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Interview: Lizzy Walker Interviews Hansi Oppenheimer, Director of All Hail the Popcorn King

Image of Hansi Oppenheimer

Hansi Oppenheimer is the director of the recently released documentary on Joe R. Lansdale, All Hail the Popcorn Queen, which we reviewed earlier this year. In addition to her interview with Lansdale, reviewer Lizzy Walker had the opportunity to interview Oppenheimer about her experiences with Lansdale and with making the documentary.

 

LW: How did your All Hail the Popcorn King documentary project come about?

HO: I have been a fan of Joe’s work since the 1980s. I finally had the opportunity to meet him two years ago when I was invited to appear at a con in Houston. I reached out to him to see if he’d be available for an interview for my YouTube channel, and he invited me to Nacogdoches for lunch and the interview. After the interview, I reached out to him for a piece on a short about Joe Bob Briggs that I was working on, and he wrote me the most beautiful, touching, funny piece, and got back to me in a day.

I was so grateful that I promised him my next film would be about him, and I’m so glad I did. I’ve never worked with anyone who was more honest, generous and collaborative.

 

LW: Why did you decide on the title All Hail the Popcorn King for the documentary?

The title of the film All Hail The Popcorn King is a reference to Lansdale’s The Drive-In, in which a group of people get trapped by an inexplicable force and chaos quickly ensues. Two of the characters get fused together (it’s a crazy book), don a popcorn bucket as crown and are blindly worshipped as The Popcorn King. Additionally, Joe came up with the story after a series of nightmares he had after eating popcorn that his wife used to make cooked in Kroger grease. The book has inspired dozens of writers, including Joe Hill, who has said when he read it as a kid, he decided he wanted to be a writer.

 

LW: When and where will the documentary be available outside of the film circuit?

HO: We completed the film and are working on some bonus features for the DVD. Right now, we don’t have a formal distributor. I expect that will change once the world gets back to some kind of normal.

 

LW: What drew you to Joe’s work?

HO: Joe’s been compared to Mark Twain and William Faulkner, won an insane amount of awards (see bio in the Press Kit) and has helped so many young writers with his advice or including them in anthologies. He’s a true American Literary Treasure and yet many people don’t know about him and his work. In part that is because he has never stuck to one genre. Joe Lansdale is his own genre. He has a singular voice which comes through in everything he writes.

He is also an incredibly good human being and there’s far too many documentaries about temperamental tortured artists. Joe loves what he does, and that’s a valuable message for anyone who wants to write.

 

LW: What is your favourite work of Joe R. Lansdale’s?

HO: My favorite books of Joe’s are The Drive-In and The Magic Wagon.

Check out the documentary trailer: https://youtu.be/pSvnb_Hzijk

 

 

Posted on September 1, 2020 by , Reply

Book Review The Virgin by Wol-vriey

Content warning: unless you have a strong stomach you may want to skip over this review.

 

The Virgin by [Wol-vriey]

The Virgin by Wol-vriey  ( Amazon.com)

Burning Bulb Publishing, 2020

ISBN: 9781948278232

Availability: paperback, Kindle

 

Wol-vriey’s latest effort, The Virgin, is unquestionably his best to date, and also the most likely to offend people; this isn’t the kind of book you want your mother seeing you read.  It’s highly creative and original, but fair warning: it revolves around a reality show where rape is expected of the contestants, although the contestants willingly signed up for the show knowing this.  This is true hardcore, if you can handle that, read on.  If not, don’t bother.

“The Virgin” is a reality TV show broadcast on the “dark web” to whatever sleazy individuals are willing to pay the exorbitant fees to watch it.  It involves five ladies (virgins, obviously) who are placed in a Hollywood style mock-up town somewhere in America.  (if you’ve read Wol-vriey before, you can make a pretty good guess where he put the town)  The ladies have to survive and avoid getting raped for three hours, as there are ten “suitors” in the town trying to track them down for forced sex.  The ladies are not defenseless: each of them is given a choice of one weapon to carry with them, and there are plenty of weapons scattered throughout the town.  That’s one advantage to the ladies: they have some defense in the beginning, while the suitors have none.  Once everyone is in the town, anything goes, and it’s a question of survival.

The plotline itself is quite original. Authors have used reality shows before, but this is truly a new concept, although a sick and twisted one.  If this was just a standard hack and slash, it would have been good, not great.  The other elements Wol-vriey thought of and added in are what push this to the next level, and make for great storytelling.  For example, the money pot for the ladies is $10 million, but the catch is, it has to be split among the ladies that survive and avoid sex.  One person survives intact, she gets the ten million.  Two survive, they each get five.  Three survive…you get the idea.  Not only do the ladies have to contend with the suitors, they have excellent incentive to kill each other off.  There are “safe spaces” built into the show, a few churches where you can take a 15 minute break and not be touched.  To counter that, there are also traps built into many of the buildings, to prevent the contestants from hiding for the duration.  Rats, spiders, rattlesnakes, acid vats…they all make an appearance, keeping the story from becoming a standard kill-fest.

The book contains everything you’ve come to expect from Wol-vriey: gore, graphic sex, and his trademark dark humor that shows up at times.  Example: why is the show three hours long?  If you’ve ever heard a Viagra ad, you know the answer.  The writing is fine and pushes the story along at a brisk clip, but it’s the creativity that sets this one apart from his other efforts, and from most horror stories in general.  Highly recommended, but only for hardcore horror readers who want the limits pushed.  Other readers who prefer tamer material would do best to take a pass on this one.

 

 

Contains: violence, extreme gore, graphic sex, profanity, rape.

 

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson

 

Posted on September 1, 2020 by , Reply
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