Movies
Cinedigm Making 10 Horror Films Back-to-Back-to-Back, etc.
Cinedigm is launching a reinvention of American International Pictures exploitation titles including Girls in Prison and The Brain Eaters in a whopping 10-picture project within a single movie universe, reports Variety.
Cinedigm is teaming with producers Lou Arkoff (Inspector Gadget), Jeff Katz (Snakes on a Plane) and Hal Sadoff (Hotel Rwanda) to shoot the 10 films with storylines and characters as part of a single story arc. The films will be shot starting in September with cast and directors to be announced soon.
Katz has written all 10 films, which are based on Girls in Prison, Viking Women and The Sea Serpent, The Brain Eaters, She-Creature, Teenage Caveman, Reform School Girl, The Undead, War of the Colossal Beast, The Cool and the Crazy and The Day the World Ended.
Cinedigm will handle the theatrical release, DVD, digital, TV and nontheatrical formats including on CONtv, Cinedigm’s upcoming digital network targeted to the Comic-Con audience.
“In a unique twist on the current filmmaking model, all 10 films will shoot back-to-back and share a single movie universe with a big recurring cast of antiheroes, monsters and bad girls,” said Arkoff, son of AIP founder Samuel Arkoff. “This format will allow our casts and directors to build a strong relationship with the characters — and our audience — over the course of several films.”
Katz said audiences should respond to the hybrid format, which he called “binge-viewing at the feature film level.”
“Each movie in this series has a complete beginning, middle and end, yet watched over all 10 films we’re really telling one larger, epic story,” he added. “These are very much, at heart, indie comic book movies. Unpretentious. R-Rated. It’s fantastic to have a distribution model that fits that sensibility.”
Before updating the video nasty Faces of Death, director Daniel Goldhaber and writer Isa Mazzei explored the dangers of online life in tech-thriller Cam, their feature debut that was acquired by Netflix in 2018 after making waves on the festival circuit.
At the end of last year, the Netflix exclusive quietly departed from the streaming platform, left without another streaming home.
It’s not an isolated story; Mike Flanagan’s Hush also left streaming entirely for a period until it was finally picked up on both physical media and other streaming services.
While the tech-thriller currently isn’t available to watch on Netflix, Tubi, Hulu, or any other platforms, that’s not a problem for Cam thanks to a very cool move by Goldhaber: the director has made his breakout film accessible to watch online for free via his website.
As his site notes: “CAM is unfortunately not currently available to view on any platforms, so you can watch it here if you like :).“
No subscriptions or fees necessary, just hit play.
Cam follows Alice (Madeline Brewer), who works as an online cam girl obsessed with her ranking on the cam site. The higher her ranking goes, the more it draws unwanted attention, and Alice soon finds herself replaced on her own show with a doppelganger.
Written by Mazzei, a former camgirl, it uses the horror thriller premise to examine the life of a sex worker; Alice’s career ambition is directly at odds with the shame it brings to her family, and how she tries to spare them from it by keeping them in the dark. It only compounds her danger when the doppelganger enters the equation in Goldhaber’s engaging thriller.
For a deep dive into the treacherous world of Cam, listen to Horror Queers’ episode on it now.
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