Brain Dead and Loving it!

Sometimes just one critic can change the course of movie history.  Or at the very least, the life of a talented, yet unknown director. In 1978, a young John Carpenter was hired to make a horror film about babysitters being stalked by a serial killer by producer Irwin Yablans and financier Moustapha Akkad, who had been impressed by his ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 . The gutsy 30 years old demanded complete artistic control, his name above the title (like his idols Howard Hawks, John Ford and Hitchcock) and proceeded to write, direct and score the film, which went from THE BABYSITTER MURDERS to the less on-the-nose HALLOWEEN (On a suggestion by Yablans). The film was released in October 1978 and was panned unanimously by critics, and looked like it may vanish quickly from theaters. That is until a particularly glowing review by Tom Allen in THE VILLAGE VOICE shifted the opinion of critics who started seeing the film for more than a mere killer on the loose horror film.

Let me get this out in the ether right away: I don't like Venom as a character. I feel it's no more than a pale variation on a popular hero, seasoned with a ''bad-ass'' attitude meant to please mainly a sensation-hungry juvenile audience who has their own skewed views of what is supposed to be ''cool". There. I said it. Now this old man who likes comics will step down from his soapbox and take a few deep breaths. The journey to the VENOM movie is a convoluted  one, and it started with the suggestion of a 22 year old comic book fan named Randy Schueller .  He had written way back in the early eighties to Marvel Comics Editor-in-chief Jim Shooter about a story idea where SPIDER-MAN would acquire a new, black costume. He then received that letter: Schueller submitted some story lines, but nothing ever came out of it. But he did see his costume idea make its first appearance about a year later on the cover of SPIDER-MAN # 252. How

July 20 th 2018. Days after having been denied an interview with legendary actor Sam Elliott at the Montreal Fantasia Film festival (Too many journalists had requested some of the limited time that was allocated for interviews, and I was just too late to fit in), I get a call around 12.45, during my lunch break at work. A spot had freed up in an hour to be able to sit with Sam Elliott. I was to have roughly 15 minutes. I’m horribly unprepared, but still jumps at the chance. An hour later, I am sitting in the press room, waiting for my chance to be face to face with the velvet-voiced, epically mustached cowboy. Time stretches and the distributor has other plans for his star, and I’m starting to feel that I may not be able to do the interview. Fortunately, I am soon lead to the green room, and am informed that Robert Krzykowski, the director of the intriguingly titled THE MAN WHO KILLED HITLER AND THEN THE BIGFOOT which stars the grizzled sex-symbol, is also waiting in t