Richard Grieco on Pinterest

I'm not a big Pinterest fan, but Susanne seems to be a woman after our own hearts. She's collected quite a few photos of Richard spanning quite a few years.  I've seen most of them before and you probably have, too, but there are a few new shots.

And honestly...are you really tired of looking at the old ones?  I didn't think so.  Check out her Richard Grieco Pins here.

After Midnight Update and Trailer

The trailer for After Midnight, the new Richard Grieco movie I mentioned a couple of weeks back, has arrived.  It does appear to include a supernatural element, which shouldn't come as a surprise--I should have known better than to buy into early hints that made it seem more like a straight mystery.

 

I'm looking forward to this one.  And I appreciate that Horror-Movies.ca opened its introduction to this trailer with "One thing you can take away from this trailer is that Richard Grieco has a fantastic voice."

I know, right? Have you heard those commercials where...

Oh, wait. We're talking about After Midnight, right?  No word on a release date yet, but it's slated for this year.

AE: Apocalypse Earth Trailer

It's only a little over a month until AE: Apocalypse Earth is available on DVD, but in case you need something to hold you over (or to help you decide whether or not you want to pre-order the movie), here's the first official trailer.

Fresh off of viewing Almighty Thor, I'm happy to report that Richard Grieco plays one of the humans in this film...

 

The Asylum's Almighty Thor

Honestly, Almighty Thor wasn't high on my list of Richard Grieco movies to watch. I'm not a big fan of sci fi, mythology or knock-off movies and Grieco has been in so many films that there are several I haven't seen that interest me more.  Fish Don't Blink, for example.  And I assumed (correctly) that Richard wouldn't be at his most attractive as a deteriorating demon god.

But my options on Amazon streaming video were limited the trailer was kind of interesting, so I decided to go ahead and give it a shot. 




Honestly, the movie wasn't great: I had a hard time taking Cody Deal seriously as Thor, even before he pulled out the semi-automatic weapon.  I'm not sure whether it's a positive or negative to say that I had far less trouble taking Richard Grieco seriously as a demon god with giant, lizard-like beasts for pets.

All in all, I found the movie relatively entertaining, though I was sometimes unsure whether the things that were making me laugh had been intended to do so.  If you're a Grieco fan and haven't seen it, it's worth watching.  (If you do and you come away with an understanding of why he starts the movie looking pretty much like himself and is as white as The Joker by the end, please come back and share.)

While determining whether or not to watch this movie, I also learned some very interesting things about The Asylum, which is also behind Richard's upcoming AE: Apocalypse Earth.  The fact that both of these movies appeared to be created specifically to capture an audience created by a closely-related box office film initially put me off, but the more I learned the more interesting their business model became.

Apparently these knock-offs, often referred to as "mockbusters," are all The Asylum does.  And, that was apparently a conscious decision and one that's paid off. Sure, they get sued from time to time.  Yes, they may have had to change a name here and there or been restrained from releasing a movie for a while.  But from what I've read, it appears that the company has never lost money on one of these relatively low-budget movies. 

The more I learned, the more I shifted from thinking of The Asylum as a company that makes crappy rip-off movies to thinking of it as a company that knows exactly what it's doing, has accepted that it's not a blockbuster sort of operation and is having fun and making money doing its own thing.  Which, from where I'm sitting, looks like a pretty good fit for the guy who put on 40 pounds to mock himself in A Night at the Roxbury.

Pre-Order AE: Apocalypse Earth Now

Just a few days ago, AE: Apocalypse Earth's official Facebook page informed us that the film was "essentially complete"--and the movie is now available for pre-order on DVD and Blu-Ray. 

I'm pre-ordering through the store on Richard's official website simply because I like to see as much of the revenue as possible actually go to the people who make movies what they are.

And, of course, you can wander afield and order any of a number of movies and television shows Richard has appeared in while you're there. Not that anything like that happened to me.

Buyer Beware

Is it just me, or do these two "hand signed" photos from the Marker era look an awful lot alike?

Sure, they could have signed a whole batch at once, but...ever seen that done? I have, and usually the person doing the signing isn't so careful that each signature is not only identical, but ends up in EXACTLY the same spot on the photograph and at exactly the same angle. 

I'm not saying either of these sellers is trying to put something over on buyers--one of these photos may well be the original.  Or not.  It's tough to tell from an online image, and possibly even in hard copy.  But it's worth noting that there are a lot of autographed items out there that...aren't.

Booker Was Never Really My Type, Anyway

A few weeks ago, I posed the question, "Is Richard Grieco still hot in 2013?"  I asked the question because reactions on the Internet seem so widely varied, and because...let's face it...no one in his late forties looks like Richard Grieco did in 1989.  Hell, the vast majority of men in their twenties don't come close to looking like Richard Grieco did in 1989.

I'm officially withdrawing the question.

Well, not technically. The little poll is still down there in the lower right-hand corner and you're free to respond, but I no longer consider this an opinion question.  See, yesterday I found this:

So...that settles that. 

I found this in a post from on the Huffington Post blog; it probably doesn't say anything you don't already know, but it has a couple of other nice pics I hadn't seen before (all taken by Richard's sister, Laura).