Lloyd Kaufman

Greetings from Tromaville!

I don’t get it, I just don’t get it. I’m stunned, shocked, staggered. For the first time in my highly-celebrated and sexy 40-year career, I’m flabbergasted! Where to begin? Where to start? Well, let’s rewind to three weeks from last Friday. I was visiting the local movie theatre in hopes of writing a 2-page spread on High School Musical 3 for Tiger Beat Magazine. Thirty minutes into the Zach Efron tour-de-force, I was thrown out after learning that you can’t sing along to movie musicals in a public place…wearing nothing but a top hat. Live and learn, I guess. But, after wandering around the hollow halls of the chain theatre for the better part of an hour, I found myself sitting in on a screening of the latest instalment of the Saw films. Which leads me to the subject of this very blog: I do not understand what’s with these films whose plot (and I use the term “plot” generously) seem to involve nothing more than some person being dismembered limb by sawed-off limb. And what’s even more confounding is that the audience is made up of date-goers who, I would assume, are deriving some sort of entertainment from what’s being projected onscreen. I mean, this was the fifth film in a highly-lucrative franchise!

The artistically devoid, devil-worshiping mega conglomerates presenting these “films” are just doing so to make a cheap buck. These movies aren’t bringing anything new to the table, except to epitomize the boring, run-of-the-mill Hollywood horror format which allows one to show as much violence as necessary, but God forbid show a pair of melon heavy breasts or the perfect metaphor for a Time Warner executive, the human penis, and you’re damned! The only recent movie to break this trend, in my extremely relevant and highly enlightened opinion, is Eli Roth’s Hostel. Now there’s a film that has humor, social commentary , fright factor and…oh, some actual nudity! And, of course, Troma’s own Bloodsucking Freaks is the 70’s version of an intelligent and satirical take on these vapid, humourless shit-shows.

Now we at Troma are known for our fair share of Blood, Boobs and Beast, so we feel that guys and gynos alike have the right to have their bare bodies immortalized on celluloid, or even video, without the threat of having it put through some medieval torture device. I remember just recently being at the Sitges International Film Festival in Spain, watching these films where women in particular were being subjected to the most disgusting and depraved tortures known to man. And as I watched, I noticed a group of women in their 20’s, sitting in front of me. They seemed completely undisturbed about what was transpiring onscreen as it seemed with many of the women making up the audience. Which begs the question: Considering they are usually the ones being violently desecrated, why is it that the gynos seem unaffected by this disturbing trend? These films have no substance; they are merely empty shells, showing women being chopped up in basements, and that’s all – just the torture, dismemberment and death. Much more effective and scary are those films about the greatest torture of all…marriage!

If you want to see a movie that shows real cluckin’ horror in society, check out the recently hatched, 3-disc, individually numbered and collectible DVD of Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, available now by CLICKING HERE, or in a store near you!

Lloyd Kaufman
with the help of Matt Lawrence & Danielle Shubert

P.S. Please let me know if my above-listed rant makes any sense or if I’ve just become an out of touch, sixty-something National Treasure.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 9th, 2009 at 1:42 pm and is filed under `Roids. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.