The Troma panel at Comic-Con gets smaller every year, but the sense that you’re at a really fucked up family reunion never dissipates. “What I find is amazing about Lloyd, is that everybody is connected to him in some fashion,” said panelist Steven Paul at yesterday’s session. He gestured at the room––the smallest I entered all weekend. “I bet everyone here has acted in a Lloyd Kaufman film.”
Not quite, but part of the reason to show up to this thing every year is to see which disparate characters Lloyd will rope into making an appearance. This year, there wasn’t a guest more unexpected than Paul, a producer on Ghost Rider, the visual effects producer on Karate Dog (!!!), and the man responsible for a number of upcoming “is that really necessary?” video game adaptations, including Castlevania and Tekken. What, exactly, was this guy doing on what Kaufman himself billed as “a panel of independent thinkers?” “I at one time was Steven’s teacher,” Kaufman boasted. “So there’s a little bit of Troma in the mainstream world!”
Maybe more than a little bit. Seated on the far end of the table was Mark Neveldine, co-writer/director of the budding Jason Statham franchise, Crank. “You’ll have to excuse me, because this is the first panel I’ve been sober for,” Neveldine cracked with pitch perfect post-frat bravado––now that nerds are inheriting the earth, an awful lot of them look and sound suspiciously like recurring characters on Entourage. What’s this guy’s connection to Kaufman? He’s apparently Troma’s most dedicated plagiarist.
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God, I love Lloyd Kaufman. The Troma figurehead was frustrated that the Tribeca Film Festival’s takeover of the Village East Cinema prevented the theater from being able to show trailers or post posters for Troma’s Poultrygeist</em> for two weeks before the film was set to open there. So he dressed up like a chicken and protested in front of the theater on the final weekend of the festival. According to the New York Post’s Page Six, Poultrygeist’s opening night at the Village East is now sold out. In the Page Six story, Kaufman complains that the “Tri-beak-a Film Festival” has never screened a Troma film, and there are probably a lot of reasonable reasons for that, but the fact remains that as an extremely corporate event blocking a local, truly independent filmmaker from promoting his upcoming release in the usual ways, they’re sort of asking for it.
Story via Indie Eye; the above photo via EssG on Flickr.
