Amateurs are doing amazing things these days with consumer-grade high-def camcorders, especially Canon’s HV30 MiniDV unit (which retails for about $800) and its predecessor, the HV20. The impressive clip below is the work of a Memphis college student named Kyle Shields, who acquired a new audio library and wanted to test out some of the gunshot sounds. So he used his HV20 to film a short backyard shootout with a friend. The ominous music, the well-crafted audio track, the Saving Private Ryan-style green filter, and Shields’s talent with the camera combine to make this a very cool little experiment. I wish video technology had been this advanced when I was his age.

To watch this in actual high-def, go to the Vimeo page.

There’s a whole channel on Vimeo devoted to people’s experiments with Canon’s HV30 and HV20 camcorders. The selection is hit or miss, but some of it is quite good indeed.

[via my pal Jonathan Hayes.]

Last month I spent a weekend in my hometown, Bloomington, Indiana, and I finally got my hands on a video I’ve been wanting to find for years: Haunted Indiana, a classic low-budget horror compilation that ran on Bloomington public access starting in the early ’80s. Created by a couple of local filmmakers, it was an 18-minute-long collection of Indiana-themed paranormal tales, each one accompanied by music lifted from Psycho or another archetypal horror film. One story was about three young campers who pitch a tent in an empty clearing and wake up to find themselves in the middle of a graveyard; another was about a stretch of rural road that is haunted by the spirit of a man who was killed in an accident.

Like the Sleestaks, Haunted Indiana seems very silly to me today, but I found it pretty frightening when it was first broadcast, partly because a few of the stories played into my own childhood fears, as good horror stories often do. Seeing it now, I’m impressed by how effective most of the tales are, and I’m also struck by the flat Indiana accent of the narrator, whose calm delivery is funny and a little bit chilling.

Here’s the story I remember most:

On the set of the 1970 film Maidstone, Rip Torn assaults Norman Mailer with a hammer, and Mailer retaliates by biting off a piece of Torn’s ear:

Some backstory:

Norman Mailer created a film in the late 60s called MAIDSTONE. He played the part of a famous movie director who is considering a run for the presidency. Rip Torn played his potential assassin. At the end of filming, Rip appeared to get a little too far into his role, and he attacked Mailer on camera with a hammer, drawing blood. Mailer retaliated by viciously biting into Torn’s ear, drawing even more blood. This is the fight.

It’s debatable how “surprised” that Mailer was by the attack, but it should be noted that he still had the camera crew hanging around and filming, the day after production had allegedly “ended” on the picture. However, the blood from both men is undeniably real, as are the horrified reactions of Mailer’s children (his wife, on the other hand, seems to be overacting badly).

More backstory here.

[via iFilm.]

In this reworked ending to the classic holiday special, Charlie Brown is sentenced to death by Linus. Brilliant.

[via my pal Joey X.]

In 1951, a sound designer on a Gary Cooper western called Distant Drums needed to overdub a scream onto a scene in which a man is killed by an alligator. He brought a contract actor into his studio and rolled tape as the man did six brief, anguished screams in one take. These screams were then added to the Warner Brothers sound library, and over the next couple of decades they found their way into dozens of Warner Brothers films.

In the mid-’70s, a young sound designer named Ben Burtt gave these sounds a name: “the Wilhelm scream,” after a character in one of the earliest films that utilized the sounds. A couple of years later, Burtt was hired to work on a film called Star Wars. As an homage, he overdubbed the scream onto a scene in that film. Then he overdubbed it onto a scene in The Empire Strikes Back. And Return of the Jedi. A fellow Lucasfilm sound designer began using the Wilhelm too, in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, among other movies. And thus a film-geek in-joke was born. In the last 30 years the Wilhelm has been used winkingly in dozens of movies and TV shows, from Reservoir Dogs and The X-Files to Aladdin and Return of the King. More details are at Hollywood Lost and Found.

The video below is a compilation of dozens of Wilhelms from the last half-century.

[via an excellent blog called Cynical-C.]

Here’s a YouTube gem: the rarely seen 2002 short film Ernest and Bertram, which tells the sad and ultimately violent tale of the doomed relationship between those two closeted Muppets. Lawyers at Sesame Workshop forced the eight-minute film out of circulation right after its well-received showing at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival. The minor-key rendition of the Sesame Street theme song is hilarious.

[via one of the smart people on Echo.]

This grainy amateur footage of half a dozen young drunkards is one of my favorite underground video clips ever. It’s bloody, it’s patriotic, it’s a disturbing window into the existentialist mindset of America’s intellectual underclass. The clip, which is probably about ten years old, captures a group of bored nonvaledictorians as they conduct experiments regarding the breakability of beer bottles when smashed against the human head. The footage is mesmerizing for lots of reasons, not the least of which is the sounds on the audio track: the triumphant yelps, the mournful howls, the shattering of glass, the dull thud of intact beer bottles caroming off of empty human heads.

As usual, this is from one of my Media Shower tapes. When Jamie Greenberg, Media Shower’s host, introduced this clip on his (now defunct) show four or five years ago, he described it as “kind of Blair Witch meets Animal House, with a touch of the Russian roulette scene from The Deer Hunter thrown in.” I can’t imagine a more apt description than that.

(If you’d like to link to this, please link to this post and not to the file itself. Thanks!)

These guys are numbskulls.

Don’t fuck with this redneck: Your knife sucks. His does not, because it attaches to his belt buckle for easy access. The video demonstration is hilarious: “Whatever I’m doing with my hands, my knife’s going to do.” (I love the dog barking in the background, and the offscreen woman’s voice telling the dog to shut up.)

[Tip from my excellent pal Mary Schmidtberger, who is absolutely the coolest and funniest person ever.]

Another underground video gem from one of my Media Shower tapes. This one-and-a-half-minute clip was apparently filmed at a small club in Oklahoma. A redneck with an acoustic guitar has lost control of his audience, which is heckling him mercilessly. The agitated guitarist heckles back. One of the hecklers apparently gets up and makes a move toward the stage—and the guitarist steps down and goes all El Kabong on the guy. You don’t really see anyone but the guitarist during the clip—the camera never moves, and the violence takes place just out of camera range. But somehow that makes it funnier: The guitarist lunges out of view with an intact guitar; there’s a big THUNK; and then he steps back onstage with a broken guitar. He pleads with the audience to take his side, but the stunned crowd isn’t having any of it. Someone suggests calling security. And then the perfect kicker: Someone yells, “I want my money back!”

I’ve seen this clip dozens of times over the last few years, and it still makes me laugh and laugh every single time.