Goth Chick News: Leonardo’s Next Stop; The Twilight Zone… Maybe
The epic of this film’s development is definitely beginning to look like a journey not of sight or sound, but only of mind.
Leonardo DiCaprio and his company, Appian Way Productions, have been developing a Twilight Zone movie since 2007. The script has been through a series of rewrites, with Joby Harold (All You Need is Kill, Tom Cruise’s latest film) being the latest scribe. There have also been numerous directors attached, with things looking up recently when Matt Reeves (Let Me In and Cloverfield) got onboard… until he dropped out shortly after, reportedly to head 20th Century Fox’s upcoming sequel, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.
Bummer.
We were never actually told what the new Twilight Zone film was about, except that it would combine several episodes from the original Twilight Zone show. But today, we have a one-sentence plot summary that states:
The film follows a test pilot who winds up breaking the speed of light; when he puts down his craft, he discovers that he’s landed a bit late for supper – 96 years late.
Not a huge amount to go on then, although it’s nice to see a nod to The Twilight Zone’s favorite themes, namely space and time travel. It’s also not clear which of the episodes the movie will draw from.
But one thing is certain, there will be a twist at the end.
Over the last few years, I’ve been a big fan of Disney/Pixar films, but not so much of the films put out by Disney itself. While I enjoyed Tangled well enough, when compared to the Toy Story franchise or Wall-E, the more mainstream Disney movies just don’t have the same emotional impact.
About a month ago, The Avengers 
This year, the home video divisions of all the major distributors banded together and plotted a full-scale assault on the wallets and bank accounts of Blu-ray owners during September and October. Only the wealthiest could possibly survive an attack that began with the first Hi-Def release of the Indiana Jones films. But the supreme weapon, the ultimate October Surprise, is Universal’s huge ebony slab of fear, nostalgia, and latex make-up: Universal Classic Monsters: The Essential Collection. Spanning twenty-three years and nine films (advertised as eight, sorry Spanish Dracula), the long-anticipated set brings the Masters of Halloween into glorious 1080p for the first time, and in perfect seasonal position to drain your money before you waste it on a Jack Sparrow costume that forty other people are also going to wear to that same party.
The sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Puritan adventurer Solomon Kane is my favorite of Robert E. Howard’s serial characters: a fascinating mixture of obsession, religion, righteousness, history, and dark fantasy awesomeness. However, it’s the character I love, not necessarily the stories in which he appeared. With the exception of “Wings in the Night,” the Solomon Kane stories are mid-range pieces in Howard’s canon, not at the consistent level he delivered later with Conan, King Kull, or many of his one-shots. Solomon Kane appeared early in Howard’s short professional pulp career, with the first published story in the August 1928 issue of Weird Tales. Perhaps if Howard stayed longer with the Puritan hero while his storytelling skills increased, he might have equaled the Conan series in quality.
Originally a series of short stories appearing in manga (Japanese comic book) anthologies, Pet Shop of Horrors premiered on the Tokyo Broadcasting System as a series of short animated clips in 1999. Viewers would see a two-minute piece (usually between music videos or short films) every few days until an entire episode was completed. Four whole episodes were broadcast before the animated series was discontinued. The collected episodes were released in North America in 2000 by Urban Vision.