Dream Review #4 - Zombie Picnic

I was a big-time director filming the final scene of this movie I wrote called Zombie Picnic, which took place at Bath Nature Preserve in Bath, Ohio.

It was a five-minute, unedited pan of the zombie picnic.

Basically, the zombies won and took over the town of Bath. To celebrate, they were, unintentionally, having a picnic and feasting on all of the humans at the nature preserve.

Picture this: Body parts being ripped apart. Blood flying everywhere. Zombies fighting over scraps of human brains. Humans screaming in agony.

Not tooting my own horn, but - with the sunset coming through the lens followed by the colorful flowers, picnic tables, soccer fields and the playground mixed in with the macabre imagery - it was a beautiful shot.

But something always went wrong. Some zombie extra would sneeze. A key actor would accidentally look at the camera. The boom mic would get into the camera shot.

We must have gone through the shot 10 times. And I was staring to get pissed.

In any event, we had one more shot before the sun finally set. I grabbed a megaphone from my assistant and yelled to the cast and crew.

"This is the final fucking shot,"I screamed. "Everyone better be on their A-game on this one or your all fucking fired!"

"YOU UNDERSTAND ME MOTHER FUCKERS!!!" I walked over to the cinematographer and grabbed the camera. "I'm shooting this one."

"ACTION!"

We filmed the five-minute shot to perfection. Every actor hit their cues. The blood spurted at the exact moment I wanted to. Zombies dug their teeth into the mayor's brain on cue. In short, the shot turned out beautifully.

"Cut," I yelled. "Good job everyone. That's a wrap. Go home." Everyone let out a cheer and started to leave the set.

Suddenly, my producer came running over to me.

"We didn't get the shot," he said patting me back. "Sorry."

"What," I screamed. "Why not?"

He pointed down to the camera I had in my hand. But it wasn't a camera at all. It was a severed head with a worm squirting out of one of the eye sockets.

I was filming the final scene with a zombie head.

"Fuck," I said. "Isn't there someway we can hook up wire to its brain so we can get the imagery?"

"I don't think so, sir" My producer siad. "Nothiing like that has been invented yet?"

"Goddammit," I screamed as I threw the severed head into the woods walked over to my trailer and did two lines of coke.

Then I woke up.


Links to my other Dream Reviews:

• Dream Review #1
• Dream Review #2
• Dream Review #3
  

Dream Review #3 - My Two Dumb Sons

A couple nights ago, I had a dream where I had two teenaged sons who looked like the Hanson brothers from the movie Slap Shot.

And they were stupid.

And by stupid I mean they couldn't speak English very well, they couldn't read, they couldn't feed themselves and their mouths were always agape with drool constantly running out.

Oh yeah. And they both had that little brown trailer-trash dirt rings around their mouths.

I gave one of my sons the book Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk and told him to read it.

"This is good. This is important. You should read this," I told him. "It will make you think about your life in a different way."

I left the room to do some dishes and came back to find him staring at the book....upside down.

"I know you're not really reading it," I yelled as grabbed the book out of his hands and threw it against the wall. "Why don't you and your brother just try a little harder?"

He stared back at me with an empty gaze and, of course, drool dripping from his mouth.

I grabbed my other son by the hand and took him downstairs to watch a movie in this elaborate home movie theater we had in our basement. There were about 10,000 DVDs lining the wall. Everything from Citizen Kane to No Country For Old Men and everything in between.

I asked him to pick out a movie.

He scanned the DVDs and quickly chose Just My Luck a stupid romantic comedy starring Lindsay Lohan.

"Dude, we've got every movie imaginable and you want to watch this?" I screamed at him. "How about Apocalypse Now directed by Francis Ford Coppola? How about The Killing directing by Stanley Kubrick? How about anything besides Just My Luck."

He searched the DVD wall again and produced another movie:

It was Leonard Part 6.

I let out a huge sigh and acquiesced. Tonight, we would watch Bill Cosby make a boob of himself.

As I tossed the movie into the DVD player, I silently and secretly damned my two stupid, drooling sons to hell.


When I awoke, I somehow blamed myself for my two dumb sons' stupidity.


Hmmm. A guilty parent? Imagine that.

Dream Review #2 - Shootin' Arrows At Indy

I was in this living room that had three or four sofas, great artwork hanging and blood-red walls.

I was standing next to this 20' x 20' window with a pretty cool view of this city. It looked like a mix between Chicago, New York and Las Vegas.

In my hand, I noticed that I had a bow and arrow. I also noticed that my right leg had an arrow sticking out of it with a small stream of blood trickling down my leg onto the floor. I was dressed in a jeans, black shoes and a black t-shirt.

I looked across the room and standing next to a wall-size, flat-screen TV - playing what looked like Herbie Hancock's 'Rockit' video - was an older-looking Harrison Ford in full Indiana Jones-attire. He had a bow as well but, it was aimed in another direction.

I glanced towards this magnificant stainless, steel kitchen. Standing there was the hot, brunette chick from the new Transformers movie (Megan Fox). She had a black crossbow that was aimed right at me. I quickly drew my bow in her direction.

It was a Mexican, bow-and-arrow standoff.

Megan let an arrow fly. It punctured my chest above my heart. I yelled. Then I screamed. Then I was angry. Not regular angry, but Hulk angry.

Indy and I both took a couple shots at her. My arrow hit her in the stomach. Indy's arrow planted her in the arm. She screamed, broke off both arrows with her hand and began firing her crossbow. Arrows spewed out in rapid-fire motion almost like a machine gun. I ran for cover as a bevy of arrows busted through the window behind me throwing shards of glass everywhere.

It was a battle royale.

We hopped around, hid behind plants and furniture and continued to shoot arrows at each other. I noticed that my arrow pack would always replenish and I never had to look around for arrows on the ground. It was like I was in some sort of 3-D video game.

Dead silence. We reached a stand still, which I took as an opportunity.

With a dozen arrows poking out of my body, I took a running start, leapt into the air and jumped over a couch. In super-slow motion, I let two arrows fly from my bow. Both arrows hit their mark...head shots to Megan and Indy.

I landed on this white, polar-bear skin rug, which instantly stained with droplets of my blood. As I stood up, I saw Megan Fox's limp body face down in the kitchen sink. Her dead body must have hit the faucet before she died because the sink was overflowing with blood from her wounds. She was dead.

I shot a look over at Indy and, with dozens of arrows sticking out of his body as well, he was locked and loaded with an arrow pointed towards my skull. You could tell by the look on his face that he wasn't too concerned about dying. But, I was. I quickly reloaded and mirrored his aim.

It was yet another high-noon, Mexican standoff.

He smirked and said something that I took it to be a smart-ass remark. Then, I smirked and said something sarcastic back.

We both let our arrows fly.

I felt the penetration of the arrow going through my head right before I woke up.

MY INTERPRETATION: I'm looking forward to the new Indiana Jones movie AND if I can't have Megan Fox no one can.

Dream Review #1 - ATTACK!

Most of my dreams are usually pretty stupid. Myself falling, running from something, sitting down for a test and realizing I haven't studied or even going online to see that my checking account is overdrawn (Wait. That's not a dream!)

In any event, I also have some very, very strange dreams. That's when I thought it would be fun to share some of my rather 'cool' dreams with the viewing public. NOTE: If your eyes are already glazing over, I completely understand. But, trust me, I won't bore you with the stupid dreams. I'll bore you with the interesting ones instead. So, here's my first online dream review titled: ATTACK! I had it last night.

So there I was standing in line at the Army Reserves with my good friend Tom. We were the same age we are right now - thirtysomething- and for the life of me I can't remember why we decided to sign up.

We filled out the required paperwork, put on our issued fatigues and walked through this green, steel door. The room was empty with the exception of a rather impatient Gunny Staff Sgt. Hartman from Full Metal Jacket standing in the middle of the room with his arms behind his back.

"Oh shit," I whispered to Tom. "We're in for it."

"GET YER ASS OVER HERE," he yelled at us. "It's time for basic training."

We ran over and stood side-by-side. I was expecting a tirade and getting a big hock of spit in my face. But, he simply put his arms on his hips and said, "NOW DON'T JUST STAND THERE! GIMME 20."

We both immediately hit the ground and pumped out 20 push-ups. We stood up and Sgt. Hartman had two machine guns in his hands. "Congratulations," he said. "You passed."

Sweet.

We all hopped in a jeep and drove off the army base. The land around me started to look vaguely familiar. We were in the country passing various farm houses. We also passed an IGA, a couple of exploded gas stations and a farmer's market where farmers were selling these really, really big pieces of corn. The sky was an eerie reddish-purple and, in the distance, I noticed explosions blasting away in the woods.

Then we passed an ice-cream shop and an old-time video store that I used to visit when I was young. That's when I realized we were in the Ohio Valley. The jeep took a couple hard turns. As I passed my old grade school, the jeep careened up a hill and we pulled into my parent's driveway. Bombs were exploding at the top of the hills. Schrapnel was raining from the sky. The Sgt turned around in his seat to face us. "You've got orders to defend this station."

We got out and the sarge tossed us a bag of bullets, some grenades, a couple jugs of water, a six-pack of banana-strawberry yogurt (huh?) and a couple hiking backpacks filled to the brim with supplies and food. As he started up the jeep, an explosion rocked my backyard, I noticed a bunch of basketballs, kickballs and baseballs get thrown into the air and a couple trees cracked and fell on top of the house.

"God be with you," he yelled as he peeled out of the driveway. "They're attacking at night!"

"Who's attacking at night?" I yelled. I looked over to Tom who shrugged and started firing his gun at the hills. I followed his lead. Mortar blasts landed all around our house. It was getting pretty heavy so we ducked under my Dad's green Hyundai for protection.

"Man down" Tom yelled. "I've been hit."

He opened up his shirt and there was a grenade sticking out of his stomach. My first instinct was to run. But I noticed that the pin wasn't pulled yet. So I hung around to help him out. Then, I felt something slam into my body. I lifted my jacket and found a similar grenade sticking out of my stomach. "Fuck," I yelled. "YOU BASTARDS." I started to fire my machine gun into the woods. I even tossed a couple hand grenades for good measure.

Then we heard a strange rumble of footsteps. It was coming from the top of the mountain across the road and was headed our way.

Tom and I looked at each other. I tossed him some bullets from the bag and we reloaded. The rumble grew louder and I could see faint puffs of dust coming through the trees as whatever it was making its way down the hill.

I shuffled around in my pack and found a bottle of whiskey. We both took gulps and prepared for battle.

Suddenly, over the top of the guardrail leapt these human-size RAT CREATURES dressed in full-military fatigue. They looked like the evil rats from the movie The Secret of Nimh. Hundreds if not thousands of them were skittering toward us like angry cockroaches.

The creatures noticed us and halted. Howls and hisses came from the angry mob.

One of the bigger rats who had a bevy of medals pinned to his jacket (perhaps the General Rat?) pulled himself high above the rest of the army and held up a paw. He spoke some rat gibberish and the rat army cheered. Then, he turned toward us and hissed. His army started to charge and rounds of ammo shot out of their M-16s pinging my Dad's rusted car.

We unloaded our guns toward the creatures. Many of them fell dead at our feet. I could feel the warm blood on my face as I shot off my last round and blew off a rat's head. Then, a realization came to me. We were going to die.

I didn't want to get gnawed to death by a bunch of ARMY RAT CREATURES so I pulled up my shirt and yanked the pin from the grenade in my stomach. Tom followed my lead and did the same.

The rat creatures were closing in. The General Rat leapt in the air (a la' Watership Down) with his fangs and claws outstretched ready to attack. Blood was pouring from its mouth....

I woke up.