A complete set of every LOTR Sideshow/WETA piece must exist somewhere. I can’t imagine being that devoted to any single pop culture property myself but do confess to owning a lot of the LOTR pieces I consider signature storytelling archetypes. In the end I’m less interested in the film or even the novel but the characters and character types and what they represent symbolically. Perhaps its the way they cry out to have their meaning recognized, “Here is bravery, cowardice, nobility, innocence, evil etc.” But with so many pieces and lines to choose from it can be difficult to get started. The obvious thing is to stick with one line and hope that they do your favorites justice. But as someone who has had pieces from all of the lines I highly recommend mixing and matching them. Really large characters like the trolls and the Balrog have made spectacular Legendary Scale Busts and so far the Premium Format line has been generally great. I have issues with the statue like appearance of Galadriel- she’s a little mannequin like. But every other piece has been amazing. I know, I know. Some of you were unhappy with Frodo but for me virtually every piece in this line has bridged the gap between stylized approach and film likeness dead on. 

Aragorn is a case in point. Like Gandalf he is remembered as two fairly distinct (perhaps even three) characters. The first and most debatable is as the hooded lurker in the shadows early in the first book. Then as the guide and warrior Strider. Finally as the King. As individually and symbolically compelling as they are I can’t imagine, even if Sideshow rendered them perfectly, ever purchasing three separate Aragorns. And forced to choose between them I would say that in many ways Aragorn as Strider seems the most resonant. The protector, sullied but not lost to the world, still able to rise up and do battle for a righteous cause. Here we get him mid-stride as he swings his battlesword. The exclusive version features an extra hand with knife. And I love the facial sculpt. Instead of absolutely spot on Viggo we get a more stylized look that captures a broader idea of human bravery and nobility and battle weary fierceness. The costuming is as lush as everyone has said with unbelievable detailing especially on the shoes, belt and weaponry. And everything including Aragorn himself bears the dust of travel and life on the road.

When unwrapping this thing you’ll want to be very careful ot to snag the hair strands that hang in front of Aragorns face. The are very thin and in the future the value of your piece will probably be determined, at least part, by whether or not that strand is intact as it is liable to be the first thing broken by careless collectors. The next danger area would be the feet and base. Only one foot attaches to the base so whenever moving it make sure the figure and base and held static so that no chips result. I can’t imagine this figure ever doing anything but appreciate in value and for fans of the film I like it even better than the far more expensive ($1200!!) Cinemaquette figure.

Chi-towners I have no idea how this slipped thru the radar. But needless to say if you live in Chicago then you should know that freaking Clive Barker and Lucky McKee are in town this Saturday night (as in THIS Saturday Oct 25!) as part of the Music Box Massacre. This is the fourth installment of the mass (as I like to call it) and has become a Halloween tradition for many. In addition to the screenings of May and Midnight Meat Train (which of course are followed by Q and A with the aforementioned VIPs) there’s a dynamite lineup of other screenings, dealer tables, a charity auction by event organizer Rusty Nails and also an appearance/Q &A by Joseph Zito in conjunction with a screening of Friday the 13th The Final Chapter. The whole thing is MC’d by Aaron “Dr. AC” Christensen author of Horror 101: The A List of Horror Films and Monster Movies Vol. One. For a complete schedule visit the event myspace page.

And if tht’s not enough Clive Barker for ya be sure to head over to the Packer Schopf Gallery (942 W. Lake, Chicago, 312.226.8984) on Sunday, October 26th where original concept paintings from the film MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN, along with other artwork, will be on display.Tickets for MM4 are $27 in advance, $33 at the door. Pay once and come and go as you like! Advance tickets are available now at the theatre box office, Laurie’s Planet of Sound, or through Ticketweb

Here’s a flick that I’ve read about numerous times but never seen and is most likely more famous today for being the original that the Brad Pitt starer Meet Joe Black was based upon. Death Takes a Holiday is the classic 1935 film about, just that, the Grim Reaper taking a few days off and falls for the pretty girl who is supposed to marry another man. Hilarity ensues. Well not really but this is a rare opportunity to catch this film on the big screen at the best theater in the US.
The Alamo have gone and made a poster for this event and asked Aesthetic Apparatus to do so. The result is this classy looking art deco piece that would go well on the wall of any home.
As always go to mondotees.com to purchase this two color beauty which comes signed and numbered by the artist and if you want to see this film as well it will screen on the 28th at the Alamo on South Lamar.

We generally don’t do a lot in the way of plugging other websites or publications - so please don’t email me asking me to - but I’m making an exception here for the November issue of Impact Magazine.  Why?  Because editor Mike Leeder is a first class individual who has put together an extensive spread on Jean Claude Van Damme, his upcoming film JCVD and director Mabrouk El-Mechri - a first class film and two more first class individuals.  You should read this.  They’ve also got a feature interview with Watchmen author Alan Moore, a notoriously cranky individual, and Conan Stevens, a notoriously large individual who could grind my bones to make his bread.  Plus the proverbial more, more more.

Just a reminder to you local folk:  the 2008 edition of the Toronto After Dark Festival launches tonight with a 7 pm screening of Let The Right One In - Five star reviews in the local papers!  It’s a hit here, too! - and advance ticket sales have already been far stronger than any previous year of the festival.  So, if you’re planning on attending - and you really should - then you should act fast.

How the hell do you make an Evil Dead 2 poster without having a picture of Man-God Bruce Campbell on it? Todd Slater shows us how with is awesome poster released in conjunction with the Alamo’s screening of this all time classic on the 31st of this month. This evil goodness comes in two versions, both sporting gold metallic inks, one red and a more limited blue one....dare I say it...Groovy.

The other one is for the fantastic modern western vampire film Near Dark and this one is finger licking good indeed. The Heads of State made this stylish and sparse poster by using bull horns as fangs. This poster is created for the October 30th screening. No variant for this one so get to it.

So these are the last two posters created for the October horror series, hopefully there will be more cause these have been truly great.

Here we finally have the second poster for the Alamo screening of The Shining that is to be held at the Timberline Lodge in Oregon at the end of this month. Billy Perkins produced this piece which comes in two versions, Ice cold blue and blood red with clear varnish over each piece that form the infamous psychotic rant from the film.
So if you want a crazy as a brick shit house looking Jack Nicholson on your wall this would be the time to do it.

Now there’s only Evil Dead 2 to wait for and I for one can’t wait to see what they came up with.

Okay, some back story required here.  Spanish film maker Eugenio Mira has long been a friend to this site, operating as an occasional resource for us and translating the occasional interview.  And a few years back Mira helmed himself an absurd little real-time comedy titled The Birthday starring everybody’s favorite poster-boy for wasted youth, Corey Feldman.  Now, Mira is currently hard at work on pre-production for his new film Agnoisa - expect more on that soon but it turns out that The Birthday may not yet have reached the end of its life span.

You see, it turns out that none other than Guillermo Del Toro has become a huge fan of the film.  So much so that when he raved about it recently to a British journalist that conversation sparkedenough interest to bring about a major event screening of the full 117 minute cut of the film - a much shorter version was on the festival circuit - in London with Feldman himself in attendance.  And who wouldn’t jump at the chance to meet one of the two Coreys?

Hey there all you loyal Twitch readers ... as of today you’re going to start noticing something a little bit different throughout the site.  On the main page and individual article pages you’ll see a number of double underlined links.  Now, before you go yelling, “Argh!  Intellitxt!”, here’s the skinny ...

Twitch currently has thousands and thousands of articles in its archive, of which typically only about thirty are available on the front page while the VAST majority of the archive sits sad, alone and neglected on our servers where tens of thousands of words of hard work and love cry sad tears.  As the guy who wrote the majority of those words that’s always kind of bothered me and I’m always looking for ways of making better use of the archive, ways of encouraging people to browse and peruse those earlier bits of news.  And that’s what these links are for.  Yes, they are an ad-supported service - just like our video player - but the ads aren’t the point, the point is that every bubble that pops up when you hover over one of those links also includes a search engine that will dig through the Twitch archive for the linked term.  I look at it like a sort of random browser or Stumble-type service, a free form sort of way to go skipping through the archives and I’m hoping it’ll encourage people to dig a bit deeper in the site than they otherwise would.

We’ve just taken the service live for a month long trial to see how it works, to get you feedback, and to see how it impacts our page numbers.  It’s quite customizable so if you have thoughts on color scheme or other such things please let me know ...

Got two (kind of three) posters for you today. First up are two portraits for The Rocky Horror Picture Show that are a part of the weekly midnight showings that Alamo is hosting (since 2004!). These are portraits of Riff Raff and Magenta but if you think that this would be a weird choice for RHPS posters rather than the iconic Frankenfurter fear not. Six more portraits are on the way so the in the end all you Rocky fans will have eight fantastic posters of all your favorite characters. These posters are done by Alamo newcomer Ken Taylor and are pretty bad ass. You can get these as a set of two or as a single uncut sheet.

Next up is more for you music fans out there. On October 11th the Alamo Ritz is showing the new Flaming Lips movie Christmas on Mars, with front man Wayne Coyne in attendance and Jason Munn whipped up this stylish, and very good IMO, poster for the occasion. Only 90 copies will be sold through Mondotees.com so if you want this you’ll probably have to act fast.

Simply because this came up as a topic of discussion in the Sitges hotel bar last night:  is anybody out there aware of an English friendly DVD release of Jan Kounen’s 99 Francs?  Because, if not, there are a whole lot of acquisitions execs out there not particularly doing their job.  The film’s great, at this point it would probably come cheap, and I know conclusively of at least three people who would buy it.  And you’ve got to start somewhere.

Oooooh baby. Here’s Johnny alright. The Alamo Drafthouse has done it again with a kick ass poster for the horror classic The Shining by Stanley Kubrik. This is part of their new horror series which has already given us a fantastic looking Lost Boys poster and will follow up later with Near Dark, Rocky Horror Picture Show and Evil Dead 2.
This poster is for a special screening at the Timberline Lodge in Oregon on the 31st this month and Jeff Kleinsmith has made a beautiful piece for this occasion. But be aware that the Alamo also commissioned Billy Perkins to do another Shining poster that will be available later on.
So for now you can get this great piece of art over at mondotees.com but I’d act quickly cause Kleinsmith’s last poster, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly sold out fast. This guy is hot, like mad hot.

Danny Trejo is back. And he looks MAD!

He was the object of attention in last Tuesday’s Twitch-O’-Meter, where we asked you people to identify 5 movies he was in based on some screenshots.
Normally I always add a line saying something like: “Answers will follow next Friday (earlier if someone has all 5 of them right)”, but on every previous occasion the list was guessed pretty quickly so this time I didn’t feel the need to do so.

Well, guess what: at the moment I write this, we still have one un-guessed close-up. Uh-oh…

It’s screenshot number 5, part of which can be seen on the left here. I’ll post the answer at the end of this day, but it’s nicer if someone gets it right of course.


After all, should we ever get a chance to interview Mr. Trejo we don’t want him to think that you (our readers!) don’t know who he is, do we?

Because it pleases me to do so I have just uploaded the contents of my camera from this year’s edition of Fantastic Fest into an image gallery here at Twitch.  Now, as the lady friend would be all-too-quick to point out I’m not the most camera-happy guy in the world so my own photos are dominated by the trip we took out to a local shotgun range - other Twitch-folk who were there, feel free to add your own photos into the gallery - where it turned out that mild mannered Gachi Boy director Norihiro Koizumi was a surprisingly good shot, Man From Hong Kong director Brian Trenchard Smith is the guy you most want covering your back in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, and the lady friend kicked my ass - distressingly easy to do as I didn’t hit a damn thing.  It also pleases me to no end that I now possess a photo of Hobo With a Shotgun director Jason Eisener with a shotgun.  Hit the link below to browse the gallery.

Sadly today one of the most legendary bad asses and all around good guy in Hollywood Paul Newman has lost his battle with cancer at the age of 83.
There goes one of the last true Hollywood legends, a man I remember seeing for the first time running out to meet his fate at the end of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, what a way to go.
His memory will live on forever as he has a stellar filmography that people will go to over and over again.
Rest in peace Butch.