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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-poster-small

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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Alone at the Edge of the World: The Witch

Alone at the Edge of the World: The Witch

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The Witch - Thomasin haunted-small

Have you ever considered the possibilities that would open up if certain common modern inventions had appeared much earlier than they actually did? (If you haven’t, humor me for the next few minutes and pretend that you have.)

Imagine, for example, that some starch-collared, black-hatted pre or proto-Edison had invented motion pictures some three hundred years before that technology really did arrive. What sort of films would have resulted? What kind of movies would have been made, for instance, by the dour puritans of New England?

Somehow, I don’t think that particular group would have been big on romantic comedies or caper pictures, and their 50 Shades of Grey would have been a sober documentary on the winter landscape of Massachusetts instead of… well, you know. Scary movies, on the other hand — they might well have gone in for those, and if you had gotten the corn shucking and butter churning done early some Saturday night in 1660, and had hopped on the family mule to trot into town to the Salem Cinema 6 to see a horror movie, you might have seen something very like The Witch.

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Goth Chick News: Tim Burton May (or May Not) Have Confirmed Beetlejuice 2 Is (or Is Not) a Go

Goth Chick News: Tim Burton May (or May Not) Have Confirmed Beetlejuice 2 Is (or Is Not) a Go

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Beetlejuice II

Yes, we’re confused too, in a giddy-with-anticipation kind of way. So let me explain.

March 30th marks 28 years since the viewing public was first introduced to “the ghost with the most” and it’s been nearly as many years that talk of a sequel has been swirling.

To begin, let’s draw a door into the 90’s for a little background.

Beetlejuice was actually where we were first introduced to the wildly imaginative, dark humor of Tim Burton, whose name has since become synonymous with “strange and unusual” films.

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Old Dark House Double Feature II: Secret of the Chateau (1934) and The Headless Ghost (1959)

Old Dark House Double Feature II: Secret of the Chateau (1934) and The Headless Ghost (1959)

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Secret of the Chateau poster

Secret of the Chateau
Universal Studios, 1934
Directed by Richard Thorpe

Books — as in rare collectible ones — are the theme in this particular incarnation of the old dark house movie. Whose old dark house properties are a good bit more understated than some other movies in this genre (sub-genre?). It takes a while for all parties concerned to even get to the old dark house and when they do things play out more like a fairly standard murder mystery. But its close enough for government work, as the saying goes.

The book that’s causing all of the fuss is a Gutenberg Bible, the first book ever to be printed on a printing press. Needless to say, it’s somewhat valuable and high on the want list of a certain book thief.

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Superhero TV: Arrow

Superhero TV: Arrow

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The Arrow. I’ve been told by the ladies that he is easy on the eyes.

Over the last several weeks, a Canadian cadre of Black Gate‘s bloggers have formed an Alpha Flight of super-bloggers to right the wrongs of the world, especially where such wrongs take the form of you not knowing about every superhero TV show we can talk about.

This is going to be my last post in this huge comic event, and to cap off my contribution, I wanted to dig into the CW’s Arrow which has been running since 2012 and is into its fourth season. It has the same producers as The Flash and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow (also running on CW) and CBS’ Supergirl, and they occupy the same universe (multiverse in the case of Supergirl).

Green Arrow is not a new DC property, dating back to 1941. Green Arrow was a Robin Hood-themed character cast in the same mold as Batman, so much so that he also started as a millionaire, had a kid sidekick, and an Arrow Car and an Arrow-Plane.

In fact, there wasn’t much to separate him from Batman for much of his early years, which begs the question of, if you’re looking for Batman, why not just buy a Batman comic?

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Star Trek Movie Rewatch: Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984)

Star Trek Movie Rewatch: Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984)

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Star Trek 3 cast-small

Where’s Spock? Why, he’s right there in the director’s chair, of course. For the third cinematic voyage of the Starship Enterprise, Leonard Nimoy took on a dual role as actor and director, though the former role was somewhat minimal. Which set a pattern for numerous other Star Trek cast members. According to Memory Alpha, the Star Trek wiki, 15 cast members eventually sat in the big chair, although only Nimoy, Shatner and Jonathan Frakes directed movies.

I don’t recall if I watched The Search for Spock prior to this rewatch project. But I actually watched it twice within a month or two to make up for it. Why? Well, because it didn’t really stick the first time around. Which is to say that about the best I can do to critique this movie is to damn it with faint praise. It’s like one of the many Star Trek TV episodes that’s not bad but that doesn’t have anything special to recommend it. I think the word serviceable sums it up best.

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