So I’m rolling with one of those occasional kicks we all (I’m assuming) go on where we catch up on seeing a bunch of shit we’ve been hearing about for X number of weeks, months, even years, and  last night said kick took me to 2011’s Rise Of The Animals, a flick shot in and around Rochester, New York for the princely sum of $7,000 by a guy named Chris Wojcik who may be short on what passes for “skill,” but clearly thinks he possesses just enough to crank out one of those “so bad it’s good” pre-fabricated “cult” numbers that outfits like Troma and The Asylum have made their bread and butter for literally decades now. That being said, if any one film can be considered a direct thematic and stylistic predecessor to this one, it would be James Nguyen’s Birdemic, but there’s a very crucial difference…

Quick preamble : a good editor can make a big difference. I was commissioned to write this review for Daniel Elkin’s “Your Chicken Enemy” small-press site, and what follows is the text as originally conceived by yours truly. Daniel suggested — as opposed to demanding — a few small but crucial changes, and I think the piece reads much better in its “final” form, given that his observations were uniformly spot-on. I decided to run this “warts-and-all” version simply because, hey, it was saved “as is” in my WordPress folder, and I thought it might be of interest (to somebody? Somewhere?) to compare and contrasts the two versions.

Or, hey, maybe not. In any case, the “finished product” can be viewed here : http://www.danielelkin.com/2018/01/cutting-deep-but-missing-artery-ryan-c.html

I’ll say this much for Chuck Forsman’s just-released Slasher trade paperback collection (Floating World Comics, originally serialized over five issues) — it leaves you with plenty…