A podcast with Mark Jones, the director of Fraternity Massacre at Hell Island

By Adam Lippe

Below is a podcast I did with Mark Jones, the director of Fraternity Massacre at Hell Island, a very low-budget gay slasher parody. And since the movie was finished in 2005, did the festival circuit in 2007, and was finally released on DVD in April, it probably means that not only have none of you reading this seen the movie, you’ve never even heard of it.

Luckily, this 17 minute interview covers all sorts of other topics that only tangentially deal with the movie (while still discussing it), such as, how do you make a movie deliberately bad without winking too much while still figuring out how much skill should be evident, can you make a fraternity more homoerotic, how Mark’s pastor feels about the nudity and violence in his movie,  considering there are a number of extraordinarily obscure references,  who exactly the audience is for his film, and whether he’s aware that he shares the name of the guy who directed Leprechaun.

The recording is nearly perfect except for the occasional background sound of an air purifier for the first three minutes (it gets turned off after that) and the fact that I sound very nasal throughout. The purifier is not really a distraction, just trying to make sure that those of you who listen to the podcast don’t think you’re going insane.

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Roadracers

By Adam Lippe

Whenever there’s a genre parody or ode to a specific era of films, such as Black Dynamite’s mocking of Blaxploitation films or Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, the second half of Grindhouse, the danger is that the film might fall into the trap of either being condescending without any particular insight, or so faithful that it becomes the very flawed thing it is emulating.

Black Dynamite has nothing new to say about Blaxploitation films, it just does a decent job of copying what an inept [...]


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On Cold Fish:

Though the 16 year old me described the 1994 weepie Angie, starring Geena Davis as a Brooklyn mother raising her new baby alone, as “maudlin and melodramatic,” Roger Ebert, during his TV review, referring to the multitude of soap-operaish problems piling up on the titular character, suggested that it was only in Hollywood where Angie would get a happy ending. “If they made this movie in France, Angie would have shot herself.”

Well Cold Fish was made in Japan, where Angie would have shot herself and that would have been the happy ending.