I’m a big fan of “Bellflower.”
I think that’s been pretty clear since January when I ranted and raved and ran both a pair of interviews and a review during the festival.
Now it’s finally arriving on home video this week, and the Blu-ray is flat out gorgeous. It’s also got the DVD inside, and it’s a handsomely packaged release by Oscilloscope Laboratories. In honor of the release at home, I’m going to be running some lists this week that were put together by the cast of the film, in which they name their favorite post-apocalyptic films.
First up, fittingly, is Evan Glodell, who wrote and directed the film, and he also stars in it. He’s a real talent, and an interesting guy overall, and yet when he sat down this weekend to record the podcast, he confessed that he has some strange blind spots in terms of what he has or hasn’t seen.
Keep that in mind with his fun list that starts with the exact film you think it starts with if you saw “Bellflower”:
TOP 5 POST-APOCALYPTIC MOVIES from the cast of BELLFLOWER
EVAN GLODELL – “Woodrow”
1. Mad Max 2 (The Road Warrior)
I feel like this movie has ended up playing a much bigger part in my life than I ever expected. Since putting references to it in Bellflower I have had to talk about it almost non-stop to hundreds of people this year, and I imagine this may continue for quite some time.
I saw it first when I was a young boy, immediately wished that I was Max and had his awesome supercharged car and was terrified of Lord Humungus. As I got older it switched and I wanted to be Lord Humungus and didn’t care much about Max, but still wanted his car.
2. Cyborg
Saw a preview for this on television when I was in middle school and got so excited about it that I actually made a note of the time it was coming on and recorded it onto a VHS tape. This was not normal behavior for me as I was a very unorganized and insane child.
Van Damme is awesome and one of the few important real action heroes of our time, but in this movie the villain Fender is the star. No joke, to this day I regularly put the DVD on and fast forward to the parts with Fender. He is insane and insanely awesome. He never stops flexing his muscles like a crazy person and the majority of his lines are just variations on the word “f*#k” being screamed in a very intense and insane way.
It was a close fight between Lord Humungus and Fender for who my character in Bellflower would be obsessed with. Lord Humungus won, but really he is #2 on my list of best bad guys of all time that I wish I was.
Fender is my hero.
3. Terminator I and II
This one is so big it almost doesn’t deserve to be on another list, but Terminator was the very first apocalypse and action movie I ever saw in my life and introduced me to the concept of evil characters who test the limit of manliness and what it means to be a badass.
After I saw it in 2nd grade, I asked the lady who cut my hair to give me the terminator”s haircut, I sported that same flat top until I was a young adult.
4. Fist of the North Star (animated movie 1986)
This is almost an anomaly of post-apocalypse awesomeness. The characters are so badass that it should be outlawed.
Don’t watch the live action movie as it should be outlawed for very different reasons(it sucks).
5. Dr. Strangelove
I just saw this movie for the first time this year. It’s on this list for very different reasons. I have not been able to stop thinking about. I think this movie and the concept of the doomsday machine hold the seeds that will grow into some sort of answer that could actually lead to world peace, or whatever the real world equivalent of world peace is.
6. Neverending Story
This movie is so good, I just watched it again. It’s about an apocalypse in Fantasia, and the little boy hero Atreyu is actually badass even though he’s only a kid. When he kills the Gmork is when you realize he doesn’t give a f*#k. He even says, “If we are all gonna die anyway, I’d rather die fighting!” Then he stabs the giant Wolf monster to death and he lives forever.
My thanks to Evan and to Oscilloscope for putting this together. Tomorrow, I’ll have the rather surprising list of Jessie Wiseman who plays Milly, the girl who threatens Woodrow’s heart and even sanity in “Bellflower.”
The film is available on DVD and Blur-ray tomorrow.