I've been holding on to this scoop for a few weeks, waiting til the right time to deliver it...

Back in 1990 when Midnight Madness was at the Bloor, the sponsor of the series that year was Sinister Cinema and they had a plan to shoot a documentary on MM. A camera was thrust into the hands of audience member Erik Sulev and he hit the line-up, gabbing with other audience members and even pinning down a few directors for interviews. Well, the doc never materialized, but those VHS tapes with the footage have been discovered and thanks to the speedy and sharp editing skills of Simon Ennis (director of THE CANADIAN SHEILD in the Short Cuts Canada selection), they have been turned into a number of clips that we have posted on YouTube.

First up is the line-up and introduction for Brian Yuzna's BRIDE OF THE RE-ANIMATOR at The Bloor Cinema. Looking at the storefronts along that stretch of Bloor, it seems that the only surviving ones on that block are The Bloor and Paupers. Remember the Woolco beside the Bloor? And the Pizza Pizza where there is now a Starbucks? It also seems that the audience at the Bloor is a little rowdier before the migration to the Uptown and then the Ryerson. There are lots of familiar faces that still come out for film at the Witching Hour and in my magic mirror I see Mike Ferguson, Remo Greco, Gord and Ernie and others. There are also some faces who have moved to other lands to do exciting things like Dennis Capicik who coaches Canadian Olympic freestyle skiers and Jason Gray who is married (to Eiko who is returning to TIFF in our press dept handling Japnese films) and living in Japan where he tutors film directors in English, translates scripts, writes for Screen International and sometimes pops up as any extra in films (remember the Ramones in the dream sequence from LINDA LINDA LINDA?). Do you see yourself or someone you know?

And of course, there is a cameo by yours truly and I am fully prepared to suffer the teasing about that dangly cross earring (if you look closely you can still see the piercing hole on my earlobe). Those were good times in the line-ups, waiting for a wild and wacky film with friends and making new ones. Coming from rural Ontario, the highlight of my first week in Toronto to attend college was standing in line for the inaugral year of MM, meeting guys that I could talk to about Italian zombie films and other horrific cinematic delights. The following years I saw more films in the rest of the Fest, but my heart stayed in Midnight. I always tell people that one of the best experiences in the Fest is talking with others in the line-ups and trading tips on other films and striking up friendships, unless of coursem it should rain...

I run into Brian Yuzna on the film fest circuit often and I just read this news over at Twitchfilm.net that he has teamed up with a Dutch producer to launch a new internationally based production house based in Indonesia called Komodo, to produce genre pictures. Their first production? Amphibious, the story of a gigantic, pre-historic, aquatic scorpion rising from the sea to wreak havoc.

Brian Yuzna gets revenge for the missing DENTIST 2 print in Sitges, Spain