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Goth Chick News: Waist Deep in the Horror or Covering the Halloween and Haunted Attractions Show 2016

Goth Chick News: Waist Deep in the Horror or Covering the Halloween and Haunted Attractions Show 2016

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Transworld Halloween 2016-small

A 4 a.m. wakeup call, ten hours in the car, more coffee and Mountain Dew than can reasonably be tallied, two shots of Fireball whisky and over 100K square feet of blood, guts and latex.

No, it isn’t the Black Gate holiday party in Vegas. If it were, there would be way more than two shots of Fireball…

It is in fact, the biggest haunt show of the year; the Transworld Halloween & Haunted Attraction Show in St Louis, Missouri and Black Gate photog Chris Z and I are hopping on the road at zero-dark-thirty to cover it for the sixteenth year running – Chicago to Saint Louie and back in one day.

WTF? I hear you asking. But trust me when I say getting an inside peep at this “industry only” show is well worth the long day and the dry cleaning bill to get the smell of rotting flesh (courtesy of Sinister Scents) out of our Black Gate polo’s.

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Here Come the Replicants! – Blade Runner 2 Moved Up

Here Come the Replicants! – Blade Runner 2 Moved Up

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BladeRunnerThe long awaited sequel from Ridley Scott, starring Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, Robin Wright and Dave Bautista (yes, the former wrestler), was originally slated for January of 2018. That’s not exactly prime release time. Or a sign that the studio has confidence in the film. Instead, it’s been moved up to the weekend of October 6, 2017, which would put it in the Oscar discussion. If it is any good, of course.

Feelings about the sequel are certainly mixed. Though I think folks should remember that Blade Runner was not a hit upon release and had fared so poorly in test screenings that the film was recut before general distribution. However, it has grown to cult status. It’s one of my favorites and certainly a classic of scifi noir.

The script continues the story from the first film, which was an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Which is well worth a read.

K.W. Jeter wrote two official sequel novels, which I’m happy to say, have nothing to do with the film. The first was readable: the second was terrible.

If you enjoyed Blade Runner, there’s a superb book on the making of the film, Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner.

I remain hopeful about this film. And Vangelis is 73 years old. Will he be doing the soundtrack? It was a big part of the original.

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Star Trek Movie Rewatch: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

Star Trek Movie Rewatch: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

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Star Trek 4 The Probe-small

I’m not always the most attentive or detail oriented movie watcher. So, as I came to the end of The Voyage Home, the fourth of the original cast Star Trek movies, I realized that I still didn’t know exactly what was going on with those whales.

After movie three — The Search For Spock — the crew of the late starship Enterprise (watch the aforementioned for more details on that) are laying over on Vulcan, getting their commandeered Klingon ship up to speed when Earth finds itself menaced by a Big Dumb Object of some sort. It demands that it be paid a tribute of whales – or something like that — or it will wipe out the Earth in dramatic fashion. Our heroes enact that time honored SF convention of slingshotting around the sun to go several centuries back in time (with keen precision, I must note) and pick up a few whales, which they spirit off in a hastily built whale tank in the Klingon ship.

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Check Out the Teaser Trailer for Marvel’s Doctor Strange

Check Out the Teaser Trailer for Marvel’s Doctor Strange

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I’m very excited by Marvel’s upcoming Doctor Strange movie, even more than I usually am by big-budget comic adaptations. And the brand new teaser trailer — featuring our first look at Benedict Cumberbatch as Stephen Strange, Tilda Swinton as the Ancient One, and Chiwetel Ejiofor as the sinister Baron Mordo — isn’t helping me stay calm at all.

I view Doctor Strange at the last major untapped Marvel property. The 1960s comic, by Stan Lee and the brilliant Steve Ditko, the team that created Spider-Man, created in Doctor Strange a truly unique comic character, a sorcerer-hero who learned to navigate the strange paths between our reality and the next, and in the process discovered an endless chain of bizarrely-connected — and frequently very dangerous — parallel dimensions. I had real fears the movie would gloss over that aspect of his origin story, or ignore it entirely, but this trailer has put those to rest. It’s going to be epic.

Doctor Strange is scheduled for release November 4. It also stars Rachel McAdams and Mads Mikkelsen, and is directed by Scott Derrickson (The Messengers, Sinister). See our previous coverage here and here. Derek Kunsken took a detailed look at Lee and Ditko’s original comic here and here.

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: John Cleese as Holmes – Take One

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: John Cleese as Holmes – Take One

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Cleese_ElementaryJohn Cleese is best known, of course, as the sardonic Q opposite Pierce Brosnan’s James Bond in Die Another Day. Though not as well remembered, he also played a key role in the British comedy troupe, Monty Python.

I’m kidding!

On January 18, 1973, the final episode of Python’s third season aired. It was Cleese’s last episode with the group, which would continue on for one more season. That very same same day, Cleese’s next project aired – Comedy Playhouse Presents: Elementary, My Dear Watson. It was produced by Barry Took, who had brought the Python members together.

I’m going to tackle the Achilles heel (really, it’s more like the entire torso) of this show, the plot: or rather, the lack of one. It’s barely a story. Try to stick with me, and no, I’m not leaving things out: it really goes like this…

The show opens in a room full of dead lawyers, slumped over their desks, each with a knife in the back.  Some would say that’s a pretty good start, but let’s stay focused. Thus the show’s subtitle, The Strange Case of the Dead Solicitors. A policeman and a secretary exchange what are intended to be witty comments, which immediately brings the lame laugh track to the viewer’s attention. This is not the most robust laugh track you’ll come across.

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Goth Chick News: Doctor Sleep Gets the Hollywood Treatment

Goth Chick News: Doctor Sleep Gets the Hollywood Treatment

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Doctor Sleep-smallThey say for good or bad, you never forget your first love; and so it went with me and Stephen King.

I fell deeply in love with him in those heady, early days of Carrie, Salem’s Lot and Firestarter when thankfully I was advised by an older and wiser high school friend, to “read King in order.” But by the time I arrived at The Stand and Gerald’s Game I had begun to spend more and more time with other authors, as King started to feel… well… a little predictable. And ultimately, I never even cracked The Dark Tower books (though I have heard they are quite good) because by that time my literary horror affections were firmly turned elsewhere.

Ah well… I was young.

So it was with some trepidation that I picked up Doctor Sleep when it was released in October, 2013. I mean, King to me was “back then”; was I really proposing to give him another chance?

Ultimately, I was moved by the warm memories I had of The Shining, in spite of being in the heretical subset who think Kubrick’s interpretation is every bit as good a movie as the source material. Doctor Sleep was, after all, King’s hotly-anticipated sequel.

Well as you probably know, there I was the minute I closed the back cover of the novel, literally gushing about King all over you in Goth Chick News. Doctor Sleep was not only fantastic, but may well rank in my top 10 favorite reads ever. And that’s saying quite a lot.

All that old magic came flooding back.

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A Helluva Detour: The Mysterious Island

A Helluva Detour: The Mysterious Island

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Mysterious Island poster-small

The Mysterious Island (1961)
Based on a novel by Jules Verne
Directed by Cy Endfield

It wasn’t my intention to watch a bunch of adventure movies lately that all dated from the early Sixties. It just worked out that way. As coincidence would have it, the three I watched shared a similar theme — that of being stranded. The Lost World (1960) found a group of adventurers stranded on a high plateau in South America. In Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964), well, you can figure that one out. In The Mysterious Island (1961), a group of Union soldiers and a Confederate find their balloon swept way off course, all the way from Virginia to a point located somewhere in the South Sea Islands of the Pacific Ocean. Which is a helluva detour, by my reckoning.

Like The Lost World, which was based on a story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Mysterious Island is an adaption of a work by a well-known author of yesteryear. Jules Verne’s first novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon, was published in 1863 and in the next decade or so he turned out a number of books, including Journey to the Center of the Earth, From the Earth to the Moon, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and Around the World in Eighty Days. He returned to balloon adventures in The Mysterious Island, which was published in 1874. But it was hardly the end of the line for the prolific Verne, who had written his best known novels by this time, but who turned out many more novels before his death in 1905.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Ronald Howard Dons the Deerstalker

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Ronald Howard Dons the Deerstalker

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RonHoward2SmileArthur Wontner was the first great screen Holmes of the sound era, followed by Basil Rathbone. Wontner was 56 when he first donned the deerstalker and looked older. Rathbone was 54 for his last Holmes film, though he came across as younger.

I’ve already written a post here at Black Gate (Go ahead: read that before continuing on with this one. You know you want to…) on Ronald Howard’s under-appreciated performance as Holmes in Sheldon Reynolds’ television series, which was filmed in France. Howard, son of British actor Leslie Howard (familiar to Bogart fans), was 36 and portrayed a much younger Holmes than the previous standards. His Watson, H. Marion Crawford, was less of a doofus than we’d seen from Nigel Bruce (Rathbone) and Ian Fleming and Ian Hunter (Wontner).

It’s Elementary – Rathbone was not impressed with his successor: “All I can say is, I think he’s too young for the role. I never thought of Holmes being so young…”

While the scripts often left something to be desired, Howard and Crawford gave fresh performances in the 39 episodes they filmed. The first two, while self-supporting, actually formed a two-parter, by design.

The second episode, The Case of Lady Beryl, took place immediately after the conclusion of the first, The Case of the Cunningham Heritage. Reynolds was a savvy operator and he was hedging his bets. If the pilot episode failed to sell, he could splice the two together and sell it as a filler movie. However, the series was picked up and the two episodes aired in back-to-back weeks in October of 1954 on NBC stations in America. Today, we’re going to look at those two episodes.

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That Movie About the Guy Who’s Stranded on Mars

That Movie About the Guy Who’s Stranded on Mars

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Robinson Crusoe on Mars
Paramount Pictures, 1964
Directed by Byron Haskin

(There will be spoilers.)

So there’s this movie about a guy who finds himself in the rather grim position of being stranded on Mars — all by his lonesome (more or less – but we’ll get to that).

I think you probably thought you knew the one, but it’s actually not that one. Robinson Crusoe on Mars debuted about a half century before that other, more popular, “guy stranded on Mars” movie. I haven’t seen The Martian or read the book, so I can’t compare the two. I’ll confine myself to commenting on the earlier movie.

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Screw ISIS! Here Are Five Great Reasons to Visit Brussels

Screw ISIS! Here Are Five Great Reasons to Visit Brussels

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These colors don’t run! Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Well, the pseudo-Muslims are at it again, killing innocent people and trying to turn one of the world’s great faiths into a whacked-out death cult. It’s been 24 hours since the Brussels attacks and now people are mourning, the politicians are posturing, and the police are hunting down suspects. A few extra bombing runs against Islamic State are probably being planned too.

It is, sadly, all too predictable. We’ve seen this before and we will see it again. So I’d like to buck the vibe and take a look at what Brussels has to offer visitors. It’s a beautiful European capital that’s all too often overlooked by people headed to more popular destinations such as London and Paris. That’s a shame, because I’ve visited Belgium several times and have always enjoyed my visits to the city. It’s a fun place with great food, awesome beer, and plenty to see. The fundamentalists haven’t changed that and never will. Here are five things you won’t want to miss.

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