Latest / Cinema Yūgen / Under Siege 2... But With Raccoons: The Madness of Killer Raccoons 2
Transcript
- 0:00G'day. That's right. It's that time again. Time for Cinema Yugen.
- 0:15Yo hey hey hey welcome
- 0:18back eugenite cinema eugen your
- 0:22host can't heal back killer raccoons too dark
- 0:25christmas in the dark i must claim
- 0:29ignorance for i have not seen
- 0:32travis o'rion's original killer raccoon film
- 0:36and this factor i confess crossed my mind as killer
- 0:39raccoons 2 dark christmas in the dark began how much would not knowing the players
- 0:44and their origins affect my enjoyment of the sequel truth is in this reviewer's
- 0:50opinion not at all once of course I realized what this movie really is.
- 0:57And that is what this conversation is all about. Ladies and gentlemen,
- 1:04the mastermind behind Killer Raccoons 2, Dark Christmas in the Dark, is my guest.
- 1:12Please, put your hands together, welcoming him to Cinema Yugen,
- 1:17the wonderful, the magnificent, he's a beautiful powerful man with killer raccoons
- 1:24and a love of bad 90s action sequels on the brain we're happy to have him welcome
- 1:33to cinema you again travis.
- 1:38G'day travis hey thank you so much for having me it's good to be back down under
- 1:44i've never been down under, but I'll, I'm good for going down. Maybe not under.
- 1:51Anywhere which way you get there will be a good day because we'd be glad to have you.
- 1:58Just as I was so thrilled to watch Killer Raccoons, Dark Christmas in the Dark,
- 2:04potential cult Christmas film on the rise up there with Die Hard and Gremlins
- 2:10and all that good stuff. Mate, this is a great film.
- 2:15Thank you for going there. Thank you for doing it. tell us
- 2:18a little bit about the journey of killer raccoons to
- 2:21dark christmas in the dark well i
- 2:25appreciate the comparison to gremlins because i think between diehard
- 2:28and gremlins were definitely one or the other there but it is inspired by a
- 2:34bad action sequels uh the first movie is a real don't give it away because if
- 2:39you give it away then everyone will just jump on that and yeah You know what I know. I know. Right.
- 2:47Yes. For the people who know, that's what's nice. For the people who know, they know.
- 2:51Yeah. Like I said at the start of my review, I said that I was worried because
- 2:56I have to confess, I've not seen the previous Killer Raccoon movie.
- 3:03And I was worried about that. Should I go back and watch it?
- 3:06You know, that whole thing. Should I watch the first one before I watch the sequel?
- 3:10But as I'll say, and I won't divulge it. But once I realized what you were doing.
- 3:16I, I, I love it because the, the homage that you're homaging, I, I dig it.
- 3:22So yeah, please, sorry for coming you off.
- 3:27No, no, that's great because there is a first movie. We made the first one in
- 3:30college, uh, when we were all undergraduates at Ohio university in Athens,
- 3:36Ohio, in the foothills of Appalachia here in, in the States.
- 3:41And, you know, it basically started, I'd never seen a zombie movie and I was
- 3:46camping in Florida with my comedy troupe in college.
- 3:51And we were camping with some surfers and they were doing surfing and we were
- 3:55up to other things, mainly enjoying substances and then going to the movie theater, not the beach.
- 4:01And this was early 2000. So I had seen the new remake of Dawn of the Dead and
- 4:07I had never seen a zombie movie before.
- 4:09And it was very dark. This is the Zack Schneider one you're talking about.
- 4:13Yeah. Yeah. Very, yeah. Very dark comedy meets gore.
- 4:18And I never really seen, I've seen a couple of movies like that,
- 4:22like Bubba Hotep, maybe even going back a long ways.
- 4:26Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein is very funny, but very dark as well. Maybe not as gory.
- 4:31So I was always drawn to those kinds of movies, but zombie movie,
- 4:34never seen one until college right there. And we're camping there in Florida
- 4:39and late in the evening, enjoying more college substances and- Vaccines?
- 4:46Yeah, absolutely. We start to hear this chatter from around the camp and it's raccoons.
- 4:53It's raccoons and they're talking to each other and they're like,
- 4:57you know, kind of working their way around the camp. It's like in that movie,
- 5:00The Great Outdoors. Yeah.
- 5:02Yeah, very much. And yeah, and raccoons have been in films and film lore and
- 5:07comedy, things like that for a long time.
- 5:09But I basically, enjoying the substances and being inspired by a zombie movie
- 5:15for the first time in my entire life, asked my comedy true buddy who was still
- 5:19up with me at that time of the night, I said, hey, has anyone ever made a killer raccoon movie ever?
- 5:24And this is early 2000s, so none of us had the smartphones the way we do now,
- 5:28and we're camping anyway.
- 5:30So I wasn't even able to look on Internet Explorer or whatever it was on my
- 5:34desktop computer until I was back in the dorms in college. And sure enough,
- 5:38no one had ever made a Killer Raccoon movie ever before.
- 5:42So we got to work. We made the first one. We were the first undergraduates to
- 5:46ever make a feature-length film and finish it and then get a distribution deal
- 5:51with Troma Entertainment.
- 5:53And for those who know, if you know, you know, Lloyd Kaufman.
- 5:56You're like a John Carpenter with Darkstar back in the day.
- 6:00I wish, man. I just saw him live in concert, by the way, here in L.A. for Halloween.
- 6:05That was very cool. He's still got it, even at 80-plus years old.
- 6:09He's incredible. God bless, John.
- 6:13Yeah. And I was familiar with Troma, familiar with their work,
- 6:17familiar with the fact that they distributed Trey Parker, Matt Stone's college movie. Cannibal.
- 6:24Cannibal the Musical. and so Troma was on my radar and I basically just set out to make this movie,
- 6:30the first movie with my college comedy troupe and to get it done and get it
- 6:35to Troma and all three of those things worked out and Troma,
- 6:38Lloyd I remember specifically,
- 6:40loved the first movie and so if you want to find the first movie it is findable
- 6:46with Troma Entertainment but it is just, you know,
- 6:50it's tucked in between their, I think they just
- 6:53have it on their Vimeo channel now you know for
- 6:55a long for a long time it was on amazon it was on
- 6:58youtube and it was it was more findable but poor
- 7:01trauma they just got deplatformed from all kinds of
- 7:04things in the last few years so if you get their subscription
- 7:07i think it's like 4.99 a month and you have
- 7:10access to all 800 plus make your
- 7:13own damn movies if you will in their catalog
- 7:16so that's where you find the first one if you want to know
- 7:19the lore of the characters and things like that but as you
- 7:22pointed out correctly to see Killer Raccoons 2 you do not need to see the first
- 7:27movie because like any good sequel especially bad action sequels in the 90s
- 7:31we explain exactly what happened in the first movie to you over and over and
- 7:37over in the first 20 minutes of the second movie as you saw right yeah.
- 7:42No it's it's beautiful but the way this movie crept up on me once i realized
- 7:47what was going on what what what the director was up to i was like because the
- 7:53like again i sent the the homage,
- 7:56that you present here is is a movie i enjoyed i saw it at the cinema and look
- 8:02like oliver stone once talked about cheese in movies there's good cheese and
- 8:06there's bad cheese but you you chose some really good cheese to, uh,
- 8:12to have a, to have a crack at.
- 8:15And the fact that you did it like note for note, I was waiting for it to like,
- 8:19veer off the track, pardon the pun, but I was waiting for it to veer off the tracks,
- 8:27but you stuck through right to the end, not missing a single beat as far as
- 8:33hitting all the, the notes, uh, that you were going for there.
- 8:38And man, some of the, like some of the lines, like when Ty slash Casey is saying
- 8:45to, uh, Darlene, sorry for that stuff up too, by the way, some of these things
- 8:50all start to blend together.
- 8:52You know, when you watch too many movies like me, but yeah, when he,
- 8:57when he says to her, you know, at the near the end where he says,
- 9:00oh damn, you look when I realized like he didn't have time to tell her about how her sister died.
- 9:06Like, you know, I want to tell you about my dead girlfriend,
- 9:09how your dead sister died.
- 9:11Like, I think he actually says that line. That's how he says it.
- 9:14He says, I'll get around to telling you how your dead sister died.
- 9:17And yeah, just, just great. And the fact that you, the fact that he,
- 9:23and then Ron Jeremy shows up.
- 9:27Right yeah talk about on
- 9:30talk about wrong jeremy's involvement in this man how did
- 9:33that happen oh well very tangential honestly
- 9:36we i i guess i i almost like you said don't want to spoil it but after we finished
- 9:42the first after we finished the first movie and and sold it signed it away to
- 9:46troma and by sell it i mean like for zero dollars and they informed us up top
- 9:51when we We were 21 years old that we'd never make any money on the movie.
- 9:56But, you know, for trauma, again, to distribute our college movie that we made
- 10:00for five grand or whatever, it was a big deal. Right.
- 10:03And so I remember the summer after we graduated, you know, we'd have TNT on or whatever.
- 10:09You know, it was the post-senior year, post-graduation summer in sleepy Athens, Ohio.
- 10:15And under siege two was on the
- 10:19tnt like 24 hours a day just like over
- 10:22and over and over right one of these 90s action sequels
- 10:25yeah and i remember seeing under siege two in
- 10:29a family van the bork family had invited me
- 10:32down after sixth grade for a trip to north carolina
- 10:36and we had a bunch of movies on
- 10:39vhs so we pop them in and so i first saw
- 10:42under siege two when i was 12 years old and that's in
- 10:44a van and even that i
- 10:48on this small tiny tv i was like this movie sucks
- 10:51and then when it came back after college after we had finished you know the
- 10:58first killer raccoon movie sure enough me and my friends again post-college
- 11:03probably a few more substances we're just watching you know hanging out and
- 11:07just watching under siege 2 like over and over every day.
- 11:11And I'm just like, Under Sage 2 is like your troll too.
- 11:14Very much. I mean, I would say it's even worse. It's even, you know, it was just something.
- 11:20And I remembered it from seeing it when I was 12.
- 11:24Me and my friends, shout out to my friends when we all, you know,
- 11:27some of my actors and some of my crew from the first movie, we were all watching it.
- 11:31And we were all just, we kind of had that same idea at the same time.
- 11:34It's like, if we ever make a sequel to this stupid ass killer raccoon movie,
- 11:40it should just be Under Siege 2. and the bad guys are raccoons and we replace
- 11:46the good guys with all of our characters.
- 11:48Like we mapped it all out way back in early 2000s,
- 11:52And then all went our separate ways after college. Troma released the movie
- 11:56and, you know, it never really made any money.
- 11:59But, you know, it kind of gained cult status in the Troma fan world.
- 12:03And it must have been like seven years later.
- 12:08Me and my college buddies got together in Chicago to shoot, I think it was a
- 12:12pilot that my friend was making for his graduate degree.
- 12:17And we all got together and they were like, so what are we making?
- 12:20What are we doing raccoons to?
- 12:21What are we doing that? I'm like, whoa, whoa, fellas, you don't want to do this.
- 12:25And they're like, yeah, we actually, it was such a fun idea.
- 12:29It was just going to be Under Siege 2, but with raccoons, right?
- 12:31And I was like, so we're in Chicago, and this must have been, like, 2013.
- 12:35And sure enough, we rent, or, you know, I think someone even had a VHS tape
- 12:40of it. Right. Under Siege 2, and we pop it in.
- 12:44And now we're adults, but we're still enjoying some substances.
- 12:47And we just are cracking jokes the entire movie, just like. And it all kind
- 12:52of came back to me of how it was supposed to work.
- 12:55So 2015, I had some time.
- 12:58I was living in New York in between getting a journalism degree and hustling freelance work.
- 13:04And I was just like, you know what? It's time to make this happen.
- 13:08And it was the dead of winter.
- 13:10And in New York, it's very cold. So I rented Under Siege 2 on streaming.
- 13:15And the script writing process was literally watching
- 13:19under siege to pausing writing the
- 13:22script with our characters and then hitting play again
- 13:25and then pause again and just it was just that play pause right play pause right
- 13:31and i got basically i i want to say a couple drafts done to copyright it in
- 13:372015 and then you know we had some crazy political stuff happen here in the
- 13:42States over the next few years.
- 13:45Yeah. But by 2017 with the script, basically, you know, the, the core of it was there.
- 13:52That's when my production company finally.
- 13:56Did enough branded content work and other things in
- 13:59new york that we had raised a chunk of
- 14:02money and i told all my business partners like hey
- 14:05nobody touched this because this is for killer
- 14:07records too if and when we can make it happen and 2017 was the year that we
- 14:13just i don't know you know how it is money it's lightning in a bottle when you
- 14:17make a movie yeah but we we in 2017 was when I went back to the script and we
- 14:23added diehard two and equally,
- 14:26some people say diehard two is good.
- 14:28I don't see it. I, you know, diehard.
- 14:31Yeah, nah, I've always had a problem. I always skip and just go to diehard with
- 14:34a vengeance, which I prefer. Yeah.
- 14:36Yeah. Diehard two, even though, even though, you know, the story behind that,
- 14:40that wasn't, that was originally never a diehard movie.
- 14:43They're just cross-section did it into a diehard movie, but yeah.
- 14:47Yeah. I do prefer that to Die Hard 2, which is, I'm not saying it's lame,
- 14:53but it's kind of like, it's not like Under Siege 2 is to Under Siege.
- 14:57It's not like Die Hard 2 is to Die Hard because Under Siege 2 kind of tries
- 15:03to hit all the same marks that Under Siege did, except instead of on a battleship, it's now on a train.
- 15:12In but it's essentially the plot of the first film rehashed yet again but now
- 15:17it's on a train whereas with diehard 2 it's not.
- 15:21It's not kind of the same plot as the, the Nakatomi building thing.
- 15:26Cause you've got the stuff going on the plane and you've got the Franco Nero
- 15:29thing, and then you've got the William Sadler thing.
- 15:34So it's multiple, there's multiple stuff going on as opposed to like,
- 15:38oh yeah, he's trapped in a building with a bunch of terrorists, you know? Right.
- 15:42Even though they do hit some of the same jokes, you know, like,
- 15:45you know, when it's a same fucking time of year, same fucking air shaft or whatever it is, you know?
- 15:51Yeah well in fact that's that's a line john mcclain
- 15:54says in diehard 2 that i lifted directly and put
- 15:57it into killer raccoons 2 is how can the same shit happen to the same guy twice
- 16:01yeah yeah yeah you know so diehard 2 was it added that christmas element before
- 16:07we were just going to do killer raccoons 2 as another summer movie right and
- 16:11then quickly after seeing diehard 2 i I was like, oh,
- 16:15this, we got to just, I just fused the two together.
- 16:19Took a few elements from Speed 2, which is also comically bad.
- 16:23But you're right. It was this thing in the 90s where they were like, the franchise works.
- 16:28And so the strategy is, let's just do the same thing again, but different.
- 16:33And that was kind of the idea. Obviously, in between our first movie and the
- 16:37second movie, it's completely different.
- 16:38But it's fun to, again, hit those notes of the, the, uh, the bad nineties action
- 16:45sequel as if, you know, he's fighting raccoons again.
- 16:49So here we go. And that's kind of. I had an interesting interview once with
- 16:54John Ottman, the composer slash editor who used to work a lot with Brian Singer.
- 16:59And he talked, when I was interviewing him, he was talking about a score,
- 17:03one of a score he was very proud of for a film he wrote that starred Jason Patrick.
- 17:08And in the film, he was playing a forger, like an art.
- 17:13Forger you know and he said
- 17:16man that movie was going to be so huge and it was really
- 17:18going to he thought propel jason patrick and
- 17:22he said but then speed two came out
- 17:24oh no speed two
- 17:28is i mean that will willem dafoe is
- 17:31good as the bad guy obviously who sleeps in
- 17:34the bath full of leeches yeah or whatever
- 17:37yeah that's their homage to sadler's character
- 17:40in diehard 2 where he's just doing yoga naked
- 17:44inexplicably at the at the beginning of the movie but yeah
- 17:48like i remember seeing speed 2 and just like
- 17:51wow jason patrick's hairline is so bad they just zoom
- 17:54in on him on every single a shot so but there's all those same elements you
- 18:00know like morris chestnuts the uh the black sidekick in under siege 2 um sandra
- 18:07bullock they have a black sidekick who works on the boat and speed to is just,
- 18:12I don't know what it was in the nineties and then computers.
- 18:16It was always like a Willem Dafoe had the computer programming for the cruise ship.
- 18:21There was always, yeah. There was always a guy who was like the evil hacker, part of the team.
- 18:26Yeah. Like even in, even in GoldenEye, like the, the, the first of the Pierce
- 18:30Brosnan Bonds, you had Alan Huming as the, the evil.
- 18:36Yeah. Well, even Dennis, you could say Dennis Nedry from, from the first Jurassic Park too.
- 18:43Right. Yeah. But there was an element. Seinfeld. yes
- 18:46of course i figured his name but you know who i'm talking about
- 18:49now yeah of course wayne knight he was wayne knight that's
- 18:52him yeah it is not the 90s for wayne knight were very good
- 18:55to him it's yeah yeah i don't know what he's doing
- 18:58now the the difference is like night and day thanks so
- 19:01much i also like him in that tim allen movie uh
- 19:04for richer or poorer where he's the dude who embezzles all that's
- 19:07money oh he plays like
- 19:10he's he plays his financial advisor or something it's yeah
- 19:13yeah but but to
- 19:16your point like yeah the 90s they especially in sequels
- 19:19they were just like boy computers can really disrupt a lot of stuff so the guy
- 19:23who knows the computer and that's the thing with under siege too it's eric bogosian
- 19:27yes to this day because my name's travis and i remember seeing the movie when
- 19:32i was 12 and be like the bad guy's name is travis which is still so funny because he is.
- 19:38Again, they got to build them up. He has no link to the first movie.
- 19:42And that's where we thought, you know, in our movie, we're actually making Under
- 19:45Siege 2 better because we're actually building on stuff that happens in the
- 19:49first movie. There's a connection.
- 19:50Yeah, exactly. I love how all the evil dudes in your movie have eye patches too.
- 19:55Yeah, that was the thing we definitely came up with on substances,
- 19:59either in college or as adults.
- 20:01No, I love it. I'm still hoping to write a film or work on a film where one
- 20:05of the characters has an eye patch.
- 20:07It's a it's a thing or make all of them have eye patches yeah why not and what's
- 20:12fun is when they all weren't in the same shot together i think we only had like
- 20:16two or three eye patches so we never really you know that we just i'm sorry
- 20:20you're gonna have to share an eye patch yeah i mean it was a low budget movie you know yeah so.
- 20:26What do you want? Your own eye patch? Are you kidding? No, can't do that here.
- 20:31You'll be sharing with, uh, with the, but we have a buddy system here.
- 20:36When he's not on camera, he's got that. Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah.
- 20:41Same with the little guns that the raccoons had.
- 20:43Um, and for, by the way, for people who can't tell, those are dead frozen raccoons in the movie.
- 20:49And the reason we do that is because dead frozen raccoons,
- 20:52especially in the state of ohio where i'm from uh are zero dollars because um
- 20:58pest control companies have to capture the raccoon and then kill it legally
- 21:02because it's a pest yeah they don't just release it back to the wild somewhere
- 21:06else they have to gas it freeze it and throw it away to kill all the diseases,
- 21:10and this was the trick we learned on the first movie when we were in college
- 21:13because we were going to taxidermy them and every time i read a review you know
- 21:18letterboxd or whatever somebody's like, oh, they're taxidermy raccoons.
- 21:21Nah, taxidermy raccoons would be like $600 a pop.
- 21:25And we don't have that kind of money. But in the biology community,
- 21:29raccoons are very famous for playing pranks on each other.
- 21:33Biologists will use dead frozen raccoons to play pranks on each other because
- 21:37you get a dead frozen raccoon, they're usually like curled up in a ball because
- 21:41they've been gassed and, you know, killed that way.
- 21:44But they're very malleable if you thaw them out and You can put them in fun
- 21:47positions and then refreeze them.
- 21:50And then they stay like that, you know, until they start to thaw out again.
- 21:55So the first movie, again, we shot in the summer in the early 2000s.
- 21:59And those raccoons, by the end of the shoot, would get quite droopy.
- 22:03And I'm happy to report that for Killer Raccoons 2, because we shot it around Christmas time.
- 22:09Those raccoons would stay frozen the whole time, holding their little guns.
- 22:12And then we put them back in their freezer to work another day.
- 22:15We called the freezer their green room and I'm told they were very happy with it.
- 22:21Awesome. That's,
- 22:23You learn something new every day. Frozen raccoons. No money.
- 22:27So if you're really, really, if you're really, really hungry, can you eat them?
- 22:32I would not recommend it. First of all, as it's evolved as raccoons have been, I'll never eat.
- 22:38Yeah. I'll never eat raccoon. I'll never turn on my own kind is how I feel about
- 22:43it. Right. Yeah. But apparently because.
- 22:45But if I'm in a plane crash in the Andes and there's only like frozen raccoons
- 22:49and, you know. They are. Yes, they are.
- 22:53Edible it's just like any raccoon they
- 22:56are what they or like any animal they are what they eat and
- 22:59raccoons eat garbage and so raccoon meat is
- 23:03known to be very stringy and
- 23:06greasy and oily and there is so weird you know when raccoons are in the news
- 23:12people send me articles all the time there is a place in ohio in my home state
- 23:16where they've had a raccoon dinner an annual raccoon dinner every year for almost
- 23:21a hundred years, like since the 1920s.
- 23:24And because the raccoon meat's so greasy and oily and stringy,
- 23:28it's apparently really good for chili.
- 23:30So that would be, if you're in the Andes and you got dead frozen raccoons and
- 23:35you got to eat, make it into chili. Instead of people. Don't try to eat it.
- 23:41Yeah. Oh, please. Well, you know, that's a different movie entirely.
- 23:45Yeah. Yeah, but another, speaking about, since we're on the subject of homage,
- 23:51is the spacecraft, you know, with the ray gun on it, is that Austin Powers inspired,
- 23:58the fact it looks like a Woody Harrelson? Yeah.
- 24:01Oh, sure. Sure. Yeah. What was Austin powers too? I think that was our nod to Austin powers too.
- 24:07I forget when they had that satellite, but no, I mean, that was kind of a dumb
- 24:11joke for, from under siege too, that I think I had that joke when I was 12,
- 24:16you know, my brain was immediately like, I forget what they call it.
- 24:20You know yeah well we call it the
- 24:23pen 15 yeah and now you know since penis yeah
- 24:27exactly so you know
- 24:29and we but we call it the pen 15 the whole time and we only call it the pen
- 24:3315 yeah no it's good it's good you know that's that's what that's what like
- 24:36what that's what people don't realize that's what make these things work is
- 24:39like the more serious the characters play it that's what where you get that
- 24:43unintentional comedy from like people people think like it's just comedy but.
- 24:49Unintentionally funny is pretty tough to do and it
- 24:52usually relies on the actors playing it like dead
- 24:56serious like this is real they're right they're in
- 24:58it you know because yeah well that's where
- 25:02you'll get the laughs from is the fact that they're so serious yeah
- 25:06and that's why you mentioned it earlier but
- 25:09that's why we always our hero we always call his
- 25:12first love interest that girl's dead sister
- 25:15he always refers to her as the dead girl i lost
- 25:18my virginia yeah my dead girl your dead sister i'll tell
- 25:21you how your dead sister died and that's we just that was
- 25:25kind of born on set and then we kind of just like
- 25:27made sure it was like okay every time you mention her you have to mention she's
- 25:31dead yeah you gotta yeah part of her pronouns at this point yeah no it's it's
- 25:37it is it is important that that there is this sincerity there because like even
- 25:43in under siege too, like Eric Boghossian is a great actor.
- 25:46He's fantastic. Great actor. And he's playing that scenery chewing...
- 25:52To the hilt, like balls deep. He's, you know, like even at the end,
- 25:58like, I love the fact that even, you know, that bit at the end where he like
- 26:00jumps right back, right back,
- 26:04you know, right before he like, you know, falls into the explosion,
- 26:08but an Everett McGill, let's not forget the mighty Everett McGill.
- 26:14The heavy. Yeah. Yeah.
- 26:16Pying that to perfection. I love that bit where she, where, uh,
- 26:20Catherine Heigl maces him.
- 26:22And he like just goes, oh, and then he takes it off and goes, pepper spray, you know.
- 26:29Cause he's so hardcore. He can just like, you know, he drinks mace for breakfast.
- 26:35Right. Yeah. Well, and like you said, under siege too.
- 26:38Yeah. It, it, it started Catherine Heigl's career.
- 26:41It started Morris Chestnut's career and it ended Eric Bogosian's career. He still does TV.
- 26:48In fact, I do want to tell a quick story. And he was really good in uncut gems as well.
- 26:52Yeah oh yeah i deep down
- 26:55i wish i could have gotten eric bogosian that would have
- 26:58been fantastic to play to play ron jeremy's role ron
- 27:01jeremy unfortunately was the only one he is ron has done trauma movies before
- 27:07he's actually in trey parker and matt stone's yes second movie um orgasmo orgasmo
- 27:14that's right yeah as jizz master zero and he yeah he was the only guy who would do it for $500.
- 27:21And, you know, and then like literally right after we shot with him,
- 27:24that's when he, he got charged with all kinds of terrible things.
- 27:27So we're not condoning anything he's accused of doing, but I do know for a fact
- 27:32that this is going to be his last movie because we couldn't take him out.
- 27:36We didn't have money to take him out.
- 27:37And then our distributor was like, you know, I remember saying to our distributor,
- 27:41like, Hey, we can reshoot that stuff or whatever you guys want to do.
- 27:44And they're like, Oh, when he dies in prison, this is the last movie he's ever
- 27:48going to make, which makes it even weirder and cultier and, and all that stuff.
- 27:53You know, I look at how people are just now waking up to the fact that he's
- 27:56in Ghostbusters, like in the background.
- 27:58Yeah, exactly. So. He did a lot. Did you ever read his book?
- 28:01He wrote a book a ways back called the hardest working man in show business.
- 28:06Yes, I heard of it. I had not read it. Yeah, but man, he did everything.
- 28:10He would go to the opening of an envelope, that dude.
- 28:14He wanted to be an actor so bad, regardless of what he's done and how it's all ended up.
- 28:22Man, he did work hard. Look, he turned up for anything.
- 28:26That's why he's in Ghostbusters in the background.
- 28:30You see him pop up randomly in films like Boondock Saints.
- 28:36Right. You know, it's like, hey, that's what you do.
- 28:40And again, it's just, you know, like you said, we're a small,
- 28:44low-budget movie, and the best we can hope for is to be a cult Christmas classic over the years.
- 28:50And this, just him being in that movie, and it's going to be his last movie
- 28:54ever, it just adds that weird extra cult layer on top of the whole thing.
- 28:59But I did want to- What's kind of poetic about this, though,
- 29:02sorry for cutting you off again, what's kind of poetic about this though is,
- 29:05is this film could be like, it could become the under siege too, for like someone else.
- 29:12But one day your kids are going to be like you went like you,
- 29:15when you were watching under siege too, they're going to be watching killer raccoons too.
- 29:18And then one day want to make a film that homage is.
- 29:23Killer raccoons to yeah thinking that
- 29:27they're only homaging raccoons to not knowing that
- 29:30they're also homaging under siege to well especially
- 29:34with tubi gen z and gen alpha they are
- 29:37discovering killer raccoons too and and so
- 29:40that's what's nice about you know when the movie's on tubi and
- 29:42people can watch it with ads for free it really
- 29:45you know we our letterbox reviews exploded you
- 29:50know in number and well it's it's kind of like you
- 29:52pointed out people either love it or they hate it it's
- 29:55all five star reviews or one star reviews and there's no
- 29:58in between it's a it's a very divisive film oh
- 30:01well you know what we live in divisive times we
- 30:04definitely here in this we do don't we there's like two sides
- 30:07and no in between but yeah which is sad that's no way to make a sandwich you
- 30:14need stuff in the middle otherwise just two slices of bread and that's kind
- 30:18of boring yeah but there's nothing boring ladies and gentlemen about killer
- 30:23raccoons to dark Christmas in the dark.
- 30:27I love how, yeah, you even got the dark territory in there with the dark Christmas.
- 30:32You got it all in there. You did the whole nine yards. This is a love letter.
- 30:36Or as I said in my, my review, a Valentine.
- 30:41Hey, there we go. That'll be a good holiday for the third one.
- 30:45It's Valentine's day. A Valentine to Halloween.
- 30:48What some might say a, a very crappy sequel, but look, one man's garbage is
- 30:55another man's Greek yogurt. I don't know.
- 30:59That's the, that's the raccoon rule. One man's garbage is another raccoon's
- 31:04dinner. So thank you. There you go. There you go.
- 31:06So yeah, before we get too far off the rails, mate, tell our,
- 31:11our wonderful listening audience the best place to get their killer raccoons on.
- 31:18Well, here in the States, it's on TubeBee. It is available this year in Great Britain and Australia.
- 31:25Cool. The nice thing is you type in Killer Raccoons into your streaming device,
- 31:30and it will be the only movie that pops up.
- 31:33Yeah. So YouTube, it's for sale.
- 31:36Amazon Prime, it's for sale. Cool.
- 31:39We've found it everywhere. Going physical?
- 31:43What's that? Are you going for a physical, Blu-ray, DVD, anything like that?
- 31:48DVDs are available from our distributor, Indican Pictures.
- 31:51So if you go to their website, indicanpictures.com, we are in the,
- 31:56I believe, older releases.
- 31:58They move us around on their website accordingly, but we will be there.
- 32:02We are a very findable movie, I will say. Awesome.
- 32:06We'll put all those links in the description. Travis, God bless you. Thank you so much.
- 32:12I really love this movie. I like Under Siege 2.
- 32:17I, I love the fact that the poster had him in his whites, like in his dress
- 32:22whites, and he doesn't get into them until that last shot, standing at the brother's grave. Yeah.
- 32:28But there was no mention of a brother in under siege.
- 32:31And now all of a sudden he's got a brother who's dead and he's got to go home
- 32:35for the funeral with his niece who doesn't like him.
- 32:39Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
- 32:42Yeah i know they couldn't even yeah don't get me started there's there's no
- 32:47crossover between under siege one and under siege two yeah step stephen seagal
- 32:51and that's it yeah and i mean they couldn't bring back tommy lee jones because
- 32:55he got stabbed in the face.
- 32:58But you know maybe they should have maybe let's see they never they never they
- 33:02never think like that far or they never used to think that far ahead you know
- 33:06like what happened with right And Highlander two, um,
- 33:11you know, it's just like, if you, you, if you close off the ending and it's
- 33:14an, it's ended, um, you know, well, that's the end. Like, it's okay.
- 33:20You bring the character back.
- 33:22But, you know, as you said, it was a trend back in the 90s to just do the first
- 33:27film again. But, oh, this time it's on a boat instead of a bus.
- 33:33Right. Right. It's on a train instead of a boat. Yeah, there you go.
- 33:39Now it's on a bus instead of a train. Yeah.
- 33:43Or it's in outer space instead of the old west.
- 33:46But. That'll be the third one. We, we. Oh, yes.
- 33:50Do like Tremors. Was it Tremors 4? Yeah, I think it was Tremors 4.
- 33:54Yeah, or one of the leper. Five, it
- 33:55went back to like, it's called Back to Perfection or something like that.
- 34:00Yes, yes. Yeah, we would just be moon base on the moon and it'd be Aliens 3
- 34:07and a couple other things. Awesome.
- 34:09Where we're going, we don't need raccoons. Exactly.
- 34:14Mate, it's been fantastic to talk to you. I wish you all the best with your future productions.
- 34:18Thank you. Thank you. Making this movie and thank you for being on Cinema Yugen.
- 34:21Thank you so much yes killer raccoons
- 34:25to dark christmas in the dark travis
- 34:28vine this is such a splendid splendid
- 34:32movie folks if you didn't listen to this and want to go out and see this picture
- 34:37well i don't know christmas is coming and this this is technically a christmas
- 34:43movie and I think the burgeoning of a cult Christmas classic.
- 34:48Killer Raccoons 2 Dark Christmas in the Dark.
- 34:52Travis Irvine. What a legend. Check the links in the description.
- 34:58And as always, my little Eugenites, thank you for listening to us on Spotify
- 35:04or wherever you choose to listen to your favorite podcasts. I'm Kent Hill.
- 35:08And until next time, you've been listening to Cinema.
- 35:12You are okay.