The Long Road to Rogue Cinema's 5th Anniversary - By Josh Samford

Articles & Profiles: The Long Road to Rogue Cinema's 5th Anniversary - By Josh Samford
Posted on Monday, June 01, 2009 @ 00:05:00 Mountain Daylight Time by Duane

Although I don't remember those days as well as I probably should, I remember when Duane (Duane L. Martin, the brilliant editor and chief mastermind behind Rogue Cinema) first brought up the idea of doing an online 'zine'. Looking back on it, I remember being incredibly wary of it all. At that point I had never really written much other than your basic film reviews. So originally Duane was going to have us either write a review with an article or maybe two reviews, and at the point with my lack of creative output during this period - either situation was going to be more than a little frightening for me. However, when the time came, we all somehow delivered. For those of you unfamiliar with the beginnings of Rogue Cinema, we are from a group called The Rogue Reviewers and this whole concept was started up by Jordan Garren as an alternative to the B-Masters Cabal (Jordan, who we all respect and admire to no end, politely bowed out of the Rogues and gave full position to Duane who had kind of been our figurehead for a long while anyhow. Jordan is doing well and still writing over at his site and hasn't lost the love of cinema that we all share). We were never all too specific on our site selections in terms of genre-content in reference to the people who joined up. When Jordan first contacted me and asked me to join the Rogue Reviewers, I remember telling him that my site (Varied Celluloid) wasn't exactly b-movie specific, and he just brushed it aside. Truthfully, Jordan wouldn't take no for an answer and I essentially HAD to join up!

From the very start with the Rogue Reviewers, it was always kind of tricky to keep up with our Roundtable Reviews. A system where we would all pick a topic every month and try to review a film from that one specific genre/subgenre. Looking back, one review really doesn't seem so tough but somehow my laziness prevented me from keeping up. So, when Rogue Cinema came along I had my fears. Desperate fears and a total lack of confidence in my own writing, which still remains the same to this day. However, somehow Duane always made me feel at home and always tried to boost my confidence with my own writing. My memories of that first year were of me just trying to experiment with different voices. In this time I wrote up a lot of basic summaries on filmmakers and a lot of lists. I'm sure I wasn't the only one in that first year BS'ing my way through it all. My first ever review for Rogue Cinema, I will never forget. I remember thinking "well, chances are this thing is going to be a b-movie magazine so I might as well go out and try to find the biggest b-movie I can possibly track down". So, in preparation for my first film review for Rogue Cinema, I went VHS hunting at our local mom & pop videostore!

"There it is!" I thought. There, sitting on the horror shelf it sat, with a comic book looking cover that simply screamed low budget garbage. The sort of cover, in all of it's bad taste, you just picture some death metal band having shot and filmed then selling at one of their shows. Unfortunately when I actually watched the movie it wasn't anywhere near as interesting as that, as it turned out to simply be your average slasher, but that was the fun part of the film and the fun part of the entire atmosphere for this magazine. We never really knew what we were getting into, at least from my vantage point but that was what made it so exciting. On the subject of Nailgun Massacre, it wasn't nearly as bad as I had hoped it would be, but it seemed so obscure at the time that I was more than happy to have it as my first ever review. Since then the film has actually had a DVD release and has lost a bit of that edge, but I couldn't have picked a better title for my first review - because it simply shows the 'expectations' versus what Rogue Cinema actually became. Going into all of this, I don't know what I really expected it to be like five years from then. Half of a decade, which is pretty weird to think of. In that first month, I simply thought all of this would turn out as a compilation of our own sites with standard reviews and articles covering the things we already knew about and have been talking about for years. My actual first written work for the magazine was an article on Takashi Miike, who I was absolutely infatuated with back in those days. Time moves on though, and things change. Even though I'm still a great fan of that filmmaker, I've seen so much of his work at this point the infatuation has simply turned to respect and light admiration. Times move about and month to month, things changed with Rogue Cinema as well.

From my personal experiences, it was around July of 2006 when I first started getting independent screeners sent to me. It was Green Eyes For Anastice, which still remains one of my favorite independent productions to this day. Even though at this point I have been lucky enough to catch many great ones. I am not sure exactly what caused us to get swamped with so many screeners month after month, but it just seemed to start in a very sudden way and doesn't seem close to stopping anytime soon. For the likes of myself, Duane and Brian Morton (those two are the real workhorses of this magazine, I put in nowhere near the amount of work that those guys do) it's fairly easy that we're reviewing anywhere from 3-6 screeners a month each. For those two, it's usually the larger number with a couple of articles or interviews along with it. The growth of Rogue Cinema, from it's inception as a b-movie genre zine to these days when we have picked up steam as having one of the largest collections online for independent film reviews. Like Film Threat, we're open to all filmmakers and always do our best to complete every screener thrown our way.

Who knows what the future holds for Rogue Cinema? We've had former members go on to some big things, including hosting gigs on IFC and appearances in various horror outlets. The most we can hope for however is the continuing deliverance of all things worth you the reader's interest. Whether it's good, bad or just plain awful - Rogue Cinema will be there and chances are we'll have a few things to say about it. Don't forget about us and keep your eyes posted here at the first of every month!