I have a love/hate relationship with “The Gauntlet!”

It seems like a hundred years since we’ve been showing Sick and Twisted as well as the original festival at the San Diego comic-con. It started as a free current show and then morphed into something else.

One year I decided that it would be a great testing ground to gauge an audience reaction to new films. I mean it was a no-brainer, about 1500 kids stuffed into a room the size of a football field, a captive audience, and I can show them anything I wanted. It was a great an experiment and the weaklings were quickly weeded out.

Then one faithful year, I decided to let the audience into the loop, I told them that I was showing them some new films to see what they thought some were classics and some were dogs and asked them to cheer or whatever. I don’t know why I did this, it’s like telling sheep that they are… sheep. But these sheep were like wolves, they devoured the films like candy. If they liked it they cheered like crazy if they hated it, they booed loud enough to unfreeze Disney! One of the films got such a violently bad reaction that I told the techie guy to cut off the film and when he did a cheer of such relief filled the room you could taste it and as it did, a bolt from above hit me right between the eyes. An idea of such magnitude I would eventually regret it.

The last time something this happen was about 20 years ago at the University of California, Berkley. It was after a practically great show and Mike and I were digging it, then we asked the audience if they wanted to see something different, of course they cheered and we showed them Danny Antonucci’s “Lupo the Butcher.” If you’ve ever seen this thing you know how “different” it is!! It was like feeding crumbs to pigeons, they went crazy. Afterwards walking through the campus I knew we had something special and that was when “Sick and Twisted” was born.

Now back to the Gauntlet, the next year at comic-con I decided to let the audience in even further into the loop and make them part of it – I told them that if they loved a film give it props, if they didn’t thrash it and I would cut it off. They took their role to heart and for the most part they were right on, films I knew were awful found their way in the trash and great films were praised. For a couple of years, this worked very well, the audience relished in its role and I got a good idea of what film would work and what wouldn’t. Sometimes I played the audience, knowing a film started slow and had a great payoff. I would let them thrash it and when the film paid off, they knew they were in on the joke and the cheers showed their appreciation. The best example was when Bill Plympton had me show something and said, “Just keep it running.” And I did, the boos got greater and louder and we just sat there laughing our butts off, the film was basically two lines criss-crossing the screen until one gets shot and the other one berates the audience that the dead one just wanted to express himself. The crowd went wild – realizing the joke was on them.

But all good things must come to an end and last year was the straw that broke the Gauntlet’s back. A group of punks who must have been just let out of prison, disrupted every film even though others in the audience yelled at them to stop, they wouldn’t even listen to me and good films were thrashed even before the opening credits stopped. Even though I love the Gauntlet and it is a great tool for me – it is time to retire it for a while, but like all good things, it might RISE AGAIN!

Below is a little taste of what the Gauntlet was. It was shot at the 2007 show, which was the show at its best. Enjoy.