horror comedy

The horror comedy is a beast easy to break and fickle to tame. When it's done right, the mixture of laughter and white knuckles can be a blissful, riotous night at the movies. When it's done wrong, however, well, you end up walking out of the theater with a white-knuckled clenched fist. And as we all know by now, the horror comedy is broken far more often than it's tamed.

That said, SXSW is batting a thousand this year. Their midnight slate kicked off with the highly amusing and blood-splatter loving Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil, kept things going with the note-perfect Australian wunderkind The Loved Ones, and then capped things off rather nicely with Suck, a fun and charming little import from Canada about a struggling band that coincidentally begins to find an audience once one of their band members starts fearing the sunlight and starts living off the blood of groupies and roadies. Now before you let out a justifiable groan at the idea of yet another vampire movie, you should know two things about Rob Stefaniuk's film.

First, despite changing a few of the long-standing rules (daylight is not fatal, for one), Suck is, in a coy way, actually respectful of its vampiric lineage. Stefaniuk makes no attempt to justify their existence in some newfangled way. They could just as easily be evolutionary descendants of the days of Dracula. And on top of that, one of the band members even takes on the eager-to-please, bug eating role of Renfield; a role most riffs on the classic tale end up excising.

Ryan McDermott has been generating a nice little buzz about his award winning horror comedy short, Mark Macready and the Archangel Murders. The British producer, writer, editor and lead actor of the 33 minute film helped bring home the award for 'Most Original Horror Film' award at the Horror UK Film Festival last year and 'Special Commendation in Indie Filmmaking' at the 20th Festival of Fantastic Films. "We previously won a BBC new filmmaker award before this film. Winning that encouraged us to make the short," McDermott revealed during our interview.

Macready's story goes a little something like this: the detective wakes from a coma after being attacked by an unseen enemy only to discover that his wife Christina is missing and a monster known as 'The Archangel' has been slaughtering everything in sight. He makes the connection between his wife's disappearance and the monster, which sends him on a search through the supernatural underbelly of Manchester, battling ghouls and demons at every turn. Can he bring Archangel to justice?

McDermott plays the lead character of Detective Mark Macready and has been hailed as a "British Hellboy". It seems that director Sean Candon and company may have been influenced by other occult heroes while creating Mcready, such as John Constantine, perhaps a little bit of Cal McDonald or even the B.P.R.D. My immediate impression was a Garth Marenghi and Clive Owen hybrid, but enough with the comparisons already. If the film finds the right following, McDermott told me the team will be turning Mark Macready into a full length feature. "We really tried to change up the short film scene. It's all rape, guns and drugs here in UK."

The film's official website will go live in a few weeks, where you'll be able to watch it in its entirety. McDermott will be previewing the short on Twitter if it garners enough attention, and you can visit the Facebook fan page for other updates. For now, hit the jump to watch the trailer for Mark Macready and the Archangel Murders and let me know what you think.

Encounters of the Spooky Kind, directed by Sammo Hung, 1980
Even though I am slightly obsessed with Takashi Miike, my experience with Asian horror has been somewhat limited and often disappointing. I was pleasantly surprised to come across Encounters of the Spooky Kind which was my favorite film of the three mentioned in this post. This film is a near perfect blend of horror, comedy and kung fu--a seriously fun combination. Director Sammo Hung is credited as one of the directors who spearheaded the Hong Kong New Wave genre in the 80's. He also started the vampire-like (more zombie, really) Jiang Shi genre which consists of reanimated corpses that hop (literally) around and cause trouble. Hung also stars in the lead role of Bold Cheung and his performance is brilliant mix of physical comedy and goofball appeal.

In Encounters of the Spooky Kind, Bold Cheung suspects his wife of having an affair but what he doesn't suspect is that the other man is Master Tam , a powerful government official. When Tam is almost caught in Cheung's bed, he decides having Cheung around is too risky and hires a nasty Taoist priest to kill him. Meanwhile the cocky and bold Cheung accepts a bet to spend the night at a temple where he encounters strange, undead creatures and battles the evil magic being thwarted against him at every turn by the men set out to kill him.

Encounters is heavier on the horror elements and comedy than it is on the kung fu but that just made the fight scenes more worth it for me. Though the pace lags in part, stick with it because this highly entertaining, kick-butt-combo of a film has enough laughs and charm to make it a commendable addition to your horror queue.

Bloody-Disgusting shared some Halloween cheer on Saturday by hosting the debut of the trailer for Eli Craig's new hillbilly horror comedy flick Tucker & Dale vs. Evil. Normally, I'm pretty wary of horror comedies because I've seen so many awful ones over the years; the only recent exceptions that spring readily to mind are Shaun of the Dead, Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer, and Zombieland. The horror comedy is like a siren on the rocks, luring young filmmakers to their doom. Hopefully Craig can avoid the danger and give us a film that's as fun as the trailer looks.

Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine star as the title characters, two good ol' boys "trying to survive their vacation in the woods when they are mistaken for killers by a gang of college kids. Our heroes valiantly save one of the college girls from drowning but are accused of wrongdoing. The chase ensues, not treating the students too well, leaving us with a gory but hilarious tale of two hillbillies and their hearts of gold."

The trailer has some genuinely funny moments, and if Craig and crew can sustain that throughout, they may have a hit on their hands. No official release date for Tucker & Dale vs. Evil has been set yet, but it's expected to debut sometime in 2010.

Click past the jump to view the trailer and let us know what you think.

Zombieland is aiming to become one of the most unapologetic movies of the year. Sure that's an obvious task when you make a horror comedy, but it's not always easy to do. Go over the top and you're Scary Movie 4, go too low brow and you're Terror at Blood Fart Lake. Fortunately during Scott Weinberg's set visit, director Ruben Fleischer made clear the balance he's trying to strike for his first major studio picture, "The movie is basically kind of the hybrid of 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead, I guess. It's a comedic look at the post apocalyptic zombie world and it's a band of survivors that kind of met along the way."

If that hybrid doesn't make much sense on the surface, take a gander at the new, decidedly Not Safe for Work Red-Band trailer. It looks like cast and crew are treating the end of the world as their unrestricted playground. Woody Harrleson luring the undead with 'Dueling Banjos'? Abigail Breslin holding a shotgun? Jesse Eisenberg's profanity laden, trailer-stealing tirade? It all looks like a end-of-the-world blast.



(Psst, enter your B-day in those tiny little boxes to get it to play)

Must Love Death, Directed by Andreas Schaap, 2009
Sometimes a movie is so out there it evades description, but I'll give it a shot: Must Love Death is a German made, English language horror comedy about a down on his luck singer who, after experiencing back-to-back heartbreaks, agrees to a suicide pact with three strangers that turns out to be less a pact and more a round robin game of 'let's torture this poor schmuck'.

Despite a second half that will make you squirm between giggles, I'm hesitant to even call Andreas Schaap's film a horror movie. If anything, it's a jet black romantic comedy, but as the title implies it's also a movie only for people who love the morbid side of life. I didn't fall head over heels, but there is no denying how unique of genre bender it is. It's certainly a film to keep on your radar as it begins to globe trot to various festivals.

Nature's Grave (AKA Long Weekend), Directed by Jamie Blanks, 2009
I haven't seen Long Weekend, Colin Eggleston's original 1974 Ozploitation film about a couple who venture into the wild for a few days only to discover that Mother Nature's creatures great and small don't take kindly to their intrusion, so I can't speak as to how different Jamie Blanks' update on the film is. However, I imagine it can't be too different considering the screenwriter Everett De Roche can be found over at IMDb stating, "I wrote both the original and the remake, and yes, Director Jamie Blanks insisted on a verbatum version, although I was able to insert a few more spooky bits."

How can you not develop at least a schoolboy horror crush on a movie who's trailer opens with "Some people are born Strigoi and some people become Strigoi after death," and ends with that same Transylvanian tongued woman saying, "You're a good boy, Vlad. Cut out his heart."?

For more on what exactly a strigoi is head over to wikipedia, but not until clicking over to the official Strigoi site for the first trailer (a slightly different version is embeded below) and soundbyte goodness. While you're there, mouse over "About Strigoi" at the top of the page for a quick giggle. Unless you're at work, in which case, it wasn't me who told you to.

Just when it seemed that October might be super-serious with its horror and dramatic offerings -- Shutter Island to Sorority Row, The Stepfather to Saw VI -- we get our first look at the fun-looking Zombieland, an action-horror-comedy in which Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone (!) and Abigail Breslin all team up in the post-apocalyptic wasteland and whoop some undead ass.

The tone of at least the trailer (I could see the narration carrying over to the film) strikes me as something like Shaun of the Dead crossed with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and I for one don't think that intersection's a bad place to be. The vague set visit rumblings I've heard suggest that this could be just as fun as it looks, though whether or not they'll run with an R rating remains to be determined. My hopes, of course, are that they go nuts with it. Breslin can wait and watch the finished film when she's old enough, but I wouldn't have to wait.

I like the sound of that. I could totally live with that compromise.

Anyhoo, Zombieland comes at you and me and everyone we know with a baseball bat on October 9th.