It came as no surprise to Thrillpeddler Heidi Wolff that spirit orbs appeared both on stage and off during a behind the scenes interpretive dance she shared with Head Trips cast members during Friday night’s performance of John Zorn’s Cobra. Miss Wolff has fed her mediumistic talents and love of “the dance” since she was just a small girl. The sprightly spheres of other-worldly energy appear distinctly in these photos on my partner Jim’s computer screen, but when I viewed the self-same photographs on my computer, they had disappeared. It’s as if the spirits knew I would expose them on my blog. Oh, my!

Spirit manifestations are becoming more common at the Hypnodrome these days. Be sure to let us know if you experience any supernatural phenomena while visiting our theater.

Fresh on the heals of his visit to the Hypnodrome to catch our Hypnodrome Head Trips show, film director Guy Maddin is featured in today’s New York Times. His latest film, the silent Brand Upon The Brain, incorporates live musicians, singers, and actors who perform on stage as the “soundtrack.” A live screening/peformance of Brand Upon The Brain happens tonight in San Francisco at the Castro Theatre, and May 9 -15 at the Village East Cinemas in New York. From the article:

…”Brand Upon the Brain!” is set in a lighthouse that doubles as a “mom and pop orphanage” where the senior Maddins engage in the vampiric harvesting of “orphan nectar.” While a prepubescent Guy and his older sister become infatuated with a pair of androgynous sibling teenage detectives, their scientist father toils away on sinister experiments, and their fearsome mother surveys the island with a lighthouse beam, cracking down on unseemly behavior.

“I didn’t grow up in a lighthouse,” Mr. Maddin said, “but a lot of the Grand Guignol stuff actually happened: My mother was on the alert to everything. She could see into your underwear with her searchlight.”

Read the full article.

Vampiric harvesting of orphan nectar? Now that’s entertainment!

The party that The Onion threw for us on Thursday night at Butter was da bomb! And Friday night we got a special treat as well when film director Guy Maddin joined Thrillpeddler playwright Eddie Muller in the center “Shock Box” for the performance of Hypnodrome Head Trips. You need only see Maddin’s The Saddest Music in the World, Tales from the Gimli Hospital or Sissy Boy Slap Party to know why his presence was both an honor and delight for Thrillpeddlers. What a match! He really dug the show… and man, do I dig him.

Maddin is in town as a guest of honor for the 50th Annual San Francisco International Film Festival. On Monday, May 7th his film Brand Upon the Brain! will dominate The Castro Theatre. Check out this blurb from the Castro’s website and see if you can resist it:

May 7, 8:00 PM
Brand Upon the Brain!
Guy Maddin, USA/Canada, 2006, 95 minutes
SFIFF favorite Maddin’s faux-autobiographical masterwork mines the rich territories of his youth and spins them into a fantasy of familial discontent. The film’s original score will be performed live by a 13-piece ensemble, with foley artists, a benshi-like narrator and a “castrato” adding to the fun.

Tonight we begin a five-week extension of Hypnodrome Head Trips, our latest show. Shoot, that means I’ll be having my eyes gouged out until at least June 2! The Onion has offered to kick things off with a post-performance party tonight at Butter, a white-trash themed SOMA nightclub just a couple of blocks from The Hypnodrome. The joint even has an indoor “roach coach” where they sell Tater Tots, macaroni and cheese and deep fried Twinkies. I intend to lead the audience and cast straight from the curtain call to the bar dressed in my bloody “Empress of Colma” drag! Should be wild!

Nathaniel Eaton has written a very enthusiastic review of our current show, Hypnodrome Head Trips, in today’s SF Weekly newspaper. We’re usually quick to post the juiciest quotes on our website, but this particular review contains so many spoilers - key surprises and plot twists - that it’s difficult for us to pull a quote without giving something away. As a remedy, I’ve re-posted the review below with spoilers redacted:

It’s a titillating concept to revive the Grand Guignol, the terror theater that ran for 65 years in Paris around the turn of the 20th century. Tucked away underneath the Hwy. 101 overpass in SOMA, the Hypnodrome is the perfect setting for a Guignol revival with its player pianos, lanterns, and “shock box” seating that ________ and is curtained off. The priest at the bar opens beers with his _________ and reminds patrons they can do anything they want behind those curtains. This is the world of the Thrill Peddlers, the blood-splattering theater company that is up to its usual shocking mischief in a new production of six twisted shorts. In one short, a curious daughter finds a _____________ in an antique machine (brilliant design by Jonathan Horton) and decides to ________ herself with it; in another, a cross-dresser huffs sodium pentathol and is inspired to ________________ with a hot iron. Maybe modern audiences accustomed to slasher films will find such moments ho-hum, but they won’t be yawning during the second-act segment “Orgy in the Lighthouse,” a ___________ scene that manages to be both arousing and disturbing.

Let your imagination run wild.

If you’re just dying to fill in the blanks, you can either buy tickets to Hypnodrome Head Trips, which we perform every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night (recommended), or just click over to the SF Weekly website to read the unedited review.

The highly anticipated (at least in my household) Tarantino/Rodriguez double feature GRINDHOUSE opened this weekend, and although it came in 4th at the box office (behind an Ice Cube family comedy?!), it’s far and away my favorite movie since, well… KILL BILL. I was lucky enough to see it at Oakland’s Grand Lake Theater, an old movie palace with a huge screen and live organ music before the show. The place was packed and the audience was ready for action. GRINDHOUSE did not disappoint. I hate when movie critics use the term thrill-ride, but I have to admit that the GRINDHOUSE experience felt much more like being strapped into zombie-infested ‘fun house’ car, rather than sitting in a theatre.

I stayed away from reading any reviews or press coverage before seeing the film(s), but now that I’ve dug through a pile of them, this one from Ain’t It Cool News sums up the experience pretty well:

Remember, when George W. Bush was elected, and he said that thing about how, by 2008, we’d have “movies that would explode in our balls like a shotgun filled with handjobs”?

Well, that promise came true two days ago when I saw GRINDHOUSE in Hollywood. Except not only was it a shotgun full of handjobs exploding in my balls, but also my balls suddenly knew how to make fire using karate. All from seeing GRINDHOUSE, a movie that’s made of screaming car crash zombie boobs.

There’s also a slightly less hyperbolic review from Harry at Ain’t It Cool that’s also worth a read.

Seems like everybody has an opinion about which of the two features is the better one, with many people coming down in favor of Rodriguez’s dead-fest Planet Terror. It’s certainly the wilder, showier, funnier, and bloodier of the two, but A.O. Scott puts his finger on the real difference between it and Tarantino’s car-chase co-feature Death Proof:

At a certain point in “Death Proof” the scratches and bad splices disappear, and you find yourself watching not an arch, clever pastiche of old movies and movie theaters but an actual movie. You are not laughing at deliberately clumsy camera work but rather admiring the grace and artistry of the shots — in particular a long take in which the camera circles around a group of women talking in a diner. At his best — in parts of “Pulp Fiction,” in “Jackie Brown,” in sections of “Kill Bill, Vol. 2” — Mr. Tarantino strips away the quotation marks and finds a route through his formal virtuosity and his encyclopedic knowledge of film history back to the basics of character, action and story.

Both films are fun and satisfying in their own way, and I think both compliment each other perfectly. I’ll be going back to see GRINDHOUSE again before it’s gone from the theaters.

One last note: As if I didn’t enjoy GRINDHOUSE enough, the cherry on the top was the inclusion of April March’s recording of Chick Habit on the soundtrack. Chick Habit has been one of Thrillpeddler’s favorite songs for years, and we’ve even named our currently running homage to Jack T. Chick after it. Here’s hoping it becomes as popular as the Woo Hoo song from Kill Bill.

For all you fans of Chick Habit, the original French version, Laisse Tomber Les Filles, was written by Serge Gainsbourg and sung by France Gall:

Today’s edition of the University of Maryland’s student newspaper features a story on the student-produced and directed Grand Guignol play that I mentioned here yesterday. The Lab: An Experiment in Grand Guignol gets high marks from student reporter Dave Smith, though his article could have used another proof-read and a healthy dose of judicious editing:

“The play, a theatre department Off-Center Production, features the two directors’ interpretation of the play. Messer and Snyder envelop the torture-heavy play with several profound layers of conceptual metaphor. For example, while the chief storyline revolves around a mad doctor’s Frankenstein-esque experiments (Igor-like deformed assistant included), the audience listens to a conversation between Alien Voices (David Kriebs and Catherine Schuler) as they discuss whether these examples of “thinking meat” deserve to be involved in the bigger galactic picture.

But if you’re not a narcissist, don’t be shocked by The Lab. Its pessimistic message - we’re all going to hell, and there’s nothing we can do about it - is the bottom line of the production.”

Read the full article.

One bone I’d like to pick with the paper is that the homepage of our GrandGuignol.com site is quoted twice in the article without any attribution given. The quoted text even appears in quotes, but isn’t followed by any source. I’m not sure how that slipped by the editors without raising a big red flag, but I have a suspicion that it may be time to ban beer bongs in the Diamondback newsroom.

Anyway, such an enthusiastic article should help ensure a full house at tonight’s final performance.

An actor at the University of Maryland writes about his experiences performing in a Grand Guignol production on campus:

“I’m very thankful for this opportunity to explore such an obscure artform, one that is seldom done anymore. Grand Guignol is such a melodramatic, overly-exaggerated way of theatre. It definitely goes for shock value, using realistic scenes of violence which result in puddles of blood all over the stage every show. Why would people like to see this onstage? I don’t really know.”

Information is scarce on the UM website, but The Lab: An Experiment in Grand Guignol appears to be an adaptation of Andre de Lorde’s play Laboratory of Hallucinations. It will have its final performance on Monday, April 2, 2007 at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center’s Laboratory Theatre. Admission is free. Seating is limited.

Congrats to the cast and crew. Sounds like M. de Lorde would be proud.

The first reviews of our new show Hypnodrome Head Trips are starting to trickle in. In her review for the San Francisco Bay Times titled “A Grand Time at Grand Guignol,” Linda Ayres-Frederick writes:

With high technical production values, Thrillpeddlers lives up to their name, delivering thrills that stimulate the mind and other portions of the anatomy.

Read the full review.

Hypnodrome Head Trips is now playing evey Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights at the Hypnodrome, 575 10th Street, San Francisco. Tickets are available online.

The reviews are in for CanStage’s revival of The Rocky Horror Show, which opened last week at the Bluma Appel Theatre in Toronto, and they’re not pretty.

Paula Citron of the Globe and Mail writes:

Pity the poor Rocky Virgins, that distinct underclass of society who has never experienced either the stage or movie versions of Richard O’Brien’s high camp, transsexual, sci-fi, musical spoof The Rocky Horror Show. After attending the CanStage production, they are not going to have any idea what the show is about, even after it’s over, because they won’t have heard a word.

…Actor Eddie Glen comes out before the show to tell the crowd they can shout out and use their props, but to refrain from throwing anything at the actors. There is even a Prop Rules & Instructions page in the program. Glen also administers the Transylvanian Oath, and leads the ritual that usually begins each screening where the Rocky Virgins pop their cherries.

Amid the almighty din that accompanies the performance, dialogue and lyrics go south. What is worse, when the audience does shut up for the songs, the diction of the performers is incomprehensible, which is too bad because O’Brien did write some clever lyrics to his fifties’ rock pastiche tunes. In other words, this RHS performance is virtually like a silent movie engulfed in deafening noise.

John Coulbourn of the Toronto Sun also takes issue with the audience interaction:

If you find theatrical attempts to orchestrate anarchy not only oxymoronic, but vaguely creepy to boot, you might think twice about heading out to the production of The Rocky Horror Show that opened Thursday at the Bluma Appel Theatre.

He singles out several strong performers in the cast, but also notes the chaos they’re fighting against:

Sadly, even their work is diminished by the combination of John Bent Jr.’s muddy sound design and a relentless opening-night clack seemingly determined to convince us we were all having the time of our lives.

Yeah, yeah, we know it’s cool to shout out at the movie, but frankly, in a theatre, a choice between hearing the esteemed John Neville deliver his lines via film as Narrator or someone from the audience scream “Slut,” “A–hole” or “There is no phone in a castle,” like they were on auto-pilot, doesn’t seem to be much of a choice at all.

I think that trying to replicate the experience of the Rocky Horror Picture Show in a live theatre is a lose-lose proposition. The die-hard fans will certainly feel constricted by the necessary rules (unless you want them throwing things at your actors), and traditional theatre-goers (especially subscribers) will grow weary of the audience’s antics long before the final curtain.

If you’ve seen or been involved with a production of The Rocky Horror Show that successfully incorporated the film’s audience participation elements, post a comment an let us know how it was done.

While you’re thinking, here are CanStage’s “rules” mentioned above.