No, I didn’t make Corn Boys 2 (yet), but I did make a new movie. I can only hope that we didn’t, you know, Corn Boys it up this time around. Apparently the title of my 2005 flop is now a widely accepted verb in the movie biz for “fucking everything up” or, at the very least, synonymous with failure. Hey! I blame Sonic 3D Blast for that one. I literally played it for like a week straight and neglected to really put much editing into Corn Boys, though yeah, there’s no amount of plastic surgery I could impart in the way of editing to salvage what is essentially a half an hour of half-constructed inside jokes and niche material. That’s the trouble with making movies, though, is that there’s no way to look at them without bias. After spending the past 2 weeks editing this little number, Goodbye Monster, well, of course I’m going to be inclined to say that it’s good. Maybe it actually is! I really don’t know.

It is then, really, the justification of that which has already been done. Similar to your grandfather justifying his job as head secretary for Frankfort, Kentucky’s Ku Klux Klan branch for 40 years, he’s going to tell you the same damn thing: Well, what’s done is done!

Goodbye Monster is a curious creation. Please note: it is not Goodbye, Monster. There are no goodbyes, here; the idea was that a monster whose job it was to say goodbye existed for some reason. Somehow that got muddled and was ultimately dismantled and abandoned. I guess I liked the idea of monsters having “jobs”. I’ve always imagined them to have, like, abilities or specialties. For instance, one monster is good at eating unborn children, while another simply prefers to make you put your hand in a box with noodles or grapes inside to replicate the feeling of brains or eyeballs. Is that what the spaghetti was meant to feel like? I think they used to do that at haunted houses or something.

The name itself came from a “rap session” three winters ago when we were trying to name our new production company; we’d worn out Tyrant Films, was the group’s sentiment. I’d given us the name Tyrant Films after spending several years as a Led Zeppelin devotee. In the song “The Battle of Evermore” off of their undeniably perfect Led Zeppelin IV (uh, Four Sticks aside), Robert Plant remarks that “the tyrant’s face is red.” I guess I liked that. This was no time for ripping Led Zeppelin lines, though, so we were hankering for something new. My suggestions were probably awful: Goodbye Monster and Eggplant Factory. The latter I can defend, sort of: I simply wanted a logo of a factory belching purple smoke. I thought that was cool. Never mind the fact that the eggplant, a vegetable, doesn’t emit smoke. Purple smoke was cool to me back then. In fact, purple smoke is always cool.

So that didn’t really pan out. Since then, I’ve been slapping the octonaut logo on every movie I’ve shown here, and I don’t really have much of a desire to change that. So we still had this name Goodbye Monster, though. (Don’t ask when the movie Eggplant Factory is going to roll around, because I’m not entirely sure yet.) In a heated (lol) session of what we call Jacuzzi Jabberin’ – that is, hanging out in a hot tub and discussing ideas and/or engaging in “guy talk” – we dissected our recent work, which took place in a McDonalds near a major highway. Well, see, this movie didn’t really pan out. Not yet, at least. So we got to thinking, and we got to thinking hard. Remembering the dinosaur/dragon costume that Ryan Butler owns for some reason, we wanted to do a movie based around him. The costume was last used in our 2005 epic, “What Do You Know, America? Part Deux” at 8 minutes and 47 seconds, where Ryan Butler can be seen pretending to eat his bastard of a little brother.

Generally everyone was merely caricature of themselves. Ryan Butler is probably an exception to this rule, as he’s not exactly a 5-year-old boy, although Mike D’amico does an excellent job as weary alcoholic. Jessi Beach is just plain angry about something. Eddie Long is an overenthusiastic, sort-of-creepy step-dad. Chase Faett is a dry-witted, sarcastic atheist. As to how I’m like a dinosaur, well, I’m not entirely sure, though hell if it wasn’t fun to play. Well, it was somewhat fun to play. That damned costume heats up to a temperature so hot that I’m pretty my testosterone has been converted to scrambled eggs. As Eddie put it, everyone played the exact role they were meant to play. It wouldn’t have worked if, say, I played Ryan’s character, and Eddie played Chase’s character. I don’t even want to think about what sort of surrealist mindfuck the movie would have ended up being had Mike played the dinosaur. Chills – I’m actually getting chills.

The lines were fed to the actors before each scene, since we didn’t really feel like this one necessitated a detailed script. Some of Eddie and Mike’s improvisation is borderline brilliant, however, and I can’t help but wish that Eddie’s character, Clark, actually existed. Furthermore, I’d like for him to be my dad. The inspiration for his character was, in all seriousness, the masterful acting of Judge Reinhold from 1994’s holiday classic The Santa Clause. That was obscure as hell, by the way, but maybe someone got it.

Anyway, here it is, and isn’t it beautiful. A lot of hard work was put into this little gem, so, I don’t know, show your parents or something. You can turn down the volume during the parts when we say “fuck”, I guess, and tell them how much of a reckless scoundrel that Ryan Litton is; I’m sure they’ll probably just wince and pretend to laugh.