News

A young film student contacts an artist to design a poster for his new documentary about a musician. The film student was named Todd Phillips, the musician was named Gg Allin and the artist was named John Wayne Gacy… who happens to be an infamous serial killer known for dressing like a clown. This artistic contribution earned Gacy an “executive producer” credit and gave the documentary some dark twisted notoriety – not that Gg Allin needed any. That’s right: the director of Joker got his start thanks to a real-life serial killing clown. Director Todd Phillips went on to bring us some of the most interesting and hilarious films of the past few decades. He was pumping out groundbreaking blockbusters left and right for years, surprising us all with classics like The Hangover and Joker and instantly disappointing us all with their sequels. But has Todd Phillips sung his last great cinematic song?...

Marilyn Manson, the controversial schlock rocker, is to be the subject of a new documentary series.

British broadcaster Channel 4 has ordered three-part series Marilyn Manson: Behind The Mask (w/t) that is co-financed by Fifth Season, the company formerly known as Endeavor Content, and comes from Spector producer Lightbox in partnership with Rolling Stone.

It comes after Manson, otherwise known as Brian Warner, received a litany of accusations in recent years. Evan Rachel Wood accused the musician of sexual and physical violence and was behind a two-part HBO documentary Phoenix Rising. Subsequently, Game of Thrones star Esmé Bianco accused him of sexual assault and sexual battery and a number of other women filed civil lawsuits against him.

He was dropped by CAA and his record label Loma Vista and axed from series such as Starz’s American Gods and Shudder’s Creepshow.

After these initial accusations, Rolling Stone magazine,...

While Italian genre cinema generated its fair share of classics throughout the ’70s and ’80s, filmmakers during that period were also quick to exploit successful trends. Lax copyright protections gave way to Italian rip-offs of such hits as The Exorcist, Jaws, Dawn of the Dead, Alien, The Evil Dead, and Mad Max, to name a few.

Not even Italy’s own productions were safe from imitation, as the cannibal subgenre proved. While 1972’s Man from Deep River is often cited as the originator, the international notoriety of Cannibal Holocaust ushered in the cannibal boom in 1980. Man from Deep River director Umberto Lenzi helmed another one of the subgenre’s highlights, Cannibal Ferox (originally released in the US as Make Them Die Slowly), in 1981.

Shot on location in the Amazon, the film follows three Americans to the Colombian jungles in search of an alleged cannibal village. Unfortunately for them, they find...

Exclusive: Jake Brennan, the man behind the hit rock n roll true-crime podcast Disgraceland, and his production company Double Elvis, have signed with Range Media Partners.

The company will manage Brennan, whose stable of podcasts also includes Badlands and Badlands.

Brennan has been making episodes of Disgraceland, a true crime podcast about musicians getting away with murder and behaving very badly, since 2018. It is currently in Season 12.

It has told stories about the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis, Sam Cooke, Gg Allin, John Lennon, Grateful Dead and, most recently, Jeff Buckley.

“I didn’t want to do just another music podcast and I don’t think there’s a lot of great music podcasts,” Brennan, who was a member of punk band Cast Iron Hike, told Deadline in 2018. “The best podcasts are all about telling stories. I knew a lot about the general aspects of these stories from being a...

Jerry Springer, the controversial and influential talk-show host who fused chaos and entertainment while showcasing the underbelly of America on daytime television, died Thursday at the age of 79.

Springer’s family confirmed his death in a statement to Rolling Stone, noting that he died peacefully at his home in the suburbs of Chicago; while no cause of death was provided, it was reported recently that Springer had been diagnosed with cancer.

“Jerry’s ability to connect with people was at the heart of his success in everything he tried, whether that was politics,...

Titled Gg Allin: Live. Fast. Die., a biopic centered on controversial punk rocker Gg Allin is on the way from director Jonas Åkerlund (Lords of Chaos), THR reports this afternoon.

The Hollywood Reporter notes in their announcement, “The producers have acquired Allin’s life and music rights, and have a script written by Richard Schenkman (Mischief Night).

Gg Allin: Live. Fast. Die. is said to explore “what happens to a borderline personality when the reach for fame exceeds the limits of talent… when substance abuse goes unchecked and mental illness undiagnosed and untreated… and when a fictional character takes over a real person’s life, driving Gg beyond limits anyone could possibly endure.”

“Allin was a cult and fringe figure in the 1980s punk scene that became notorious for his outrageous acts on stage, notably defecating on stage and sometimes hurling it at his audience,” THR reminds. “His shows frequently...

Click here to read the full article.

Notorious punk rocker Gg Allin is getting the biopic treatment.

Jonas Åkerlund, the music video director behind heavy metal thriller Lords of Chaos, will helm the feature, titled Gg Allin: Live. Fast. Die., which will be produced by Don Murphy and Susan Monford of Angry Films and Mvd Entertainment Group.

The producers have acquired Allin’s life and music rights, and have a script written by Richard Schenkman.

Allin was a cult and fringe figure in the 1980s punk scene that became notorious for his outrageous acts on stage, notably defecating on stage and sometimes hurling it at his audience. His shows frequently ended in chaos and violence and he found himself frequently arrested and imprisoned. Allin fell headlong into booze and drugs while putting out albums — punk, spoken word, and country — mostly on cassette in the 80s.

According to the producers, Live.

Executive producer Ed Seaman and Mvd Entertainment Group have acquired punk rocker Gg Allin’s life and music rights, with Jonas Åkerlund attached to the direct the biopic film, titled “Gg Allin: Live. Fast. Die.”

Angry Films’ Don Murphy and Susan MonEord will produce along with Eric D. Wilkinson from a screenplay by Richard Schenkman.

Known as rock ‘n roll’s “outlaw scumfuc,” Gg Allin’s live shows were legendary for his outrageous antics. Kevin Michael Allin (born Jesus Christ Allin) adopted “Gg” as his stage persona, but the role took over his life. Descending into booze, drugs and schizophrenia, Gg tore through band mates, fans, and women, announcing that he would commit suicide on stage October 31st, 1991 – only to find himself in prison for assault on that date.

Also Read:

Daniel Kaluuya Cast in ‘Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’ as Spider-Punk

Husband, father, lunatic “Gg Allin: Live. Fast. Die.” is...

Pink Flamingos

Blu ray

Criterion

1972 / 1:66:1 / 93 Min.

Starring Divine, Mink Stole, Edith Massey

Written by John Waters

Directed by John Waters

In 1980, J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum began an exploration into those elusive films that could only be seen at the witching hour—a time when most theaters were closed and, it was implied, most decent people were home in bed. Published in 1983, their book was a catalogue of curios that defied categorization until Rosenbaum and Hoberman named them: Midnight Movies. But even alongside renegade efforts like Jodorowsky’s El Topo and Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, John Waters’ Pink Flamingos stood out as the tarnished gold standard for transgressive entertainment; it felt then, and it feels now, like a genuinely lawless movie—as of this writing, it remains banned in the town of Hicksville, New York.

A gender-bending satire of a great republic’s rush to the bottom,...

Siniestro Release New Single “One Last Bullet One Last Ride” Swedish-Chilean thrash metal outfit Siniestro has unleashed their new single and music video for “One Last Bullet One Last Ride”. Filmed in the mountains of Gran Canaria, the band showcases how you can combine black, thrash, and Gg Allin in a masterly manner. The new …

The post Siniestro Release New Single & Video for “One Last Bullet One Last Ride” appeared first on Horror News | Hnn.

In 2019, no movie became a greater flashpoint for cultural debate than “Joker” — and Todd Phillips sat happily at the center of the battlefield. To some, Phillips looked like he wanted to provoke the ire of the moment — the bearded reprobate with a naughty grin and cynical gaze, the Hollywood bro who made those “Hangover” movies and gave up on comedy to avoid the sensitivities of the moment, a Tinseltown huckster straight out of the “Entourage” mold who cared less about the art of filmmaking than contorting it into the ultimate blockbuster coup.

But these readings tend to ignore his roots, and how they set him up for everything that followed. Phillips’ origin story has been obscured by the sheer scale of his commercial successes, and even he’s reticent to look back. “People don’t always know about my beginnings, and I get it,” Phillips told me when we met...

Nothing takes you back to time and a place like the music of a particular era. That’s one big reason why music documentaries are flourishing at a time of enormous demand for high-end docu productions.

This year’s five Grammy Award nominees for best music film reflect the appetite for stories about renowned and beloved musical figures, from Whitney Houston to Itzhak Perlman to Elvis Presley to Quincy Jones. Music docus have a natural commercial appeal and a built-in core target audience, which provides a foundation for marketing efforts to spur word-of-mouth about a title.

“What’s beautiful about doing a music documentary is that it immediately transcends the borders of the docu-loving audience and the community of an artist’s fans,” said Vinnie Malhotra, Showtime’s head of documentary programming. “They’re emotional. There’s a nostalgia factor to them. At their best they give you new perspective...

Showtime announced a new run of December music documentaries profiling Jeff Beck, Korn guitarist Brian “Head” Welch, Gg Allin and Agnostic Front. The network previewed all four titles in a brief trailer featuring interviews and live footage.

Jeff Beck: Still on the Run will premiere Tuesday, December 11th at 7:30 p.m. Et/Pt, followed by Agnostic Front: Godfathers of Hardcore on Wednesday, the 12th at 7 p.m. Et/Pt; Gg Allin: All in the Family on Thursday, the 13th at 10 p.m. Et/Pt; and Korn’s Brian ‘Head...

We should probably start with the muscular, shirtless man perched on a banquet table, shrieking like an animal and terrorizing folks at a $5,000-a-plate dinner.

There will be many scenes in The Square, the new pitch-black comedy from Swedish director Ruben Östlund about a museum director in moral free-fall and which hits theaters this weekend, that will provoke, push buttons and provide postscreening argument fodder: a man with Tourette's screaming obscenities during a Q&A; a social media team's viral video that goes way, way overboard; Elisabeth Moss and Danish...

We should probably start with the muscular, shirtless man perched on a banquet table, shrieking like an animal and terrorizing folks at a $5,000-a-plate dinner.

There will be many scenes in The Square, the new pitch-black comedy from Swedish director Ruben Östlund about a museum director in moral free-fall and which hits theaters this weekend, that will provoke, push buttons and provide postscreening argument fodder: a man with Tourette's screaming obscenities during a Q&A; a social media team's viral video that goes way, way overboard; Elisabeth Moss and Danish...

There are no Nirvana songs in As You Are. It makes sense: More than a few seconds of the iconic, underwater guitar warble from the radio smash in question would probably cost more than the entire budget of this tiny American indie. Still, we are talking about a movie named for a Nirvana song, that follows a couple of teenagers obsessed with Nirvana, and that uses Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain’s suicide as a plot point. The omission feels a little glaring, even distracting. So, too, does the absence of any music from the mid-’90s, when As You Are is set. While the characters gush about the Melvins and Mudhoney and Gg Allin, director Miles Joris-Peyrafitte and avant-garde composer Patrick Higgins provide their own original soundtrack. Sometimes it sounds like outtakes from an Explosions In The Sky record. Other times it sounds like an imitation of the moody synth...

Gg Allin custom emojis by Emoji Fame Available Now Click Here for the story on Dangerous Minds A new set of Gg Allin custom emojis is now available via Emoji Fame, the go-to company specializing in making emoji sets for musicians. Thus far, the artist emoji space has been dominated by hip-hop and Edm acts, Gg’s …

The post Gg Allin custom emojis by Emoji Fame first appeared on Hnn | Horrornews.net - Official News Site...

The director’s new film tells the true story of two weapons wheeler-dealers who get hired by the Pentagon. It’s a long way from the usual frat boy hijinks

In 1993, while still a 22-year-old Nyu film student, Todd Phillips made a documentary about possibly the most notorious, most disgusting punk singer of all time. Hated: Gg Allin & The Murder Junkies found Phillips slumming it with Allin as the latter did what he was best at: getting wasted, getting naked, starting fights, flinging faeces. Then, with the film in the can, Phillips set up a premiere at the university.

“Gg had got out of jail three days before,” remembers Phillips. “He showed up drunk as fuck, with three 40-ounces [bottles] on him, and he’s sitting at the back yelling at the screen. Thirty minutes in, someone in the film talks shit about him and Gg throws a 40-ounce at the screen and,...

"My whole life, even now, I'm attracted to mayhem," Todd Phillips is saying, feet resting on a spotless coffee table inside his spotless office on the Warner Bros. film-studio lot in Burbank, him having turned this lifelong attraction into so much money you can't believe it.

Take the three Hangover movies, from 2009 to 2013, all of which Phillips directed and two of which he co-wrote. Altogether, they've raked in $1.4 billion, with lunacy galore, chain-smoking monkeys, unexpected face tattoos, roofie-puffed marshmallows and so forth, ad nauseam. Crazy stuff, none of which would...

Frequent collaborators Bradley Cooper and Todd Phillips will executive produce a TV series about Isis for HBO, Deadline reports. The miniseries will be based on Joby Warrick’s 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction book “Black Flags: The Rise Of Isis.” Tim Van Patten (“Game of Thrones,” “Boardwalk Empire”) is attached to direct and executive produce. Author Gregg Hurwitz is in the process adapting the book, and will also serve as an executive producer.

The series could be the first TV project for the pair’s production company Joint Effort, which they established together in 2014. The company’s first movie since Cooper and Phillips merged their Warner Bros.-based shingles is “War Dogs,” which hits theaters August 19.

Read More: Jonah Hill On ‘War Dogs’ and the Acting Advice Leonardo DiCaprio Gave Him

The series based on “Black Flags” will cover the origin story of Isis, which began in a prison in Jordan before...

Gg Allin “My Prison Walls” Kindle edition now Available

Gg Allin “My Prison Walls” Kindle edition now available The critically acclaimed book goes digital… Gg’s letters, illustrations, prose, and his own personal account of prison In 2013, Aggronautix published Gg Allin “My Prison Walls”, a limited edition hard cover collector’s book wrapped in black saifu cloth and decorated / titled in red foil blood stamping. Each book …

Hnn | Horrornews.net - Official News Site...

In the mid-90s, conservatives and parents' groups grew alarmed at what they perceived to be the cultural threat posed by supposed shock rock acts like Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails. Both pushed sexual and violent lyrics and imagery into the mainstream, finding sympathy in the ears of your ordinary, everyday, disaffected teenager. While editorial pieces and op-eds tried to figure out what responsibility artists had to younger listeners, in Temecula, California, another band was pushing things to extremes that Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails could never conjure in their worst nightmare. Read More: Slamdance Exclusive: Trailer For Doc 'Dead Hands Dig Deep' Explores The Edge Of Heavy Metal Extremes Fronted by Edwin Borsheim, Kettle Cadaver waded into waters perhaps only previously occupied by Gg Allin. Their shows became notorious for their violence, and Borsheim’s own dedication to extreme behavior, which often included genital mutilation,...

Do you like horror stories? What about Gg Allin? If the idea of mashing those two together into one literary endeavor doesn’t sound completely off the mark, then we have a Kickstarter campaign with your name written all over it.… Continue Reading →

The post Blood for You: A Literary Tribute to Gg Allin Launches Kickstarter Campaign appeared first on Dread Central.

What goes on tour stays on tour – unless it's caught on camera. With classic Beatles comedy A Hard Day's Night returning to UK cinemas on July 4, and Metallica's triumphant set at Glastonbury reminding us how far they've come from darker days, now feels like the time to look back on some of the movies that prove that maxim.

Below, we catalogue the craziest music movies ever made, helpfully divided into four distinct categories of weirdness.

Bad Behaviour

Beginning with its 70-something subject attacking the director with his walking stick, Beware Of Mr Baker (2012) introduces a man – ex-Cream drummer Ginger Baker – so bellicose he's made the whole world his practice kit. Like Brick Top from Snatch with even greater anger-management issues, Baker is a bitter old codger who "communicates more through his drums than his words", according to his long-suffering daughter. He certainly doesn't mince the latter.

Mick Jagger is...

It’s been approximately 11 years since the release of the infamous documentary about the arguable rock god Gg Allin, “Hated: Gg Allin and the Murder Junkies,” but that didn’t stop the Nitethawk in New York City from screening a rare print late last week to a sold out audience. To top it off, the director of the doc, Todd Phillips, known for such hits as “Old School,” “The Hangover,” and “Due Date,” to name a few, was present for a little Q&A. Phillips was only a junior at Nyu during filming, and it’s safe to say this was the start to a career in acidic comedic pieces revolving around deeply flawed figures. The primary difference between “Hated: Gg Allin and the Murder Junkies” and Phillips’ later work is the fact that this doc centered on an actual, real-life individual and the filmmaker has rarely done documentary films...

Raw, brutal, rough, and bloody. The words that spewed out of Gg Allin’s mouth over twenty years ago never rang truer than they did at Sony’s E3 press conference as they unveiled a new gameplay trailer for Mortal Kombat X.

Aside from a glistening showcase of violence, the trailer reveals a few of the game’s new characters. Classics like Scorpion and Sub Zero are there, but so are two new characters: a woman who looks like a deadly dragonfly mutant and a giant/little person combo that is no doubt inspired by Master Blaster.

Weapons were one heavy showcase as Scorpion dices with short swords and the Master Blaster character unleashes a fury of stabbings with blades attached to his wrists. Developers also promise Mortal Kombat X will feature an online ranking system, putting players in contact and competition across the world.

Mortal Kombat X is slated...

Hated: Gg Allin And The Murder Junkies | Gg Allin: (Un)Censored Live 1993

It speaks to the peculiar appeal of punk rock antihero Gg Allin that at the time of his death in 1993, he counted both mellow pop scarecrow Beck and serial killer John Wayne Gacy among his fans. Neither cared much for Allin's music (though Beck did record a cover of Tough Fuckin Shit in 1992) but both admitted a fascination with the singer's eccentric stage performances, which often began with a bit of light coprophagia and then got weirder.

Continue reading...

The void left by the passing of Gwar frontman Dave Brockie is a big one, and we all miss him and his alter-ego Oderus Urungus immensely. Now a new way has been devised to fill just a little bit of that hole in our hearts!

From the Press Release

Aggronautix and Slave Pit Inc. proudly present the Gwar Throbblehead Set featuring Oderus Urungus and Balsac "The Jaws of Death."

Oderus, Gwar's lead singer and broadsword swinger, stands an imposing 6.5" tall and will lay waste to any opposing his reign of terror. Dutifully worship Balsac, guitarist for Gwar, while keeping out of decapitation distance. He stands 7.5" tall from horn to hoof.

Will you be one of the worthy few to own this collectible set? Worship your masters, human filth!

A portion of the proceeds will go to the Dave Brockie Fund, a charity with the mission of promoting the advancement of music,...

This week, alternative comedy's single greatest sentence constructor Patton Oswalt premieres Tragedy + Comedy = Time, his fifth hour-long special for Comedy Central (airing April 6), and his soon-to-be-released fifth stand-up LP. Having built a career on punk-rock touring cycles and venomous rants against fast food chains, Oswalt is now masterfully and hilariously playing the long game, embracing less esoteric references (though Werner Herzog still gets a shout-out) and accepting the things that make him an adult. As the guy who once took down Jackyl on a comedy album lays out: "I don't hate any music any more…...

Although they started largely unknown outside of their native Sweden, extreme-rock quartet Sister eventually broke out into the international arena with the release of their Ep Dead Boys Making Noise in 2009, which got them signed to Metal Blade the following year. After their well-received full-length debut Hated and successful shows with the likes of Fozzy, U.D.O. and (long-time Fearnet fave) Wednesday 13, the band quickly became one of rock & metal's most talked-about names; natually, old and new fans have been clamoring for a follow-up. The wait is over next Tuesday with the arrival of Disguised Vultures – and while it's definitely the band's most polished record to date, it manages to balance the their aggressive attitude and flamboyant glam-rock stylings with just the right edge of old-school grit and grime. That sound is described by the label as “the bastard child of Gg Allin and Guns N' Roses,” and that's...

The Decline of Western Civilization

Directed by Penelope Spheeris

Screenplay by Penelope Spheeris

1981, USA

My friend George is The authority on music, in my opinion. He was the guy that turned me on to bands like King’s X and The New Amsterdams – whose album Worse for the Wear is my long drive anthem – and helped me navigate the waters of the noise genre. One day, he shows me a documentary on the L.A. punk rock scene of the late 70’s / early 80’s. I witness young people choosing to live in squalor and grown men shouting nonsense into a microphone.

And the energy of it all was infectious.

George had previously introduced me to heavy punk through another documentary by Todd Philips called Hated in the Nation, about the “great” Gg Allin. That movie was more about one man; this movie is about a movement. And the poster child of that movement?...

Article by Aaron AuBuchon

Television means one of two things these days: episodic, long form (usually cable) dramas- the high water mark of narrative motion media storytelling, and on the other end, the nadir, are so-called ‘reality’ shows. We are bombarded by advertisements for shows about former celebrities doing strange things, people who desperately want to be celebrities, and normal people doing insane things for money. It gets nauseating sometimes, and we like to think of this as being indicative of some new shortcoming in the moral or intellectual fabric of our times, as though the mere presence of these things points to a reduction in the cultural ideal of our society. A common misconception about these shows is that they’re a relatively new phenomenon and that they have originated out of virtual air over the last decade or so. While this may be true of television, moviegoers have...

The Hangover's Todd Phillips has directed movies that involve drunken nights of debauchery and craziness. Before he directed Old School, Road Trip, and produced Project X, Phillips got his start with documentaries. He directed the G.G. Allin documentary Hated, and then helmed Frat House for HBO.

The project was to be part of the network's American Undercover series. The doc debuted at Sundance in 1998, but was shelved after accusations that the events shown were staged. Frat House was co-directed by Andrew Gurland (The Virginity Hit), The movie has been online before, and it is once again available. Here is a description: Frat House purports to go deep into the unseen world of rush week and the hazing that involves new recruits. The sizzle part of the doc is when Phillips decides to pledge himself in order to accurately experience and document what rushes undergo in order to join a fraternity.

To say that Todd Phillips has had an ongoing cinematic interest in recklessness and debauchery would be an understatement. As the director of "The Hangover," "Old School," "Road Trip" and the producer behind this weekend's R-rated found footage teenage bacchanalia "Project X," there is no one who is perhaps more tuned in to hedonistic male desires. But even before he made it big, Phillips was exploring what drives young men to the extreme ends of drunkeness and sex.

The director got his start with the notorious G.G. Allin documentary "Hated," before moving over to HBO to helm "Frat House." Originally intended for the network's "American Undercover" series, the one-hour doc premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1998 and following accusations that events in the movie were staged, it was permanently shelved. It has popped up online now and again over the years, and seems to have surfaced once more, and...

The Hangover Part II may have had the biggest opening five-day haul of any comedy in history, but the collective Internet/media/ spectator-snark voice has spoken, and the verdict is not pretty. The Hangover Part II, it is said, reduces the first Hangover to a transparently contrived formula; it’s a cookie-cutter comedy, way too safe and pat; it doesn’t do anything that’s really unpredictable; it’s more of the same; and beyond that (did I mention this point yet?), it’s more of the same. To which I can only react by asking: And you were expecting the movie to be what,...

"I can't believe this is happening Again!" - Ed Helms in The Hangover Part II

"Neither can we." - The Audience

Director Todd Phillips has a punk rock streak.  His first project, made while he was still an Nyu student, is the shock-documentary Hated: Gg Allin and the Murder Junkies.  In it an interview subject is about to reveal someone's identity, but stops himself.  "Wait, you can't use this in the movie."  Okay, we won't, is the response.  And, of course, the footage remains in the final cut.

Punk rock filmmaking!

The Hangover, a movie I didn't particularly care for, but also didn't hate, touched a nerve with a lot of people.  Bradley Cooper and Ed Helms are charismatic as the everyman joker and uptight dentist tracing the consequences of their uncaged inner animals.  The plot is absurd and some scenes are funnier than others, but at least it was a somewhat clever idea.

Short, but sweet, this week. I was out of town pretty much all week and didn’t have time to gather many links, unfortunately. Plus, I’ve been ensconced in a couple of bigger projects that have been eating up tons of my time. But, I had a few links drop pretty much into my lap, so that’s what we’ve got. Here they are:

Sick of the Radio interviewed Bad Lit fave Jon Clark about his music video for “So Unreal,” plus about his work in general. They asked him just about all the questions I would have wanted answered — and a few more.For Moving Image Source, Ed Halter writes a lengthy essay on the formerly “lost” films of philosopher Manuel DeLanda, one of Nick Zedd’s inspirations behind the Cinema of Transgression.Speaking of Transgression — and I usually am — Jay Hollinsworth lets us know about a...

Ed Helms and Todd Phillips on the set of The HangoverThe other day I was reading an article in Salon magazine. The article was titled "Why we need more 'adult' movies?" and it addressed the need for more films with themes that "kids won't understand" according to the author. Then he went on to sing the praises of two recent movies, The American with George Clooney and The Romantics with Katie Holmes. I have to say I agreed with the premise, we could use more films with adult themes, but I couldn't agree with what he was saying.

First of all, the author seemed to equate slow pacing with "adult", going so far as to cite a scene in The Romantics where the camera lingers on Anna Paquin for almost a minute. Slow does not mean adult. (Many of the comments left for the author echoed my sentiments as well...

Congratulations to director Todd Phillips for winning the Best Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical Golden Globe for his hit film The Hangover. Phillips, it may not be popularly known by anyone other than regular readers of this site, holds a special place in the history of underground film as the co-founder of the New York Underground Film Festival in 1994.

Prior to that, Phillips directed the documentary Hated, about controversial punk rock musician and performance artist Gg Allin, who regularly defecated, urinated and self-mutilated himself live on stage. According to the book Deathtripping: The Extreme Underground, Phillips financed the film through cab driving, “credit card scams” and by selling an advance poster signed by convicted serial killer John Wayne Gacy. Three days before the film’s NYC premiere, Allin died of a heroin overdose.

Upon completion, Hated screened at film festivals all over the world. Phillips was especially impressed and inspired...

It's kind of hard to beat a shelf that already sags under the weight of bobbleheads of Jason Vorhees, Napoleon Dynamite, Al Franken and the 40-Year-Old Virgin (complete with realistic chest hair removal patterns). But then I feasted my eyes on the piece de resistance of completely unnecessary but must-have gross-out collectibles: The Gg Allin 1991 Extra Filthy Bloody Edition bobble.

Aggronautix, the same demented people who have created wobbly-necked figurines of such similarly obscure punk rock icons as Tesco Vee of the Meatmen, Milo of the Descendents and the barely-legal Dwarves, have truly gone all out for the second edition of the Allin figure, which commemorates the scat-loving punk icon in all his messy glory.

From the bloody hematoma on his forehead to the true Manchu beard-mustache combo, bloody cuts on his body and guaranteed-to-offend tattoos, this seven-inch tall likeness of the late punker best known for using the stage as a toilet,...

The trajectory of careers can be pretty fascinating. I remember when G.G. Allin was a Lower East Side punk rock performance freakshow, cutting himself on stage, fighting with audience members and threatening/promising to kill himself during one of his performances. Todd Phillips was attending Nyu Film School at the time and while a junior there made his debut feature, a documentary portrait of the performer entitled Hated: Gg Allin and the Murder Junkies (1994). He also, with Andrew Gurland, founded the New York Underground Film Festival, would go on to make with Gurland the controversial college hazing doc Frat House (1998) and then, just two years later, would make the very successful comedy Road Trip. There was also Old School (2003)...

by Ryan J. Downey

The shenanigans Zach Galifianakas and crew get up to in “The Hangover” are nothing compared to the protagonist in director Todd Phillips’ debut. The maniacal star of 1994’s “Hated” slashed himself with razor blades, crapped on nightclub stages and verbally sparred with Geraldo. And that guy — late punk legend G.G. Allin — was a real person.

Considering Phillips’ deep roots in punk rock, heavy metal and other subcultural genres, defining musical moments like The Cramps and Danzig songs in “The Hangover” or the Metallica and Black Flag jams in “Old School” make a lot of sense. Skate-punk hero Mike Vallely, whose band Revolution Mother was invited by Philips to write a track specifically for the movie, cameos as the tuxedo rental guy who hands “The Hangover” crew their clothes on the freeway.

A couple of the musical moments in “The Hangover” — like Mike Tyson singing and air-drumming...