Over in the sidebar there you’ll see a couple of new sections. One is Sounds wherein you can currently listen to and/or download for straight up FREE my e.p. from way back in 2002 known as Stripper Music!. It is comprised of the tracks you’ll find there plus five others that I have no right nor permission to advertise nor distribute. So on that tip, please don’t tell.

The other is The Recordings, a joint where I have listed all the albums and all the lyrics of all the junk I’ve spewed forth since, say, 1994. There’s no music to be had here, really, but if you want to be astounded at the breadth and depth of the Craig Moorhead 4-track catalog… well… go be astounded?

Now – in the coming days and months, I’ll be uploading everything I’ve ever done and making the stuff available for download. As with Stripper Music, the albums will stream here for a while and I’ll probably change that up every now and again once I have more stuff ready to go. So you can give everything a good listen before deciding whether or not to waste your money.

I’ll also be doing limited edition CDs, though I’m not entirely sure how I’m going to go about doing them – whether by hand or by pre-order or by on-demand pressing. But that’s for me to worry about. The downloads’ll be dirt cheap and the CDs will be a little more pricey, but keep in mind how useful such things can be in terms of cupholders or table propper uppers or door keeper openers.

This probably also hopefully means there is something new in the offing. We shall see.

Thanks for listening!

Continuing where I left off…

Which brings us to ‘The Blair Witch Project’. I’m not sure there’s a horror movie with a lower-budget and a bigger response. The fact they were able to pull off such a gigantic prank for so long – that it was an actual documentary and this actually did happen – is something I’m jealous of. Because of ‘Blair Witch’, this can never happen again. At least, not in the same way. It does seem a bit flash-in-the-pan-ish now – I never hear anyone bring up ‘Blair Witch’ anymore unless they’re pointing out how much money can be made from low-budget horror. No one says “I want to do this just like they did in Blair Witch.” It’s an idea that came right at the right moment and then ran far away. This movie scared the crap out of me when I saw it in the theater, but I’ve never watched a frame of it since. Interesting that something can swing that far in both directions.

When this sucker went to Sundance, the alleged budget was around $35k to $60k. You’ll still find that number on most sites that list such info, but by the time it went out to theaters, it had cost Artisan – who bought it for $1.1m – around $30m total, with marketing, etc. Still, not a bad gamble on their part, considering it went on to earn nearly $250m.

And nothing since then seems to have come close to this kind of sensation as much as the upcoming ‘Paranormal Activity’, touted as having a budget of $10k. It definitely looks like a pretty scaled down film, trading on a sort of documentary feel like ‘Blair Witch’. According the trailer, the story seems to concern a couple living in a house they think is haunted and setting up cameras to capture any of the possible paranormal activity. The trailer itself doesn’t seem overly terrifying, but hopefully the scary is going to come from a slow boil over the course of a 90 minute movie. This one has gotten raves all over the place. Will it be the second coming or a dud? We’ll see.

The $10k price tag, like ‘Blair Witch’, is probably all blown to hell now, though by how much it’s hard to say. Where ‘Blair Witch’ opened wide after a few weeks in major cities, ‘Paranormal’ seems to be rolling out mainly in colleges, its website set up to gauge where its audience is before they start booking dates. A pretty great idea and with the press the movie is getting, this could work out amazingly well. Interesting to note, too, that it is not being sold as anything real. Funny to think we’re too far beyond that idea to get tricked into it again.

More to come…

Without a doubt, ‘Friday the 13th’ ups the ante in terms of production value – it’s as slick as a barrel of oil and a hundred thousand times more expensive. But that wasn’t hard to do – the original movies looked fairly dipped in mud half of the time. One could argue that was half their charm, but that would make one a curmudgeon, probably, so I’ll skip it. What else is new is that there’s a CW TV star in it and there’s Aaron Yoo who seems to be the only Asian twentysomething working in Hollywood (and who is also pretty great even in the midst of terrible material).

But who cares about the cast or the production value? In a ‘Friday the 13th’ movie, it doesn’t matter. Jason doesn’t even really matter. The only thing that matters in ‘Friday the 13th’ are the FX. read more »