Doug Luberts

Here’s a show I came across, not online for once, but through the pages of DV Magazine.

Jay Holben is a veteran cinematographer, producer and director.  He blogs for DV Magazine and has a column in their print edition.  In the last issue Jay discussed his work as the new producer/director of CryptiqueTV starring Miko Macabre.

Miko is the on-screen alter-ego of actress/writer/producer Sophia Baxter, who started the show while she was a college student in PA.  Early efforts were very homegrown, with Miko offering up really capsule summaries of bad horror films while dishing out cheesy comedy and a lot of cleavage.

CryptiqueTV is in the spririt of Elvira, Mistress of the Dark and Vampira, and is very faithfull to the cornball jokes and cheeky dialog that you would expect from this type of ghoul, uh, girl. In fact Sophia, who writes the show, is pretty good at coming up with the material.

In every episode Miko dissects a truly awful horror film, while pile-driving every pun and cliche she can imagine at her audience.  I’ll admit, you have to hand it to her … Taking the best of the worst and not having to sit through a whole filmic atrocity is a big improvement over her predecessors.  I always enjoyed Elvira’s show, but could never hang through the entire movie.  CryptiqueTV gives it to you all in 10 minutes, and that’s about all of any of these movies one could take (although afficienados of this genre will probably take  exception with that point … I’m a romantic comedy kind of guy myself) … Miko is obviously the chief attraction here anyway, the movies there just to give her an excuse to camp it up.

As a startup on YouTube, Miko created a bit of a buzz, enough to get Holben interested in taking the show in to his production company, and giving it a bit of an upgrade.

Cryptique is now shot by Holben in Los Angeles, where Ms. Baxter is also pursuing an acting career, and airing new episodes monthly.

The new episodes on YouTube are getting play, but neither producer has really jumped into the whole social networking aspect of promoting the show, which we’re all seeing as key to getting known, noticed, and watched.  It takes more than a static web page these days to build an audience, which I believe this show is capable of, but it needs promotion.

Holben follows up with his efforts on CryptiqueTV in this months online DV Magazine.

New episodes are available monthly at www.cryptiquetv.com.