Midwest Premiere a success and fun

Since I'm in the movie it would be a tad unseemly to review it here! But watching it at the midwest premiere last weekend with an audience of three to four hundred people was an energizing experience, leading me to believe that Steve's movie works and may be pointed to as an example of grassroots, Regional Film Making at its finest. It shows, without a doubt, that a huge budget and a caravan of technical support is not a prerequisite for artistic success. When you have a singular story driven vision, told with conviction, energetically and creatively getting across all the "ghost" stuff, a sturdy bridge for viewers to cross has been built.

I sat though Ridley Scott's trillion dollar extravaganza last weekend, before the premiere, and can honestly say that SPIRIT STALKERS is a better movie. Why? Because SPIRIT STALKERS has a story worth telling, whereas PROMETHEUS, for all its budget and all its visual majesty, not to mention its top tier stars, plays out on the giant screen without that bridge, without, in fact, a story; making the "worth telling" part of my comparison absolutely moot. PROMETHEUS comes wrapped up in the kind of corporate cynicism that seems to take the failing intelligence of its audience for granted; thinking, as they apparently do, that we will get all hot and bothered over a pretty package and ignore the fact that there's nothing at all in the box.

On the other hand, SPIRIT STALKERS, though elementary in its craft, is expressed with simple moment by moment connections that leads one from beginning to end. This low budget box is not empty - it's full, complex without announcing itself as such. SPIRIT STALKERS has a story; watch it with the same critical eye used for big name movies and you discover a rather sophisticated crisscross story structure that borrows (unintentionally, I think) from Hitchcock, but does not copy the master. Nor does it take the kind of short cuts you find in other regional horror movie parodies. Big Biting Pig avoids the kind of distancing parody creates; they believe in what they're doing and want you be believe in it, too. The want you to recognize the characters and get involved in what happens to them. Yes, there are clinkers now and then, but the film makers' conviction makes it easy to float over them; the story is that strong. Compared to Ridley's movie, which at a certain point is one long, uninterrupted clinker, SPIRIT STALKERS is seamless.