First off, Dustin and I want to thank everyone for who donated any of their time and/or money to the Scene-Stealers.com “Night of Rock n Roll Horror” event last Wednesday night at the Screenland Theater in downtown Kansas City. Everybody had a great time, and almost everybody went home with some kind of badass prize. Most importantly, we also raised a lot of cash for the Children’s Music Fund.

As you can tell from the photo on the right, sitegoer Lindsay Parker was pretty excited to win the 32GB iPod touch, and she wasn’t alone. Scene-Stealers Top 10 author Tony Sams kicked everyone’s ass in the horror trivia game (despite answering “Kazaam” to one of the questions he didn’t know), walking away with a full-sized autographed “Grindhouse” poster.

We played Rock Band (apparently, I don’t know as many of the words to Mountain’s “Mississippi Queen” as I thought I did, and I certainly can’t sing in tune), did some “Thriller” Jacko zombie dance moves, and drank the Screenland’s special of the night–an actual drink called the Trick or Treat that contained vodka, triple sec, amaretto, and orange juice.

We watched original 80s trailers for “This is Spinal Tap,” “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure,” “Say Anything,” and “Breakin’.” It was a pretty nice score to have the four original fake trailers from last year’s “Grindhouse,” especially since three of them are not available on the two DVDs they wrongly split that movie into. But I have to say…the trailer for “Theodore Rex,” starring Whoopi Goldberg and a giant animatronic farting dinosaur was pretty spectacular.

Our feature presentation, “Trick or Treat,” in my mind, held up pretty well as a really fun B-movie in a campy sort of way. It was a lot funnier then I remembered, and the Scene-Stealers crowd yelled out their fair share of punchlines. “Don’t play that tape, it’ll blow your bra off!” from the girl in the front row was one of my favorites.

Anyway, thanks again to Transmuto, Spiral16, the Screenland Theater, and all our sponsors for a great night. Here’s a link to more pictures from the event.

Tags: benefit, children's, fund, horror, music, n, night, of, rock, roll, scene-stealers

Two months ago, Scene-Stealers sitegoer Aaron Hale submitted his Top 10 Zombie Movie list. Rather than do a list of my favorite zombie movies, which would be very similar to his, I thought I’d write about something that gets to the very heart of why we love zombie movies so much, even though sometimes we don’t even know it: The zombie metaphor.

Horror genres are known to go in and out of fashion. The slasher movie, for instance, is fading a bit right now, while (thanks to HBO’s “True Blood” and the upcoming “Twilight” movie) vampires seem to be having a bit of resurgence of late. One genre, however, that never seems to go away is the zombie movie. The reason is simple. Zombies are easy stand-ins for our lesser selves. Essentially, zombies are reflections of who we are at our worst. Or best, depending on what glass you are viewing the metaphor through.

George Romero is the undisputed king of the zombie flicks. A political filmmaker at heart, he is pigeonholed as a horror director because his zombie movies are full of such prescient social commentary. The original “Night of the Living Dead” (1968) was made for $114,000, and its doom-laden atmosphere and breaching of several taboo subjects have caused its legions of fans to perceive it as many different things. It’s a metaphor for homosexual repression, the civil rights movement, feminism, the counterculture, or an unwinnable war in Vietnam, depending on who you talk to.

However you choose to view it, there is no doubt that its budget limitations only lent more authority to the stark situations that it presents its protagonists with. As zombies overtake the land and nobody is able to stop them, an unfit society’s ultimate fate is to be devoured by, in essence, itself.

By the time Romero finally filmed a sequel, 1978’s “Dawn of the Dead,” he had turned his sights on rampant American consumerism. While stopping to outrun the ever-widening plague, Romero’s characters hole up in the one place they feel safe—the mall. A wickedly funny critique of the nature of consumerism, “Dawn” has its main characters not only taking refuge in a mall, but fighting each other for possessions and territory that is completely meaningless considering the apocalyptic situation outside. The humans celebrate what they think to be their final victory in ridding the mall of zombies with a festive orgy of meaningless “purchase power.” More zombies are soon discovered surrounding the mall, clawing helplessly at the glass and looking in on the humans. It is then that one of the partygoers has the astute observation, “They’re us!” while his companion shivers and pulls up the collar on her new fur coat.

Zombies are the lowest examples of the lower class. They shuffle forward in a hideous lurch; their brains are turned to mush; they moan and groan, producing no intelligible speech; and are driven by one simple, base desire—to eat human flesh. Nevertheless, they seem to overpower their faster, supposedly smarter foes in the human race due to their sheer numbers alone. In Romero’s “Day of the Dead” (1985), this class warfare is more evident than ever before.

“Day” takes place mostly in a military installation, where a sadistic and volatile Army commander—a satire that’s devoid of any subtlety whatsoever—lords with glee over captured zombies. His increasingly psychopathic behavior becomes a problem for scientists trying to study one the living dad to try to figure out how to stop them. Like any good classic horror film (see “Frankenstein,” “Freaks,” etc.), pity grows for the monster, and as military and science turn on each other, it’s the zombies we end up rooting for.

Rich humans are holed up in an indoor oasis and the poor humans must fend for themselves on the zombie-infested outside in Romero’s satire of Bush-era America, 2005’s “Land of the Dead.” One significant change from his past films, besides a bigger budget and some “name” actors like Dennis Hopper and John Leguizamo, is that zombies are evolving. They begin to remember elements of their past human lives, and start to learn from their experiences. Of course, it is a disgruntled human who threatens the encased city with exposure, and when the zombies do eventually overrun, the humans discover—irony of all ironies— that the electric fence that previously kept the zombies out has become a wall that now prevents their own escape.

Rather than continue his continuing narrative, Romero re-imagined his zombie plague from a different perspective with this year’s ill-conceived “Diary of the Dead,” which attempted to address the current user-driven YouTube revolution and general societal mistrust of the government and its fear-mongering. There are some great ideas buried somewhere within, but the movie is too in love with its own out-of-touch, 60s-era sloganeering.

Famous directors like Peter Jackson (“Braindead” aka “Dead Alive”), Sam Raimi (“The Evil Dead” series), and Lucio Fulci (“Zombi 2”) have also put their distinctive marks on the genre, but it was Edgar Wright’s loving send-up/tribute “Shaun of the Dead” (2004) that ventured most closely into the metaphorical by presenting an appliance salesman who stands in for all of sleepy Great Britain. The scene where he goes down the block for ice cream, oblivious to the fact that his street has been turned into a zombie hell is a perfect metaphor for the way we can sometimes plow through our own daily routine with blinders on. Shaun eventually wakes up and fights to save his family and his relationship with his girlfriend—did I mention it was a comedy? The movie is now considered a cult classic and is partly responsible (along with “28 Days Later” and the “Dawn of the Dead” remake) for the recent resurgence in zombie films.

Which may explain why the King of Zombies, George Romero, is back in production again, this time on “Island of the Living Dead,” due out in 2009.

Tags: 28, alive, braindead, dawn, day, days, dead, diary, evil, george, island, land, later, living, metaphor, night, romero, shaun, zombie

ADDING MORE GREAT PRIZES SO KEEP CHECKING BACK!

We have been lining up lots of cool stuff to do and a lot of great prizes to give away in the raffle Wednesday Oct. 29 at our Night of Rock n Roll Horror event at the Screenland Theater in Kansas City. Here’s the lineup, getting larger every day:

6:30pm:
-First 50 people in the door get free advance passes to Kevin Smith’s “Zack and Miri Make a Porno.”
-Raffle tickets will be sold for a chance to win big prizes, such as a brand-new 32GB iPod Touch, donated by our good friends at Transmuto Media.
-Rock Band will be available in the Screenland’s big room for everyone to join in and shred some nasty-hot licks and pound those drums.
-The Screenland’s bar will be open and rocking, and much socializing will occur.
-Food donated by our sponsors will be available until it runs out.

7:30pm:
-Eric will host a horror-movie trivia game. The winner will get one of the extremely cool prizes we have to give away. (Not the iPod, that’s up for grabs in the raffle!)
-Inevitably, someone will think they are playing a real guitar and try to smash the plastic toy in their hand. In true rock-show fashion, the drunken lout will be forcibly ejected.

8:00pm:
-Everything we have, including the iPod Touch (see list below), will be given away in the charity raffle.
-A short reel of cheesy 1980s movies, horror and not, will be shown.
-“Trick or Treat” (1986), starring the guy who played Skippy on “Family Ties,” will be shown in its entirety, and you will learn what happens when bad heavy metal albums are played backwards. The bar will stay open.

Prizes for raffle (updated as they continue to be confirmed):
brand new 32 GB iPod Touch
autographed “Grindhouse” poster
autographed “Grindhouse” mini-poster
Quentin Tarantino action figure from “Grindhouse”
huge “Grindhouse” hardcover book
2 Rob Zombie-autographed “Halloween” posters
“Saw I-IV” DVD Box Set
10 “Saw V” T-Shirts
lots of “Saw V” posters
2 “The Strangers” DVD
“Forgetting Sarah Marshall” DVD
“30 Rock” Season Two DVD
2 “The Dark Knight” movie posters
2 “Iron Man” movie posters
“Incredible Hulk” movie poster
2 sets of six “W.” shot glasses
“Religulous” movie poster
2 “The Spirit” movie posters
lots of “Blindness” posters
lots of “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” posters
Gift certificate for a free breakfast @ The Classic Cup
25$ Gift Certificate to Grinders
Jazz Bucks from Jazz, a Louisiana Kitchen
“Raiders of the Lost Ark” FX Theater (diorama of boulder scene) from Clint’s Comics

All proceeds go to the Children’s Music Fund.

A special thank you to all of our sponsors, to whom we couldn’t have done this without: Transmuto Media, Allied Advertising, B-BOP Comics, Grinders, The Classic Cup, Jazz, Clint’s Comics, Waldo’s, Zebedee’s rpm, and Chipotle.

Tags: 2008, 29, a, Children's Music Fund, free ipod touch, horror, n, night, october, of, raffle, rock, roll, screenland, theater