walt is the obvious awkward wallflower, standing alone, avoiding conversation, all-around not enjoying himself. But out of the corner of his eye he sees a girl running playfully upstairs, Jessica, he thinks. He makes his way across the party and goes upstairs, finds himself in an empty hallway with several doors, all of them open but one at the end. He goes to it, hears a minor skirmish and a squeal from inside. Thinking Jessica in trouble, he opens the door. In the room he finds Jessica, topless, her breasts covered in chocolate syrup, and two eager young men, naked, ready to clean her. All are a bit shocked. What follows is a difficult, awkward, and chocolate-breasted break-up (that the naked dudes observe) in which Jessica says they've been together too long, since high school, and she'd been feeling cooped up for a while now, like she was letting her sexiest days pass her by. Until recently he was the only man she'd ever been with (was?!?), and she just can't continue to waste all this (chocolate breasts) on one guy. Walt counters that they're supposed to move to the city (any city) the next day. Yeah...she's not coming. Maybe later they can get together, settle into that grown-up life Walt seems so eager for, but for now, she's young, she's hot, her moral compass for the moment is out of whack and she wants to flaunt it. Walt, spineless, concedes and even leaves the room, closing the door behind him so Jessica and her new friends can get back to business.

Roddy spots Walt, dejected, leaving the party and follows him out, gets the story. Walt is freaking out, he's got a deposit on an apartment in the city, needs to start looking for jobs, but going alone freaks him out even more; he's ruined, his life is over. Roddy steps in and says he'll move with Walt, he's spontaneous and unattached like that. So it's settled.

We pick up with the two friends in the city where in the process of moving in Roddy meets a comely neighbor and disappears to sex her up, leaving Walt alone to move in by himself. When Roddy returns Walt confronts him about this, how it will be, Roddy with the ladies and Walt all alone, and Roddy assuages him by saying all they have to do is get Walt back in the game himself and it will all balance out; he's a free man for the first time as an adult, the first time ever, he should get out there and hump anything that will let him. To prove his point, Roddy takes Walt to a nearby bar that night, tries to help him meet women, but Walt is hopelessly awkward, doesn't know how to talk to women, certainly doesn't know how to pick them up. It's a disaster, in short, and Walt leaves embarrassed, ashamed and alone, while Roddy scores again. When Roddy returns later that night, he and Walt have a talk about the problem, how Walt can't communicate with women in the moment like that, his brain seizes up and he can't think of anything to say. If only there was a way to pick up women without having to look at them. 

There is, Roddy declares, and grabs a laptop, directs Walt to a community message board that comes with a Casual Encounters section. Roddy explains the CE principle to Walt and why he thinks it's ideal: he's not looking for anything other than sex, he doesn't want to play games, and he doesn't want to talk face to face. He can communicate honestly and directly through writing, his strong suit. Walt doesn't know, he isn't sure, it sounds kind of, well, desperate and sketchy. It is sketchy and desperate, but so it the best sex, which Walt wouldn't know, having been with only one woman his whole life; he has to trust Roddy.

So trust he does, and allows Roddy to post an ad for him detailing what he wants in a sexual escapade. Walt has to get drunk as he does this, so nervous and timid he is, so it gets progressively lewder and thus funnier as he goes. Walt passes out before the ad is posted. Roddy finishes it for him by snapping a picture of Walt's package to post with the ad. As it turns out, Walt happens to be well-endowed, causing Roddy to curse all the time he spent writing when they could've just posted the pic.

When Walt wakes up in the morning, his inbox is flooded with willing women wanting to get down. Funny sequence going through the women, the pictures, the shapes, the sizes, the ages, the kinks, the personalities, all this, until he finds one that suits his purposes, someone, like him, that seems normal and even demure, bespectacled, quiet, just a mousy thing looking for a good time.

Now, from here we get into - pardon the pun - the meat of our movie, the encounters and how they effect him, so I don't want to give away much more than generalizations. What I can say is that the demure chick turns out to be the opposite, kinda dominatrix-y, the signs were all there in conversation but Walt didn't get it, and this rough but hilarious encounter freaks him out. Roddy convinces him to try again, promising this time to help him decipher the lingo via  "micro-blu," an inner ear blu tooth device (a dash of Cyrano de Bergerac never hurt a comedy). This is where the vagaries in description begin.

Walt goes on another encounter, Roddy talks him through to the good stuff. Things get a little freaky, and when it's over Walt forgets he still has the blu tooth in, allowing Roddy to have heard everything, which disturbs him and disturbs Roddy as well for how much it turned him on, so both agree this plan was a one-time thing.

As Walt continues to navigate the strange world of no-strings sex he meets an array of characters: cougars, BBWs, curious lesbians, goth girls, good, old-fashioned trashy sluts, other kinksters, and among these one girl, different from him, fiercely independent, edgy, but cautious, who answers his ad a few times, but takes it slow, talking only the first encounter, standing close without touching the second, progressing like that, because her kink is the build-up. Walt is falling for her in a weird way, but she'll have nothing of it, because once they consummate, the build-up is over. 

So as these aspects of our story wind around each other - the casual encounters eventually giving him the experience and confidence he needs to feel independent as a man and his burgeoning real affection for a girl he met that way - the monkeywrench of Jessica re-enters the picture. She's back, says she's been around and all she's found is that she had the best right where she was. She wants Walt back, wants to pick up where they left off, leaving Walt to make a difficult decision between his old, safe, static life and love or his new, exciting, dangerous and thrilling life, with it's possible new love (is there anything beyond the build-up? can it ever be more exciting?).

This one has it all: jokes, boobs, comic sex and a nice array of women characters sure to appeal to a broad range of men. Plus, I can't think of another sex-personals comedy off the top of my head, so it could be virgin territory, but without a single virgin. Would also work as a horror movie with minimal tweaks.

I'm just sayin'.

observation notes: Sex Pot


Sex and drugs - the PB&J of adulthood. And, like youth, too often the best of these are wasted on the young.

Take Sex Pot, for example, The Asylum's answer to Harold & Kumar etc. etc. etc.: magical weed and lascivious playmates are wasted on two dorks with no discernible social skills and a vocal affinity for masturbation.

Problem one: a magic bag of weed, the magic being that it makes women lose their inhibitions and fuck losers. That's not magic weed. That's just weed.

Problem two: women losing inhibitions. Inhibitions have to be had before they can be lost, and judging by the look of these women - yes, I'm judging them by their appearance, they're in their underwear on a movie box, I can do that - any inhibitions they came equipped with were stripped off a long time ago with, well, you can make your own joke here.

As for the rest of it, Seth Cassell - who you may remember I talked up in #1 Cheerleader Camp, but only in comparison to this - and the DJ Qualls impersonator that plays his buddy are perfectly believable as losers, but not at all as stoners (see Cassell's facial expression on the cover. there's a lot of that.). And somehow this makes the film weirdly watchable. The copious boobs help.

And speaking of boobs, they're only a small - well, not small, per se - facet of a script laced with nearly every raunchy cliche you can think of: hot-chick bowel movements, donkey show references, fruit-based mutual masturbation (twice I've used that word now. probably speaks more to the movie than the rest of this review), and lesbian dominatrixes. At times all this together felt a little over the top, too much, almost, but my wife reads these things, and she was sitting next to me when I put this one in - I know, I know - so I have to say that.

Bottom line, this is no comedy to write home about. But it is one to watch in a dark room by yourself with the door locked. If you like that kind of thing. Which apparently people do, because films like this get made all the time.

A couple of choice lines to set the mood:

"You sound like Harvey Milk doing a fucking porno."
(I don't know what this means.)

"Would you take pity on me, man? I have to crawl into a bathroom where the girl I just jerked off to took a big shit."
(keeping in mind this is said to the guy standing next to him when said masturbation occurred. [that's three times])

observation notes: #1 Cheerleader Camp

In the interest of painting myself as objective a reviewer as possible, and not just a raving fanatic, I will say that comedies by The Asylum don't usually do it for me, as they skimp a little too much on story for the sake of sex, drugs and flatulence. But #1 Cheerleader Camp is a pleasant exception, while still fulfilling, in kind, all the aforementioned detractors.

Basically Bring it On meets Meatballs with a dash of American Pie: Band Camp, the film concerns two young men who somehow land jobs working maintenance at a cheerleader camp. Naturally, they're in it for the perks. And there are lots of perks. Or at least perky things. Take for instance the opening scene, man's best friend: buxom young ladies on trampolines. For real. The film opens the same way The Man Show used to close. And just in case you're thinking, "wow, that's incredibly sexist," uh-uh, nope, it was written by a woman, so, you know, not sexist.

Neither then is the group shower scene, the best - if "best" can be conscienably applied to describing a group shower scene - of its kind since Porky's, nor the sprinkler montage, a rival to Phoebe Cates' iconic pool emergence in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. "How many more references is he going to make?" you may be asking yourself? None.

As for performances, for me the film was made and saved by Seth Cassell, who I really didn't like in Sex Pot, but here found to be more subtle and restrained, thus actually funny. As for the other guy, he was passable, but I was really distracted by the fact that he looks a lot like the douche who plays Ted on How I Met Your Mother. Beyond the principles, there is a bevvy of naked chicks - as though cheerleaders weren't enough, strippers enter about halfway through - a cameo from Mega Piranha hero Paul Logan and Lucy from Dallas (Charlene Tilton) playing herself with unabashed bravado. That's really all you need to know.

A couple choice quotes to give a sense of tone:

"Every time you spooge, you burn like, a 1,000 calories."

"You've never stuck your dick in a watermelon?"

"She's just a girl, one girl who will never let you fuck her while she's going down on another chick."

Perhaps I should have mentioned before now that this blog is not kid-friendly.