Pot Zombies, I'm sorry.
About two months ago, Scott enabled the comments feature common to all blogs on Blogspot. Hiding under my "Pot Zombies" review since February was a short remark from someone affiliated with the movie. He had some choice things to say and went so far as to suggest we stole their idea.
Scott and I were ecstatic. The prospect of getting into a turf dispute with another dope-come-ghoul movie was irresistible. A public feud could mobilize the flagging Wm. Moses label and raise the profile of both movies. This would be akin to Armageddon getting into a scrapper with Deep Impact, or Infamous having a knife fight with Capote.
It seemed especially tantalizing as Chris was just moving to town and we would be at our most powerful, like when the Constructicons combined to form Devastator.
So I shot off a casual email to this guy simply saying "Are you serious?" hoping it would bait the whole PZ team into a cat fight. I didn't hear from him, but I did get a couple notes from Justin Powers, director, editor and co-writer of "Pot Zombies".
In paraphrase, the emails sought to distance the real players from the commentator and made it known that this guy barely had anything to do with the film. Turned out he's some goon brought in for sound mixing in the eleventh hour.
Justin expressed dismay that such a comment was floating around cyberspace and requested it be taken down, thinking it a poor reflection on Fringe Media. The overall thrust of his emails were friendly and informative, and I suddenly felt remorse for panning his abilities, especially in light of certain facts. Below I'll attempt to redress some misinformation that made it into the review.
I misreported the budget as being around $10,000, a figure extracted from an article by Brian Abrams. My advice: Never put your trust in the internet. Not for reliable data, not for "secure" credit card purchases, and certainly not for arranging anonymous meth-fueled orgies. I'd even discourage the reader from citing this blog or even the neutral Killer Weed website as sources of factual info, especially if making, say, a case for invading Iran.
Anyway, Justin said the real budget was somewhere around $1000. Boy, do I feel like a putz. Watching it I kept wondering where they'd spent the money. Was it the cool scene where they strung a guy up by hooks in his back? Was it for Lloyd Kaufman's towncar? Was it the impressive soundtrack? Or was it intercutting to the hot lesbian chicas going Hometown Buffet on each other?
Knowing the real budget almost turns PZ into a stellar achievement, particularly as it's Justin's first film. He clearly had to wrangle a lot of resources and call in a few favors, maybe scratch a few backs. And that's a talent unto itself, the networking, the canvasing, the begging, the sweet-talking and making nice, the game.
Couple other things to address. My mistake for claiming there were no credits. Apparently my download had the closing credits sheered off for space sake. I'm told they're laid over some neat behind the scenes footage of Rob Swarthout actually getting pierced through the back by the aforementioned hooks.I also regret that the first few lines of my IMDb review became the defacto two-line for PZ on a few torrent sites. However, no one in my camp had anything to do with actually sharing their movie, as had been charged.
We can barely cope with our own workload.
Matt
