inmate re-profile: Rachel Goldenberg

In honor of the DVD release of Grimm's Snow White on the 13th of March, Committed has been spotlighting the creative forces behind the film, and I thought the next inmate profiled should be the director, Rachel Goldenberg, whose resume with The Asylum is ridiculously impressive.

Besides the above-mentioned and forthcoming fairy-tale revamp, Ms. Goldenberg also helmed the well-received Princess and the Pony, the delightfully steampunk'd Sherlock Holmes and the strangely catchy Sunday School Musical. But beneath these three headlining gigs are a few years crammed to the hilt with production work for our favorite studio. Dig these credentials:


First Assistant Director on: 2012 Ice Age, The 7 Adventures of Sinbad, Princess of Mars, 2012 Supernova, Mega Fault, The Terminators, Monster, Alien vs. Hunter, I Am Omega


Line Producer on: Mega Fault, Dragonquest, Countdown:Jerusalem, 18 Year Old Virgin, Death Racers, Street Racer


And as though all this wasn't enough, she also wrote and edited two of her three directed-films for The Asylum, and over the last year or so has directed a handful of shorts for Funny or Die featuring the likes of Courteney Cox, Nia Vardelos, Bryan Cranston, Eric Stonestreet et al. Girl's got more hats than a Lids Store. If The Asylum put out Wheaties boxes (I know, work with me here), Rachel Goldenberg would for sure be one of the featured.

There's no doubt Ms. Goldenberg has a bright, bright, bright future ahead of her. My only hope is that she sticks around The Asylum long enough to make a few more films. I mean, it's a little late, but I'd line up for an Asylum Sherlock sequel; just sayin'...

That date again for the release of Ms. Goldenberg's latest film, Grimm's Snow White,  is March 13th. Add it to your cues now!

Creature Feature: god

That's right, I'm doing a creature feature on god, or God, however you choose to spell it. Makes sense, after all, as he (or she, I suppose) has been the force to reckon with in no less than six Asylum films: Countdown: Jerusalem, The Apocalypse, Meteor Apocalypse, 2012 Doomsday, 2012 Supernova and Sunday School Musical. Now, obviously, one of these films is not like the others, and to call god the "villain" in Sunday School Musical would be a gross exaggeration and a scoch blasphemous, but there's no doubt that in the other five, he's chock-full of that Old Testament piss and vinegar than made humanity bow at his feet and call him Daddy.

In all of these films the pitch is pretty much the same: g(G)od is pissed at/fed-up with/testing the faith of humanity and so sends a plague of natural disasters including earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, droughts, crazy storms and even barrages of meteors. This, as I alluded to above, is that old-school god of wrath and vengeance, all my-way-or-the-highway, the kind of guy who would wipe out an entire universe just to prove a point, the kind of dude who told Abraham to kill his son as a gesture of faith and then stopped him just before he did, that kind of shit. Sure, he's still cool to his faithful - in Countdown: Jerusalem in particular, he does the whole Rapture thing where he plucks the souls of the righteous before unleashing Hell upon the rest of us wicked - but for those who have forgotten, forsaken or insulted him, there will be no mercy. 

Perhaps I'm painting too dour a picture of the presence of god in these films. After all, these films are meant to be faith-affirming, and sure, they use a scare tactic or two to get you there, but that is absolutely nothing new in religion. But in the end, in each of these films, the same god who is seen as angered and thus responsible for global cataclysm is always somehow appeased or satisfied and sees or re-sees the good in humanity and gives us one more chance to make a go of this crazy gift called Life.Thus is the dichotomy of god, and the element that makes him such an interesting character (in Asylum films, I mean, not in, you know, The Bible): he loves us enough to destroy us. That's some heavy shit, y'all.

No doubt we haven't seen the last of god. With 2012 right around the corner, he's sure to catch some flack in a disaster flick here or there, and if not, he can always extend a helping hand in a demon-plagued horror film or two, or even lend a benevolent ear in a faith-based family drama. That's the nice thing - or rather, one of the nice things, I guess - about being god: you're good at everything.

inmate profile: Rachel Goldenberg

Ms. Goldenberg, obviously, is the one without the awesome mustache.

In honor of the DVD release of Princess and the Pony - formerly 1st Furry Valentine - on the 25th of this month, I thought the inmate profile should turn its spotlight on Renaissance woman Rachel Goldenberg, whose resume with The Asylum is ridiculously impressive, especially for someone who seems so young*.

Besides the above-mentioned and forthcoming family film, Ms. Goldenberg also helmed the delightfully steampunk'd Sherlock Holmes and the strangely catchy Sunday School Musical. But beneath these three headlining gigs are a few years crammed to the hilt with production work for our favorite studio. Dig these credentials:


First Assistant Director on: The 7 Adventures of Sinbad, Princess of Mars, 2012 Supernova, Mega Fault, The Terminators, Monster, Alien vs. Hunter, I Am Omega


Line Producer on: Mega Fault, Dragonquest, Countdown:Jerusalem, 18 Year Old Virgin, Death Racers, Street Racer


And as though all this wasn't enough, she also wrote and edited two of her three directed-films for The Asylum, the first and the forthcoming. Girl's got more hats than a Lids Store. If The Asylum put out Wheaties boxes (I know, work with me here), Rachel Goldenberg would for sure be one of the featured.

There's no doubt Ms. Goldenberg has a bright, bright, bright future ahead of her. My only hope is that she sticks around The Asylum long enough to make a few more films. After all, there is that  big-screen Sherlock Holmes sequel coming soon that just dying to be mockbusted...

That date again for the release of Ms. Goldenberg's latest film is January 25th. Add it to your cues now!


* I'm basing this statement on nothing more than mere conjecture, having found very little information on Ms. Goldenberg online beyond her IMDB profile and the above photo on The Asylum's Photostream. So any assumptions I make that are incorrect, or conclusions I draw that are not factual, I apologize. I'm not really a journalist or anything, you know. Just sayin'