Archives & Animators; Technology & Totem Poles

I recently attended ‘The Animator’, a conference held this June in Toronto at Corus Entertainment and Sheridan College, which threw up some interesting recurring themes and motifs across the various keynotes, panel presentations and screenings (as will be the case in any good conference) and I thought I'd take the opportunity of this post to reflect on some of these ideas. Don't expect anything tremendously conclusive, however. The event was a convergence point between several institutions and events at once; the aforementioned Sheridan College and Corus Entertainment, TAAFI (the Toronto Animation Arts Festival International), the centenary of Norman McLaren (the National Film Board of Canada’s most important animation figure) and the Society for Animation Studies’ annual conference.

As a child of the VHS generation I have no problem admitting to a collector mentality. Although many of the students I teach (and one or two people my own age) experience film and animation almost exclusively through streaming or downloading, I just can't help feeling a desperate desire to own something if I really like it or find it interesting. Just having access to it through the internet isn't enough – I can even be struck by a kind of OCD ‘collector anxiety’ if I find something that, for one reason or other, I just can’t own in some way. I actually avoid watching some online material through fear that I’ll like it, but be unable to buy it. And so one of the themes that ran through the conference, the loss and/or preservation of material, struck a definite chord for me. The inimitable Paul Wells discussed the sheer amount of production material that animation studios/companies simply throw out or destroy as a result of space limitations. This includes preproduction sketches, character concept art, storyboards and even maquettes and sets in stop-motion productions. Wells and his colleagues have taken it upon themselves – within the UK at least – to gather up and preserve as much of this material as possible.

The theme of preservation continued through to the end of the conference, where we were lucky enough to be shown the ‘pre-world premier’ screening of Norman McLaren's stereoscopic films. The films were highly impressive works of early 3D animation but, amazingly, the images were hand drawn and, as with many McLaren works, actually drawn directly on to the celluloid. How one sits down in 1951 and works out how to draw lines on a tiny cel the size of a postage stamp and make them three-dimensional in projection is beyond me. These short animations had long since slipped into obscurity and were even feared lost altogether, but thanks to the wonders of digital media, the restoration and preservation of this incredible material was possible.

Despite the ability of digital technology to rescue these films, another tendency that ran through the conference was a trepidation about just what gets lost in the new digital world. Vera Brosgol, a very lovely storyboard artist for Laika, stores her material (sketches and complete storyboards) digitally but admitted that much of the work that she produced for Coraline had drifted into obscurity, because she needed the room on her hard drive. While on the one hand, this seems exactly the same situation as with the physical materials that companies feel they must throw out for the sake of space, the difference is that there is no digital equivalent of Paul Wells to turn up and take it away to a safe haven. Digital material, once deleted, stays deleted.

Another, slightly more aggressive, attitude towards digital – and the changes it brings – also became apparent through the conference. Although there were several borderline vitriolic opinions expressed, most relevant for this discussion were the thoughts on how digital impacts upon storyboards and another similar art-form, the comic. David Sweeney argued that the problem with a digital comic is that the defining quality of sequential art (the fact that the images co-exist on the page and don't simply replace one another in a continuous stream), is lost in the process of adapting them into the partially-animated Motion Comic format. Chris Pallant mentioned a similar development in the way in which storyboards are used within the production process. While in the days of paper storyboards, the images were posted up on the wall and could be rearranged as story meeting progressed and, most importantly, seen at the same time, allowing for a better understanding of story flow. But now, at some studios at least, the storyboard has become an entirely digital process. Images are drawn directly into the computer by hand and then discussed one at a time, eliminating the dynamic flow between the images that the analogue process allows.

Thus, on one hand the risk of material taking up too much room and being destroyed or discarded is greatly reduced through the digital production process, yet at the same time, the way in which this material is used in production becomes altered and the risk of art being deleted forever is increased.

Listening to Vera Brosgol and speak and show us some of her artwork also heightened my collector anxiety. The material that we were shown (both her own and that of others) was fascinating but, even in the era of DVD and Blu-Ray extras, would mostly sit in obscurity seen only by a very tiny minority. One of my (many) fascinations with animation as a medium is the fact that – moreso than live-action film – every piece of work produced during the production process can be seen as a work of art in its own right. Every character concept, used and unused, each storyboard page, each colour chart, every piece of background art, not to mention the huge amount of hand-drawings, maquettes, real and virtual models and armatures, etc., that actually produce the moving character on screen can all be regarded as works with their own artistic merit (as far as I'm concerned). And for me, the tragedy is that you can't own this stuff! Even when 'Making of' featurettes on DVDs or 'Art of' books can give you a lot of material, it is impossible to get it all.

Of course, arguably, you could have access to it all, if a digital archive of it all were to be made. I was happy to find (albeit in low-quality) Vera Brosgol's graduation short Snow-bo on youtube, as well as many other graduate films from Toronto's Sheridan College and the world-famous Disney-founded CalArts. The earliest work of people like Tim Burton or Chris Sanders is available to see online even if it is nearly impossible to find a physical copy. This is the benefit of digital media like the internet, and I have to grudgingly admit the superiority of the internet to physical artefacts like discs and books; the sheer amount of material that one can find – if one knows where to look.

Most academic work focuses its energy on analysing and unpacking 'professional' work. Film and Animation Studies are concerned with texts that are available to most people, not least of all because your brilliant insights into a particular film will be lost on everyone if you're the only person who has seen the film in question. But does this mean that the vast mountain of work produced by amateurs and students – a lot of which is accessible to all – shouldn't be studied? If I want to tell my students about the importance of metamorphosis to animation, do I have to limit my examples to the Fleischer Brothers' masterpieces, or can I demonstrate the exact same principles by showing some of the brilliant student work that was screened for us at Sheridan College? On one level, the answer to the question is: stick with the Fleischers. Partly, this is because it is very easy for me to find many articles on the Fleischer cartoons that I can support my claims with.

Academia is, of course, a reliant activity – doubly so for Film and Animation Studies. We have to draw upon the insights of other academics in order to ground our own thoughts, but we also require artists to produce work in order for us to have anything to talk about. Paul Wells (who gets in everywhere) also suggested that the relationship between theory and practice in animation studies was one of dismissiveness and superiority. While theory regards itself as an intellectual pursuit, it also regards the actual practice of animation making as somehow a lesser activity, something that doesn't require the same kind of critical thinking or evaluative understanding. This, Wells says, is nonsense. The act of creativity is by its very nature one of self-reflexive consideration, of critical evaluation of its own processes. Theory needs to better understand its relationship to, and evaluation of, the practical processes of animation. Another reason my hands are tied in showing the Sheridan students' work is because, unless the student has uploaded their work online and (even more importantly) I can remember the student's name, how will I access the material to show my own students?

'Professionalism' functions a little like a gatekeeper – if a work has been produced by a studio, we can at least assume confidently that the work will possess certain levels of competence and artistic merit (when looking at the craft of animation, I mean – the finished film might be pretty bad). And work produced professionally is more likely to exist as a ‘product’ that can be owned. Work produced by an individual in their bedroom or as part of an educational institution does not come with the same kind of guarantees. How do we as consumers (not just academics but anyone interested in animation) trawl through the average and forgettable in order to reach the gold that some artists are able to produce? At the moment, there is no particularly workable answer. There is no online system that allows for the hierarchical arrangement of students' work. You cannot type 'best cartoons to come out of Sheridan' into youtube and hope for a legitimate result. And so it seems unlikely that any animation scholar will write a piece analysing any of the great pieces of animation that I saw while in Toronto.

On the final day of the conference I had the good fortune to begin talking with a group of the conference volunteers, who were all animation students at Sheridan. Although there were several more panels during the course of the day, I ended up missing them in favour of spending time with these Animators of Tomorrow. I was struck even more so than before at the sheer amount of creativity and material that these animators produced all of the time, from sketches, to paintings, from character design to full animation. My collector anxiety went into meltdown as we toured the College and saw all of the material produced by students of all ages and stages of development. Though I did take a couple of (poor quality) photos, the fact is that I saw many, many images that were beautiful and I'm absolutely certain I will never see again. Not just because I can't own them, but because I also have no method of accessing it online even if it is up on deviantart or youtube. The tragic ephemeral nature of animation is that 95% of the art that goes into it disappears, if not deleted forever, and then gets lost in the vast ocean of amateur material on the internet.

Probably the most memorable of these Sheridan students was Coco Cheung, not least of all because she spent the final day, for no discernible reason, dressed as a totem pole. I spent much of my time with her, discussing her desire to make character maquettes for stop-motion animation (and being told, in no uncertain terms, that having a PhD does not make me a “real” doctor), and it is from her I will take the totem pole analogy that will form my conclusion. Or, more accurately, my “conclusion”.

Coco Cheung (by Coco Cheung) flying through the internet on her totem pole trainers

Academia functions as the top figure on a totem pole; not only does this nicely reflect the ‘ivory tower’ mentality that we all slip into at some time or another, but it also demonstrates the reliance that we have on the work of others. Below academia sits the professional finished products – shorts and feature films by Dreamworks, Laika, Disney and so on – that are our bread and butter, without which we would just fall down to the ground. Below this is the development and production materials; the concept art, storyboards, maquettes and cels, which exist as distinct artworks from the films that they ultimately produce. Below this is the personal or amateur work of individuals within the animation institution (both the business and education sectors) – here we find Brosgol’s Snow-bo, the caricatures produced by Disney animators during slow days, the maquettes and sketches that we glimpsed while touring Sheridan. While in a perfect world we would be able to see all of this totem pole and appreciate each of its figures on their own merits and in relation to one another, at this exact moment in time it has sunk down into the mud, almost to the halfway point. Academia and professionally produced animation are still sitting pretty without much problem, but the production materials are slowly sinking out of sight, only glimpsed in DVD extras, and the personal material has completely vanished below. The internet has led to the creation of small tunnels, allowing access to tiny portions of this bottom figure, but the mud keeps obscuring our view (yes, the mud is an analogy for all of the mediocre amateur animation on the web – sorry). What we need is a serious excavation project – something akin to Wells’ efforts on a global scale – that can reveal the entirety of the totem pole for all to see. If the majority of audiences are only interested in the second figure down, so be it, but we should have the option to explore the bottom figures and – maybe one day – create a link between the top and foundational figures, between academia and the personal material produced by highly talented individuals.

For the interested, here are some links to the work of the students that I met:

Coco 'the Human Totem Pole' Cheung: http://cy1115.blogspot.co.uk/ 

Her sister Crystal Cheung: http://liyuconberma.deviantart.com/ 

Arthur Lim Banes: http://arthurbanes.tumblr.com/ 

Anna Starkova: http://annathegallant.blogspot.ca/ 

And to cover all of those whom I met but didn't retain their names, here's the general link to Sheridan College's students: http://sheridananimation.blogspot.co.uk/2007/09/links-to-student-work.html 

                                                                                                          - P.S.

Luis Bunuel: Playing God

This is the first of three posts exploring the extremes of Luis Bunuel’s authorship, claiming that he takes control over the film world to the point of personal manipulation and casts himself in the role of God in the diegesis of his cinema. It was originally written as an undergraduate essay and so is perhaps a little grandiose in its claims...

I. GENESIS

According to Auteur Theory, the form and content of a film should be regarded as predominantly originating from the director. Though film production is of course a collaborative process, and a myriad of contributions from various parties is obvious, it is the director who has the final say in how these contributions may be cohered and therefore is responsible for the ultimate result. However, the theory goes beyond simply final say; the director – if he is to be truly considered an Auteur, the author of the film – must also bring a personal touch to it. A director such as Ron Howard, though clearly gifted at the craft of filmmaking, cannot be considered an Auteur as he is essentially invisible. On the other hand, we are never allowed to forget that Quentin Tarantino is man behind the camera in his films. Along with other famous examples, such as Alfred Hitchcock, Luis Bunuel stands as a prime example of Auteurism at work.

Bunuel’s cinema is peppered with his own private obsessions and preoccupations, each film developing on the themes and issues of the last, each one another chapter in the ongoing Book of Bunuel. Yet with Bunuel, perhaps uniquely, this can be taken to an even further extreme. His films do not just bear the mark of their director, their director actively moulds them. He aggressively takes part in their unfolding stories, interfering with the diegesis and ‘playing God’ with the lives of his characters, often placing them in situations that they would not normally be without his manipulation.

In Bunuel’s first two films – in collaboration with Salvador Dali – Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or, we can find examples of this god-like control over his cinematic kingdom. The first film, less a debut than a cinematic Big Bang, is an act of creation of something completely new out of the ashes of the old. Playing with the cinematic conventions of Classical Hollywood, which place great emphasis on continuity, Un Chien Andalou offers us up an alternative – a totally cinematic universe dictated by the whims of medium and artist than by the replication of the real world that we know. Opening with the cliché ‘Once Upon A Time...’, the audience is lulled into a false sense of familiarity which is soon replaced by a sense of apprehension as it is followed by a shot of Bunuel himself sharpening a razor blade.

The sinister quality of the action aside, the significance of Bunuel appearing within the opening few seconds of his first film is huge. Much more than simply a Hitchcockian device of humorous self-insertion designed to create a personality cult of the director, Bunuel’s appearance and subsequent action is the act of creation itself. In the beginning was God, and then He created the world. As the director moves over to a seated lady and opens her eye with thumb and forefinger, the camera cuts into an extreme close-up of an eye, just as it is sliced open by the razor. Here, we are being allowed to witness the act of creation, to see God use His phallic implement of the razor to slice open the eyes of the audience and allow his own distinctive world of cinematic possibility to come pouring out onto the screen.

Un Chien Andalou is much written about, but often it appears with the wrong frame of mind. Gwynne Edwards tries to analyse the film in great detail but is unable to let go of the traditional filmic conventions and presentations and thus almost tries to justify the film as a ‘normal’ story being told unusually. He discusses the characters’ “inner workings of mind exteriorised”[1] and refers to the appearance of the strict doppelganger as “though the thoughts of the young man are regressing in time”[2] – implying that the double is only present as a symbolic expression of the mind of the original.

This interpretation is too narrow for a film such as Un Chien Andalou or L’Age d’Or as it assumes that only the cinematic presentation of ideas is revolutionary, not the filmic reality in which these ideas occur. We must view the film and accept what is shown to us at face value, to see it as an entirely new kind of cinema, not simply the old cinema dressed up in new techniques. On the BFI DVD of the films, Robert Short states in the commentary that the film “substitutes alternative patterns of ordering for the conventional ones that it subverts”[3] – but this is more than simply editing or narrative patterns, it is the pattern of reality as shaped by the cinema. We should study and understand these films in the context of these new patterns and new diegetic worlds that they create.

Indeed, it is not just that Bunuel creates these cinematic universes, but that he has an active part in their development, controlling and manipulating events as he sees fit rather than allowing diegetic events to unfold as they would have without him. In Un Chien Andalou the central figure finds himself in two places at the same time. While Edwards considers the second to be a symbolic doppelganger, we can instead take him as a literal doubling-up of one character; time and space are rearranged and reconstituted to suit Bunuel’s will. Likewise, in the opening of L’Age d’Or we find a group of Bishops sat praying on a rocky out-crop by the shore. Later in the film, a large crowd of people in modern dress moor their boats and head to the spot where the Bishops – identified as ‘the Majorcans’ – are now just skeletons sat upright in their praying positions. The crowd offers their respect and then lays a commemorative stone, reading ‘1930 AD. This stone, on the site where the Majorcans died marks the founding of the city of Imperial Rome’. We then cut to an aerial shot of Rome in all of its glory.

Temporally, these events are impossible to understand in logical cause-and-effect terms and there is little to support reading the events as being an expression of some subjective or symbolic state. The centre of the Catholic Church is founded upon the final resting spot of a group of Catholic Bishops – and this does not occur until as late as 1930, meaning that the apparent ellipses between the commemorative stone and ‘modern Rome’ in fact covers no time at all (indeed, one character is frogmarched off away from the site of the skeletons and led through the streets of the city). The foundation of Rome exists simultaneously as a past, present and future event. This destabilisation of the establishment of the Catholic religion is both a satirical comment being made by Bunuel outside of the diegesis, but also figures to ingrain him as a component within the diegesis; Bunuel-as-God exists in the story-world and this strange ouroborous-like faith that ‘begins once it has already existed’ functions as an appropriate form of worship for such a roguish deity.

Of course it is true that these first two films were – technically – in collaboration with Salvador Dali. I say ‘technically’ as it is generally accepted that Dali had little to do with L’Age d’Or beyond a few striking images that he would later resurrect in his own surrealist paintings. Can Auteurism, in particular the extreme variant that I am proposing here, accommodate collaboration? Can Bunuel really be the omnipotent manipulative God of the diegesis if we cannot pinpoint exactly which moment was Bunuel’s idea and what was Dali’s? My ‘get-out’ clause is a simple one: Bunuel’s auteurism shifted from polytheism to monotheism during the making of L’Age d’Or. While the world of Un Chien Andalou is in equal part the product of Bunuel and Dali’s collective imagination, when they began to fall out during the production of L’Age d’Or Bunuel essentially triggered Ragnarok – a war between the gods – and ousted Dali from the pantheon. The diegesis of the latter film still displays hallmarks of its co-creator Dali, but the control of its places, people and events belongs squarely to Bunuel.

The next post will turn its attention to the films that Bunuel made in Mexico – in particular Nazarin and The Exterminating Angel – to demonstrate how the director manipulated the events of his films in a fashion that drew attention to his role as omnipotent God. 

                                                                                                  - P. S.

---

[1] Edwards, Gwynne – The Discreet Art Of Luis Bunuel, Marion Boyars, 1982, p. 70

[2] Edwards, 1982, p. 52

[3] Short, 2004

Cult Currency

Perhaps one way to distinguish between how a 'cult' horror film and a 'mainstream' horror film is sold to their respective audiences is in the treatment of the content. While the mainstream horror is sold much like any film conforming to Classical Hollywood norms – a character-driven narrative, three-act structure, a logical chain of cause-and-effect – but including set-pieces designed to scare and repulse, the cult horror film is often sold by downplaying the actual content and instead emphasising the uniqueness of its premise. Indeed, the premise itself becomes so important to the cult horror film that in some cases we can see that it is conceived, financed, produced, marketed and consumed entirely on that basis, without actual content of the film playing any significant role. Cult horror films as they are sold (and indeed produced) today is not so much as entertainment, or even a commodity, but rather as a form of currency. The idea of a cult horror film passes from producer, to distributor, to film fan like a £5 note – its value is in the premise, not the characters, story, direction, or cinematography.

In the UK we can see three distributors that overtly take the cult-movie-as-currency approach; Shameless Screen Entertainment, Arrow Films (specifically the Arrow Video Collection) and 88 Films. Each of them uses the Cult Laboratories message boards as a means of advertising and gauging consumer interest (http://www.cult-labs.com/forums/). Fans communicate with the labels, suggesting possible titles for future releases and voting on cover artwork. Of course, these distributors also release films that are sold on a kind of 'cult prestige' based upon the content (Shameless release several Fulci and Argento films, Arrow have picked up several old Tartan Asia Extreme titles such as Battle Royale) but an overwhelming number of them are sold on their premises rather than reputation. One does not look at Ratman and assume that it is going to have high-quality direction and an intriguing plot. One instead looks at the tagline ('He's the critter from the shitter') and decides to watch it (or not) based upon its preposterousness. But because the majority of these films lack much merit beyond the bizarreness of their premises, strategies need to be employed in order to increase sales.

One major technique is to instigate a collector mentality in their buyers; all three distributors create a sense of unity within their catalogues – DVD covers are designed to not only convey the individual film's distinctness but also unify them under the 'Arrow' or 'Shameless' banner (88 Films already have a sense of unity in that their releases are all drawn from the output of Full Moon Features, the low-budget company behind the Puppet Master franchise, among others). Many of the DVD spines are numbered to increase the desire to complete the collection. Shameless releases can be recognised by the yellow and black colour scheme, while Arrow's 'colour bar' running at the bottom of the image distinguishes them from other cult film distributors. 88 Films has decided to utilise the current fascination with Grindhouse movies and released several titles under the 'Eighty Eight Films Grindhouse Collection' label, a way of trying to increase interest in films that otherwise have little appeal (The Day Time Ended, Seed People, Beach Babes From Beyond, and Mandroid have all been release under the Grindhouse banner despite their not being remotely 'Grindhouse' in any way).

Part of the art of selling cult horror lies in this form of presentation. Just as a film like Seed People isn't really going to sell unless it's placed within the Grindhouse Collection, certain products have to be arranged and organised in such a way to optimise their success. Arrow Video released several films produced by Fantastic Factory (a production label working out of Spain) but, perhaps foreseeing that few of the films would sell in and of themselves, Arrow Video collected the four films under the 'Fantastic Factory Presents...' banner, giving each a similar aesthetic on the DVD covers and providing extras that unify the films. Faust: Love Of The Damned includes the featurette Director Of The Damned: Brian Yuzna, Faust and The Fantastic Factory, which traces Yuzna's formation of the label and its first film, but the 'whole story' of Yuzna and Fantastic Factory is broken up over all four DVDs, with Romasanta: The Werewolf Hunt featuring the final documentary instalment Romasanta: Lycanthropes, Lunacy And The Last Days Of Fantastic Factory. If one wants to own Arrow Video's fairly encyclopaedic overview of the Fantastic Factory label and its influence on Spanish horror, one needs to buy all four releases.

U.S. distributor Anchor Bay utilised the exact opposite approach when releasing the television series Masters Of Horror. While Arrow took several films and used DVD extras to unite them into a single product, Anchor Bay took a single product and turned it into a label, a collection of 26 films. Just as with Shameless' covers, the Masters Of Horror releases each had their own unique look and self-styled logo, but were all headed with the same banner. Because the series is an anthology, with each episode directed by a famous horror director and all coming in at around an hour in length (rather than the standard 42 minutes of US television), Anchor Bay decided to give each episode its own release, packing the DVD with extras that emphasised the individual director and making of the specific instalment, thereby increasing sales thirteen times more than if they had simply released two 'complete season' box sets alone. It's interesting to note that in the interviews on the Fantastic Factory DVDs, Brian Yuzna claims that the idea for Masters Of Horror comes from his own idea for a series of films, each based upon one of the Seven Deadly Sins and directed by a famous horror director (several of the proposed directors for that series, such as Stuart Gordon and Dario Argento subsequently directed episodes of Masters Of Horror). When the idea fell through, he went to Spain to launch Fantastic Factory.

Creating the sense that these disparate films with bizarre premises can be seen as a single collection, something that needs to be completed by any self-respecting cult film fan, helps to draw attention away from the films' actual failings or achievements as films. The individual films simply become a checklist, a group of titles and premises. What's important is that one owns Surf Nazis Must Die, not that one watches it (and subsequently realises how poorly paced and dull the film is – as is the case with any Troma movie not directed by Lloyd Kaufman, it seems). The 'cult credentials' of the film are less about how weird the content or execution of the film is (as we might find with The Rocky Horror Picture Show or Eraserhead) and rather purely on the absurdity of the idea (surfing meets Nazis). The appeal of Shameless' Amsterdamned is almost entirely in its title and its premise of a serial killer in a wetsuit leaping out of the canal system. As a narrative, it's just another serial killer/hard-boiled cop movie making a desperate attempt to put a new spin on the tried and tested formula. In reality, few of the films released by these labels are really 'cult' but simply not very good genre films.

This way of presenting a less-than-impressive horror film as a 'cult' film by simply upping the ante in the absurdity of the premise is not limited to distribution but can also be found in production. Speaking of the Full Moon movie, Castle Freak (released in the UK by 88 Films – but too high a quality production to force into the 'Grindhouse Collection'), director Stuart Gordon recalls that studio founder Charles Band “had already sold the film on the basis of the title and the artwork alone. He said 'As long as you have a castle in this film, and there's a freak inside of the castle, you can direct it'” (from Anchor Bay's DVD release of Re-Animator). The process of 'pre-selling' a film is not new, nor limited to low-budget filmmaking. Plenty of big budget Hollywood films over the years have been 'pre-sold' on the basis of its star and premise, but in the low-budget arena pre-sales are an important part of being able to make films at all. As the inclusion of genuine stars is unlikely, a low-budget or independent film needs to have a clear and distinct premise in order to convince financial backers that it will be a success if made. You have to convince the money men that your Dutch crime film will do well because it is simultaneously a safe bet (serial killer movies are popular in the 1980s) and different from the others (the killer swims around the canals in a wetsuit).

Today, the trend of absurd movies, started by B-Movie master Roger Corman and continued by 'mockbuster' studio The Asylum, have tried to play the 'premise-is-everything' card as much as possible. Whether something relatively simple, such as Two-Headed Shark Attack, something a little more obscure, like Corman's Sharktopus, or the out-and-out ludicrous glory that is Sharknado, the situation is much the same: the film is conceived, sold, financed, produced, marketed and released on the basis of its initial idea. Sharknado the movie is not much different (a little inferior, in fact) to Sharknado the poster. As the tagline states: 'Enough Said!'

                                                                                                                                                       - P. S.