Starlet Showcase

Here is a great blog that explores the many starlets in cinema.

SEATTLE TRUE INDEPENDENT FILM FEST

Bikini goes to Seattle on June 9th & 11th.

"Best of Faux" audience award winner

We just got back from 6th Annual Faux Film Festival where we won a "Best of Faux" audience award. It was a great time. We met some great filmmakers and made some new fans. Portland was very wet and cold but it did not stop us from exploring as much of the city as we had time for.  Our next festival stop will be THE SEATTLE TRUE INDEPENDENT FILM FESTIVAL in June.

Portland's Hollywood Theater (built in 1926)

BIKINI GOES TO PORTLAND

Bikini will play opening night of the FAUX FILM FESTIVAL 

which opens Friday April 2nd. Our film will play in the historic 
475 seat Hollywood Theatre.

DECAPITATION

KNB EFX built a head of one of our actors (Dean Lemont) and helped us create the decapitation sequence for the movie. We shot it a few times with and without blood. It was great fun preparing for the shoot and we were very excited by the results.


A magnetic seal holds the head in place and we use the whip to pull the head free.

Ordinary Girls

music by CHEAP PERFUME.

WEST COAST PREMIERE

We had a great turnout for the midnight screenings. The audience had a great time. Seeing it with a large group of people is pure joy for us. Some people have seen it more than once and it is great when they shout out favorite lines. Beautiful waves of laughter and chuckles all throughout the movie. Plus, we just signed the long form contract with our sales agent so this weekend was a real celebration.

Scream of the Bikini LA Screening

Posted by: TheDude  MOVIES ONLINE

Greetings gang. Sorry for the geographically localized post, but I wanted to let viewers in the greater Los Angeles area know of a few screenings of this ridiculous-hilarious-sexy-crazy movie I saw called Scream of the Bikini that will be playing in town this weekend!

A lost classic from South American director Fernando Fernandez, Scream of the Bikini is an action spy thriller thought lost to the ages in the 1960s, recently discovered, then translated into English by Germans where something obviously got lost in the translation. (Sort of like what they did with the Metropolis restoration, but with more bikinis and sexy intrigue). The film focuses on the adventures of supermodels by day/sexy secret agents by night Jasmine Orosco and Paola Apanapel who engage in intrigue, espionage, adventure, excitement, vespas, and pillow fights! Pajama-clad pillow fights! Between two gorgeous girls!

I feel the need to repeat the Hot Lady Pillow Fight Action, as that's pretty much all I ever want out of a movie.

Scream of the Bikini is winner of Best Comedy at the ThrillSpy International Film Festival AND 3 Maverick Movie Awards including Best Director. Scream of the Bikini is a hilarious bastard offspring of Barberella, Modesty Blaise, James Bond, and What's Up Tiger Lily.

The movie will be showing this Friday and Saturday, February 19th and 20th at the Laemmle Sunset 5 at midnight! It's a great flick to see with an audience (and with a little buzz, so feel free to have a cocktail beforehand). So if you're around and want to see the aforementioned hot chicks with pillows and vespas, please check it out and help support some indie cinema!

J.B. reviews Bikini

Midnight Movie: Scream of the Bikini

http://jbspins.blogspot.com/

The mid 1960’s were a golden age for Columbian-German co-productions, but the magnum opus of Fernando Fernandez, the era’s visionary auteur, remained lost to posterity until director Kiff Scholl discovered a rare surviving print. Yeah, right. It is a good back story though. For those familiar with the groovy multinational spy films of the 1960’s, Scholl’sScream of the Bikini (trailer here) is a knowingly affectionate send-up, which is booked for special midnight (technically 11:55) screenings at the Laemmle Sunset 5 in West Hollywood this Friday and Saturday.

Bridgit and Sophia are supermodels by day and superspy-bounty hunters by night (or perhaps vice versa). They have just averted a terrorist attack on an airliner, but Sophia broke a heel in the process. At least they beat their tuxedo-clad rival Humberto to the kill (and the twenty grand). However, the dead man will keep popping up, looking for a microchip or something. Needless to say, Bikini is hardly the sort of film to get hung up on plot, though there is plenty of it, including mysterious death cults, mind-controlling accessories, and plenty of suggestive flirtation. Rather, it is style all the way for its glamorous protagonists.

Eurospy enthusiasts will appreciate Bikini’s vibe, faultlessly recreating the retro color palette and weirdly disembodied dialogue that marked the swinging sixties cult film subgenre. Bikini also features a surprisingly catchy soundtrack that is true to the period and frankly much better than it has to be. And you have to love a trippy musical interlude that includes mimes at play in an open field, right?

It seems like the entire cast also doubled as producers of Bikini, suggesting the film started as an idea concocted by a group of friends over drinks. However, as Latin American actresses Jasmine Orozco and Paola Apanapal playing Bridgit and Sophia, Kelsey Weeden and Rebecca Larsen actually pull off a nice acting feat, keeping their characters cute and likable despite their self-centered cluelessness. Co-producer, editor, and cinematographer Darrett Sanders exudes the perfect hammy flair as Gregorio Peck as man-of-the-world Humberto, while nicely deadpanning some of the film’s funniest lines. Bikini also won the Maverick Movie Awards’ “The Precious” prize for random hilarity in recognition of Walter “Ensign Chekhov” Koenig’s non sequitur cameo, and rightly so.

Saucy yet sweet-tempered (just like its heroines), Bikini is a lot of fun. Deliberately cheesy, but not annoyingly so, it is perfectly suited for midnight screenings at festivals, art-houses, and college campuses. Recommended for MST3K fans (think of the bots skewering Neil Connery in the knock-off Operation Double 007), it plays at the Laemmle Sunset 5 this Friday (2/19) and Saturday (2/20).

FILM JUNK

Lot of chatter on the web regarding our movie.
Here is another post regarding the trailer.
http://www.filmjunk.com/2010/02/16/scream-of-the-bikini-trailer-another-retro-spoof/

With Black Dynamite hitting stores today, here’s a heads up on a potential distant cousin, just in case you’re in need of a second movie for a double bill. Scream of the Bikini is a similar parody of cult cinema, also trying to pass itself off as the genuine article, but instead of tackling ’70s blaxploitation it pays tribute to ’60s spy movies. It claims to be a poorly dubbed, long lost film from acclaimed South American director Fernando Fernandez, but it’s actually the directorial debut of a guy named Kiff Scholl.

I haven’t heard anything else about the movie, but apparently it played in some festivals and will get a limited theatrical run in Los Angeles this weekend. To be honest, the trailer looks a bit iffy, and nowhere near as good as Black Dynamite although I’d still be willing to give it a chance. It’s a bit of a reminder that these kinds of parodies are not necessarily as easy to pull off as they might seem. For every Black Dynamite out there, there’s also a Lost Skeleton of Cadavra to go with it. Check out the trailer for Scream of the Bikini after the jump and see what you think. For more info visit the official website.

Bikini in French online magazine

English translation

What a strange project this "scream of the bikini" supposedly "suggested by Bogota's chamber of commerce". The movie is presented as an action and spy story made in the 60s in Latin America. In this movie, the audience is invited to follow Bridget and Sophia on different adventures. Bridget and Sophia, two top models, are also bounty hunters and embody the last hopes of humanity against the plot of a madman hungry for world power. Interesting, isn't it? Except that the movie is recent, finished last year by a so-called Kiff Scholl, who appeared on the series called TVReno 911. Cheaper than our typical French series, this parody faithful to the spy movies of the 60s will in all likelihood give us a OSS 117 feeling.

Bikini on IFC Spring Indie Film Preview

Feels So Good

Oh Yeah?

ONE WEEK FROM TONIGHT

web chatter

These quotes were pulled from people talking about our movie online. The responses came from seeing the trailer. Funny stuff.

Hilarious. I love these things. Hopefully it gets enough attention that they will make a whole film like that. (I really want to see Gregorio Peck in action.)

“I don’t understand what Scream of the Bikini is, but it has bad lip dub and appears to be a period parody. It has instant camp classic written all over it. Or I’m missing the point entirely. It wouldn’t be the first time. I’m sure you’ll tell me if I’m an idiot.”

“I love when the title of a movie is so awful, that you know it is going to be be bad. Then when you see the trailer for said movie title,you can confirm what you were thinking! So what is the today’s movie title and trailer that is living up to what I was saying? SCREAM OF THE BIKINI!!! Seriously how awesomely bad does that movie look? It looks so bad, you know it has to be good!”

“And now, a propos of nothing, here's the trailer for a movie called (and I swear to God, this is true,) Scream of the Bikini. Good job, Hollywood. (Seriously? OMG!) ...”

“Guns, international intrigue, and women in skimpy bikinis — all of these saucy elements are very necessary for an entertaining throwback to the cornball action films from the 60’s. Fernando Fernandez’s ambitious 2009 endeavor “Scream of the Bikini” certainly looks the part, though to be fair, replicating the look and feel of the campy pictures produced during this era is becoming easier and easier by the day. However, the trailer below promises plenty of tongue-in-cheek action, complete with martial arts, impossibly silly gunplay, and pillow fights. After all, you can’t have a proper retro action movie without an erotic pillow fight or two. I’m pretty sure it’s a requirement upheld by a court of law.”

http://www.beyondhollywood.com/kitschy-new-trailer-for-fernando-fernandezs-scream-of-the-bikini/

"to the scooter."

In Bikini the girls go from one escapade to another on their trusty scooter. We decided early on that we wanted to shoot these sequences with rear projection. This would give us the look we wanted plus it is almost impossible to shoot driving sequences without shutting down roads. It was hard enough getting the projected footage in long takes. A trash bin, road sign, or modern car would eventually appear. We actually decided to keep the jump cuts that appear in the rear projection footage. It is funny to see the background completely change while the girls are talking. In this clip you can hear the director feeding the girls the lines. We did this a lot. Since we were not going to use the location sound it was possible to feed lines while taping. This was a pain in the editing room. Our first rough cut had the actor speaking as well as the voice of the person feeding the lines. Fortunately the actors did memorize most of their lines. I was the worst offender. Since I was shooting the movie I did not make time to memorize my lines. This would not work well on another type of film, but with Bikini it helped the style.

Bikini YAHOO!

Our trailer was posted on Yahoo Movies. It was very exciting for us to share web estate with studio films. What was even more exciting was to watch our trailer views far surpass the other trailers on the site.

Here is a snapshot of the count.

Here is a comparison of other trailers posted at the same time.

Bikini is receiving more views than films that have been on the site
for 30 days. And this is just day 2 for us.

BIKINI FOLEY

Creating the soundscape for a feature length film is very time consuming but we had so much fun doing it. We did not always get it right. There were times we thought we had the perfect object to make a sound and it would sound terrible. We did the foley for the entire movie. Some of the sounds came from sound effects libraries but much of it was done by the three of us over many days in the studio. Kiff actually did most of the walking sounds for the girls in the film.

Bikini Dubbing Sessions

We decided early on to dub the entire film like the eurospy films we were imitating. We recorded sound through the camera microphone to use for the initial edit, but once our rough cut was finished we brought all the actors back into the studio to dub their lines. We also did all the foley in the film. It was great fun creating the soundscape for the movie. In this session Kelsey Wedeen, Jamie Andrews, Jonathan Klein, and Bryan Krasner dub lines for their characters. Kiff Scholl directed the actors to dub their lines differently than on set. The idea was that the actor in the studio was hired to dub the voice of the actor on the screen. This made many of the performances quite different than how they were recorded on set. Sometimes different accents or emotions were added to create a different quality. This was my first adventure in dubbing and foley. It was a data management challenge to be in charge of both sound and video for the project. Not only a huge learning experience but lots of laughs.

Mini Bikini's

Palm Springs

The Palm Springs location was one we loved to visit. We would shoot for many hours and then lounge by the pool during our down time.  The girls house was one of two Palm Springs locations. The pool party sequence was also filmed in Palm Springs but at another house.

This picture was taken during the very first Palm Springs shoot. The script was only partially written at this time. The first scenes we shot were actually captured on the Canon XL1. Later we changed to the Canon XH-A1.

This picture was taken during our final weekend in Palm Springs.  Rebecca is giving our gaffer, Nic Trikonis, a massage while Kiff and I talk about the next set-up.

Bikini Effects

We were very fortunate to have the help of KNB EFX GROUP and FXPerts for the warehouse section of our movie.   


KNB EFX have worked on many big budget films like 
Transformers, Grindhouse, Casino Royale and Drag Me to Hell. When our writers wrote in a decapitation scene we never expected it to stay. How were we going to do a decapitation? But again the gods decided to work things out for us. KNB EFX GROUP came to the rescue and provided us with a head mold of one of our actors plus made themselves available for the day of the shoot to rig up the head.

FXPerts made our shootout sequence more realistic by using spark and dust pellet guns.  It was actually a bit scary to have them shooting at us while we played out the scene. The sparks would fire up on the walls and floor around us. Many dust pellets hit us on the ricochet. It did not hurt but it sure made it more lively.

When it came time to deal with the acid burning effect, FXPerts John Fraizer took us upstairs and showed off a mini smoke machine we could put inside an actors costume. It really made all the difference in bringing the sequence alive. 

THE GIRLS OF BIKINI

agents for S.I.A.D.
photos by Nelson Blanton

  

WHAT IS EUROSPY?

EUROSPY?

The term "Eurospy" is not widely known. It describes spy films made in Europe in the 1960s. This was the golden age of the spy film, social conditions being just right for the fine tuning of the genre. The cold war, sexual liberation, pop art, nuclear paranoia, co-production tax breaks and musical revolution were the ingredients for the cocktail.

In the mid 1960s, Europe was at the centre of a global explosion in spy film production. Between1964 and 1969, 371 spy films were made in Western Europe alone. Such was the scale of output that viewers only saw a handful of this "spy - wave". Competition was fierce with many titles only playing in the territories that financed them.

The craze was exhausted by the end of the decade. Such had been the volume of genre product that some of the more wildly experimental titles such as "L'Inconnue de Shandigor", "Hypnos - Follia di un Massacro" and "Da Istanbul Ordine di Uccidere" disappeared after their initial outing and haven't been seen since.

James Bond 007, whilst being pivotal to the genre, has cast an obscuring shadow across Eurospy for fifty years, especially at home. The numerous Eurospy titles Britain produced are now as obscure as their continental counterparts.

Britain participated very little in European co-productions. Only a handful of dubbed foreign spy films were distributed in the UK; a fraction of the number America bought for drive-ins and TV. The majority of continental Eurospy titles have never been released in the UK in any form.

The American cult cinema enthusiasts who coined the phrase "Eurospy" identified the films by their "European-ness". The iconography of France, Italy, Spain, West Germany and the UK is fore-grounded in the films by narrative motifs, European actors and geographical locations. (Depicting identifiable national icons was often a pre-requisite in obtaining subsidies for films made under EEC co-production agreements.) As such these films exhibit a tangible and cohesive European flavour.

A long standing critical and theoretical rebuff has kept the Eurospy genre in the shadows. The films have long been perceived as being repetitive, poorly dubbed, cheap and nasty. These are complex cultural artefacts. Women are presented as both victims and as emancipated equals in the spy game. Both men and women are depicted as sex objects. The gun is ever present. Conspicuous consumption and moral ambiguity rage throughout. It's probably a lot easier to just not go there.


link: http://www.squidoo.com/pinkcat

Wonderful link with Eurospy posters

http://www.davidjdeal.com/eurospy.htm

Bikini Drinking Game

Throw a Bikini House Party and play the SCREAM OF THE BIKINI drinking game.

GETTING READY FOR THE LAEMMLE SCREENING

We went down to the Laemmle Sunset 5 this weekend to run a projection test of Bikini. Rick Pollard the head projectionist helped us a great deal. We were trying to figure out the best way to screen the film. Should we do Digibeta or Blu-Ray? We know for sure we did not want to screen with a DVD because the compression decreases too much of the image quality for projection in a larger space. We also did not want to spend $500 on a transfer to tape or disc.  Rick told me about the Western Digital HD Media Player that connects to a USB drive. It has HDMI out which allows you to connect to a projector.  I was very excited by this. This would allow us to play the movie file from a portable hard drive and keep the visual quality. My first choice was H.264 compression which got the 23GB file down to 10GB. That is twice as good as DVD compression but I still was not happy. I wanted Blu-Ray quality for our compression. After many failed attempts I chose MPEG2 compression with a minimum data rate of 28bits. This got our file down to 17GB and looks great. Now we have a portable projection format for around $200. Rick even asked me for my compression specs. He said it looked better than the other projects that he has seen projected this way. One more thing I have learned in bringing Bikini to the screen.

Bikini goes to Portland, OR

Bikini is one of three features to be accepted into the FAUX FILM FESTIVAL. We are very excited to be playing in the historic Hollywood theater. (April 3-5)

The Faux Film Festival is Oregon’s irreverent alternative to the hyper-serious highbrow festivals that dominate the circuit. From fake commercials and alternative takes on training videos to music video parodies and mockumentaries plus everything in between ”some of the country’s best satire put to celluloid is showcased during the four-night event. And anyone attending is pretty much guaranteed to leave the festival in pain (from side-splitting laughter, of course).

MOVIEMAKER MAGAZINE 

Promotional Cards

MIDNIGHT SCREENINGS at the Laemmle Sunset 5

Our film will be playing at the Laemmle Sunset 5 on Feb. 19th & 20th.

get your tickets here
http://www.laemmle.com/viewmovie.php?mid=5587