Fival’s Corn Shank Productions

Fival’s Corn Shank will be having the east coast premiere of Picklock, hosted by Brett Circe, at the StarBar this Wednesday at 6:00pm. Snacks and cocktails will be served.

This is an invitation-only showing. For more information, please contact Brett Circe.

After a long hiatus, Fival’s Corn Shank Productions is proud to announce the release of its newest film, Picklock.

“I am very excited to finally release my latest creation” says David C. King, the films creator. “This is the closest a film of mine has come to my initial vision. Since it is a remake of a short I made as a teen, the challenge was to illustrate my growth as a filmmaker which I think it does. While more serious in tone than previous works, the film sticks with classic FCS themes.”

Picklock follows a man, woman and cat one shadowy evening in San Francisco. Amid stories and reports of increasing numbers of missing people and pets from around the city, we find our characters making their way through an average day. Something seems to trouble the couple as they remain distant even within the comfort of their small apartment. Unnoticed by them, something emerges out of the murky fog to invade the safety of their home. Will they emerge unscathed or will they join the ranks of the missing?

“This film has all the hallmarks of a great Fival’s Corn Shank Production” stated Brett Circe, co-founder of FCS. “From the campy and memorable use of cats, to the subtle homage to Jean Cocteau, it gave me chills the first time I watched it”

Fival’s Corn Shank Productions is an independent movie production company founded in 1990 by David C. King, Brett Circe and Justice Mitchell specializing in cutting edge creative in a cross-genre approach. With 12 titles in its filmography, ranging from shorts to a feature length film, FCS continues to develop and advance its production capabilities.

For more information about Picklock please visit www.fivalscornshank.com.

With the update of the FCS web site complete, and the ability to load and stream long videos on the internet upon us, FCS is thrilled to premiere Twisted Weekend III: Slacker Holocaust here on the FCS site.

Twisted Weekend 3: Slacker Holocaust is the final and most ambitious film in the Twisted Weekend trilogy, which also includes Twisted Weekend: Pledges Must Die and Twisted Weekend 2: Co-ed Slaughter. All three films, collaborations between David King and Brett Circe, are now available here to view in their entirety!

Meet Lucie, the angry artist; Violet, her goodie-goodie roommate; their gay friend, Morris; their party animal fraternity boy neighbor, Bobby; and the burnouts, Chuck and Joe. Their names may be different, but you know this group. You’ve met them, you went to college with them…hey, you may even be one of them.

See the only feature film in the Fival’s Corn Shank filmography! Watch Twisted Weekend III now. When you are done, be sure to leave a comment!

Fival’s Corn Shank Productions is an independent movie production company founded in 1990 by David C. King, Brett Circe and Justice Mitchell specializing in cutting edge creative in a cross-genre approach. With 12 titles in its filmography, ranging from shorts to a feature length film, FCS continues to develop and advance its production capabilities.

Finally, and for the first time ever, Twisted Weekend 2: Co-ed Slaughter (1999) is available to watch in its entirety here on our web site.

Twisted Weekend 2: Co-ed Slaughter is the sequel to the movie that started it all, Twisted Weekend: Pledges Must Die, the first collaboration between David King and Brett Circe.

With it’s controversial portrait of an artist gone mad, stunning use of lush Florida locations and an amazing array of death scenes, Twisted Weekend II: Co-ed Slaughter uses “state-of-the-art” special effects, a “chart-topping” soundtrack and “intense” performances to take the viewer on a rollercoaster ride straight to hell!

See the film that did it first! Watch Twisted Weekend 2 Now. After you are done watching it, be sure to leave your review in as a comment!

Fival’s Corn Shank Productions is an independent movie production company founded in 1990 by David C. King, Brett Circe and Justice Mitchell specializing in cutting edge creative in a cross-genre approach. With 12 titles in its filmography, ranging from shorts to a feature length film, FCS continues to develop and advance its production capabilities.

Fival’s Corn Shank (FCS) Productions unveiled today a complete redesign of the FCS web site located at http://www.fivalscornshank.com/.The first major overhaul in over five years, the new site features an innovative design, search capabilities, and blog-like features including RSS feeds of news & press, as well as RSS feeds of user comments and movie reviews.

“I am very excited about the launch of our new site” stated Brett Circe, co-founder of FCS Productions. “The advent of the blogoshpere and quality of online streaming video allowed us to evolve our site to be more community friendly. And, we have plans to have all our movies available for watching right here in the near future.”

All the information from our previous site has been incorporated into the new design, including all user comments and feedback about FCS movies going back to 1999.

Fival’s Corn Shank Productions is an independent movie production company founded in 1990 by David C. King, Brett Circe and Justice Mitchell specializing in cutting edge creative in a cross-genre approach. With 12 titles in its filmography, ranging from shorts to a feature length film, FCS continues to develop and advance its production capabilities.

Revered as “the Godfather of Gore,” this affable advertising executive (with a Ph.D in English literature) worked on industrial films in the late 1950s before teaming up with producer David Friedman to grind out several “nudie-cuties” before inventing the gore movie in 1963. Blood Feast made little sense, featured wildly inept actors and was, technically speaking, barely competent. But its graphic display of blood-and-guts (using butcher-shop rejects) offered moviegoers something the major studios wouldn’t deliver. 2,000 Maniacs (1964), in which a Confederate town is resurrected in the modern South to treat some visiting Yankees with special “hospitality,” lifted its premise from Brigadoon revealing Lewis’ sly sense of humor. After making a dozen or so followups — including Color Me Blood Red (1965) about a painter who kills to use his victim’s blood for his painting canvases, The Gruesome Twosome (196 and The Wizard of Gore (1971) — Lewis left the movie business in the early 1970s and became a direct-mail consultant.

He has since written and marketed several books on topics, including copywriting, direct and interactive marketing strategies, selling to the mature market, and public relations. Over the past 17 years he has written columns for numerous industry publications worldwide, including the monthly feature “Creative Strategies” in 200 consecutive issues of DIRECT. He currently writes “Curmudgeon-at-Large” for DIRECT, “Better Letters” for Selling, and is the copy columnist for Catalog Age. His features regularly appear in such international publications as the U.K.’s Direct Marketing International and Catalogue & Mail Order Business, as well as the Australian magazine Marketing. Together with Ian Kennedy and Jerry Reitman, Lewis also produced the video “100 Greatest Direct Response Television Commercials.”

Currently, Lewis is the principal of Lewis Enterprises, a direct response consulting company headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, FL. He is considered the leading authority on direct response copywriting, and has provided numerous marketers with the rules, formulas, and techniques for writing effective direct marketing copy for traditional and online media.

Let’s look at some similarities between Lewis and Circe:

* Bio compiled from the DMA, IMDB and Leonard Maltin

By Joshua Grover & David Patterson

Let us take a moment and consider the movie Evil Dead. In it, five friends go to a remote cabin in the woods for a weekend of fun, discover some evil relics, and release a powerful demon into the world. The demon, one by one, takes over the occupants of the cabin, until none remain.

Now, let us regroup and consider Twisted Weekend III, which consists of a group of friends who unleash a powerful demon through the use of an evil relic. One by one the demon… but I repeat myself.

There are other parallels here: the friend who doesn’t want to play with the relic; the evil voice that calls out to the possessed. For that matter, both films were shot on a low budget and edited over a period of years (Evil Dead took about two, whereas Twisted Weekend has a copyright date that runs from 1996-2003).

There probably are other parallels, but it’s here we must diverge, as Evil Dead is a classic horror film, and this film… is not.

This is not to say that the film isn’t interesting or ambitious. In fact, the primary issue is that it tries too hard in some areas and not at all in others.

The basic setup goes like this. It is Lucie’s birthday party, and she’ll drink and take a whole lot of pills if she wants to. As she opens her gifts, she comes across one that isn’t from anyone at the party – a really creepy, obviously-not-designed-by-Milton-Bradley Ouija board.

She and several of her now-doped-to-the-gills cohorts decide to pull out the board, make contact with an evil spirit named “Art,” and mayhem ensues. No, Art isn’t exactly an evil-sounding name and no, it isn’t short for something more interesting or sinister, and yes, I checked the back of the video to make sure I got it right. The name of the demon is Art.

(And, by the way, no, it isn’t a metaphor for dangerous art, as near as I can ascertain. This despite the fact that the girl who brings him forth from the grave is an artist.)

That the name Art might be something of a joke might help to explain the humor of the film. It’s weird. Not weird as in different, or strange, though it is, but rather weird as in completely incongruent with the rest of the film.

Take for example, the character of Morris, who is really, really gay. Really gay. Which is important to the film, sort of, because he ends up having sex with one of the girls. Later, when she’s possessed and trying to kill him with a pair of scissors, he attempts to apologize for doing the deed with her, which I suppose would be funny if he wasn’t getting stabbed at the time.

Another example, only minutes earlier, finds one of the girls in the bathroom having a bowel movement that can only be termed explosive, while reading Playgirl magazine. Meanwhile, Morris is being chased around the apartment by a possessed friend who is wielding sharp objects and is quite intent on his demise. Is this intercutting supposed to be funny? Scary? Tough to say, and the film doesn’t offer many clues.

There are also the huge, mawing plot holes to take into consideration. Where did the board come from? Why does Art have a vendetta against this particular group of people? Why attack Violet, who didn’t play with the board at all, but pass over other partygoers who also opted out?

But flawed as the film is, there is much to like. The makeup and gore effects generally are spectacular, and more importantly, convincing. The jokes only work perhaps 10% of the time, but those that work are worth a solid belly laugh (in particular, a stoner trying to impress girls with his assistant manager job at Wendy’s). And a couple of the horror setpieces are easily as unsettling as anything you’ll find at your local multiplex.

It’s no Evil Dead, but at the very least it’s sure to make you reconsider breaking out the Ouija board at your next party. You’d cry too, if that happened to you.

FilmThreat: http://www.filmthreat.com/
Full Article: http://www.filmthreat.com/index.php?section=reviews&Id=5023
Joshua Grover & David Patterson, Film Threat

Slackers Must Die

See what happens when real college girls go possessed!

Do you find maggots, bloodshed, and gore comical? Do you like your humor like your coffee — black? If you answered yes to these questions, you’d better clear your calendar, because the third installment of the Twisted Weekend series opens at Cinema Paradiso (503 SE Sixth St., Fort Lauderdale). Never heard of the Twisted Weekend movies? That’s OK — you’re not alone. Local producer Brett Circe created Twisted Weekend: Pledges Must Die back in 1990 and Twisted Weekend 2: Co-ed Slaughter in 1999. But these slasher flicks were all just an introduction to college depravity. Twisted Weekend 3: Slacker Holocaust takes us deep into the bowels of the seedy side of birthday parties, replete with binge drinking, drugs, sex, and Ouija boards, the latter of which obviously becomes the vehicle through which the carnage is unleashed. All the stereotypes are in place and ready to spill their guts on celluloid for your viewing pleasure. There’s the birthday girl and troubled artist Lucie and her goody-two-shoes roommate, Violet. For added comic relief, there’s the over-the-top gay guy, the party-animal frat boys, and two burnouts (because they wander in packs). It’s not long before the drugs and booze are gone and the Ouija board opens the door for hot demon possession.

New Times: http://browardpalmbeach.com/
Full Article: http://www.browardpalmbeach.com/2003-07-24/calendar/slackers-must-die/full
Tim Moffatt, New Times