Comic Con Madness: Saturday and Sunday
Johnny Butane
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My Saturday at Comic Con started off on a relatively quiet note as I was set up to do interviews with the cast and crew of Tim Sullivan’s Driftwood first thing in the morning. Sean Clark took off to wander the floor for a bit and catch the Grind House stuff later that morning, which I’m still kicking myself for having missed; but damnit, I had work to do.
I chatted with stars Diamond Dallas Page, Ricky Ullman, Lin Shaye, Talan Torreiro, Marc McClure, and Shahine Ezell that morning but never got a chance to sit down with Sullivan directly. All the interviews will be up here shortly as well as a clip that was shown at the convention and a bunch of new stills, so look for them soon. On a side note; my former partner Ryan “Rotten” Turek and Bloody Disgusting’s Spooky Dan are the guys responsible for the clip they showed, and I have to say they did a damn fine job with it. You’ll see it soon enough!
While I sat in on the Driftwood panel, Clark was witnessing something that the fans will be talking about for months to come: Grind House. Not the entire film, but a significant clip from it was shown, which featured Rose McGowan having her severed leg replaced with an M-16 machine gun and taking out zombies. Everyone I talked to said it looked amazing, and there’s a good chance Grind House will be the coolest thing we’ve seen in a long time. They also got to see one of the fake trailers that will be between Tarantino’s and Rodriguez’s films, specifically for Machete, with Danny Trejo as a man who loves the titular knife and kills with it indiscriminately. I was informed that that, too, was badass, and goddamn someone had better get it online very soon.
The rest of Saturday was spent meeting and greeting, though not a whole helluva lot of horror stuff really went down during it. We managed to get some food and relax for a while (by this point everyone’s feet were in major pain) as well as chat with the guys from Monsters HD quite a bit. Hopefully you’ll be hearing more about that in the coming months, but suffice it to say we’re both fans of one another, and hopefully we can work out a plan or two that will get us all to a better place.
I needed rest and a shower as it was significantly warmer on Saturday than any other day, so we hit our hotel room for both before making our way to the party everyone had been talking about all weekend: the Rue Morgue bash. Invite only, and trust me they were very strict about it. 
We got to hook up with all sorts of cool cats including Travis Betz (director of one of my favorite movies of the year, Joshua), Joe Lynch (the mad genius behind Wrong Turn 2, Ryan Schiffrin (who made one of the coolest Bigfoot films ever, Abominable), as well as Ryan Rotten (former partner and now Fango man), and Bloody Disgusting’s Brad Miska and Spooky Dan. We knew it was the last bash of the weekend so we made the most of it, and the Rue crew were more than accommodating to everyone there. Though the party was pretty low-key, especially compared to the rooftop bash the night before from Gentle Giant, a good time was had by all.
I got a decent night’s sleep and didn’t wake up with a hangover, thank the gods, and we hit the last day of the convention with incredibly sore feet but a willingness to just get there and get the job done. The nice thing about Sunday was that the only thing of any real interest to us was the Sony panel since they’d be talking about The Grudge 2, but Sean did some on-camera stuff with the cast and crew before the panel so I didn’t even have to pay attention. To be honest, I don’t really care about the sequel that much anyway (though its stars are smoking), but the trailer they showed looked pretty good and hinted that the curse of The Grudge makes its way out of the house and causes damage on a much larger scale (see a teensy bit of it here). Perhaps we’ll have more when we get those video interviews online for you guys!
The last panel of the con focused on Hot Fuzz, the new film from the team behind 2004’s near-perfect zombie comedy, Shaun of the Dead. Though Fuzz is not horror, I’ll still be there opening day when it’s released in March cause these guys are about as funny as they come. Sean introduced us to Edgar Wright and Nick Frost very briefly, and then we were on our way, back to what some would consider “normal” life.
I should add here that some friends of my wife and I went to the San Diego Zoo with us once the convention was over, and while it was impressively large, it was still just a zoo. Not at all the massive menagerie I had hoped for, full of exotic beasts. Ah, well, that’s what you get when you believe the hype.
So there you have it, folks! I learned a lot at Comic Con this year, but first and foremost is to have a hotel room that’s closer than a mile from the convention and to take your two “vacation days” before the con, not after. Expect more good stuff in the coming days as I finally settle in and bang it all out!
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