Unboxing Video

My copy of WEIRD WISCONSIN, the Bill Rebane box set from Arrow, arrived this morning. I thought I’d honour the occasion with my first UNBOXING VIDEO, and then I thought I’d make it in a Rebanesque style.

It’s quite short.

My documentary, WHO IS BILL REBANE?, is quite long. I didn’t have time to make it shorter. But I now know that making a feature film in a couple of months is no big deal, so long as you don’t have a Tonkinese cat screaming in your face the whole time. I’d like to do it some more.

It would be delightful if the IMDb chose today to recognise the film’s existence, but no, that’ll be another blog post for another day.

Reviews (for the doc) have been good so far. My hope is that it might actually change some viewers’ minds about the whole set — they might be thinking they don’t like Bill Rebane films after watching them all, then watch the doc and decide they do. In a way. Or they might think they like them and then decide they like them a lot. I don’t want to make anybody NOT like them, though I suppose that would be a kind of achievement too.

Weird Wisconsin

So, this is what I’ve been busy on since December and up until a few weeks ago: making a feature-length doc about Bill Rebane, the Wisconsin-based cult filmmaker behInd MONSTER A GO-GO, INVASION FROM INNER EARTH and THE ALPHA INCIDENT, for the first ever box set of his films, including the above-named titles and also DEMONS OF LUDLOW, THE GAME and TWISTER’S REVENGE! It was a wild and crazy journey, and I met so many nice people, all without actually leaving the house. Cast, crew, critics, academics, writers and the great Mark Borchardt (COVEN and the forthcoming COVEN II and THE MORE THE SCARIER IV).

Viewers will learn about eight-foot-tall giant Henry Hite’s special car, Tiny Tim’s unusual diet, Rebane’s surprise cameo in NORTH BY NORTHWEST, Ulli Lommel’s bad pig idea and much, much more. I myself went from wondering who’d want to watch this stuff to becoming obsessed and fascinated by it. Do de-programmers exist for cult cinema acolytes?

The doc, which is longer than any of Bill’s films, should serve to at least partially explain the movies, how they came to be, and what made them the way they are. A Rebane Rosetta Stone, as it were.

Too many people to thank all at once — I’ll settle for thanking Fiona for her patient support, and producer Neil Snowdon for saying yes to everything I asked for.