BRUCE DICKINSON: SINGER, PILOT… SCREENWRITER?

Vince and I are seeing Iron Maiden live tomorrow, and I’m very excited about the show. ‘Cause the last time we saw them, they just played A Matter of Life and Death in its entirety, and even if I didn’t think that that album sucks (which I do), I didn’t pay no arena ticket prices so Steve Harris could feel like he’s still young and musically relevant. Suck a dick and play “Number of the Beast,” shit heads.

ANYWAY, NME.com reports that Iron Maiden vocalist/tour jet pilot Bruce Dickinson has co-written a horror film, Chemical Wedding, “which is set to debut at the Cannes Film Festival.”

This is a fucking lie. And you should all know it’s a fucking lie, because the program for this year’s Cannes fucking film Festival hasn’t even been announced yet.

Now, I don’t think that this is fuck-up on NME’s part; rather, I think they’re just re-printing a shitty press release. The truth is, Cannes – one of the world’s most prestigious film fests – is, like every other film festival, a playground for every movie biz slime bag in the world who wants to try and sell his movie. I mean, c’mon, the dudes from Troma are there every year – but no one would ever say that The Toxic Avenger was “in” the Cannes Film Festival. Because that would be fucking retarded.

Now, Chemical Wedding was directed by Julian Doyle. If the name “Julian Doyle” doesn’t set off alarms in your mind the way, say, the name “Stanley Kubrick” does, well, that’s because Julian Doyle is nobody. A quick glance at his resumé shows that he’s been the second unit director – e.g., the guy who shoots all the inserts/action shots/scenery/whatever that are too boring/unimportant for the director to do – for acclaimed director/ex-Monty Pythoner Terry Gilliam (Brazil, Twelve Monkeys, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) a couple of times, but as a director, he hasn’t done shit you’ve ever heard of or would ever want to hear of.

And now he’s directed a movie that he co-wrote with Bruce Dickinson, that they will try to sell to the big wigs at Cannes, all the while claiming that the film is “in” the Cannes Film Festival.

This is all a very, very long winded way of saying: this movie is going to suck donkey balls. And no one should be under the impression that it won’t. No one should give it the benefit of the doubt, and no one should be offended that I’m talking shit about a movie that hasn’t been released yet. Trust me on this one: donkey balls. In this movie’s mouth. Getting sucked.

In case there’s still any lingering doubt, wait until this thing goes straight to video later this year.

-AR