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Yeah, I saw this one during it’s theatrical release, back in 1987, and above all, I recall leaving the theater in desperate need of some mental hygene given the movie’s uncomfortable explorations of incest, S&M and the consequences of selling your soul.

While the franchise’s demons, the Cenobytes, appear within the film’s first 5 minutes, we only get a glimpse — they are by no means central to the story. Rather, Pinhead and the Cenobytes are simply the vehicles of hubris:The cenobytes both identify and punish those who are willing to overreach. Though the SciFi Channel insists that all genre movies reveal their creatures within the first 15 minutes, that formula — dictated by commercial requirements — is really irrelevant because ‘Hellraiser’ is an epic drama that circulates around Kirsty Cotton (Ashley Laurence) and her evil stepmother, Julia (Clare Higgins). [Read more →]

Tags: Adaptation, Drama, Fantasy, Film, Horror, Meta-fiction, Sci-Fi, Thriller by Victor Sparrow
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Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Dark Knight‘ is the latest addition to the trend of painfully overplotted comic book movies. I’m not exactly certain when the habit of inflating a paper-thin pulp story into a full-blown bildungsroman. But since the late ’80′s it’s been necessary for each comic book movie to have at least two villains and as many as 4. (Notably, Tim Burton’s 1989 movie only had one villain, The Joker.)

While this installment of Batman seems to be the most successful commercial film since James Cameron’s ‘Titanic‘, you’d think that such a movie would have to have a simple storyline to keep selling tickets at such a rapid pace, week after week. Not so, here. [Read more →]

Tags: Action, Adaptation, Comic Book, Crime, Drama, Fantasy, Film, Sci-Fi, Thriller by Victor Sparrow
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aka ‘Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull’

Was this worth my $10?

Is it really necessary to summarize the plot of an Indiana Jones movie? Apparently it is, at least that’s the impression I walked away from ‘Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull’ with: the story turned in David Koepp (script), George Lucas and Jeff Nathanson (story) hits just enough notes to remind you that you’re at an Indiana Jones movie but it hits enough of them sour to make it impossible to miss the fact that this isn’t a movie for movie’s sake but a franchise reboot and a launching platform for the next generation.

Set more than 15 years after ‘Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade’, this film opens as all of these kind films do, in the middle of some adventure.
[Read more →]

Tags: Action, Fantasy, Film, Thriller by Anne Dougherty
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First of all, credit is due to to the website where I discovered ‘Dead & Buried‘ (1981), the Video Nasties Project, which is a blog devoted to the exploration of the 79 B-movies that were banned by the British Nanny State after the explosion of the home video market in 1979.

A list of all 79 of the ‘banned’ movies is available here, but as we all know, because something is banned it doesn’t mean that college kids and high schoolers aren’t going to figure out a way to smuggle the item home from the Continent or a summer vacation in the US. [Read more →]

Tags: Fantasy, Film, Horror, Meta-fiction, Sci-Fi, Thriller by Victor Sparrow
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It is sometimes hard to separate the actual doings of a film from the film’s publicity materials. With a writer and director like Darren Aronofsky (‘Pi’,'Requiem For a Dream’) who seems to pride himself on the rich, mythical, and often opaquely puzzling presentation of patterns in human behavior, achieving this separation is especially difficult.’The Fountain’ is a triptych bound together by the search for immortality as a means to preserve love. Interweaving stories tell the tales of a Spanish Conquistador searching for the secret to immortality, immorality that will free the Queen he loves from the bondage of the Papal Inquisition, in the form of the Tree of Life from the Garden of Eden in New Spain; of a cancer researcher desperately trying to find a way to stop the growth brain tumors in monkeys fast enough to find a cure for his dying wife who instead finds a way to reverse brain aging; and of a mystic traveling through space with a tree that he not only loves but is dependent upon for continued life. [Read more →]

Tags: Drama, Fantasy by Anne Dougherty
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Was this worth $10 and my 2 hours?

I confess publicly, now, up-front to a small obsession with Keira Knightley. I’ve seen all but two of her films and regardless of the quality, QED ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End,’ I’ve found her to be effective at a bare minimum in all and stunning in some of the roles she’s played. That said, while she acquits herself quite well her role as Cecilia Tallis in ‘Atonement’ isn’t really that much of a role. [Read more →]

Tags: Adaptation, Drama, Fantasy, Film, Meta-fiction, War by Anne Dougherty
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Jeff Goldblum is back.

We’re going into the 5th week of “Raines” this week and sadly, it’s already half over. “Raines” was brought onto NBC as a mid-season replacement for ER, which was scheduled for a 6-week hiatus as the cast and crew split their 12th season. Several weeks ago, TV.com reported that NBC had already reduced their initial order from 13 to 7, which I’m sure is a disappointment to creator and producer Graham Yost, who’s last NBC show was the celebrated and lamented “Boomtown.” [Read more →]

Tags: Crime, Drama, Fantasy, Television by Victor Sparrow
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Despite the mixed reviews coming from the fans, Marvel’s Civil War is a momentous event. People can talk their DC Kingdom Come stuff as much as they want, but Civil War is the book that they’ll be talking about in the graduate-level Ivy seminars and MLA conferences ten years from now.

Why? Well, it’s certainly not the subtlety.

Most of the fan-problem with CW is that many characters are depicted out-of-character. After a 40 year friendship, Captain America (Steve Rogers) and Iron Man (Tony Stark) have suddenly been depicted as rivals. In Marvel’s continuity, Rogers and Stark have been friends and teammates on the Avengers for more than 40 years, yet, in an almost painful evocation of the McCarthy era and the Alien and Sedition Acts, Marvel has created a ‘Super-Hero Registration Act’ (SHRA) that requires all super-powered persons to register with the Federal Gov’t, otherwise face lifetime incarceration. [Read more →]

Tags: Comic Book, Fantasy, Meta-fiction, Sci-Fi by Victor Sparrow
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O.k., it’s been on for 2 months and I was initially non-plussed when I saw a preview back at the end of August.

As ‘Unbreakable:The Series’, I was sure it would be cancelled before October, but it’s managed to hold on, and gain my attention, in part owing to my brother retuning from Europe and taking an immediate interest.

Personally, I’m not invested in the drug-addicted (cliché) artist, though his dealer is a hottie. And the A.D.A.-turned-politician (played by Adrian Pasdar) is as much a non-entity as is his brother, the lover of the art-dealing hottie. OTOH, what’s drawn me into the show are a number of tertiary characters — specifically Charlie, the Odessa TX waitress that Hiro time-travels 6 months into the past to try to save from Sylar the Hero killer. And Claire the cheerleader daughter of the would-be bad guy with the horn-rimmed glasses calling the shots for all of the mind-controlling hero-types. [Read more →]

Tags: Action, Adaptation, Comic Book, Fantasy, Meta-fiction, Sci-Fi, Television, Thriller by Victor Sparrow
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I was going to write a review of ‘Superman Returns‘ (previous comments here) but I’ve got comic book movie fatigue — for the near future, I’m swearing off the writing of such reviews as much of that stuff, I fear, is a waste of time, considering that the artistes who make these movies never take them as seriously as I’d like them to. (Granted, this is from someone who majored in Semiotics while he was in college — thus I ought to be excluded from most serious discussions..)

I’m all about the revisionism (c.1987) in comics and I’m disappointed that the rest of the world still hasn’t caught up with Alan Moore’s ‘Watchmen‘, Watchmen, importantly being THE signal event in the American comics industry that changed just about everything, with Frank Miller’s revisionist Batman miniseries, ‘The Dark Knight Returns’ being a close second. [Read more →]

Tags: Action, Adaptation, Comic Book, Fantasy, Film, Meta-fiction, Sci-Fi by Victor Sparrow
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