Midnight Madness Blog

- 2008
- 2007
Archival footage
Chocolate Intro & Q&A;
Two Girls, One Movie
CITYNews Does Midnight Madness
J.T. Petty Holding A Large Dog!
Before the Bargin Bin There Was BloodSport

Biography
Blogging By The Numbers
Movie Theatre Memories
Geeking Out At Not Quite Hollywood (warning: Leprechaun inside)
"He has his own music"

Celebrities
JCVD's New Film - "FULL LOVE"
Sexykiller and The Horror Mashup
Who is Macarena Gómez?
Meet The Ladies Of Martyrs
JCVD, JT and the "Re-Emergence" Film

Cinematography
Orphans - The Lost Films of Midnight Madness 2008
FLASH POINT: Who is Donnie Yen?

Directors
JCVD's New Film - "FULL LOVE"
Sexykiller and The Horror Mashup
Genre Down Under: An Email Roundtable
"The Burrowers" Joins Revisionist Canon
"Ozploitation": A Model for Canada?

Distribution
"Ozploitation": A Model for Canada?
Deposit More Coins!
So THAT's How Much a Zombie Costs...
MM Flashback: ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE

Free Speech
THE CIRCUIT - Film Festival Reviews From Space
Conversation From The Line Reaction to Deadgirl
In The Rush Line For JCVD

Humour
Love and Madness
"He has his own music"
Training like a MADMAN!!!
We Love You Too, Suzie.

Memories
Midnight Madness: Year One
Day Ten
Sexykiller and The Horror Mashup
More Conversations From The Line
Detroit Metal City and Japanese Duality

Music
Cue Theme Music
What's That Sound?

Panels
Devil's Chair video
Sukiyaki opening!

Parties
The Burrowers Intro & Q&A;
Deadgirl Intro & Q&A;
Detroit Metal City Intro & Q&A;
JCVD Intros & Q&As;
Flash Point: no longer just an overlooked Rolling Stones live album

Picks
Tear the roof off the suckah
What to doin the event a giant bouncing, squeezing baby eyeball attacks your city
And now for something completely different...
And that was the best beating I've ever seen
Catch That Rave!

Politics
"Ozploitation": A Model for Canada?
Detroit Metal City and Japanese Duality
Horror as a Political Platform

War & Conflict
Detroit Metal City and Japanese Duality

Posts by: Carol Borden
September 17, 2021
Midnight Wavelengths at TIFF
Posted By Carol Borden At 12:32 PM
In doing some "housekeeping" after TIFF, Michael Sicinski has an idea for a new direction at TIFF:"Now, for some real fun, let's see Madness's Colin Geddes and Wavelengths's Andréa Picard attempt a co-presentation!"  He also has some thoughts about Pontypool. 

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September 16, 2021
JeeJa Yanin vs. Street Fighter
Posted By Carol Borden At 12:04 AM
I heard there was some footage of Chocolate star JeeJa Yanin fighting Street Fighter characters. And it's true there is. Here she is on Thai Game Show 2008.(via

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September 14, 2021
Missing the Madness at The Good, The Bad and the Weird
Posted By Carol Borden At 2:01 PM
Watching Kim Jee-woon's The Good, The Bad and the Weird at the Elgin, all I could think was, “I wish I were seeing this with the Midnight Madness audience.” It's interesting to see how the daydwellers live, the Elgin is beatiful and being short I love nearly any theater with stadium seating. I'm not ashamed to admit it's a big part of why I miss Midnight Madness at the Uptown. But still, I missed the enthusiasm. I guess I should...

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September 13, 2021
Ladies of Asskickery: Lady Whirlwind
Posted By Carol Borden At 12:21 PM
Angela Mao Ying began her career in Peking opera before studying hapkido and moving to martial arts films, starring in a King Hu film, The Fate of Lee Khan, as well as the film that gave her the name, Lady Whirlwind. She also starred in several films focusing on her hapkido and taekwondo skills. She also played Bruce Lee's doomed sister in Enter the Dragon. Despite all the Bruce Lee and Shih Kien action, I still think Angela Mao is the best part. She...

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September 12, 2021
Ladies of Asskickery: Sister Streetfighter
Posted By Carol Borden At 9:17 PM
Sue Shiomi (aka, Shihomi Etsuko) is Sonny Chiba's protege showing off Shorinji kempo and shotokan coolness in movies like Golgo 13 and many, many Streetfighter movies in the 1970s.Check out the opening of her own entry into the Streetfighter canon, Sister Street Fighter while you wait for Chocolate. And this fight from Streetfighter's Last

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September 11, 2021
Ladies of Asskickery: The Queen of Wuxia Pian
Posted By Carol Borden At 6:51 PM
With Chocolate screening Saturday, it's a good time to remember the ladies of asskickery and to wonder whether Jeeja Yanin will join their ranks. Cheng Pei-Pei is a veteran of Shaw Studios and the queen of wuxia pian (sometimes called "swordsman" movies) in Shaw's heyday. Her most famous role is as the genderbending, knifewielding Golden Swallow in King Hu's groundbreaking 1966 Come Drink With Me and Chang Cheh's 1968 Golden Swallow. She's also gone toe to toe with the Master Killer himself, Gordon Liu,...

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September 10, 2021
John Wayne Can't Save You
Posted By Carol Borden At 11:23 PM
After the midnight screening of The Burrowers, director J.T. Petty (S&Man) told us one of the things he liked about the movie was that the John Wayne character doesn't save everyone. It's up to the “immigrants and the Black people”(and the Lakota and the Ute). I like that, too. (And Coffey the protagonist's bowler hat felt like a little fuck you to the drowning, snakebit Irish in Lonesome Dove) The film's been compared to The Searchers, a film about an ex-Confederate soldier leading a party to...

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Deadgirl: Extreme Objectification
Posted By Carol Borden At 7:02 PM
Shelagh M. Rowan-Legg has some things to say about  Dead girl and Sauna at Little White Lies:"Certainly one of the most disturbing films of the Midnight Madness program this year, Deadgirl takes the idea of woman-as-object and pushes it to the extreme."

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A Little More Weird Western
Posted By Carol Borden At 11:44 AM
So The Burrowers was an entirely successful blend of Western horror, creepy, desolate and good. Really, you should see it.  I have more to say about it, but I'll have to save it for later. Having a day job is just part of the Madness.  But since I've had weird Westerns and Jonah Hex on my sleep-deprived mind and I'm starting to think about tomorrow's Eden Log, I thought I'd put up just one set of weird Western scans.  This time from Hex, in which Jonah Hex travels to a future in which many people wear topknots and shoulder pads.I...

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September 8, 2021
Weird Western Tales
Posted By Carol Borden At 9:50 PM
I'm pretty excited that there are two weird Westerns at the festival this year: The Burrowers and The Good, The Bad and the Weird. It's neat to see just how flexible the genre is, encompassing both recent Asian Westerns like Sukiyaki Western Django, currently number one in the US box office, or Wisit Sasanatieng's Tears of the Black Tiger as well as creepier business like The Burrowers or Ravenous. And while comparisons to Tremors seem obvious, The Burrowers has actually been...

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Jon Hewitt talks Acolytes and Midnight Madness
Posted By Carol Borden At 7:39 PM
Bloody Disgusting interviews director Jon Hewitt (Darklovestory) about Acolytes: "Acolytes is a slow burn - we give a taste of treats to come in the opening minutes (a half naked girl terrorized in the forest; a punishing stunt) before we settle into our story of fucked-up teens living on the edge of the city. But the story ramps - ominously, believably, inevitably - to an extended climax of shocks, reveals, twists, ultra-violence, gore and death. So hang in there for car-crashing, head-smashing, crossbow-skewering, knife-slashing, screwdriver-stabbing, serial-killering mayhem!"

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September 7, 2021
Ozploitation Memory: The Cars that Eat People
Posted By Carol Borden At 6:03 PM
Australian super-director  Peter Weir (Master and Commander) is one of the featured directors in Not Quite Hollywood.  I have some non Gallipoli, non-The Year of Living Dangerously memories of  his work.  I was all about titles when I was a kid and his 1974 exploitation movie, The Cars that Eat People (aka, The Cars that Ate Paris) sounded great. I mean, cars eating people. What could be be better? But the thing is...

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Getting Deep with J.T. Petty and The Burrowers
Posted By Carol Borden At 3:05 PM
Dread Central has a short interview with J.T. Petty (S&Man) about The Burrowers. “What’s fun about a creature movie is you can get to some really deep material without actually going at it directly.”

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September 6, 2021
Drive-Ins Down Under
Posted By Carol Borden At 7:21 PM
Get ready for Not Quite Hollywood with Drive-Ins Down Under "On February 18 1954, an advertisement appeared in the Melbourne Sun; "Opening tonight at 6:30 Australia's first drive-in theater". The Skyline in Burwood, a Melbourne suburb, became the first of more than...

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Deadgirl-Related PSA
Posted By Carol Borden At 4:26 PM
If you find a naked dead woman chained to a gurney under plastic sheeting anywhere abandoned, don't have sex with her. That naked lady is there for a reason and it's never a good one. She hasn't been waiting for her Anthony Michael Hall. Weird Science was pretty cool...If you discover a space lady all alone and naked on a derelict ship and have sex with her, she will lay her her eggs all over your ship and/or feed...

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September 5, 2021
JCVD: Human
Posted By Carol Borden At 6:58 PM
JCVD was the nicest little hardboiled heist movie I've seen in a while. It's metafictional, but not evasive and ironically annoying. Human, but not cloying. It's more Dog Day Afternoon than Being John Malkovich. It's smart. It's tight. It's grounded. It's achingly well-written and well-performed with a green and white, slightly overexposed look that looks pretty nice and reminds me of 1970s crime dramas. And while I think the experience can survive spoilers, I'm glad that I saw it not knowing much...

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KISS Don't Wear Make-Up!
Posted By Carol Borden At 5:06 PM
The year was 1976. KISS was the most powerful band on the planet.  (Yes, the planet, dammit) with the largest army a band had ever raised. So of course, comedian Paul Lynde invited them to be on his Halloween Special. And they sang "Detroit Rock City,"

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Detroit Metal City, the Manga
Posted By Carol Borden At 4:10 PM
Young Animal, the publisher of the Detroit Metal City manga has a preview up for your pre-screening pleasure.  It's all in Japanese, so it could be incredibly crude and offensive. They could be talking about awful, awful things and I wouldn't know because I don't read Japanese. Still, it's a good way to get a feel for  DMC.Interested? Just go

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September 4, 2021
5 Van Damme Things
Posted By Carol Borden At 6:20 PM
So here are 5 things I like about Jean-Claude Van Damme movies. In no particular order because I'm not a good geek and can never figure out what I like most and less most and all that. 1. The Accent Thing In every Jean-Claude Van Damme movie there is an explanation for why Jean-Claude Van Damme speaks French. Conan and the Terminator might just happen to have Austrian accents and Sean Connery can play an immortal Spanish caballero or a Russian sub commander with...

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JCVD and the AV Club
Posted By Carol Borden At 6:20 PM
Found an interview with Jean-Claude Van Damme and The Onion's AV Club, including some potential spoilers about JCVD. "All my films were okay, because they were a different type of experience of going from one direction to another one. One thing that's difficult, I'm lucky, because I started action movies at the age of 25. Now I'm 47, and I'm still kicking like a mule, and I'm as flexible as before. And I'm very lucky for those companies, and for me to still be making those types of movies. Very international. Everybody understands a slap in...

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September 3, 2021
I Was A Child Soldier In The KISS Army
Posted By Carol Borden At 6:21 PM
Are you prepared for the glory of Detroit Rock City and its new incarnation, Detroit Metal City, which combines two glorious things: metal and manga. More importantly, it combines the glory of manga and KISS.  In case you've forgotten, behold the awsomeness of KISS: Yes, the KISS Army is prepared to mobilize even on ice. I myself was a child soldier in the KISS Army. But I was never more than a grunt in a state where almost all the kids were mobilized and...

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August 30, 2021
Madness, Regret
Posted By Carol Borden At 12:25 PM
It was 2007 and I was still innocent, sure that TIFF would screen at least one, if not two Johnnie To movies from now till the end of time. Now Grady Hendrix reports that since finishing Sparrow, Johnnie To is taking a break. (Todd Brown has found conflicting evidence). One of the things I like best about To is his ability to riff on other directors and play with genre. Johnnie To isn't a Midnight Madness director, but he's been a good friend to MM fans with movies like The Mission,...

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August 27, 2021
Midnight Madness' Fancy Is Still Scrappy
Posted By Carol Borden At 5:04 PM
One of the things I like most about Midnight Madness is that even its fancy is scrappy. Take last year's screening of Takashi Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django, for example. A bunch of us waited on the red carpet to meet stars Yusuke Iseya (Blindness; Casshern) and Yoshino Kimura (also Blindness) who were missing out on the Tokyo premiere to be there with us. And while it was great to meet the actors and let them know how glad I was they were there—and tell Kimura I liked her boots—it was even better when I noticed that the...

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September 15, 2021
Three Observations
Posted By Carol Borden At 11:08 PM
about Sukiyaki Western Django: Since the dawn of time, humankind has been interested in 2 things, gunslingers and samurai, resulting in movies like Yojimbo, the Western-ish samurai movie, and Fistful of Dollars, the samurai-ish Western.  And maybe incidentally in a movie where Bruce Willis is a gangster because someone thought humankind is interested in Bruce Willis. They were wrong. Humankind is not interested in Bruce Willis.  Sukiyaki Western Django fulfills the promise of both samurai movies and Westerns.  It is everything I never knew I wanted:  an English-language Japanese Western mixing the Heike Monogatari, the tale of Yoshitsune, the War...

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September 14, 2021
Well-Blooded
Posted By Carol Borden At 8:47 PM
Watching Flash Point last night, I realized something.  Despite the texting, the driving at night in the neon city, all the dislocated joints and broken ribs and justifiable reasons for using fisticuffs instead of guns, it’s so bloody brothers.  It reminded me of the films of Chang Cheh and Shaw Bros.’ period pieces.  Shaw Bros. movies are filled with crippling and vengeance and bloody suffering.  And girls just sort of dropped in a hovel or an abandoned temple or back with ma or by the side of the road.  In Flash Point,  Donnie Yen and Louis...

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September 11, 2021
Foot Sore
Posted By Carol Borden At 8:01 PM
Sisters, Brothers, Fellow Creatures in the Church of Exhaustion and Cult Cinema, let us rock the appropriate footwear. Even if we drive or hop cabs, let us consider that there’s still a lot of line time.  Me, I wear tough ass motorcycle boots.  Not tough ass as in shitkicking, but tough ass as in I can stand for a long time on concrete without feeling a damn thing.  Tonight I will pray for the strength to resist the devil that whispers in my ear, “Wear your cowboy boots to Sukiyaki Western Django—it’s not that long a walk...” And while I’m thinking about it,...

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September 9, 2021
Zombie Pride!
Posted By Carol Borden At 3:14 PM
Everybody have a good time at Diary of the Dead last night?  There’s so much to write about it, but my brain is so dead a zombie wouldn’t even want a taste.  I’m staggering around with a bit of a cold and a smidge of food poisoning and another late night.  Dizzy, a little nauseous but still hungering, I wonder if this is how zombies feel all the time.  Although, right now,  I hunger for waffles.  That might be transitional. Anyway, seems like every year I cool my ass on the concrete right behind a couple who...

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September 5, 2021
Seeing Sammo
Posted By Carol Borden At 7:30 PM
File under: Celebrities
So for a lot of people the most exciting fight in SPL / Sha Po Long is this one between Donnie Yen and Wu Jing. But for me it’s the 2 fights between Sammo Hung and Donnie Yen.The tease and the heartbreaker. It's the first time they've ever fought together. 55 and so fast, Sammo can move.  At the SPL screening, a fan asked Sammo if he actually kicked the knife Donnie Yen throws at him out of the air.  “Yes, of course, ” he said. “One take.” Later he demonstrated a move,...

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September 4, 2021
Undead at the Uptown
Posted By Carol Borden At 8:48 PM
I’m not sure I remember what my first Midnight Madness movie was. It’s all a swirl of late nights, early mornings and coagulating pizza followed by more late nights, early mornings and unwise eating on Yonge St. I do remember it was at Toronto’s lost wonder, The Uptown, a huge old renovated movie palace at Yonge and Bloor where even I at 5’2” always had an unobstructed view. Cinema 1’s huge screen ruined home theater for me. So at Midnight Madness, I focused on films I wouldn’t likely have a chance...

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