This past week with the cancellation of one shoot and aggravation of some misunderstandings about a pickup shoot schedule have served to  remind me of just how much like a music band or even a family our group of merry guerrilla film makers really is. I can only speak for myself when I say that I love these guys I work with. They are my best friends on the planet Earth. I really do think that I have more in common with my partners than really anyone else. Sometimes, just like in a band, the singer might think that the guitar is walking all over his lead, or the bass player can’t hear himself and insists on turning up his amp until everyone gets nauseous.

The core members of MVP have been working together for the better part of a decade and that hard work is starting to pay dividends, but from time to time myself or one of the other fellas will slip into a little bit of burn out and get caught up in a quagmire of interpersonal B.S. I want to jump up like Valentine McKee , Kevin Bacon’s character in Tremors, and yell at the top of my lungs, “No! No! No! We HAVE GOT TO GET OUT.” Get out of the muck and drive on. Why? Because that’s what we do. Another shoot, another script, another project. I feel that remaining productive is the key to success as any sort of actor or film maker. George Romero himself advised Streebo this way. “Finish that first one and the rest will come.”

So, if any of you Mutantville Players are missing the invigorating G.H.O.S.T. shoots in the Albemarle Opera House, or feel your creative yen waining, remember this, if it was easy to make movies, anyone could do it. It’s not and and not just any group of people can hold the band together. You are a rock star already for being active creating your art!  Above all else remember that Johnny Brento loves ya BABY!

Halloween is a week from now, and there’s one very special way to celebrate it in Evans City, Pennsylvania this year, at Gary Streiner’s 2nd Annual Living Dead Festival. Recently, I interviewed Gary about his role in the production of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. Through Gary, I was able to interview another of the key people involved in the film: his brother, the producer and the actor who played Johnny, Russell Streiner.

Russ was an important part of the Latent Image, a commercial filmmaking company which he founded with George Romero. He’s since gone on to work on many films with another NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD collaborator, John Russo. Russ was gracious enough to take some time today and discuss the legacy of the zombie classic with me, for his fans at Icons of Fright.

Phil Fasso: How did you first get involved with George Romero?

Russ Streiner: I started off wanting to be an actor, which I pursued through high school. And after high school, I went to the Pittsburgh Playhouse School of the Theatre, and graduated from their two-year acting program. While I was there, I was working in stage shows at night, and at one of those, I was cast with another fellow. His name was Rudy Ricci, and we shared a dressing room. Rudy had been attending classes at Carnegie Mellon University (back then it was called Carnegie Tech). He was taking art classes there, and he met George Romero in an art class. George was transplanted, from the Bronx to Pittsburgh, to go to Carnegie Tech’s School of Painting and Design. Rudy brought George over to one of our shows one night, and that’s how I first got to meet him. Then, within maybe six or eight months, George called me and asked me if I would be willing to be an actor in a movie that he was putting together, called EXPOSTULATIONS. And I told him I would. I showed up for my very first day of production, and really became intrigued with the whole film production part of the business, which I knew nothing about. I stuck with EXPOSTULATIONS as an actor, and then also helped out on the crew. That’s how George and I first met. And we went on to set up a business and worked together for about 10 years.

PF: How did your experience in commercials and industrial films help you to put together a feature film?

RS: Any time you get a chance to practice your craft, whether it’s in short form like TV commercials or longer form like industrials, all of that goes to help you refine your craft. And that’s certainly how our whole group got helped out, all of which led up to 1967, when we did the actual filming of NOTLD.

Read the rest of this interview with a piece of Night of the Living Dead history click the link below.

via Icons of Fright News and Updates: An Interview with Russ Streiner.

From FEARnet:

Sequels get a bad rap, and rightfully so – most of the time. The horror genre is especially rife with sequels, with many franchises so heavily spun-off that they have stopped being numbered. Not all sequels suck, and to prove it we found ten that are at least as good as the original – if not better.

Dawn of the Dead

The second of George Romero’s original zombie trilogy, Dawn of the Dead is inarguably the best of the three. A group of survivors take refuge in a shopping mall, but eventually decide to make a break for it. While not a sequel in the strictest sense, it is a damn fine movie.

Hostel II
A surprisingly good follow-up to the unimaginative original (which, in turn, was a rip-off of Saw), Hostel II focuses less on the slaughter of nubile coeds, and more on the men who buy the opportunity to do the slaughtering.  While no less violent or gruesome, it offers a different perspective than most slasher flix.

Wes Craven’s New Nightmare
The seventh installment in the Nightmare on Elm Street series is a case study in twisted post-modernism.  Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund, and Wes Craven play themselves in the real world.  Heather gets threats that echo Freddy Krueger’s M.O., and she needs to reprise her role as Nancy to defeat Freddy.  Again.  One of the most imaginative horror movies, sequel or otherwise.

via FEARnet’s Top 10 Horror Sequels – FEARNet.

From Shock Until You Drop:

George A. Romero once went 20 years between Dead sagas. Now, just two years after he decided to chronicle a new zombie outbreak with Diary of the Dead, Romero’s back with a sequel, Survival of the Dead.

For his sixth Dead – and the second in a proposed four-film cycle focusing on minor characters from Diary – Romero abandons the previous film’s “the zombie apocalypse will be streamed live” documentary

style approach for an old-school, narrative-driven showdown between a handful of rogue National Guardsmen, two warring families, and an ever-growing number of the undead.

Survival drops ‘Sarge’ Crocket (Alan Van Sprang) and his men in the middle of a Hatfield-McCoy-ish feud between two families on an isolated island off the Delaware coast. Patrick O’Flynn (Kenneth Welsh) wants to put every zombie back in the grave. Seamus Muldoon (Richard Fitzpatrick) protects the zombies in the hopes a cure can be found. He even fancies himself an amateur scientist when he begins to conduct experiments designed to help humanity coexist with the zombies.

Click the link below for more.

via Exclusive: Looking Dead Ahead With George A. Romero- ShockTillYouDrop.com.

Mutantville.com is proud to announce the signing of North Carolina’s own Todd A. Britt as the chief make-up FX designer for G.H.O.S.T..  Todd A. Britt provided memorable make-up FX for Mutantville’s Devil Comes Down – which went on to be a finalist in George A. Romero’s American Zombie Film Contest as well as the 1st place winner of the first ever IMDb Horror Board Short Film Contest 2008.  Todd A. Britt has worked on past MVP projects such as Zombie Killers, Zombie Hunter, as well as the epic horror film C for Chaos.  The Mutantville Players are proud to welcome Todd A. Britt aboard the Mutantville mothership.