‘Safety Not Guaranteed’ Meme is Now a Movie

One of the great­est inter­net memes of all time is now a movie.  Safety Not Guar­an­teed is a film based on the mys­te­ri­ous real clas­si­fied ad pic­tured above, which first appeared in a weekly Dan­ish news­pa­per.  The ad was later paired with the accom­pa­ny­ing photo of a rather serious-looking young man who seems to have stepped straight out of 1986, mul­let, turtle­neck and all.  The orig­i­nal YTMND that started it all has over 1.2 mil­lion views as of Jan­u­ary 2012.

What will a movie based on an inter­net meme be like?  The film, directed by Colin Trevor­row,  is about two mag­a­zine employ­ees (Aubrey Plaza & Jake John­son) who set out on an assign­ment to find and inter­view the quirky man who placed the clas­si­fied ad seek­ing a time travel com­pan­ion (Mark Duplass).  Accord­ing to an early review in Vari­ety,  Safety Not Guar­an­teed is “a sci-fi-tinged odd­ball com­edy about love as the ulti­mate risky adven­ture” that fea­tures “some nice soul-searching moments along­side a steady stream of laughs.”  Indeed.

Does axl­bon­bach (the per­son who cre­ated the orig­i­nal YTMND) deserve com­pen­sa­tion?  What about the unknown man in the photo?

I sup­pose it’s only nat­ural that the film indus­try would start min­ing the annals of the inter­net for movie ideas, since they seem to have exhausted most other resources.  Last month we heard about Bad Ass, a movie star­ring Dany Trejo based off the “Epic Beard Man” viral video.  It’s hard not to feel like these types of movies are only being made to cash in on the mil­lions of hits and social media buzz these dig­i­tal curiosi­ties have gen­er­ated over time.

One of the best doc­u­men­taries I’ve seen in the last few years is a film called Win­nebago Man, in which the film­maker sets out on a quest to find out what became of the tem­pera­men­tal, potty-mouthed RV sales­man whose unin­ten­tion­ally hilar­i­ous sales train­ing video out­takes ended up on the inter­net and became wildly pop­u­lar.  It was a heart­felt and fit­ting trib­ute to a sim­ple man who did not real­ize the extent of his own fame, but whose recorded moments of weak­ness gave us so much joy.  It’s doubt­ful that movies like Bad Ass and Safety Not Guar­an­teed have their sub­jects’ best inter­ests at heart.

Abraham Lincoln Kicking Some Undead Ass In New Vampire Hunter Image

Via Scoop.it — Shezcrafti

Not one to be con­fused with Steven Spielberg’s devel­op­ing Lin­coln project, Bekmambetov’s genre splice re-imagines our 16th pres­i­dent as a vam­pire slayer stomp­ing through the Civil War-era United States.
Via www.cinemablend.com

‘Star Wars: Uncut’ is a Fan-made Orgy of Nerds, Memes, Kittens and Light Sabers

The premise:  the orig­i­nal Star Wars movie cut into 15-second seg­ments to be re-filmed by thou­sands of fans and then care­fully edited together into an amus­ing patch­work of fan-generated footage.  The result­ing film is an awe­some retelling of Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope through the eyes and cre­ative tal­ents of Star Wars fans around the world.

Star Wars: Uncut was the genius idea of Casey Pugh, a 26 year old web devel­oper and (one assumes) seri­ous Star Wars fan.

“I was work­ing as a web devel­oper for Vimeo and I was doing a lot of video-based stuff, but I was also think­ing about how I could enable film­mak­ers to cre­ate either short films or feature-length films together remotely,” he says. “I bounced an idea off my friends but I had no idea it would blow up to this scale–it’s just crazy.”

Crazy or not, Star Wars: Uncut earned Pugh and his col­lab­o­ra­tors an Emmy award (the 2010 Prime­time Emmy for Out­stand­ing Cre­ative Achieve­ment In Inter­ac­tive Media — Fic­tion, to be precise).

Despite being a diverse mashup of live-action, clay­ma­tion, stop-motion, kit­tens, hand drawn ani­ma­tions, CGI, hand pup­pets, babies, Legos,  men and women in drag, Pop­si­cle sticks, paper­craft, and prac­ti­cally every other type of style and imagery you can think of, Star Wars: Uncut man­ages to stay true to the orig­i­nal film’s nar­ra­tive and is rec­og­niz­able to any­one who has seen it.

Most of the clips are silly, unre­hearsed videos of the viral sort (com­plete with trash can R2D2s and news­pa­per hats).  But there are also pol­ished, beautiful-looking scenes from tal­ented fans whom you can tell put forth a lot of time and effort.

The entire film was recently released to the inter­net masses and you can watch it right here:

Star Wars: Uncut is a film made by Star Wars fans for Star Wars fans.  I promise it will be the most fun and enter­tain­ing two hours of your life.

Who wants to see an R-rated Muppet movie?

If you’re a fan of the darker side of Hen­son (Mir­ror­mask, Labyrinth, Farscape) and ever won­dered what an adult Mup­pet movie could be like, you’ll prob­a­bly be inter­ested in the upcom­ing dark com­edy Hap­py­time Murders.

Well, okay, Hap­py­time Mur­ders isn’t really a Mup­pet movie.  At least not in the Ker­mit and Miss Piggy sense. But it’s being pro­duced and directed by Brian Hen­son. And it has puppets!

“Hap­py­time Mur­ders is a dark com­edy that depicts an alter­nate real­ity where pup­pets are sen­tient beings that live along­side humans. The pup­pets exist as ‘sec­ond class cit­i­zens’ to the humans, and when the cast of an 80s pup­pet TV show, ‘The Hap­py­time Gang’, begin to turn up dead, an alco­holic ex-cop pup­pet turned pri­vate detec­tive must solve the mur­ders with his human ex-partner.”

It sort of sounds like Who Framed Roger Rab­bit meets Death to Smoochy meets Cool World. The film, which was picked up by Lion­s­gate last month, is in pre-production, and could begin film­ing as early as Jan­u­ary 2011. The lat­est is that Cameron Diaz might be inter­ested in the lead role.

Source: Screen Rant

Review: Reasons to Love ‘Deathly Hallows: Part 1′

When I first learned that Warner Bros. was going to split Harry Pot­ter and the Deathly Hal­lows into two movies, there was much kick­ing and scream­ing on my part.  I was not alone.  There were plenty of fans and non-fans alike who felt it was a poor deci­sion, and one that fur­ther painted Warner Bros. as greedy stu­dio execs who were try­ing to milk the Harry Pot­ter fran­chise dry.

I saw Harry Pot­ter and the Deathly Hal­lows: Part 1 last night and I am happy to report that my atti­tude has changed.  My faith in David Yates still wan­ing, I went into the movie with slightly low­ered expec­ta­tions.  But when the cred­its rolled, I walked out of the the­ater with only pos­i­tive thoughts.  Reflect­ing on the fin­ished prod­uct, I now under­stand not only why it was nec­es­sary to make two films, but also why the film­mak­ers felt it was impor­tant.  They wanted to give us a proper farewell.

Right away, the decay­ing Warner Bros. logo sets the tone: this will not be a happy movie.  Dum­b­le­dore is dead, Volde­mort and his Death Eaters have infil­trated the Min­istry of Magic, and the wiz­ard­ing world is at war.  Times are so dark that even the Mug­gles are flee­ing their homes–nowhere is safe.  Harry, Ron, and Hermione have said their good­byes to Hog­warts (the warm, famil­iar school set­ting is notice­ably absent) and set out on a jour­ney to destroy the hor­cruxes: objects con­tain­ing the seven pieces of Voldemort’s soul that are the keys to his destruction.

The dan­ger is emi­nent from begin­ning to end; this is the dark­est Harry Pot­ter film yet (which should be no sur­prise to those who have read the books).  There are some gen­uinely fright­en­ing scenes and, of course, more deaths of beloved char­ac­ters.  Yet all this doom and gloom is punc­tu­ated by sur­pris­ing lit­tle moments of joy.  I found myself cheer­ing at grand entrances, for exam­ple, when [spoiler] Dobby bursts into Num­ber 12 Gri­mauld Place wrapped around Mundun­gus Fletcher;[/spoiler] and at other times laugh­ing out loud like when [spoiler]Harry tests out the wand that Ron gives him, which unex­pect­edly shoots out a pil­lar of flame[/spoiler] (it’s much fun­nier than it sounds, trust me).

There were also many moments in the film that felt like a love let­ter to fans.  There was an espe­cially lovely scene where [spoiler]Harry coaxes a melan­choly Hermione into danc­ing with him; it was a touch­ing and fit­ting trib­ute to their seven years of almost sibling-like friendship.[/spoiler]  We were also treated to an early scene where [spoiler]Hermione per­forms a mem­ory charm on her par­ents, know­ing she will have to leave them behind.  In the books, we never get to see Hermione’s “Mug­gle” life, so I really enjoyed this lit­tle bit.[/spoiler]

I some­times take issue when this type of fluff is injected into books based on movies, espe­cially if they replace scenes that are more crit­i­cal to the plot, but I could not find much to com­plain about here.  Even the book’s most ten­der moments are han­dled with great care [spoiler]like the death of Dobby (which man­aged to make me cry)[/spoiler].  There are, of course, some dif­fer­ences between book and film that improve the flow and pac­ing of events, but over­all I felt Deathly Hal­lows: Part 1 was a very faith­ful adap­ta­tion that cap­tured the same feel­ings of iso­la­tion and impend­ing doom.

There were some low­lights for me, how­ever.  Let’s start with Xenophilus Lovegood–I didn’t care for Rhys Ifans’ per­for­mance.  I real­ize the char­ac­ter is sup­posed to be eccen­tric, but I felt really dis­tracted by his screen-time.  Also, I love Helena Bon­ham Carter as Bel­la­trix Lestrange, but with every Harry Pot­ter movie she gets more and more ridicu­lous.  When­ever she’s on screen I feel like I’m watch­ing the Helena Bon­ham Carter show–I wish she’d tone it down a bit.  Then there was Alexan­der Desplat’s score, which was not spec­tac­u­lar, but it gets the job done.  Those are my only com­plaints, and yes, they’re nitpicky.

Visu­ally, Deathly Hal­lows is a mar­vel of film­mak­ing, from the cin­e­matog­ra­phy to the spe­cial effects.  The spells, appari­tions, fly­ing and bat­tle scenes all looked amaz­ing.   As much as I missed Hog­warts, this film makes up for its absence with breath­tak­ing nat­ural back­drops.  See­ing it on an IMAX screen was truly a mem­o­rable experience.

But as spec­tac­u­lar as part one of Deathly Hal­lows is, it’s almost a bit unfair to review it as a com­plete film.  Even at a whop­ping two hours and twenty six min­utes long, I guar­an­tee you will be dis­ap­pointed when it ends; feel­ing rather like some­one pulled the rug out from under you.  And like all good two-part movies, this one ends on a major down note.  For those won­der­ing what part of the book serves as the end­ing to this film, I will only say this: they made a very good decision.

There were so many things to love about Harry Pot­ter and the Deathly Hal­lows, and I am con­fi­dent it will go down as one of the best films in the Pot­ter movie fran­chise, if not the best. The only bad thing about this movie…is that it ends.

Midnight Son is an Indie Vampire Film You Should Know About

If you’re a hor­ror fan like me who enjoys vam­pire sto­ries with a dose of real­ism (a’la Let the Right One In, The Reflect­ing Skin, Grace), then Mid­night Son should be on your radar.  It’s an inde­pen­dent film with a lim­ited release from writer/director/producer Scott Leberecht.

If first heard about Mid­night Son on Twit­ter (@MidnightSonFilm), which promises to be “a gritty, real­is­tic new look at the vam­pire genre.”  Of course it got my atten­tion right away.

Here’s the trailer:

From the film’s web­site:

MIDNIGHT SON is the story of Jacob, a young man con­fined to a life of iso­la­tion, due to a rare skin dis­or­der that pre­vents him from being exposed to sun­light. His world opens up when he meets Mary, a local bar­tender, and falls in love. Trag­i­cally, Jacob’s actions become increas­ingly bizarre as he strug­gles to cope with the effects of his wors­en­ing con­di­tion. Forced by the dis­ease to drink human blood for sus­te­nance, he must con­trol his increas­ingly vio­lent ten­den­cies as local law enforce­ment nar­row their focus on him as a sus­pect in a series of grisly murders.

If you want to see this film as much as I do, you can help out by click­ing here to demand Mid­night Son in your area.

5 Reasons Why the World of Warcraft Movie will Suck

Despite yesterday’s major geek­gasm news that Sam Raimi will be tak­ing up reigns as direc­tor of the highly-anticipated movie World of War­craft, I remain pessimistic.

The World of War­craft movie will suck, and here’s why:

1. First, let’s get the obvi­ous out of the way.  As a gen­eral rule, movies based on video games suck.

   Need proof?
   – Super Mario Bros. sucked
   – Res­i­dent Evil (all of them) sucked
   – House of the Dead sucked
   – Silent Hill sucked
   – Laura Croft: Tomb Raider 1 & 2 sucked
   – Dou­ble Dragon sucked
   – Mor­tal Kom­bat 1 & 2 sucked
   – Street Fighter (both of ‘em) sucked

   …I could go on, but this post would get very long very quick.

2. The actual World of War­craft sucks nowa­days.  And things are only going to get worse as Bliz­zard scram­bles to main­tain its revolv­ing door player base.  Bliz­zard may claim to have some­where in the neigh­bor­hood of 11 mil­lion sub­scribers, but for all the new peo­ple sign­ing up, there’s a whole lot of vet­er­ans and hard­core gamers leav­ing Aze­roth, who are dis­en­chanted with many of Blizzard’s recent “fuck you” deci­sions that tend to favor its own pock­ets over those of pay­ing cus­tomers.  With the new Star Wars MMO loom­ing on the hori­zon, Bliz­zard knows it must milk the WoW cash cow for all its worth–in the form of paid fac­tion trans­fers and over­hyped expansions.
3. I like Sam Raimi, I really do.   But just watch Spider-Man 3, and var­i­ous other films Raimi has fucked up.  When it comes to direct­ing, he’s kind of a hack who’s for­tu­nate enough to have cult status/geek cred with the Evil Dead fran­chise.  Sure he makes some damn enter­tain­ing pop­corn hor­ror movies, but is he capa­ble of pulling off an epic fan­tasy film?  I hope his work on Leg­end of the Seeker isn’t an indi­ca­tion…  Check out Raimi’s over-saturated IMDB page, where he’s cur­rently listed to have over 20 projects in pro­duc­tion, includ­ing Spi­der­man 4.
4. It will be told from an Alliance per­spec­tive.  Snore.  I guess even out­side the game the Horde gets no love.  That aside, there are a zil­lion pos­si­ble sto­ry­lines in the World of War­craft upon which to base a movie.  Why choose lamestream Alliance?  I guess two mil­lion Night Elves can’t be wrong.
5. Last year, I included the long-rumored World of War­craft movie on my list of Top 5 Most Antic­i­pated Fan­tasy Films of 2009, which up until recently, Bliz­zard has main­tained would be the film’s year of release.  (I hope they didn’t really expect us to believe that! ) So it wasn’t at all supris­ing to hear that World of War­craft: The Movie is now slated for release in 2012.  TWENTY TWELVE!  Will WoW still be as pop­u­lar three years from now as it is today?

Hope I’m wrong!

Tim Burton Confirms ‘Dark Shadows’

My name is Vic­to­ria Win­ters. My jour­ney is begin­ning. A jour­ney that I hope will open the doors of life to me and link my past with my future. A jour­ney that will bring me to a strange and dark place, to the edge of the sea high atop Wid­ows’ Hill — a house called Collinwood. A world I’ve never known, with peo­ple I’ve never met. Peo­ple who tonight are still only shad­ows in my mind, but who will soon fill the days and nights of my tomorrows.

These are the words of Vic­to­ria Win­ters, and the open­ing to Dark Shad­ows, one of the most mem­o­rable TV shows of all time.  Today, vam­pire mania has sunken its fangs deep into pop­u­lar cul­ture.  Shows like True Blood dom­i­nate tele­vi­sion, while The Twi­light Saga is one of the best­selling book series.  But the Bill Comp­tons and Edward Cul­lens of the world owe their exis­tence to a vam­pire named Barn­abas Collins.

Dark Shad­ows is one of those old shows that makes you feel uncool if you’re unable to remem­ber it when it was on TV.  That’s totally me.  I was born in 1981, 10 years after the last episode of Dark Shad­ows aired.  Being drawn to all things hor­ror, cult, and vin­tage, I dis­cov­ered Dark Shad­ows some years ago dur­ing one of those casual “have you seen any­thing good lately?” con­ver­sa­tions with my par­ents, whom I am grate­ful for hav­ing passed down their good taste in movies and TV shows to me.  If there’s one true thing I can say about myself, it’s that I am never bored, because I always have a nev­erend­ing list of inter­est­ing things to watch, read, or play—and never enough time to do it all.  So some­how or another, through the fond sec­ond­hand rec­ol­lec­tions of my par­ents and at the rec­om­men­da­tions of oth­ers, Dark Shad­ows found its way onto my list.

And a few months ago I begun the long and ardu­ous (but highly enjoy­able) task of watch­ing all 1,225 episodes of Dark Shad­ows.  Yeah, you read that correctly—ONE THOUSDAND TWO HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE!  For any­one else crazy enough to do the same, Net­flix has the entire Dark Shad­ows col­lec­tion on DVD.  I think I’m some­where in the early 300’s, but I can’t be sure.  And I am lov­ing every dark, shad­owy, and weird moment of it!

So I am absolutely THRILLED to learn that Tim Bur­ton has just con­firmed to MTV News that he will begin shoot­ing Dark Shad­ows next year, a fea­ture film based on the TV series.  And, shock­ing to no one, Johnny Depp will star as self-loathing vam­pire Barn­abas Collins, con­firm­ing rumors that have been cir­cu­lat­ing amongst Dark Shad­ows & Bur­ton fans for a long time now.  Both Bur­ton and Depp are known to be huge fans of the show, hav­ing grown up with the gothic soap opera.  I think Johnny Depp will be amaz­ing as Barn­abas Collins, and Burton’s campy, gothic style is per­fectly suited for the beloved TV show that was so deli­ciously strange.  Now if we can just get Danny Elf­man to score, I will be one happy (newly-initiated) Dark Shad­ows fangirl!

Harry Potter and the Half-way Decent Movie

So it’s like 3:30 a.m., and I just got home from the mid­night show­ing of Harry Pot­ter and the Half-Blood Prince.  I could go to bed, but I had to get a few things off my mind first while my mem­o­ries are still fresh.  Legili­mens!

First, the good.  This movie was a LOT of fun.  As one of my Twit­ter pals put it, Half-Blood Prince felt like return­ing to high school and see­ing all of your old friends.  Harry, Ron, and Hermione have always been at the heart of every Pot­ter film, and HBP doesn’t devi­ate from this win­ning for­mula.  The film doesn’t waste any time get­ting right down to busi­ness, and it’s action-packed from start to fin­ish.  From a plot stand­point, it had a lot of ground to cover (as all the Pot­ter films do) and those two and a half hours just seem to fly by.  Over­all it was a solid Pot­ter film, and I’m sure it will hold up to many sub­se­quent view­ings, which are no doubt nec­es­sary to catch all the things you might have missed.  There was just so much going on in this movie it was almost overwhelming.

And now the not-so-good.  I don’t know if this is a byprod­uct of hav­ing been forced to wait an extra 9 months for its release and hav­ing inflated expec­ta­tions or what, but HBP def­i­nitely had its short­com­ings.  The down­side to cram­ming so much stuff in is that there’s quite a bit left out.  And I’m not even one of those book Nazis that insists all movies must be 100% faith­ful to the book; not even close.  I just didn’t under­stand some of the logic behind the deci­sions made in this film’s case.  They had time to throw in a bunch of lengthy scenes that never hap­pened, but they didn’t have time to include the ones that actu­ally did?  I would rather see a film where they’re forced to leave things out due to time con­straints ver­sus just mak­ing up what­ever the hell they want to.  With­out giv­ing any­thing away, the first 10 min­utes of this film is a prime example.

Many parts of this film just didn’t feel like a Harry Pot­ter movie at all when com­pared to the pre­vi­ous five.  I think a lit­tle too much lib­erty was taken, to the point that some of the things that make Pot­ter movies feel like Pot­ter movies was lost–which is really sur­pris­ing, because I felt Yates did such a fan­tas­tic job with Order of the Phoenix.  Maybe I’m expect­ing too much; it’s just Harry Pot­ter after all.  Or maybe I’m just get­ting too old for this shit.  I cer­tainly felt old dur­ing the romcom-y bits when 90% of the the­ater was squeal­ing like giddy school­girls.  It could not have been more appar­ent who this film’s tar­get audi­ence was.

Speak­ing of get­ting old, when did the stu­dents of Hog­warts all turn 30?  I real­ize Daniel Rad­cliffe and com­pany have aged quite a bit since the first film, but I don’t think I saw any younger stu­dents at all in HBP.  You know what else I didn’t see?  Any infor­ma­tion about the Half-Blood Prince what­so­ever.  I feel bad for any­one who has never read the books that tries to watch this film; you will be hope­lessly lost.

For the rest of you–the ones who’ve read the books–despite my pithy com­plaints, there’s a lot to love about the film ver­sion of Half-Blood Prince:

(Warn­ing: HERE THERE BE SPOILERS.  Beware!)

Things I liked:

• The bits about Harry & Hermione’s friend­ship, par­tic­u­larly Dumbledore’s “curios­ity.” So cute.
• Jim Broadbent’s turn as Slughorn; great job!
• Aragog’s funeral and Hagrid’s sub­se­quent drink­ing binge.
• Snape bein’ all Snape-ish as only Snape can.
• Happy to see Tonks & Lupin together, how­ever brief.
• Both kids who played Tom Rid­dle (age 11 & age 16) were fantastic!
• Michael Gambon’s Dum­b­le­dore was much bet­ter played this time around.

…And of course,  there were some things that needed improvement:

Things I could have done without:

• Jessie Cave as Laven­der Brown.
• Pan­der­ing to the HP fan­girl set.  Yes I real­ize HBP is the “O.C.” of all the Pot­ter books, but the teen romance por­trayed in this film was just over the top, to the point where I felt like the roman­tic sub­plots over­shad­owed the main one.
• Ran­dom black woman who comes on to Harry in a cafe.  Seri­ously, what is up with ran­dom black char­ac­ters appear­ing in the Pot­ter films?  It’s almost like the direc­tors throw them in there for diversity’s sake.
• The heavy-handed direc­tion.  I swear in some shots you could almost feel Yates think­ing “Hmm, what crazy cam­era wiz­ardry can I do to make this scene look cooler?”
• The Weasley’s house burn­ing down.  Um, WTF??
• Fen­rir Grey­back.  Although an impor­tant char­ac­ter in the book, his pres­ence added noth­ing to this movie.

Things I missed:

• The “feel” and spirit of Hog­warts just wasn’t there for me this time around.
• Did they even bother to put the main char­ac­ters in uni­forms dur­ing classes?
• Where the hell were all the younger stu­dents?  I don’t think I saw even one.
• Dumbledore’s funeral.  I won­der if we’ll see it in the begin­ning of Deathly Hal­lows? I felt the end­ing in gen­eral was kind of a cop-out.
• Cho Chang. I thought we’d at least see her in the back­ground or something.
• Any back­ground infor­ma­tion what­so­ever about the Half-Blood Prince.

P.S.  Did any­one else almost pee a lit­tle bit when Dum­b­le­dore (whom J.K. Rowl­ing pro­fesses to be gay) starts telling Harry how he’s been fond of him since he was a lit­tle boy, and that they need to fig­ure out the deal with the closet??  Unin­ten­tional hilar­ity FTW.

LOTR Fan Film: $3,000 of Awesome

What can you do with $3,000 and a group of ded­i­cated LOTR fans?  Make a kick-ass fan movie, that’s what.  The Hunt for Gol­lum is a 40-minute fan-made film based on the Lord of the Rings books and movies.  And more impor­tantly, it’s good.  Sur­pris­ingly so.

Based on Tolkien’s appen­dices, The Hunt for Gol­lum remains true to its source mate­r­ial and fits in nicely with the three offi­cial Peter Jack­son films.  The story is a pre­quel of sorts that fol­lows Aragorn on his quest from Gan­dalf to track down and cap­ture the crea­ture Gol­lum, who knows the where­abouts of the One Ring.  It takes place before Gan­dalf returns to The Shire, to warn Frodo of the dan­gers of his burden.

Every­thing from the cos­tumes and make-up to the film’s score and act­ing is well done, and closely mim­ics Jackson’s style of direc­tion and visual effects.  The fight scenes were epic and well choreographed.  

Even Gol­lum looks and sounds great:

It’s an impres­sive accom­plish­ment for such a lim­ited bud­get (the entire cast and crew worked for free).  Huge props to the film­mak­ers, who are as tal­ented as they are ded­i­cated.  The film was released today, May 3rd, and is avail­able to watch free online.  You can also check out the mak­ing of this epic under­tak­ing here.  Visit www.TheHuntForGollum.com, or click  the ban­ner below.  If you’re a LOTR fan, I highly rec­om­mend you go watch it—NOW!