Assmonster is a story about a guy who decides to make his own horror movie. He was inspired by a hack who sells low quality shot-on-video DVD-r's at horror conventions. If that guy can sell such crap then anybody can. It turns out, however, that although it looks really easy to make a bad movie, it's actually much harder than expected.
Assmonster first screened at Cinema Wasteland in Ohio (www.cinemawasteland.com) to an amused crowd. A few months later, Assmonster was selected for the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal (www.fantasiafestival.com). During that period, major press took notice of the movie's merits, and very flattering reviews by esteemed critics like Jeremy Knox from Film Threat (www.filmthreat.com) and Stuart Andrews from Rue Morgue (www.rue-morgue.com). Following that success, Assmonster was selected for the Hollywood Film Festival and played on a Saturday night, during a prime time hour - 9pm - on October 20, 2007 (www.hollywoodawards.com). Assmonster also played at the Rock and Shock (www.rockandshock.com). Several film festivals have invited Bill Zebub to present Assmonster in 2008.
Assmonster is the most accessible of the Bill Zebub movies. The plot is rather straighforward and the humor is easily understood.
The focus of the humor is based on situations that can occur on any film set, whether it's an actress who is totally out of her mind or a stage hand who has no idea what he's doing. Bill Zebub explains, "I wanted to take sort of a slapstick approach, and to make the viewer sort of like a witness to a sudden escalation. What I mean is, if you are walking home and you suddenly hear two people arguing, you may find the situation hilarious even though the people who are arguing are not having fun at all. I was careful to write scenes that were funny, not frustrating. There are a lot of disasters that have too much tension in them to be funny. So out of hundreds of ideas, I could only use a few because I didn't want the viewer to experience the frustration of the characters. I only wanted to the viewer to enjoy the hilarity."
"I also wanted to play around with some character development. Sure, the movie is mainly about a guy who tries to make his own movie, but every character has some other things going on, mentally. I am pretty sure that this is one of the reasons why the movie got so much critical acclaim."
"There are so many things that have happened which would have been perfect, but it would have made the movie too focused on the physical humor. I might want to re-visit this theme in the physical-somedy style. One recent funny thing that happened was that I tried to take the boom pole away from the microphone guy, and when we struggled, an actress who was lying on a bed got hit in the face with the mike. Another real-life scene was during the filming of Jesus Christ: Serial Rapist. An actress was tied to a coffee table, spread eagle, and I had to move the tripod. I was exhausted and didn't feel like collapsing the tripod before transporting it to another area of the room. Well, one of the legs of the tripod went into a very bad place. There are tons of things like this that happen all the time. Like I said, this would be perfect for a physical-comedy later on. I kept stuff like that out of Assmonster because I wanted it to be story-oriented."
A problem in the marketing of Assmonster was that the DVD cover looks too sexploitational for comedy fans. Future DVD's will have a new cover that reflects the nature of the movie a little better. The idea behind the cover looking so softcore is because that's the kind of movie that the main character was trying to make - so it is a sort of mockery of him. Well, the cover of a DVD is not the best place for an inside-joke.
In addition to the re-design of the cover, Bill Zebub is making an alternate edit and will call that version "B-Movie: The Comedy of Horror" and it should be out by February 2008. It will feature a lot of unseen footage, a different soundtrack, and never-beofer-seen out-takes, among other goodies. The retail price is expected to be $9.99