Blood, Boobs and Beast Review

I wrote this for Aint It Cool News, but it never went up. Here it is though.

I'm fortunate enough to have a growing network of spies passing me material for early consumption and this week I had the good fortune to grab a peek at one of the films that is going to be a big draw at Fantastic Fest and (from what it seems) a number of other festivals as well.

Blood, Boobs and Beast tells the tale of Don Dohler. Who's Don Dohler you ask? (Well, maybe those of you who read AICN probably aren't asking, but let's pretend anyway.) Dohler was a B movie director who started his career making B-horror films off the heels of Star Wars. His first film, Alien Factor, got picked up by TV stations thirsty for anything horror or sci-fi to play after Star Wars' release and the rest was history. The film draws its title from the three things you need to have a distributable horror film.

Kinhart, the director, managed to follow Dohler for a solid year or two, while he shot his latest film and through the travails of his life from about 2005 and 2006. This was a serious look at someone who, on the surface, would seem about as influential as Ed Wood on today's film industry, but the filmmakers were able to pull the curtain back to see how influential he really was. From publishing a teenage Art Spiegelman, to giving JJ Abrams his first job in film ( no, really) creating a character Robert Crumb illustrated and teaching an entire generation of makeup artists how to ply their craft (including Tom Savini), Dohler stood behind the curtain on so many different and interesting things and before I saw this film I'd barely even heard of him and the only movie of his I'd seen was on MST3K....

Blood, Boobs and Beast is the inspirational tale of someone who just wants to spend his life making movies in his spare time and manages to do so for the better part of his life. It really speaks to the outsider artist in all of us and makes me want to pick up a camera on the weekends to screw around with friends.

Undoubtedly, this film will be compared to New York Doll. Dohler is just as interesting and fun to watch as Arthur Kane and this film will resonate much more with us film and comics geeks than New York Doll did. Seriously, if you have any sense of geekdom in you, the amount of it that's found in this film will floor you. This is the perfect film for the AICN crowd and anyone else interested in the inner workings of outsider art. It will enlighten you and give you a good working knowledge of a person that deserves more attention and credit in the history of film.

All of that was good, but the thing that surprised me most about the film was the heart behind it. This is a geek movie, about geeks with plenty of heart. My advice to everyone is to catch this while they can at Fantastic Fest. If you're disappointed, then clearly you strayed into the wrong theatre and caught the last half of something else... The filmmakers really managed to capture with a stunning clarity and dignity the life of a B-movie director and it's really something to behold.

Seriously. Behold it.

Yours Truly,
ShineBox
(as in "go home and get your fuckin....")