Yes, originally I said the exact same thing.

Give me one good reason why the world needs another retelling of Dracula.

I mean, haven’t we suffered enough? As it is, the mythology has been altered so many times to try and make something new out of it, that If Bram Stoker ever found out about Edward Cullen, he’s be spinning in his grave like a rotisserie ham.

On the other hand, it was probably only a matter of time before network television realized that there is a viewer appetite for old fashioned violence and sexy blood drinking, and why the heck should HBO have all the fun with True Blood anyway?

Which brings me to two good reasons why we may want to listen to the Dracula tale being retold one more time…

Downton Abbey and Jonathan Rhys Meyers.

NBC is launching a Dracula mini-series this fall which will actually take place in 1890s London (as opposed to trying to modernize the story). In this telling, Dracula has assumed the identity of an American entrepreneur with aspirations of bringing modern science and technology to Victorian society.

This is all a ruse of course, as Dracula’s true endeavor is the pursuit of revenge against humankind after it nearly destroyed him centuries earlier. The only thing that may spoil his plans for vengeance is the comely young lass he’s recently fallen in love with – who may also be the reincarnation of his dead wife.

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Jason Coffman wrote, directed, produced, and shot this thirteen-minute slow-burn nightmare. Jim Carston (played by Aaron Christensen) has a problem. He finds a business card for one Mr. Lake, who specializes in “Unusual Services.” Mr. Lake agrees to make Carston’s problem go away, but on one condition. After the job is completed, he will receive a videotape and, no matter what he does, he will have to possess that tape for the rest of his life.

Now, right off, it’s a little strange that a 2012 film should revolve around a videotape, but the medium is already so outdated that it has a strange nostalgic feel to it. And, as we see in the film’s surprising climax, there’s just things you can do with a tape that can’t be done with a disc.

This short film is already gathering critical acclaim and you can watch it now on Vimeo, as well as learn more about it at the Rabbit Room Productions website. And if you want to see more of the enigmatic businessman, Mr. Lake, there’s a sequel of sorts floating around the Internet titled, “Secret Cinema.”

Just be careful about picking up strange business cards.

Michael Penkas is the website editor for Black Gate. A collection of four of his stories, titled Dead Boys, is available for download through Amazon and Smashwords. You can learn more about his various publications on his blog.

Iron Man Three (2013)
Directed by Shane Black. Starring Robert Downey Jr., Don Cheadle, Gwyneth Paltrow, Guy Pearce, Ben Kingsley, Rebecca Hall, William Sadler, Miguel Ferrer, Jon Favreau, Ty Simpkins.

For people worried that the individual Iron Man series within the greater Marvel Cinematic Universe was in trouble, have no fear: Iron Man is back on track because Shane Black has got your back.

Iron Man Three (yes, that’s what the end credits call it, and therefore it’s the official title) starts off the Marvel Movie-verse Phase 2 with a self-contained story that feels like a great five or six-issue comic book arc. You remember: the kind that Marvel used to pull off in the days before they “evented” everything to death with Skrull infiltrations and Norman Osborne conquering the world. I hear that currently the mad robot Ultron is doing the heavy lifting for Marvel’s crossover event. Maybe this means we’ll see him in Avengers 2.

This compressed approach for Iron Man Three was the correct choice coming off the huge success of The Avengers; the new Iron Man flick needed to show that Marvel’s individual heroes could still carry their own installments — their own magazine titles, so to speak — without the support of crossover mania. With Iron Man Three as the best of the Iron Man movies so far, it promises that Thor and Captain America will have superior returns in their own follow-ups. That will be quite a feat for Cap, considering how great Captain America: The First Avenger is. But it’s in the realm of the possible, as Shane Black shows everyone with Shellhead the Third.

This is a movie that will also ignite a huge debate over its changes to the comic canon. (Wait, what do I mean “will”? The battle has already started in a forum near you.) Although the script by Black and co-writer Drew Pearce uses the popular Warren Ellis Extremis storyline from 2005–06 as a starting point and features one of Iron Man’s main villains, The Mandarin, they have fashioned a story that stays true to its own internal character logic and freely jettisons major sections of Marvel Comics history both to goose the audience and give them unexpected thrills. It’s actually a touch annoying to write a standard “review” in the modern Internet spoilerphobe understanding for a film like this where I have to dodge talking about major plot points. The thrill in writing about a movie like Iron Man Three comes from getting geeky and detailed about how it toys with famous characters and undercuts expectations.

But I’ll play by the rules here — for now. You do deserve to see Iron Man Three knowing only as much as you’ve seen from the marketing. And that means I’ve negated the rest of what I am going to say. Nonetheless, onward…. and I do promise a minimum of “spoilers.” (I hate that word. Can we ditch it? I’ve found out “spoilers” before and yet not had the film “spoiled” for me. We need a better term. How about “twists”? There you go: we’ve already got a good word. Occam’s Razor Rules!)

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Last week the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo (C2E2 for you cool kids) rolled into town with its usual juggernaut of the innovative, the unusual and the spandex’d.

Though this is my fourth year covering the show for Black Gate, I must say it is by far the worst place to send someone like me who has a problem with staring; especially when doing so is likely to seriously annoy a very big person in a very small costume.

But never let it be said that I shirked my obligation to a long-suffering readership. Therefore I bribed Black Gate photographer Chris Z to once again wade into a precarious situation with me, this time with the promise he could meet all the crew of the Black Pearl from Pirates of the Caribbean who were listed as special guests.

Plus, Chris would be a good deterrent if I did indeed seriously annoy someone; like Batman or Chewbacca.

Almost immediately I realized Chris Z was probably in as much trouble as I was.

The first indication was a sign instructing us to text a number if we saw anything “suspicious.” At which point Chris and I looked at each other and said in unison, “Define suspicious.”

When everywhere you look are adults dressed as super heroes, Star Wars characters and video game icons, determining exactly what constitutes “suspicious” is darn near impossible. Which makes you wonder what would cause someone to text the number as instructed.

Still, Chris and I did our very best to put on the mental blinders and run through a full-day lineup of interviews, meet-and-greets and 100 aisles of merchandise.

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What IS the scariest single hour of TV ever? Something out of Night Gallery, perhaps, or one of the more high octane Twilight Zone episodes? Star Trek’s “The Devil in the Dark?” What about recent vintages like True Blood, or some modern-day zombie flick? Salem’s Lot was made for TV and that has chills aplenty, but it’s far longer than an hour.

What’s left?

Space 1999. That’s right. Not usually a rock ‘em-sock ‘em sort of program, and definitely relegated now to the “dated” category, but still… for one awful hour in 1975, Space 1999 changed my life.

Let me admit up front that I was a scaredy-cat kid. If a more frightened child ever existed, I have yet to meet him, her, or it. I was scared of the dark, terrified of the basement, and petrified of being alone: demonstrating fear of abandonment in all its forms, from sensorial to parental. For years, in watching TV broadcasts of The Wizard of Oz, I never once saw the Wicked Witch; at the least hint that she was to make an appearance, I’d flee the room.

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Apparently, now that Marvel Comics has hit on a fabulously successful formula for its film properties, future movies are being released according to an ambitious Plan. The Plan ties together all the films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in a way that should be very familiar to anyone who has ever read Marvel comics.

The first picture in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is now considered to be 2008′s Iron Man (presumably ignoring all Marvel films that came before, like all three Spider-Man and X-Men pictures, Ghost Rider, Daredevil, Elektra, Fantastic Four, Wolverine, The Punisher, Blade, X-Men: First Class, etc.) Iron Man was the beginning of Phase One, a sequence which included The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger, and The Avengers.

Phase Two kicks off next month with Iron Man 3, followed by Thor: The Dark World, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Guardians of the Galaxy and culminating in The Avengers 2, scheduled to arrive in May of 2015. Like Phase One, the films in this second set will share sub-plots and secondary characters, and dovetail into the plot for Avengers 2, details of which are a closely guarded secret (but will almost certainly involve Thanos and the Cosmic Cube — excuse me, The Tesseract.)

Whatevs. Today all we care about is that the first teaser trailer for Thor: The Dark World has been released, and it contains a satisfying quantity of ‘splosions and cosmic violence. The trailer also confirms the return of all the major stars from the first film, including Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Stellan Skarsgård, Idris Elba, Kat Dennings, Jaimie Alexander, Rene Russo and Anthony Hopkins — and Tom Hiddleston as Loki (yay!).

Thor: The Dark World is directed by Alan Taylor, and is scheduled for release on November 8th. You can see the complete teaser trailer for yourself below. And if you figure out what that giant floating hood ornament is, let us know.

Just a brief post today, some passing thoughts not about sci-fi, fantasy, or horror in particular, but about the formats in which we receive much of our sci-fi, fantasy, and horror entertainment these days…

One of the odder examples of hybrid entertainment packaging to come along in some time, I think, is the DVD/Blu-ray combo pack. Since all DVDs play on Blu-ray players, the DVD is a little redundant. The only market I can think of for which this combo would be a practical necessity is people who do not yet have a Blu-ray player but plan to upgrade to one in the near future. This way they can watch the movie now and have the Blu-ray in their collection already when they do make the jump. That must be a fairly small demographic, and shrinking by the day as people upgrade out of it.

I suppose there could be a few who have a Blu-ray player in one room and just a DVD player in another, and they want to be able to watch the film in either room? “Serious mysterious,” as Alfred Hedgehog, the latest cartoon character my daughter is obsessed with, would say. Aw well, I’m not going to lose any sleep over it. Here’s how combo-pack mania has played out in our house: the Blu-ray disc gets put up out of reach of prying hands, and the DVDs are left out to get smudged up and scratched all to hell.

Speaking of new technologies, those of you who, like me, are old enough to remember when VCRs debuted in your living room may recall that initially there were two competing technologies: VHS and Betamax. The fate of the latter is well illustrated by the fact that Word flags it as a misspelling and suggests I replace it with “Bateman.” Now, the conventional wisdom is that Betamax was the superior technology and that the only reason VHS won out is thanks to superior marketing. In other words, like sheep, we embraced the inferior product because more money was spent on getting us to do so.

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After watching the Red Sonja film, many viewers will find themselves asking why the film was made. Who was responsible? How could such a thing happen?

It began in 1982, with the release of Conan the Barbarian. That film’s success led to the release, two years later, of the far cheesier Conan the Destroyer. Red Sonja appeared the following year, bringing an embarrassing end to what could have been the sword & sorcery equivalent of James Bond.

But first, the plot. After resisting the sexual advances of Queen Gedren, the evil lesbian sorceress has Sonja’s entire family murdered before ordering her men to rape her.

No, really, save your complaints until the end of the review.

Sonja is visited by a ghost that gives her the strength to best any foe in combat. After training for an indeterminate amount of time, Sonja is approached by Lord Kalidor (played by Schwarzenegger as basically Conan with pants), who takes Sonja to visit her dying sister.

Yes yes yes, her entire family was killed ten minutes earlier, but apparently her sister Varna was out with friends or something.

Varna warns Sonja that Queen Gedren has gotten hold of the Talisman (gah, think of cooler names for your artifacts), which will give her the ability to rule the world by causing earthquakes. Or something. The Talisman can only be touched by a woman, so Varna makes Sonja swear she will destroy it. After swearing an oath and building a funeral pyre for sis, Sonja goes off on her quest. She is followed by Kalidor, as well as the boy-prince Tarn and his assistant, Falkon. They fight some bandits, the phoniest-looking sea monster you’ll ever see (seriously, even the characters realize it’s just a prop), and finally the evil witch-queen herself. Spoilers, the Talisman is destroyed, Red Sonja pretty much chucks her vow, and the Conan film franchise is forced into hibernation for decades.

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How any adult, in this day and age, can approach Westworld (1973) in anything remotely close to the appropriate frame of mind is beyond me. To further complicate an open, honest viewing, the film could not possibly telegraph its intentions more bluntly. Will the tourists attending Western World, Roman World, and Medieval World have the time of their vacationing lives? Well, yes –– but in short order, they will be done in by their out-of-control hosts, robots one and all, semi-sentient machines understandably tired of living out their days getting gunned down by their rich and warm-blooded doppelgangers.

Pardon me if in the course of this review I don’t concern myself with spoilers.  If the DVD’s cover doesn’t give the game away, the first two minutes of the film surely will.

Leaving, then… what? A cautionary tale, in which we fragile mortals should learn to stop messing around with simulacrums? Or is it an adventure in which the stakes are high and the six-guns are fast?

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Admittedly, I’m a complete sucker for ghost hunting shows.

Yes, they can be painfully cheesy; from Grant Wilson’s (Ghost Hunters – SciFi Channel) earnest takes to the camera while expounding on how blessed he is to be able to help tormented souls, to Zak Bagans’s (Ghost Adventures – Travel Channel) shameless dramatics, I love every one of them.

But here’s a question for those who’ve tuned in: did you ever wonder what would happen if just once something truly horrifying actually reached out and touched one of them?

It’s an amusing thought – there’s Zak asking the “ghost” if it would give a sign it can hear him and suddenly a full bodied apparition shows up, pokes him in the nose, and says, “Yeah, I’m standing right here you tool.”

And the next thing you know, Zak and the whole GA crew are “retired.”

Well apparently I’m not the only one who imagined something similar – only they’ve taken it several steps (miles?) further.

Director James Wan already has some pretty substantial horror “street-cred” as the mind behind Saw, Dead Silence and Insidious.  And as these films represent a more in-your-face kind of scare than generally appeals to me, I am really anticipating his latest outing.

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