John Carpenter’s ‘The Fog‘ (1980) was, of course, one of seminal horror pictures of the 80′s. ‘The Fog’ was Carpenter’s third feature film to be followed by ‘Escape from New York’ in 1981 and his remake of ‘The Thing’ in 1982. Shot for $1 million 1980 dollars (300% the value of 2008 dollars) it would have made $63,000,000 if released today. [Read more →]
‘Shutter‘(2008) is touted as a product of ‘the Executive Producers of ‘The Ring’ and ‘The Grudge’, but is the American audience’s memory so brief as to forget that only one of these American remakes was any good?
‘Shutter’ plays like ‘Ring 2′ ought to have. Back in 2005, I had hoped that the production team at DreamWorks would have done the smart thing and either followed the Japanese sequel or done the metatextual thing and paid homage to their source material by sending Rachel Keller East for a close-encounter with kwaidon — Japanese ghost stories. Unfortunately that didn’t happen. [Read more →]
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 →]
Now don’t get me wrong, here — ‘The Mist‘ (2007) was adequately executed, beautifully shot and well cast, but Frank Darabont ought to have done more to haul the premise of Stephen King’s novella out of the ’50′s.
I used to be a King fan way, way back and read a good few of his books back in my junior HS days. I even followed some of his adaptations for a while — his adaptations from other people’s ideas and other people’s adaptations of his work — but that was before Frank Darabont started making his filmazations. [Read more →]
Though its a sometimes-interesting exercise in high-concept mash-up (Godzilla-meets-Blair Witch, anyone?), ‘Cloverfield‘ really brings very little that’s new to the table.
Numerous reviewers have referred to ‘Cloverfield’ is horror for the Facebook generation, “because it’s not really happening unless it’s on videotape”. But to be more exact and closer to the point, ‘Cloverfield’ is authentic J-horror for Facebookii Americanus — J-horror made by and for narcissistic, web-ready American audiences. [Read more →]
Though Richard Matheson’s novella has been adapted for the screen 3 times and served as the inspiration for George Romero and John Russo’s ‘Living Dead’ franchises, but this is the first time that a film has borne the original title. With each incarnation the story has played against its own specific cultural background:
1964′s ‘Last Man on Earth‘ starring Vincent Price, was quintessentially an Atomic-age Cold War story; Romero and Russo played their story as an American Civil Rights morality tale while a politically disenchanted Charleton Heston found fit to illustrate Matheson’s story as a reaction against the late ’60′s/early ’70′s culture of protest [Read more →]
I recently tried – and failed – to endear two of my younger friends to Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake of Don Seigel’s 1956 classic. I personally think the problem was demi-generational as both of the young men I tried to introduce the film to were 5 years my junior and therefore entirely unconscious during the Watergate hearings, not to mention the slow cavalcade of Vietnam casualties being announced on the evening news in the early ’70′s and the protests that those deaths inspired.
When I was an undergraduate at Brown University in the ’80′s, I remember Michael Silverman lecturing to us about Kaufman’s remake of this oh-so-wooden ’50′s Cold War science-fiction/horror canard. [Read more →]
Not just another ‘Medium’ clone.
So, I was in NYC over New Years’ and I was pimping my friend’s VOD Digital cable and I came across this show, ‘Afterlife‘ and thought I’d give it a shot. Apparently it was broadcast in the UK starting in 2005 and has gotten play on Australia’s Channel 9 before comig to BBC America.
Knowing little the show’s premise and having missed the first episode (it had expired off of the system) I gave the show a look. Very interesting. Though the show’s got many of the trappings of Patricia Arquette’s co-evolved show (both premiered in 2005) Ms. Sharpe’s drama is played very differently… [Read more →]
After 33 years in obscurity, an important adaptation is finally released on DVD.
‘Frankenstein: The True Story‘ (1973) was Originally broadcast over 2 nights back in 1973. ‘Frankenstein: TTS‘ starred James Mason, Michael Sarrazin, David McCallum, Ralph Richardson, John Gielgud, Leonard Whiting, Jane Seymour and Agnes Moorehead, was directed by Jack Smight and written by Christopher Isherwood, the writer of ‘Cabaret‘ (1972). This filmisation is widely acknowledged to be the most faithful of adaptations, outshining even Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 ‘Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein‘. In fact, the Branagh version borrowed many themes from the 1973 Isherwood version without improving upon any of it.
Writer Isherwood, while being faithful to the source material was also comprehensive in his effort to do justice to the Frankenstein legacy by drawing heavily from not only the Shelley novel, but also elements of James Whale’s 1931 follow-up to ‘Frankenstein‘, ‘The Bride of Frankenstein‘ (1935). The film is daring in its presentation of Michael Sarrazin as the Creature, who evolves from a beautiful young man to an ugly homunculus as a result of his slow necrotization. Equally ambitious is Isherwood’s Pygmalion treatment of James Whale’s ‘Bride of Frankenstein‘, as Jane Seymour’s Prima evolves from a childlike tabula rasa to a full-blown debutante before her untimely demise. [Read more →]
How is it that this movie didn’t get a proper US release?
Probably because it was too similar to so many other, poorer movies released in 2005. In 2005, we saw the long-awaited and haplessly inferior sequel, ‘Ring 2‘, ‘Boogeyman‘, ‘Darkness‘, the American remake of ‘The Grudge‘ and earlier this year, ‘Silent Hill‘, and unnecessary remakes of ‘The Hills Have Eyes‘, ‘The Amityville Horror‘ and ‘House of Wax‘.
Earlier this week, a friend gave me the thumbnail production cycle of 18 months for any release. I can’t establish a complete timeline for this film, but there are so many aspects of ‘The Dark‘ that are similar to the latter duds, I can’t help but wonder if plotlines were lifted from the former whole-cloth and inserted into these other, inferior movies. [Read more →]
