1989 | 1991 | 1992 | 1993 | 1994 | 1996 | 1997 | 1998 | 1999 | 2000
A movie about the clumsiest and youngest boxer in the world who was so stupid, he couldn't even defeat his own punching bag.
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King Kong remake with a group of characters traveling to an island and encountering bizarre creatures.
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The survivors from the first one, return to the island in search of something that they left behind in this dumb monotonous sequel.
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Ambitious but brainless production about child Ghostbusters who must combat evil spirits. Nice ideas and high energy, but overlong with barely any story structure. Production days were scattered over 6 months and I moved to a new neighborhood in the middle of it, so not only the locations change halfway through the movie, but so does the entire cast! The ghosts were created using a special trick of mine. Drawing them and superimposing them through the camera's title display function. It was weird.
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Inspired by Tim Burton's two Batman movies, I decided to make the next sequel on my own using Batman figures. This movie is just as much fun as watching a little kid playing with toys, whichever way you want to look at that.
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Heavily inspired by Godzilla, I decided to make a series on my own, about a monster. I used a dinosaur figure with movable jaws and limbs as my star. The plot again revolved around people who venture to a mysterious island.
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When Smogo returns again to threaten humanity, the same group of people responsible for discovering him travel to another island to find a good creature, a turtle called Tucker to confront him. Battleships are also brought in to fight Smogo.
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Smogo returns to demolish the city again, along with three other monsters, until a good creature convinces him to become a hero. Just like Godzilla, Smogo fights off the other beasts and saves civilization. What's funny is that Smogo talks.
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In this fourth and final chapter in the Smogo series, Smogo is given a son and together they must battle a monster made of Rocks who wants to take over the island and become king. Interestingly, each Smogo movie was shot in one day. The four days were consecutive.
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A boring survival story about four people stranded out at sea while an enormous reptilian creature attacks their boat. Inspired by the second half of "Jaws."
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Dumb sequel. This time takes place on the beach. Again a "Jaws" rip-off.
A friend of mine, Phil, was over my house, so I decided to have him act in a quick improvised movie. The plot involved a demonic mask that is found harboring the soul of an ancient warlock who died in the year 1693. Now, three centuries later, he possesses Phil's body once he wears the mask. Phil had to go home, so I cloned him with a hand-puppet and finished the movie all by myself. See also: 29. SNIX: THE RETURN, 37. SNIX AGAIN, 52. ROTTEN CORPSE OF SNIX, 53. POSSESSED MASK OF SNIX and 54. EVIL SPIRIT OF SNIX.
My thirteenth movie made when I became thirteen years of age holds true to the unlucky number thirteen. It's the worst piece of shit I've ever made.
I was so enthused about Halloween, I put together this boring disorganized mess to explore the holiday's various themes and try to get people into the spirit. It contains some mini-movies such as one where I am trapped inside a pumpkin. (a closeup of my fingers wiggling out of the jack-o-lantern's mouth) Other segments include some footage of my Halloween party, myself babbling on about classic horror films, footage of my annual Haunted House exhibit, and a music video for "Monster Mash" which actually isn't too bad. I animated several Halloween scenes such as a witch flying on her broomstick across the full moon and a Frankenstein monster rising from a laboratory table. They were all done on the Super NES Mario Paint program and to get the music on them, I had to play back everything I recorded and videotape the TV screen while playing the song on my audio tape player. I should have stacked the camera up on some books, (or heaven help me, a tripod!) but for some reason which is unknown to me today, I held the camera and it shakes like hell.
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This is the first time I was serious about making a movie. I wrote a script, gathered props and casted all of my friends from the neighborhood to make this moralistic horror/sci-fi b-movie about a scientist that brings back the dinosaurs from another dimension where they supposedly departed to. My friends were not serious about acting and all they did was play around. Soon, nobody was interested in making this movie at all and it was left unfinished. I thought I'd quit making movies with live actors forever.
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I decided to go back to my puppets. When I made my remake of the classic horror tale, I stuck close to the original 1818 novel by Mary Shelley and suprisingly not the 1931 movie.
I took some Saturday animation classes at the University of the Arts and made a series of cut-out cartoons which featured people fleeing from dinosaurs, knights sword-fighting through castles and castaways exploring dangerous jungles. Though they're rushed and choppy-looking, they're fun to watch.
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This marked the beginning of a new way to make movies without actors. I had no figures, toys or puppets that looked like The Wolf Man, so I just drew the whole story on paper in sequential panels like a comic book and videotaped them while playing music in the background and narrating the story. I also spoke the dialogue of all the characters, just like in all my puppet/figure films.
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Tale of a boy who is chosen by an evil wizard to bring forth the destruction of the world. A black spell is cast while he sleeps which causes all of his dreams to come true. Unfortunatley, he can't help but dream of monsters that kill people. This is my best "illustrated" or "still" movie. (meaning it's more like a comic book that's being read for you. I draw everything and do all the voices and sound effects.)
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Self made nighmarish sequence which shows me wandering about my house encountering bizarre apparitions at every turn. Bares no relation to the classic TV series, but uses the music. This is the first movie in which I added music after the video was shot. I played the movie with my camera pointing toward the TV screen and re-recorded it while my tape player played the music next to the camera.
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I had a 1 foot tall Godzilla figure, so I couldn't resist making a remake of the 1954 Japanese classic monster movie. I built a city, using old toys, complete with miniature toy cars for Godzilla to pick up in his mouth and plenty of buildings for him to knock over. For the final scene where Godzilla is blown to bits, I threw in a wooden model T-rex skeleton.
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A remake of the 1958 horror classic "The Blob" but with a totally different storyline about a guy who vows to turn into a blob after he dies if anybody invades his grave. I bought this slimy substance called "gak" and used it for this movie. It was fun devouring human figures with it.
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I was highly interested in cryptozoology, the search for animals unknown to science, so I made this documentary about Nessie. My mission here was to get people to be more open minded and realize that there exist species that have not yet been verified. This documentary was put together well, but I should have scripted my narration. My improvisational speeches sounded very weak.
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This is probably my best figure/puppet film, because the plot is appropriate for toys, because it's about toys that come to life. They awaken from my closet, without any memory of who they are, and explore my house. Along the way, they are confronted by my cat, other figures and myself. At the end, I snatch them all and put them back inside the closet. I'm the giant movie director and I use them to act in my movies, but their memory is erased each time the movie is finished. The theme of small people has been done in films like "Dr. Cyclops", "The Incredible Shrinking Man" or "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids." It's that sort of movie.
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Aliens from outer space abduct a dinosaur egg, keep it alive and dormant for billions of years and then send it back to Earth, during the present time, where it's discovered by a scientific exhibition. The egg hatches and a baby velociraptor comes out and kills off the scientists. It escapes the lab and runs amuck in the city while it grows larger. There were three phases to its size. I had a baby Jurassic Park raptor figure for the infant. For the second phase, I used an adult sized raptor. For the third and final stage, I used a raptor mask and claws which were supposed to be used in the unfinished "DinoMen From D-4." I only showed the head and claws, obviously, to suggest an enormous sized creature which picks up people off the streets and eats them.
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A real stupid movie about a real stupid comedy duo who wears underwear over their heads and hits each other with plastic baseball bats, arguing who is more dumb.
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A fake documentary of myself as a tourist in Transylvania, exploring the woods, and stumbling upon the ruins of Dracula's castle. It actually took place in the woods behind my house in New Jersey, U.S.A. where there was an old stone building that was crumbling away, with vines and trees growing all around it. It's sort of a Blair-Witch kind of movie, but this was years before it.
My classic about a thief on the run who is stalked by a mysterious gang of thugs who dress up like monsters. This is the movie that got my friends to act for me again, for the first time in two years and is the one and only accomplishment of mine which truly got me started on my new path of movie making! This movie...This day was the turning point of my life! This is the film that made me realize that I was destined to become a director and since then, I have been making movies non-stop.
I watched all of my old movies and my favorite was "Snix." To me, it was a classic, so as a joke, I decided to make its sequel after three years. I grew a lot in the past year and looked completely different, but still played the same role. I used the same mask from the original which was faded, crinkled and torn. As well as it being the return of Snix, it was also the return of me, making movies again like the old days.
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The title speaks for itself. It's a documentary about the movie that changed my life.
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All of my friends from the neighborhood used to have wrestling matches on a trampoline in their backyard. It was lots of fun, so I began videotaping the fights. The competitors became more dramatic and intense when the camera was on them. At the end of the summer, I edited a greatest "hits" (all the best punches, kicks, slams, etc.) music video with the song "Eye of the Tiger." It was the FIRST EDITING JOB I've ever done! (done using two regular vcr's)
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I was hanging out in my next door neighbors' backyard one day and they said they were in the mood to be in another movie, so we made this quick improvised crime/comedy about two dumb, lazy, undercover cops who are in search of an insane, hyperactive, equally stupid, masked serial killer who's running around shooting people while hooked on a terrible potion, which he's invented to give him power. The killer stands four feet tall wearing a paper mask and sombrero! It was so funny, we had to make a sequel the next day. Both are 8 minutes long and run back to back. They're both usually referred to as the same movie. I now had an audio dubbing remote control for my camera, so this is the first movie where I dubbed in music and experimented with post-production sound effects and voices.
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The killer character from "Mighty Joe Rampage" was so funny that we had to make another sequel. It begins with him escaping from a mental institution screaming his head off. Then, he goes back home, drinks his potion and goes even crazier. Just like the first movie, a second part was added. This is when another killer is introduced who wants to steal his beloved potion. The movie stopped here, because everybody was complaining about how cold the weather was. My favorite part was when Joe climbs up a chimney and then falls off!
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The Halloween season was approaching, so I decided to make a series of music videos, using footage from existing monster movies. I edited them primitively using two ordinary vcr's, while playing the songs repeatedly to try and choreograph them with the film clips. After I had all my footage edited, I dubbed the songs over the footage, using my audio dubbing remote control. I did music videos for "The Monster Mash", "Ghostbusters", "The Blob", "Creature From the Black Lagoon", "The Green Slime" and an instrumental horror theme from a video game, Killer Instinct. The results are really fun to watch, considering how primitive my techniques were. People were actually in disbelief that I made this all by myself without any professional video equipment. See also 42. FEELING OF TERROR
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I left my audiences of "A Night of Total Terror" with an open ending. I wanted to leave it this way, so people could use their imagination to decide what happens next, but months later, I could not resist the temptation of making this sequel. I devised a more careful storyline and was ready to make my greatest movie yet, but my co-star was always unavailable, so I deleted his scenes and filmed the movie with only myself, as both the actor and camera operator. As a result, the action suffers because of no camera movement and the plot became tasteless. After this, I vowed never to make a sequel again. (besides the six "Snix" flicks) The only thing superior about this sequel is the visual side of it. I used my annual Halloween haunted house exhibit as the set and experimented with blacklights, strobe lights and a severe red floodlight to suggest the fires of hell. The shot of me crawling cross-eyed through a tunnel, covered with spiders and snakes, was classic. Another advancement in this film was my use of sound. Instead of dubbing in any music, I concentrated on spooky sound effects, such as wolves howling, coffins creaking and ghosts moaning to support what was taking place on screen. I tried my best, using two different audio tapes, playing simultaneously, to blend the sounds together and try to give them a seemingly natural flow throughout the film.
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In my history class, we had to pick a philosopher, write a report and present a "visual", such as a poster, to the class. My family's background is Italian, so I chose Galilieo and made a video. I wore a beard and renascence hat to portray myself as Galileo while I spoke of my theory of gravity and threw things out my window. I added stock footage of the leaning tower of Pisa, titles, and renascence music. It was real stupid, hence my one star rating, but when we screened it in class, everybody loved it and was surprised because nobody knew I made movies.
I was so pleased with "Snix: The Return" that I decided to do one more sequel, so I could call the whole thing "The Snix Trilogy". I tried to make this one the grand finale, however I put too much thought into it. The story was too complex and had to broken up into four more sequels which I eventually called The Six Snix Flicks. (See 98 filmography for Rotten Corpse of Snix, Possessed Mask of Snix and finally The Evil Spirit of Snix.)
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There's a lot of famous landmarks being destroyed or climbed in monster movies. Using footage from some of these films, I edited a little compilation, using two vcrs and dubbed my narration over it. Scenes I used included "The Deadly Mantis" climbing the Washington Monument, "King Kong" climbing the Empire State Building, alien invaders from "Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers" destroying the famous governmental buildings of Washington DC, and the creature Gorosaurus tearing apart the Arc De Triump in "Destroy All Monsters."
One day, my friend Brian was so bored, he picked a cluster of flowers off a tree and shoved the whole thing down his throat. Immediately, the idea for this movie came about. If he didn't mind eating those flowers, I was sure he wouldn't mind munching on some more. "The Herbivore" has no plot and no purpose, except to depict a peaceful day in the life of a human herbivore who dwells in the forest and eats weeds, leaves and flowers. A trilogy was planned, "The Carnivore" and "The Omnivore", but neither were filmed.
Another spontaneous film of mine. Joe and Ed from the neighborhood were hanging out at my back porch, bored out of their minds, so I decided to have them act in a quick spoof of "Speed"(the 1994 action thriller where a bomb is programmed on a bus to explode if the bus travels any slower than 50 mph). In "Bicycle Speed", two stupid kids are threatened by a bomb on an exercise bike that can't go above 25 mph. If they simply stop pedaling and get off the bike, they'll be safe, but they're too stupid to realize it. The "Timmy" and "Jimmy" characters they invented are hilarious. I wanted to make a series of sequels, using this comedy duo, but only one sequel was finished: 49. TIMMY AND JIMMY PLAY BASKETBALL.
A group of people are stranded on a jungle island where a harmful mixture of chemicals was dropped by a plane. As a result of this accident, strange radiation takes possession of the island and transforms the animals into monsters. The group is attacked by flesh eating snakes and giant wasps, but their worst enemy is a vicious werewolf. The movie is full of clichés. For example, Joe keeps tripping when he's running from the wolf, just like victims in slasher films always do. It was all meant to be stupid. The wolf was just a kid wearing a mask.
While taking some summer video production classes at the University of the Arts, I got to use some analog editing gear for my first time and edited a remake of one of my "Monster Music Videos" (filmography 96). This time, I was able to get the cuts just right and time it precisely with the music, the same way I envisioned it in my mind. It's chilling! This video is important to my career, because it marked the end of my amateurish in-camera editing method. Even though I had no editing gear of my own, two vcr's had to do.
Inspired by zombie horror classics such as "Night of the Living Dead" and "Dawn of the Dead", I wrote a script, casted my friends and made my own classic. The simplistic plot revolves around a guy who witnesses an evil sorcerer resurrect some corpses from a graveyard. Struck with fear, he runs away from this terrifying scene, but the sorcerer sends the zombies after him. The chase lasts throughout the film as he finds different weapons. He shoves a pool stick through the body of one zombie and crushes another under a garage door. "Red Zombie" was meant to be a comedy, so I exaggerated the amount of blood tremendously. For example, there's a scene where Mike lifts a zombie up to a ceiling fan. First, we see a shot of the zombie's head going up near the fan. In the next shot, we see a close-up of Mike's face grimacing as gallons of blood begin to pour all over him. We had a lot of fun making this movie, but the star lost interest halfway through production, so this movie was never finished. As a side note, it's the first movie that I shot raw and edited on my two vcr's. The title is a spoof of the 1932 Bela Lugosi cult classic "White Zombie."
This is a remake of my classic "A Night of Total Terror" with a revised script, more attention given to lighting and editing and better cinematography. It was going to be good and I was looking forward to shooting the cemetery battle climax, but my co-star was never available and this movie was never completed.
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A short improvised thriller about a kid who is confronted by unknown terrors of the dark. Very vague and mysterious with a poetic narration. Background sound effects, night shooting and serious attitude gave this little movie a chilling mood, but funny at the same time, making it a Cinemassacre cult classic.
I had a computer program called "3D Movie Maker" where you can select characters, pick locations and program them to walk about and do as you command to tell a story. I ended up making an epic action horror film which is somewhat of a remake of Red Zombie. It shares the same title as the improv, but bears no resemblance to it.
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I play a guy who owns a video store full of horror movies. A masked psychopath calls up and asks if I have a movie called "Bouncing Bears From Heaven." I tell him no, but then he arrives at my door and kills me.
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A music video about two kids who get so excited over a game of chess, they begin fighting with each other. The song is "Eye of the Tiger", but I changed the lyrics to describe how intense chess can be.
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"There's this old man who's dying and he wants one last entertainment before he goes. So he gathers together all his friends, all the freaks, to give him one last big show. It's a Freaky Freak-Show!" This was the opening narration for this three-act music video. Each of the three songs served as the beginning, middle and end for the story. It was the easiest movie to act in. Just wear a weird mask, dress up weird and dance around my backyard. My only cast were all my neighborhood friends who were always busy, so unfortunately, It took me a couple months to finish this simple idea and I never got more than three "freaks" together at the same time. That includes myself. The whole movie shows mostly individual freaks by theirselves, so I had to cut everything together to try and create a feeling that the whole yard is full of 50 freaks. I didn't capture the insane party atmosphere as I hoped, but it's still an entertaining feast for the eyes.
In this sequel to "Bicycle Speed", Timmy and Jimmy try to have a nice game of basketball, but it turns into a childish battle of name calling and face slapping. The improvised dialogue was hilarious. Joe's line "I wanna clean your mom's butt with a toothpick and thread", was so funny that you can hear me choking back my laughter. This was my first movie shot using my new VHS camera. I also found that using it as a vcr, I could make clean looking cuts with it, though they were still tricky to time, if you know what I mean.
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Joe tried on some of my vampire makeup and before he washed if off, I got out my camera, dimmed the lights and made a quick improvised horror flick about an insane guy who is telling scary stories to himself when a zombie suddenly sneaks into his house. It's kind of creepy and funny at the same time. A Cinemassacre cult classic.
In this fourth chapter of the Snix series, the long dead body of Snix is resurrected in a modern day 20th century in search of his eternal rival Xins. Once again, this sequel shows tremendous improvement over the previous installment in the series. Though, it's a bit overlong, it contains some amusing scenes, including a chase with a tractor on a public roadway and a grand finale where I sword-fight Snix and eventually cut off his head, throw the body out a second-story window, and take the head to the railroad tracks where the train actually runs it over!
The biggest problem in making the Snix series was the availability of the actors. The Rotten Corpse of Snix was a very simple movie but it took 10 months to make. Knowing I had two more chapters to go, I couldn't stand to take any longer, so this time, I casted no actors other than myself, so there was nothing to halt the production and it was over in two weeks. The plot picks up where Snix's body has been destroyed, but his mask still exists and haunts me. This movie provided me with great editing practice, and it's technically a better movie than the last Snix flicks, but it's not one of my favorites. It feels very solitary without any other actors to liven it up.
I get possessed by the spirit of Snix and my only hope of driving the demon out is my neighbor to come over and whack me over the head with a golf club. Once defeated, the spirit appears inside the television set where he must confront his rival Xins before departing this dimension. There's some interesting editing and use of flashbacks. Each Snix movie is better than the one before it. As I age from 12 to 17 throughout the series, I grow both physically and mentally as an amatuer filmmaker who keeps improving. Also this is my first movie done on my new editing vcr.
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This is a documentary about my next door neighbors who used to beat each other up after getting excited by watching wrestling on TV. For hours, I taped them lift each other in the air, fall down stairs, throw each other onto couches, and actually slam their heads against walls, leaving dents! Most of this is as real as it looks, but nobody was seriously injured. When I edited all the best moments to heavy metal music, it became a very entertaining video.
This is sort of like a remake of Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds", but instead of pecking at people, the birds attack by crapping. The bird feces was made from milk and flour which was dumped from a ladder onto the star, Joe's head. It dried in his hair and took a long time to wash out. He was a great sport about the whole thing.
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For a high school project, my sister's friends wrote a fairy tale script about witches who try to poison a princess. When they made a video of it, they consulted me for help. I had little to do with this production, but directed one scene and edited the whole thing.
Because of work and school consuming all my free time and college coming the next year, I knew I had to call it quits for my annual haunted house tour. I kept it a Halloween tradition from 1993 to 1998, but now I was becoming an adult and I was too busy to put all my time into it. This is why I made a video tour of the last one to preserve the memory.
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Simple plot about two girls who play pranks on each other while they sleep. Ends with a pillow fight.
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For the English class term paper, most students were writing about whether or not abortion should be legal, but I chose to do something interesting: Cryptozoology which is the search for animals unknown to science. My argue was that there exist creatures that have not yet been verified. For the visual presentation, I made this documentary about Big Foot and the Loch Ness Monster, assembling photographs and film footage while narrating over it.
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There's already a music video for King Nothing, but I never saw it, so I decided to make my own. I inserted some shots of Metallica concert footage, but most of it consisted of a king (my next door neighbor's little sister) having a bad temper and crashing through cardboard brick walls. This video was the most challenging editing job I've yet done, at the time.
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I was really bored, so I decided to make another music video for Metallica. I used stock footage from films showing avalanches and people being buried in ice. Includes "The Thing", "Cliffhanger", "The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms" and "Godzilla Raids Again."
At the time, this was my masterpiece which I finished the summer after I graduated high school. I put full effort into writing a script, drawing storyboards, and devising special effects. The entire production length was 8 months. It's about psychotherapists who examine an insane man who is haunted by delusions of a possessed disembodied dummy head which floats on air and mysteriously kills people. At first, his crazy story is ridiculed, but when more people start seeing it, they start to doubt his neurotic condition. It's great b-movie fun. Chilling at times, and funny. A bit overlong though.
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Two undercover detectives team up to trace the source of a radioactive chemical that's been used by criminals to burn the faces of their victims. They eventually find a swimming pool full of the deadly stuff owned by Master Merciless. Thus begins a cheesy Kung Fu fight. After a series of disasters occurring such as my sister breaking her toe, this film was dropped.
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An improvised spoof of "Jaws" shot in my swimming pool without any continuity. It was cut like a trailer. The main joke was that it was a bad cheesy version of what used to be one of the highest grossing films of all time. The shark's fin was made of cardboard, though there are still some good qualities. By placing the camera in a fish tank and carefully submerging it just below the water line, without getting any water in the top of the tank, I was able to get some beautiful underwater shots. An idea by Kirk and I, the two insane brains that brought you the Head Incident.
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There was a week left before my first year of college started, so I quit my job and became extremely bored. I wanted to make one last movie before the summer ended, but nobody was available to act, as usual, so I casted my dog and two cats. I just lowered the camera level to the ground and documented their daily activities and laid the classical tune "Blue Danube" over it all. The results are relaxing to watch.
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I was alone in my apartment, doing 2D Design homework, when I saw a giant cockroach. Being the country boy I am and not having any experience in the city, I had never seen a roach before. I grabbed my camera and attempted to tape it, but it escaped and I never saw it again. I ended up making a suspense movie about me looking for the roach. This was my first movie made while in college.
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My neighbor in the dorms, Gina, was also interested in making films, so we decided to collaborate on this improvised, experimental film. Illogic and random funny things were what made it fun. I later edited the footage into a music video for Led Zeppelin's Dazed and Confused.
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A hilarious documentary about the F-word and all of it's different usages. Different cursing scenarios are staged to demonstrate how it is the most flexible and most versatile word in the English language.
This was my first experience with using 16mm film instead of video. Visual arts majors at my school are forced to go through a "foundation" program where you are stuck drawing, sculpting, painting and doing everything. I had one film class for an elective and no emphasis was placed on narrative structure or editing. The only assignment was to shoot off a 3 minute roll of film on a simple action and explore the different ways to depict it, places to move the camera and lighting setups. I was the only student in the class who did a narrative and at first everybody thought I was crazy, but I pulled it off. Everybody in the class wore monster masks and had lots of fun.
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I wanted to get a fake band together for a White Zombie music video, but we didn't have any instruments available, so the guitarist had to rock out on an acoustic guitar and the drummer just sat on a bed and slapped two dummy monster heads. It was real funny. The song on the CD played into my vcr which was connected to my camera, so the videotape recorded us on the video signal and the music simultaneously on the audio signal. The TV was turned on, blasting the music from its speaker, so we could perform to it and I could lip sync the vocals in my black top hat and long hair wig. After copying the best take onto another videotape, I inserted stock footage of old horror movies of mine to complete it.
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My mom got me a video title maker for Christmas, so I could add credits and titles in my movies. My first movie to use this device was this experimental video with my sister and her friend speaking a foreign language and I translated it with subtitles.
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This is a parody commercial advertising an album of 13 devil worshipping songs. A devil speaks and says "To order, call 1-800-666-HELL." Footage of various metal bands is used while the credit crawl lists all the songs including "AntiChrist Superstar" by Marilyn Manson, "Hell's Bells" by AC/DC, "Burn in Hell" by Judas Priest", "Number of the Beast" by Iron Maiden", "Selling my Soul" by Black Sabbath", "Unholy" by Kiss, and many more! This is first in a trilogy that has not yet been made. The next two are "Suicide's greatest hits" and "Junkie's greatest hits." Drugs, devil-worshipping, suicide... the stuff that makes rock n' roll great! (This is an example of my dark sick humor.)
One day, I was bored out of my mind, so I decided to make this surreal music video using hand puppets subjected to blacklights, animated cut out characters and plastic glow-in-the-dark skeletons moving by strings. My intention was to drown the viewer with bizarre imagery and make them feel like they've entered a dream world.
I take you through the entire process of the Head Incident from writing to editing. Very extensive. I think I took it a bit too far. I tell you everything inside and out and I get sick of hearing myself talk.
My friend had this overly playful dog which would always jump all over guests, so I decided to star her in a really bad horror movie. The idea with this film was to purposely make it bad. The continuity goes out of control. A character's hand is bitten off, but somehow grows back. The dog keeps changing breeds. Articles of clothing change. The relationships of the characters change. One of them turns from an unwelcome guest to a close friend, while another turns from a friend to a stranger. You can hear me behind the camera whispering to the actors when they forget their lines. When the dog starts to attack, the main character calls 911, says "My puppy's trying to kill me", then hangs up the phone immediately. Right away, two people barge through the door wearing t-shirts that say "911." I have a personal fondness for this one. It's so bad and so funny.
There were hardly any long takes in my movies, because I was always cutting. While it controls the pace and keeps the excitement level up, editing can also lend to some falsity. When two shots are cut together, everybody knows that the two incidents did not actually occur at the same time. Long takes can seem more realistic, because the action is continuous. Everybody knew I was a good editor, so I wanted to try something different, a movie without any editing. This is like a remake of Alfred Hitchock's Rope and Edgar Allan Poe's Tell Tale Heart, both combined. Unlike Rope, rather than shooting it mostly from a theatrical viewpoint, I moved the camera around constantly. The plot involved two colleagues who murder someone in their apartment and have to hide his body when unexpected guests arrive. Throughout the film, they grow increasingly nervous as guilt overwhelms them.
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For a highschool project, my friend had to make a television commercial. He decided to do a commercial for Acme and consulted me to help him make it. We ended up turning it into an action thriller where an Acme employee is fighting against a ShopRite employee. It turns into a car chase and climaxes with the Acme dude running over the Shoprite guy and crushing his head, which is actually a stuffed dummy with a watermelon head. Then he gets out of his car, faces the camera and says "Acme always crushes this competition." I heard that the class loved it, but the teacher said it was too violent.
This is a psychological journey through the tormented mind of an art student who is summoned to the top of a gothic temple known as the Dreaded Drake Tower. An evil wizard who lives inside the top dome casts a spell on him, which gives him the power to involuntarily manifest horrible things. Whatever he imagines becomes a reality and his own creativeness becomes a doomsday dream which terminates the entire human race. The Drake Tower in Philadelphia is a sinister looking building that looks like the temple of Zuul in Ghostbusters. With special permission, I got to shoot on the top of it. This is a remake of my old film "Deadly Dreams" from 1993, but this one is much better. It's highly experimental, with lots of metaphoric imagery, and shot loosely around school. It shows my filmmaking abililtes maturing past horror b-movies.
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In my dorm around midnight some friends were hanging out. One of them wanted to make an experimental movie, so we decided that he'd shoot it and I'd edit it. He went out to the streets with his camera and came back at 3AM with some crazy footage of people hanging off street lamps and jumping into piles of garbage cans. I edited it and added music.
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I had a "time & motion" class which dealt with creating patterns and sequences in various mediums. One of the assignments we had involved shooting a video of a sequence of shots of somebody doing an action. I got carried away and made a movie about an art student who attempts to carry his heavy project, a giant mouse trap, from the classroom, back to his apartment. Along the way, he has to squeeze into an elevator. When crossing the street, pieces of the project keep dropping and he has to pick them up. People who have taken the three-dimensional design course know exactly what I'm talking about, because that's what they have to endure. What I like so much about this video is that it's a true story and George, the actor, appeared to be very natural.
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I had an animation elective course where we I made this cut-out action epic. The characters came from magazines which I cut the limbs off of and reassembled with strings behind them to make their arms and legs movable. The star is Jim Carrey in his role as Andy Kaufman in "Man on The Moon" cut from a newspaper ad. Throughout this insane cartoon, he engages in mortal combat with all kinds of other crazy characters.
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At the end of the last semester of Freshmen year, my friend Gina and I decided to make a sequel to our improvised Zone Out which was made at the beginning of the first semester. Again, there's no logic or plot to this surreal work of art, but it subconsciously shows what we went through during the year and how we've changed since the first Zone Out. See also 65. ZONE OUT.
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Very intense documentary about the rebellion in the dorm rooms, which I did not participate in, but since I documented it, I was suspended from college for a year. How ironic that I'd get in trouble for my own art, filmmaking which is what I was going to the school for.
I wanted to make an entertaining action movie, so I casted two friends who knew some martial arts (American Goju and Tai Kwan Do). The movie begins like a gangster film, but turns into a martial arts film halfway through. A villain hires a hit man to kill his rival. It begins with them playing a game of pool and ends with a battle at a swimming pool. For a one day shoot, it came out really good.
There's no band like Black Sabbath. Their cartoonishly dark music feeds me with vivid mental images which would make great music videos. I would make a video for every Sabbath song, if I had the time, but for a starter, I made one for the first song, the self-titled one on the first album. There is a loose narrative function to it, but it's mostly just a montage of supernatural images of horror. It resembles my older horror montage "The Feeling of Terror" (filmography 97) except that one used clips from existing films, while "Black Sabbath" uses only my own footage. I shot footage of a life-sized dummy burning in a fire, a close-up of a tarantula, a burning clay skull dripping red wax, and a grim reaper chasing somebody through a cemetery which is actually the same cemetery in Philadelphia which appeared in the movie "The Sixth Sense." This video contains some of the strongest imagery which I've ever produced and the editing is so tight, that you wouldn't believe I did it using two VCRs and no computers.