The "Hick School" Cycle

HICK SCHOOL [comedy]

One of a small and narrow clique of rednecks wins a radio station's contest, a week in England.

Floyd completely hates it — he can't understand anything (the local language, culture, and complete lack of NASCAR). But at the end of the week, he sees that his favorite country star (think of Shania Twain, just more so) is going to perform at Wembly Stadium.

Imagine his shock when what she does an entire concert of Euro-pop! Floyd's world suddenly makes no sense....

Back home in northern Georgia, he tries to explain this to his friends with no success. They hop a Greyhound to Nashville to prove him wrong. But when they get too close to a mysterious Institute on a hill outside Nashville, suit-clad earphone-wearing heavies in a van swoop down and seize them.

It appears that American country music has a dark secret — all their "down-home" heroes are really talented Canadians, carefully trained in the Institute to speak with southern accents and espouse precise canned models of "southern culture". Floyd and the boys are given a choice: become instructors at the "Hick School", or disappear!

Befuddlement gives way to shock, then to frustration. Their idols are more interested in a life like that of William F Buckley rather than that of their popular image, which scrupulously avoids any awareness of William F Buckley himself! They prefer polo and yacht racing to NASCAR. Not only do they not seem to care about stock car racing, they cannot be coerced into paying much attention.

By the end our heroes find themselves "perverted" into thinking more like their erstwhile heroes rather than vice-versa — when one of them sees something colored red, white, and blue, they comment that it's "just like the French flag". Another, in horror, says "no, just like the Russian flag". Screams of terror erupt as the final credits roll....

The film would feature cameos by country stars (most of whom really ARE Canadian), and the DVD would include humorous subtitle options which would convert the hickish dialogue into grammatical English, and/or the grammatical English into Hickish (recall here the subtitling in the "I can speak Jive" scene in "Airplane").

Tagline:
Country music's dark secret!

MAN, I FEEL LIKE A WOMAN [horror]

An overly peppy "country artist", really a Canadian who has undergone extensive training to speak and even sing in a distinctively southern American fashion (and see here the classic screenplay HICK SCHOOL, acclaimed by influential critic Andrew Groves as one of the most convincing horror scenarios ever concocted for the screen), seems to be nothing more than yet another spandex-favoring crossover artist. Or is she?

Brazen in its obviousness, the title of her most popular hit song can be parsed like the sentence "Wow, I could really go for a Snickers bar." Is it possible that there is some alternative meaning? Surely not. But....

Married to "an acclaimed producer of popular albums" (who has been mysteriously absent from the world of commercial success since the early 1980s "Back in Black" album of AC/DC), she and her husband live in Switzerland and are famously reclusive from the public eye.

Our hero is an investigator who realizes that there is far more than expected going on at the remote Swiss compound. For one thing, the husband appears to be nothing more than a head kept alive in a jar! And the artist in question is really a tentacled, quasi-reptilian Chthulu-like creature that has come down from the space between the stars to feed on the females of the dominant species of our otherwise nondescript planet.

Tagline:
H.P. Lovecraft meets Minnie Pearl in MAN, I FEEL LIKE A WOMAN — only in theatres, this fall!

DARTH BROOKS [science fiction, action]

One of America's most popular so-called "country" performers and one of the most successful products of the HICK SCHOOL conspiracy suddenly leaves the industry at the peak of his career.

An investigative reporter suspects a sinister reason, and comes to believe that the popular and apparently all-American entertainer is really Canadian and a Dark Lord of the Sith.

But after the reported seems to be strangled by an unseen hand in front of a large group of witnesses, who will take up the investigation? Perhaps a young would-be journalist who has left his uncle's farm to seek his fortune in the large port city.