Jones created The Passenger entirely by himself, doing everything from the modeling to the editing to the musical composition solo. He completed the short in 2006, but just put it online and is offering high quality version on DVD.

[The Passenger via Neatorama]

When I first heard about Matt Youngmark's Chooseomatic book, I fully expected I'd get a fairly straightforward (perhaps even perfunctory) take on the zombie apocalypse where the only twist was the multithreaded, Choose Your Own Adventure-inspired storytelling layered over it. It's something we've seen before; last year, a pair of designers released a choose-your-own-ending film, The Outbreak, with a similar premise. But I was pleasantly surprised when the book arrived and I found a pink, chainsaw-wielding bunny on the cover and a note inside warning me to avoid the zombie kitten.

Zombocalypse Now doesn't just feature a pink stuffed rabbit; you are the pink stuffed rabbit, living in a world where stuffed animals walk, talk, and intermarry with the human population. As the book opens, you are waiting on what is sure to be another atrocious online date. And sure enough, when he or she shows up, they're disheveled, glassy-eyed, lacking in hygiene, and mumbling something about brains. You've been on so many bad dates that it takes you a while to figure out that they're undead, but soon enough, you're up to your fuzzy elbows in the walking dead.

From here there are, of course, multiple paths your bunny self could take from here. You could tag along with a renegade cop named Mittens (who, despite the name, is not a stuffed animal). You could visit your conspiracy theorist friend Ernie, who is convinced that the walking dead are powered by fluoride in the water. You could try to strike out on your own and bash in as many zombie brains as you possibly can. You just hope that the choices you make lead to your ultimate survival.

Spoiler alert: you usually end up zombie chow.

To get the full effect of Zombocalypse Now, you have to read through several of the plotlines. Some are, admittedly, stronger than others (there's an oddly rushed one where you go all I Am Legend and start experimenting on the zombies), but taken together, the stories do form a cohesive narrative, and the logic from one plotline still holds true in the others. For example, in several storylines, the zombies are unusually attracted to your car (as in licking the windshields), and in one of threads, we learn exactly why. The chilling and rather amusing cause behind the zombie outbreak is also key; you learn about it in certain storylines, but it plays a significant role in others — including one ending where you mistakenly believe you've survived.

Youngmark packs a lot of strange odds and ends into his zombie adventure, and cherrypicks references from a wide variety of genres: mob movies, cop dramas, the works of Stephen King, and The Postman, to name a few. There's even a moment where you let out the battle cry "Leeeeeeroy Jenkins!" The effect is over-the-top silliness, like someone set a particularly manic children's book in the midst of a zombie outbreak. Sure, it's a bit on the fluffy side, but I found myself eagerly flipping back to try out different plotlines — at first to see if I could survive, then to root out some of the book's more bizarre twists and turns. It's a satisfying way to spend a couple hours here and there, even if you do die most of the time.

And do watch out for that zombie kitten. It's a killer.

There's a scene early on in Gentlemen Broncos where science fiction novelist Ronald Chevalier (the always wonderful Jemaine Clement) is holding a workshop on fantasy naming. A young girl tells him that she has a troll character named Teacup. He scoffs and explains that there are rules for naming trolls, and that a troll mother would never name a child "Teacup;" only a little girl would.

It's as if writers Jared and Jerusha Hess anticipated what the critics would say about Gentlemen Broncos, namely that the film disobeys the conventions of movie storytelling in favor of their own strange and gleeful energy. Gentlmen Broncos is a movie well aware of what it doesn't do, of what rules it doesn't follow, but it doesn't care. It's naming its troll Teacup whether you like it or not.

That said, Gentlemen Broncos isn't Napoleon Dynamite. Where the latter is a character study of an unusual protagonist, the former is, by contrast, a highly metafictional narrative about creativity and adaptation, with a hero, a villain, and a solid resolution.

Benjamin Purvis, a teenager nominally homeschooled by his loving but distracted mother (an appropriately out-of-it Jennifer Coolidge), spends most of his days writing pulpy science fiction stories. When he attends a writing conference keynoted by Chevalier, his favorite writer, Ben's latest endeavor, a wild tale called Yeast Lords: The Bronco Years falls into the hands of two conference attendees. One is Tabatha Jenkins, a fellow homeschooler who quickly elbows her way into Ben's life. Where Ben is quiet and shy to the point that he doesn't like people reading his stories, Tabatha is brazen, projecting a strange, confident energy. She is utterly without shame, but also unafraid of doing or embracing things that could be perceived as weird, and her remarkable joie de vivre makes her oddness charismatic where it should be off-putting.

The other person who happens upon Yeast Lords is Chevalier himself. Chevalier, with an endless collection of leather jackets and surgically attached to his Bluetooth ear piece, long ago won legions of fans with his series about harpies who shoot lasers from their breasts. It's easy to see Chevalier as a parody of the self-celebrating author (something Clement does with pitch perfection), especially when he presents a slideshow of the forty-some odd pieces of cover art he drew for his first novel. But even as we're laughing at the absurd harpy folk art, there's something deeper underneath. Chevalier was once an excited dreamer who compulsively doodled his bizarre fantasies; now he believes there are rules for naming trolls and his creativity has suffered. He simply can't recapture that crazy imaginative energy he once had, although he can certainly recognize it when he reads Yeast Lords.

Tabatha and Chevalier both want to adapt Yeast Lords, though each does it in a sort of underhanded way, and Ben's original vision gets poked and prodded into new shapes. Interspersed with the main narrative are scenes from Yeast Lords itself, with Sam Rockwell playing the story's shaggy-haired hero, Bronco. These scenes are crammed with all the strange ideas that swarm through Ben's brain: stolen testicles, cyclops turret men, rocket-powered battle stags, and yeast that gives you superpowers. These scenes are pure, straightforward fun, but they also show us first-hand Ben's own vision for Yeast Lords. As Chevalier takes over the story, we see how he changes and bastardizes Ben's original ideas, with Rockwell playing a very different version of Bronco. And as Tabatha and her friends adapt Yeast Lords as an amateur movie, we can experience the same disappointment Ben feels, that the characters and special effects never quite live up to the version in his head.

Gentlemen Broncos has been accused of asking audiences to laugh at the very characters it claims to celebrate: the weirdoes and misfits. And yes, it's easy to laugh at Ben's mother, who makes popcorn balls for every occasion and designs nightgowns that could double as space opera costumes, and Lonnie, Tabatha's lip-smacking filmmaker friend who invites less than flattering comparisons to Napoleon Dynamite. But the Hesses are, in fact, asking you to be a little repulsed by these characters and then look deeper, to see if they know something we don't. Yes, they may not fit into normal society, they may have values that differ from ours, they may make ugly nightgowns and crappy movies, but they're having fun. They're trying to live their lives on their own terms and be creative and pursue their wildest, wackiest ideas. Gentlemen Broncos may invite you to laugh at their foibles and their quirks, but it also invites you to go home, pick up your sketchbook, your camera, or that novel you're working on, and create something as great, as strange, and as utterly your own as Yeast Lords.

This instant classic will be out Dec. 4. Click the link to watch the trailer in higher quality. [MSN Movies]

Television writer Paul Simms' piece "Attention, People of Earth" imagines the first extraterrestrial missive to Earth, if the extraterrestrials in question were the sorts of creatures who read The New Yorker and want to assure us that they don't intend to steal our vast reserves of gravel:

You may be wondering how we know your language. We are aware that there's a theory on your planet that we (or other alien species from the far reaches of the galaxy) have been able to learn your language from your television transmissions. This is not the case, because most of us don't really watch TV. Most of our knowledge about your Earth TV comes from reading Zeitgeisty think pieces by our resident intellectuals, who watch it not for fun but for ideas for their print articles about how Earth TV holds a mirror up to Earth society, and so on. We mean, we'll watch Earth TV sometimes-if it happens to be on already-but, generally, we prefer to read a good book or revive the lost art of conversation.

Sadly, Earth TV is like a vast wasteland, as the Earthling Newton Minow once said. But, for those of you who can understand things only in TV terms, just think of us as being very similar to Mork from Ork, in that he was a friendly, non-gravel-wanting alien who visited Earth just to find out what was there, and not to harvest gravel.

Attention, People of Earth [The New Yorker via Mental Floss]

Like its literary predecessor, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Sea Monsters includes a discussion guide, in case readers want to get together in a book club, to discuss the symbolism of killer crustaceans and giant squid:

2. In "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters," painful personal setbacks often occur at the same moment as sea-monster attacks, suggesting a metaphorical linkage of "monsters" with the pains of romantic disappointment; for example, Marianne is rebuffed by Willoughby at Hydra-Z precisely as the giant mutant lobsters are staging their mutiny. Have you ever been "attacked by giant lobsters," either figuratively or literally?

5. Which would be worse: being eaten by a shark or consumed by the acidic stomach juice of a sand-shambling man-o'-war?

8. Have you ever been romantically involved with someone who turned out to be a sea witch?

10. Is Monsieur Pierre a symbol for something? Name three other well-known works of Western literature that feature orangutan valets. Are those characters also slain by pirates?

I think I'll just skip to the questions about tentacle porn.

Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters comes out September 15.

How to Discuss ‘Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters' [NY Times]

As we mentioned earlier this week, Suck follows The Winners, a roadtripping rock band that just can't seem to catch that big break. But when their female bassist joins the ranks of the bloodsucking undead, she becomes and instant crowd favorite, prompting the rest of the band to follow her lead. Soon they're playing to packed houses, but their new hook has attracted more than just fans. They're haunted by Alice Cooper in the form of a creepy bartender, and stalked by vampire hunter Eddie van Helsing (an eyepatch-wearing Malcolm McDowell).

Some of the scenes in the (very, very bloody) trailer below have slightly off production values, but the movie might well prove an absurd and off-beat guilty pleasure:

[via Twitch]

After seeing the first Rule for Surviving Zombieland, I hoped we'd be seeing more from this zombie-fighting odd couple, and it looks like my wish has been granted. In the first clip, Woody Harrelson's Tallahassee and Jesse Eisenberg's Columbus explain how a simple household item can save your family from the undead:

Here, Columbus speculates on why zombies never attack one another:

And, in an odd bit of apparent product placement, Columbus lists Bounty paper towels as an essential tool for survival:

And in the final clip, Columbus pulls out a standby, the trusty Swiss Army Knife, and tries to convince us of its endless usefulness:

In the first clip, we see Spader as Mr. Black motivating (and periodically firing) the employees of Black Box, the ominously ill-lit Apple send-up that employs the entire town:

Here, our hero Tobin "Toe" Thompson (whose parents are the ill-fated team leaders in the clip above), stands up to school bully (and daughter of Mr. Black) Helvetica by insisting she's in love with him:

Toe's bully-confronting strategy gets a little help from the wishing rock he finds, which enables him to conjure up a crew of aliens who prove as strong as they are tiny:

But naturally the wishes don't always go as planned, as when Toe's friend Loogie wishes for one of their crew to become super smart:

Or when "Nose" Noseworthy summons forth a sentient monster made from his own boogers:

We also get two clips from the Black Box employee party. First, Jon Cryer and Leslie Mann get too close for comfort:

Then Toe has another violent encounter with Helvetica:

Hossan Leong Star Wars Stand Up

Steve Dix "The Whole Story"

John Gard Makes Star Wars Fat Jokes....Gets a little better when they call out scenes

TK421- Stormtrooper Stand Up

Dave Odd- Religion and Star Wars Streeeeeetch

GOOD Star Wars Stand Up (Suggested By You Fine Folk):

Patton Oswalt:

Eddie Izzard:

Tim Ollive was an animator and model maker for Monty Python movies The Meaning of Life and Life of Brian, and has done visual effects for numerous other Gilliam projects, including Brazil, Twelve Monkeys, Time Bandits, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Now Gilliam is backing Ollive's own film 1884, a collaboration with production designer Dennis De Groot.

The promotional trailer is a proof-of-concept reel, shot entirely on Ollive's kitchen table, to test out the effects for an eventual feature-length film. The clunky feel of the animation and Thunderbirds-style marionettes is deliberate, trying to evoke the sense that it was filmed using the same steam-powered technology it depicts.

[Peculiar Productions via Quiet Earth]

Despite the unfinished look of the footage, this is the extended trailer shown during Saturday's Comic Con Zombieland panel. The first trailer hinted at the whimsy peeking through the blood and ooze of corpse-eating, fast-moving zombies, but here we get a better sense of the plot. Snatches of the relationship between Jesse Eisenberg's ultra-cautious Columbus and Woody Harrelson's gleeful, spree-killing Tallahassee come to light, and we glimpse how they're outwitted by — and eventually team up with — survivalist sisters Wichita and Little Rock, played by Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin. Plus, there are plenty of frenzied zombie kills, including Tallahassee's "Dueling Banjos" kill and Columbus's futile attempt to suffocate a zombie with a shower curtain.

[via Quiet Earth]

Noting that the Ghostbusters films owe a great to old horror comedies, from Abbott and Costello flicks to the 1970s children's series The Ghost Busters, YouTube user whoiseyevan created this faux trailer from over a dozen films and TV shows, recasting Dean Martin as Ray Stantz, Bob Hope as Peter Venkman, and Fred MacMurray as Egon Spengler. And personally, I think the 1975 Ghost Busters theme is a great improvement.

[via Coilhouse]

We don't know who is behind Reboot, but we're definitely going to tune in again next week for the new episode promised for July 14th. [YouTube]

The series Captain Stargood, clearly a naughty tip of the hat to the Andersons' squeaky-clean series for kids, is the brainchild of a group of retro-satirist fans who call themselves the Stargood Players. They've whipped up a couple of episodes of the series, creating all the fantastically cheesy sets themselves. You can even peruse publicity shots for the show (see one above) that are almost authentic enough to be convincing - except for those bizarre breasts.

The whole Captain Stargood concept resembles a goofy cross between Forbidden Planet and the British potty humor mag Viz.

According to the Captain Stargood site, which is packed with fun details and trivia:

Fresh from the success of a popular series of animated commercials, the shows creators, early-1960s wunderkind puppeteers and filmmakers Oswald Larsen and L. B. Laurence, were approached by network television execs anxious to cash in on the growing national fascination with the Space Race. A notorious megalomaniac, Larsen demanded and surprisingly received, total autonomy in the show's production. Apparently satisfied with the limited footage they were shown of the requisite spaceships and puppet derring-do, the team was given carte blanche for their production. The show debuted on time, and by some reports, fared quite well in the ratings.

Then someone actually sat down and watched the show.

Reports are sketchy on the exact chain of events which followed, but horror-stricken executives infamously later described what they witnessed as "unwatchable," "twisted," and "utter sh*t." Perhaps worst of all were the unauthorized commercial sponsorships interspersed throughout the show, for products wildly inappropriate for impressionable youngsters. One account blamed these unfortunate additions on L.B. Laurence's desperate attempts to recoup advance monies, which had disappeared under somewhat cloudy circumstances.

By this time untold thousands had been spent, but the increasingly detached and bizarre Larsen refused to alter what he now claimed was his "unflinching look at the world of tomorrow." Threatened with massive law suits, the two young filmmakers fled with what they could grab and disappeared, never to be heard from again. The networks, fearing massive legal action from concerned parents, promptly destroyed the remaining prints and set about attempting to disavow all knowledge of the show.

Over 40 years later, prints of some of these lost episodes began appearing under mysterious circumstances on the doorstep of N.Y.-based designer and illustrator Laird Ogden. He and fellow sci-fi buff Larry Basinait, along with the Stargood Players, are pleased to make them available again here after all these years…

Nicely done. Can't wait to see the continuing adventures of Captain Stargood, especially if he manages to work those Blackhole Condoms into the plot.

via Captain Stargood Official Site

In many ways, the movie is a recreation of the original TV series with this serious characters taken out and replaced by goofballs who make a lot of pop culture references. Ferrell and company satirize the original show, but most of all they satirize themselves.

I was a big fan of the Krofft Super Show series where Land of the Lost debuted in the 1970s. It was a fun kids' series about an alternative universe full of dinosaurs and lizard aliens, and somebody was always being chomped or threatened with being chomped. Although the show was whimsical, it was sort of like the recent Journey To The Center of the Earth - goofy but snarkless. I couldn't imagine how Will Ferrell's adolescent humor would translate into this universe.

But it did, effortlessly. Instead of a nice dad and his two kids trapped in a dinosaur-packed landscape, we have a self important scientist (who is basically the anchorman, but with time travel on his mind), the hot Oxford graduate student (Holly, played a rather woodenly by Anna Friel) who believes in him, and a sideshow operator (Will, played by Danny Mcbride) whose goal in life is to build a mega casino. Through an accident that involves show tunes and a broken down roadside attraction, the three of them wind up on an alternate Earth where the past, present and future are intertwined. And that's when things get really awesome.

Chaka, the cute primate of the TV series, has been turned into a horny adolescent. The sleestaks are still bulgy-eyed lizard people, but they're kind of scary too. And Dr. Rick Marshall, played by Ferrell with deadpan pizzazz, is the perfect satirical white explorer without a clue. He immediately tries to establish himself as Chaka's master (though Chaka hardly takes him seriously), and is constantly making incorrect proclamations about everything around them. There's a great moment when he thinks the sleestak are guarding when they're actually about to "hit that ass." And even on alternate earth, he can't escape a humiliation he suffered on YouTube.

Part of the fun in this flick is watching Ferrell turn science fiction stereotypes of the intrepid explorer upside down. The other part of that fun is watching him dance to show tunes, pour dinosaur urine all over himself so that his scent will "blend in," and make an ill-advised deal with an alien wearing a tunic. As Will points out wisely, tunics are always bad news.

The plot, such as it is, is pretty simple. The gang falls into an alternate dimension, with the help of Rick's tachyon-enhanced time travel device, and now they need to get the device back if they want to go home. In addition the tunic - wearing alien has told them that an evil alien will use the device to invade earth with his terrible army of lizard aliens. So it's a race against time, and also, strangely, a test of banjo improvisation. Hey, it's Will Ferrell - what do you want?

Somehow along the way we manage to have drug induced male bonding. And boob grabbing. Plus a wide array of poop jokes, which culminate in the biggest poop joke of all. But that's a major spoiler and I won't give it away.

A few scenes go on a bit too long (the drug scene springs to mind), and you may be irritated by the fact that many of the jokes are at the expense of women. But despite this most of the bits are genuinely funny, and I predict you'll be repeating lines from the movie for days afterward. In fact, if you're looking for good science fiction fun this weekend I would recommend Land of the Lost over Terminator 4 any day of the week.