The Spine of Night - Even in death, my powers continue

Looks potentially interesting. Some decent actors attached. Rotoscoped in that 70s style found in Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings adaptation or Fire and Ice, but also seems very Heavy Metal

That does look extremely late 70s/early 80s, except for the eyeball in the torso. Will watch.

Where? What platforms will it be on?

No idea. I just meant I would make time for it eventually.

Looks like a movie from one of my Total War: Warhammer II campaigns…

I don’t think that stuff has been announced yet, this is the trailer for the SXSW debut next week.

Definitely looks like a Bakshi/ Heavy Metal mashup, but with Patton Oswalt. I just hope it comes to a streaming platform I can access!

Impressions out of SXSW seem generally positive, hopefully they announce release platforms soon.

So this is a full-length thing? After I watched this trailer, YT helpfully suggested the earlier shorts produced by the same team. There were 3 of them, all about 7-9 years ago. Have they bee working on this thing that whole time? Whoa.

Their first project, Mongrel, was miserable, terrible animation, and literally just rehashing the original Conan movie. The second part of it, released a year later, has improved animation, but doesn’t really resolve anything, and is then dropped. Meh.

They did hit their stride though, with the third project, Exordium, an 8-minute long self-contained short film. It has some viual tie-ins with the Spine of Night trailer. It was also really cool. I’m really looking forward to this now.

Yes, it’s a full length movie with 93 minute runtime.

Sweet.

Late 2021 for theaters, 2022 on Shudder.

Bah, I had a feeling it was gonna be Shudder. Guess I’ll have to do a trial sub through Amazon or something at some point.

Super bummed. I saw a trailer for this a few weeks back. Said release date to theaters was October 29th. I was pumped to see it for Halloween weekend.

I’ve been looking all week for movie times, nothing came up. I figured it would happen by Thursday for sure, right? Well, today I found out why. One of the sites had this note

“The Spine of Night” plays in the following states

California, Florida, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Tennessee"

Seattle is not on that list.

I couldn’t make it through this. I really wanted to see it, since the director and writer did a movie I like called They Remain, an adaptation of a Laird Barron story. But this was not working for me and I just threw in the towel after about forty minutes.

So it’s about some people who haven’t invented pants, but they somehow have a magical feather boa that someone steals and Patton Oswald yells a lot, which isn’t something I have a very high tolerance for. I might have stuck with it longer if the animation hadn’t been so aggressively…retro? ugly? low-fi?

Someone who watched the whole thing is going to have to weigh in and let me know what I missed.

-Tom

The trailer made it seem like it would have been a great silent movie, or at least no dialogue.

The voice casting is really weird, too. I liked Betty Gabriel, but everyone else sounded like they were filling in until the actual voice actors showed up.

-Tom

Wait what? Is the movie different in tone than the trailer? Is he playing a comic relief character, or doing a serious role?

He’s a bad guy. It’s a 100% for-serious movie.

-Tom

This is true. I’m going to say there was not a single joke in the entire length of it.

I dug it. But then, i grew up on Heavy Metal, Wizards, Fire and Ice, etc., and it was a throwback to that sort of thing, including the feel of the animation that put you off. It’s like how some people like pixel-art graphics in their modern games- sure, techniques have come a long way in the last 30 years, but they’re going for a specific style.

I do not regret the extra $3 I paid to own it instead of rent it via Amazon.