Well, how about Garth Jenning’s SON OF RAMBOW, which opens in the UK tomorrow and in the US very shortly.

It’s a great film by two fantastic film-makers, writer/director Garth Jennings and producer Nick Goldsmith. If you don’t know their incredible body of work as Hammer And Tongs, you should…

Tongsville - Check it all out…

I heartily recommend you see it, not just because it features the ridiculously talented Jessica Hynes (nee Stevenson), but also a familiar looking fellow playing a bearded ’Metalwork Teacher’. I shall say no more.

Also, I have it on good authority that Patton Oswalt mentions me on the Tonight Show - uh - tonight.

Patton just did 3 commentaries with me on Tuesday for the new SPACED DVD - hitting North America this July.

Also featuring on the commentary tracks along with me, Simon and Jessica are Quentin Tarantino, Matt Stone, Kevin Smith, Bill Hader and one Diablo Cody.

That’s some line up.

The new DVD will feature all 14 episodes with no music changes (!), all the extras from the UK 3 disc set, plus a great video of our NFT SPACED marathon. And new artwork from Jim Murray.

Expect a press release very soon.

Nice to be sharing good news again…

Edgar

*(cough) Saw IRON MAN (cough) It’s awesome (cough)…

Aside from being the super talented director of GREMLINS, THE HOWLING, EXPLORERS, INNERSPACE, PIRANHA, as well as an extraordinary episode in TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE; he’s also one of the nicest and most knowledgable fellows in the movie industry.

So come for the movies, come for the fun, but above all, if you count yourself as any kind of geek - come for an education.

I will be there as much as I can. Is going to be great.

I will now paste in Joe’s program of events and liner notes.

NEW BEVERLY CINEMA MAIN PAGE

NEW BEVERLY MYSPACE

DANTE’S INFERNO - APRIL 9th - 22nd

“April 9 + 10 MONDO CANE and ZULU

It’s hard to imagine today the impact this tawdry but fascinating Italian “shockumentary” had on the world in 1962, when the bizarre customs of people in other lands seemed both exotic and horrifying to Western eyes. Its smash success spawned a whole genre of mostly phony Mondo movies, each outdoing the other for pure sleaze, which lasted into the 80s and paved the way for something much more upsetting: Reality TV.

ZULU is simply one of the great historical epics ever–100 stuff-upper-lip British soldiers battle 4000 Zulu warriors in a beautifully staged reenactment of the 1879 Battle of Roarke’s Drift. John Barry should have won (but didn’t) an Oscar for his brilliant score. The cast, led by producer Stanley Baker, is terrific, but the great Nigel Green steals the show as the consummate side-whiskered, mustached Victorian Sergeant-Major. With Jack Hawkins, James Booth, Patrick Magee and a very young Michael Caine, whose work here got him THE IPCRESS FILE.

April 11 + 12 HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD and TRUCK TURNER

We called it “Day For Nothing” when we made it (shot in ten days around footage from 12 other movies on a bet with Roger Corman). One of the last of New World Pictures’ popular “three girl” drive-in movies where pretty girls doff their duds and chase around non-permitted LA locations. The late great Candice Rialson plays a version of herself as a naive Indiana girl trying to make it in scuzzy 70s Hollywood. Pulled from 42nd Street after two days, it seems to have survived as a cult movie. It’s certainly an accurate record of what it was like to make a New World Picture. Producer Jon Davison, co-director Allan Arkush and stars Mary Woronov and Dick Miller are scheduled to appear.

TRUCK TURNER, which came out late in the blaxploitation game, got lost in the Hollywood shuffle but it’s as dazzling a piece of action filmmaking as the 70s had to offer. Isaac Hayes is a bounty hunter on the trail of a big-time pimp whose vengeful, bitch-slapping squeeze is played by Star Trek’s Nichelle Nichols! Along for the violent ride are Yaphet Kotto, Alan Weeks, Scatman Crothers, Sam Laws and Dick Miller. One of the overlooked gems of the decade from director Jonathan Kaplan (HEART LIKE A WHEEL), who will introduce the film.

April 13, 14, 15 THE SADIST and CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM EATER

Fairway-International was a tiny company specializing in grade-C drive-in movies like WILD GUITAR and EEGAH! But from such unlikely soil springs a chilling surprise! James Landis’ intense 1963 drive-in classic is based on the same true crime story as BADLANDS– the serial killing exploits of Charles Starkweather and his underage girlfriend. Brutally unfolding in Real Time over 94 taut minutes, mad killer Arch Hall Jr. terrorizes our small cast in a junkyard — maybe the best-photographed junkyard ever, courtesy of the great Vilmos Zsigmond, who will appear in person on the 15th.

CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM EATER is the greatest work of exploitation king Albert Zugsmith (SEX KITTENS GO TO COLLEGE)–a triumphantly surreal parade of seemingly inexplicable images starring a deliriously miscast Vincent Price as an aphorism-spouting soldier of fortune trying to get the lowdown on a girls-for-sale ring in turn of the century Chinatown. Price, who has probably consumed more drugs onscreen than anyone except Bela Lugosi, goes on a trip in this one that you won’t soon forget. With Philip Ahn, Richard Loo, Lisa Lu and every Asian actor in town. As you might imagine, they don’t make ’em like this anymore.

April 16 + 17 THE SECRET INVASION and TOMB OF LIGEIA

This scenic WWII epic, shot in Yugoslavia in 1964, is one of Roger Corman’s least-seen yet most accomplished films, with essentially the same plot as THE DIRTY DOZEN — which wasn’t made until three years later! Stewart Granger, Mickey Rooney, Edd Byrnes, Henry Silva and Raf Vallone are felons recruited for a mission to rescue an Italian general from behind enemy lines. Roger used this story idea in his first movie, FIVE GUNS WEST. I haven’t seen this since it came out!

TOMB OF LIGEIA was the last of Corman’s popular series of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, but unlike the others it has many beautiful English countryside exteriors and mostly departs from the stylized stage-bound unreality of its forebears. Robert Towne (CHINATOWN) wrote the script in a more romantic vein, thinking Richard Chamberlain would play the lead–but AIP intervened and sure enough, Vincent Price took over.

April 18 + 19 WRONG IS RIGHT and Mystery Movie

When Richard Brooks’ star-studded adaptation of Charles McCarry’s spy novel The Better Angels came out in 1982 it was roundly dismissed as a confused jumble. From the hindsight of 2008, it looks like the STRANGELOVE of its era. So many aspects of this film have come true, it’s up there with NETWORK as a predictor of the future, our sorry present. Sean Connery stars as a globe-trotting tv reporter who’s tracking a terrorist dealing nuclear weapons in the mideast. Along the way we meet a President who goes to war to boost his ratings, a (Condi-like) Vice President, CIA and FBI figures who are so broadly caricatured they seemed divorced from reality in 1982– but who closely resemble figures we now see on the news every day! Suffice it to say the climax involves the World Trade Center. One of the all-star ensemble will join us–John Saxon!

Plus another movie in the same vein TBA with guest

April 20 + 21 BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW and HORROR EXPRESS

Piers Haggard’s atmospheric and beautifully photographed (Dick Bush) entry in the burn-the-witches genre benefits from a prolonged sense of dread, literate dialog and an unusually convincing period flavor — sort of a Masterpiece Theater horror film. When hairy patches of “satan’s skin” start cropping up on the bodies of nubile 17th century teenagers, local judge Patrick Wymark intervenes, starting with voluptuous teen temptress Linda Hayden. Less well known than the same studio’s earlier WITCHFINDER GENERAL, but equally effective, with more emphasis on the supernatural. Great score by Marc Wilkinson.

I love train movies. HORROR EXPRESS was made because the producers had access to the train models from NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA. One of my very favorite vehicles (get it?) for Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, this Spanish-made extravaganza (also known as Panic on the Trans-Siberian Express) has it all — good characters, lots of wry humor, a mad monk, a mysterious countess, a prehistoric fossilized monster alien, eyeballs in a jar, Telly Savalas as a bellicose Cossack (it’s 1906) and a surprisingly complex science fiction plot. And I left out the zombies! Seriously, this one of my top favorites of all time.

April 22 THE MOVIE ORGY

This the first, one nite only public showing in many years of my first project. In 1968 when “camp” was king, Jon Davison and I put together a counterculture compendium of 16mm bits and pieces (tv show openings, commercials, parts of features, old serials etc.), physically spliced them in ironic juxtapositions and ran the result at the Philadelphia College of Art interspersed with parts of a Bela Lugosi serial. The reaction was phenomenal. This led to The Movie Orgy, a 7-hour marathon of old movie clips and stuff with a crowd-pleasing anti-war, anti-military, anti-establishment slant that played the Fillmore East and on college campuses all over the country for years — always the one print. We called it a 2001-splice odyssey. We kept adding and subtracting material over time so this, alas, is not the original version– it’s the later cutdown, running a mere 4 hours and 19 minutes! But it’s still a pop time capsule that will bring many a nostalgic chuckle from baby boomers and dazed expressions of WTF?! from anyone else.”

Yes, this is a real story from a local West Country paper.

It was not confirmed at the time of going to press whether the runaway swan broke a man’s arm.

Or indeed blew up a man’s house.

IGN INTERVIEW

Asked how McSpaced was progressing, McG replied.

“It’s going well. I sure wish that Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg were involved. I chased after the show because I’m a huge fan of their collective voice – you know, Nick Frost and the whole gang. I’ve never spoken to them and I would very much like to make it clear that I’d bend over backwards to have them involved in any capacity that they see fit. They’re the reason I went after the show originally and I certainly intend to respect them in every way that I know how.”

Okay, how’s this for a check list of ways to respect us:

1) Note that there are also two women responsible for the creation of SPACED, co-writer and star Jessica Hynes (nee Stevenson), not to mention producer of both series, Nira Park

2) Contact us before a) announcing the show in the trades b) hiring a writer c) shopping it to a network d) acquiring the rights e) crowing on about what huge fans you are.

3) Bend over backwards to pick up the phone. You got in touch with James Cameron before commencing TERMINATOR 4, but didn’t see it fit to contact any or all of us before developing this.*

(*It’s worth pointing out that McG has actually been in touch - at least by voicemail - reaching out to me last week. Weird that he managed to obtain my number in late March and not during the two or three months before the Variety article in October. So only eight months late.)

I could go on with my list, but this exhausts me as much as I’m sure it exhausts you.

I will leave you with one other comment that McG had about pilot writer Adam Barr.

“Adam Barr is writing the show. He’s a very smart guy and he’s written a pilot that everyone’s excited about.”

Yeah, McG, that would be the first episode of the original series, by Simon and Jessica. Maybe have a look at the original again. Or perhaps for the first time. Nothing would surprise me at this point.

First off, thanks to anyone who voted in Empire’s Greatest TV Shows Of All Time poll. We made number 10, very nice company to be in too.

EMPIRE 50 GREATEST TV SHOWS OF ALL TIME

Not sure if I agree with their favourite episode, it’s a good one, but mine I would say is 2.5. But godamn if I don’t love them all.

Second link is to a great interview with my good friend and partner in crime Mister Pegg. It’s from Entertainment Weekly and after a long day of talking to the press, he was pretty damn honest about his feelings on McSpaced.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY SIMON PEGG INTERVIEW

And you know what? I’m glad he was.

For any of you in North America, then go see RUN FATBOY RUN this weekend, if only to see Simon’s arse in tight shorts and Dylan Moran’s arse sans any shorts.

If that isn’t encouragement enough then I don’t know what you want from life.