Review - Video Armageddon 2

At last, the wait is over! If the last mixtape was a shotgun blast, this one is more of visit to Bob's Bunker. This one is subtitled "An Odyssey into Madness" and it delivers. Randomness abounds and the tape's main concern: Gore, is in buckets. Shot on video ketchup fests to karo syrup drenched film all show their best. Resting these scenes against visits to japan and stringing them with Fallout Bob's homemade madness makes for a delicious stew. The Real enjoyment of this tape is manufactured moments where you're side swiped with a joke. A face explodes to reveal a monster. A Nazi guard peers into a cell to view clown fucking. You'll find out there's more songs about eyes than you remember. There was only a few things I'll pick on. There is a scene that needed to be de-interlaced. Audio is a little loud or soft in parts. Very small potatoes, this video is hard to dislike. I only recognized a few clips, but that's because I'm a video junkie. I think an average viewer wouldn't notice. Fallout Bob has conjured another tape out of the dust of our video remains. Fallout Bob was kind enough to answer a few questions...

Video Mixtape Reviews: The girl appearing with you, does she have a name? Atomic Jane Perhaps?

Fallout Bob: Name? Heh never thought up one.. how about Shelter Girl :)

Video Mixtape Reviews: Between the two videos there seems to be kind of a story building around Bob, anything you care to say now about what sort of life Bob leads?

Fallout Bob: Not so much a story specifically with 'bob' really. More so the goal was in 'Video Armageddon' we saw the Earth destroyed, in the sequel we move beyond our planet into destruction on an interstellar level. At least that's sort of the framing I was trying for.. its really just something to break up the clips.

Video Mixtape Reviews: The scene where the phantom says bob is a gay name, first was that something you shot? And second, what is the reply? I couldn't make it out.

Fallout Bob: No, nothing I shot just a scene from some horrendously long (like 3 hours) microbudget film that came out under one of the trauma labels. I just thought the clip of the guy in the gask mask being called Bob was rather appropriate. I -THINK- his response is something like "Oh Well, sorry" as in "sorry Bob is a gay name" it is hard to hear as the sound on that film was terrible.

Video Mixtape Reviews: What's a rough estimation on the time you put into this video vs the first one?

Fallout Bob: This took a ridiculous amount of time. The original tape was put together over about 4 months and probably took a few weeks altogether. VA2 took well over a year and I can't even estimate the amount of time. The big difference was in the original tape I was just grabbing clips from my personal collection, sometimes multiple clips per movie. On this one I made the limitation going in that I was only going to use 1 clip per source, period. (I only break that rule once or twice). So it took forever to source all those clips. I think I had 6 or 7 hours of clips i recorded that got edited down to the actual 80 minute tape. I was also avoiding anything too mainstream or anything that was so 'underground' that everyone in the scene would have already seen it. Thus nothing from say 'Evil Dead' and I didn't even bother with 'Tokyo Gore Police' as that was too popular in the obscure circles.

Video Mixtape Reviews: What was your aim with this tape verses the first?

Fallout Bob: The only goal was to improve on the first one, you tell me if that was successful.

Video Mixtape Reviews: Your style seems to have gelled. What would you say best expresses that style in this tape?

Fallout Bob: The style is just pure randomness.. from a variety of sources. I try to keep things jumping around. Many tapes seem overly concerned with one genre or another, I try to draw from everything and make it dynamic enough that it (hopefully) never gets boring. That's always the main goal, keep it moving quickly. Also throw in some humour, never take yourself too seriously.

Video Mixtape Reviews: People want to know: When can we expect a DVD edition and what special features can we look forward to?

Fallout Bob: The DVD edition will be like the original VA DVD. You'll have better quality (if you can call it that) and there will be bonus footage. In quite a few cases there were clips that were good but just didn't fit into the flow so I held them back. There were also a few instances where one source had 2 great clips.. but because of the 1 clip per source rule I held the 2nd back. Plus I can already think of a few clips that I intended to hunt down and use but forgot.. so all of that will come together on the DVD.

Video Mixtape Reviews: If people take one thing away from this mixtape what would you like it to be?

Fallout Bob: Entertainment, that's the only point. Well, other than to maybe bring a
bit of the surreal into peoples lives as well.


Thanks to Bob for a great mixtape series and being a great sport about things! I've also been told that we can expect slight improvements with the DVD, yet another reason to check this one out again in a few months!