Browsed by
Category: Movies and TV

Goth Chick News: Hansel & Gretel: WTF…?

Goth Chick News: Hansel & Gretel: WTF…?

Comments 16 comments

Hansel and Gretel PosterGet ready to put this little morsel under the heading, “You’re Kidding, Right??”

Partially because it is my sworn journalistic commitment to bring you all things scary and partially because of Jeremy Renner, I actually paid full price to sit through Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters in its bombastic entirety.  Little did I know when I entered the theater that I really wasn’t getting a private screening due to my Black Gate creds, but was just far more optimistic than the rest of the viewing public by showing up to see it.

I occupied my favorite location in the dead center rows of seats that Saturday night, very much alone as I watched a Pepsi commercial with extremely high production values, yet filled with hope that what I was about to witness would be a reimaging of a well-known tale in the vein of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

Eighty-eight excruciating minutes later I realized I should have bailed after the Pepsi commercial.

Dialog: lame, special effects: marginal, acting: vapid (yes even my beloved Mr. Renner), and plot: so thin you could read War and Peace through it, which would likely be a far better use of your time.

And, by the way, how is that even possible when a good chunk of the story has been in existence since 1812?

It wasn’t until weeks later that I learned Hansel & Gretel cost $50M to make and grossed only $54M in the US, which should have labeled it an unqualified bomb and immediately relegated it to a local RedBox.

But that’s before considering the audiences in what must truly be the global movie wastelands of Brazil, Russia and Mexico.  Because, lo and behold, Hansel and Gretel grossed a whopping $150M more internationally, thanks primarily to those countries.

…

Read More Read More

Released This Week: Upside Down

Released This Week: Upside Down

Comments 6 comments

Upside Down, the French-Canadian science fiction romance starring Kirsten Dunst and Jim Sturgess, finally gets a U.S. release this week.

The film is visually gorgeous — just have a look at the trailer below. It also has an intriguing and unique premise (although I had a tough time explaining it to my son Tim, whose high school physics required him to challenge just how separate planetary gravities might work. It’s Hollywood Tim, just go with it). The film does not have anything resembling a wide release, at least not here in Chicago, but it might be well worth tracking it down. Or at least waiting for the DVD.

Upside Down was produced by Millennium Entertainment and released on March 15. The website, with additional trailers, behind-the-scenes info, and photo galleries, is here.

Weird Western-on-Demand: The White Buffalo from MGM Limited Edition Collection

Weird Western-on-Demand: The White Buffalo from MGM Limited Edition Collection

Comments 3 comments

White Buffalo One SheetWarner Archive has so far received all the attention in my recent veer into the world of the manufacture-on-demand DVD, a dazzling universe where the big studios serve the niche movie lovers with titles that would otherwise only surface in North America on bootlegs swiped off Japanese laserdiscs. (Yeah, you own a couple of those.) Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure, The Bermuda Depths, and The Last Dinosaur all come from Warner Brothers’ MOD division. But two other studios have their own extensive MOD programs: MGM Limited Edition Collection and Universal Vault. It’s through MGM that we get the strange 1977 combo of Western and monster movie called The White Buffalo.

My first experience with The White Buffalo, aside from seeing ads on local television stations when it ran during “Charles Bronson Tough Guy Week,” was on an awful first-generation VHS tape I watched during college as part of an independent study of the 1970s Western. The movie was drab and a cruel disappointment considering how exciting the plot description sounded: “Wild Bill Hickok and Crazy Horse team up to hunt down a giant, possibly supernatural, white buffalo on a rampage.” How could such a crunchy high-concept result in such a bland film?

Blame “VHS goggles,” which turned the movie’s photography into mulch. The difference in The White Buffalo experience between VHS and DVD is substantial. Although the MGM Limited Edition Collection DVD is rough compared to today’s Blu-rays, it is about as good as the picture could look in standard definition without undergoing hefty restoration. The movie isn’t a lost classic, but it wins in the realm of atmosphere: eerie and bleak. The artifice of the limited budget, which puts most of the nighttime and snowbound scenes against the Buffalo on obvious interior sets, contributes to the dream-like atmosphere. That may be an accident of filming, but it’s a positive creative accident. The White Buffalo never succeeds as an action thriller, but it remains a fascinating piece of odd Western cinema of the 1970s, a decade filled with plenty of oddness for the grand ol’ American genre. The current popularity of the Weird Western and steampunk subgenres gives the movie a freshness that moves it beyond being only a “Manifest Destiny” take on Jaws.

…

Read More Read More

Adventure on Film: The Naked Prey

Adventure on Film: The Naked Prey

Comments 3 comments

Loincloths: love ’em or hate ’em, it’s a fact that Tarzan and Conan weren’t the only Wilde runningmusclebound men to model the style. For proof, we need look no farther than The Naked Prey (1966).

But first, let’s time-warp back to 1980. Required reading in my junior high meant immersion in Richard Connell’s short, “The Most Dangerous Game,” in which humans are both predator and prey. It’s an old idea, but rarely presented quite as starkly as in this story, wherein a big game hunter in the Colonial tradition seeks one final thrill before hanging up his boots. As in a few Dame Agatha novels and a great many summer camp slashers, the hunter’s weekend guests become his targets.

What we teen readers were supposed to glean from “The Most Dangerous Game,” I have no idea, and I might well have forgotten the entire piece had it not been for my stumbling onto The Naked Prey a few years later. Watching this celluloid take on man hunting man transported me sharply back to the Connell story and even, if my failing memory serves, prompted me to re-read it.

In The Naked Prey, Cornel Wilde’s wily explorer-hero is actually credited as “Man.” If he has another name, we never learn it. He doesn’t really need one, although a nickname might be helpful. If I were his parent, I’d call him Determination Personified.

…

Read More Read More

Tarzan-on-Demand: Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure on DVD from Warner Archive

Tarzan-on-Demand: Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure on DVD from Warner Archive

Comments 9 comments

tarzans-greatest-adventure-posterI’ve discovered a way to merge my recent posts about the manufacture-on-demand DVDs of The Bermuda Depths and The Last Dinosaur with my long-running Edgar Rice Burroughs posts. Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure, the 1959 live-action film now available from Warner Archive, also gives me a reason to go back to talking about Tarzan for the first time since I reviewed Tarzan and “The Foreign Legion”.

Johnny Weissmuller played Tarzan in twelve movies from 1932 to 1948. But Weissmuller’s departure from the role didn’t bring a halt to the series. It soldiered on, switching around studios and distributors (it had already flipped from MGM to RKO during Weissmuller’s tenure) for two more decades. Lex Barker, Gordon Scott, Jock Mahoney, and Mike Henry all played the Lord of the Jungle for at least two films each, and then the movies segued into the television series starring Ron Ely, who would later play another famous pulp hero in George Pal’s unfortunate Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze in 1975.

Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure arrived in the middle of this second stage of the jungle adventures and marked a major shift in style. Producer Sol Lesser left the series, and his replacement Sy Weintraub decided to revamp Tarzan with a “New Look.” Actually, it was more of an “Old Look”: Weintraub took Tarzan back to his literary roots and made a movie more faithful to Edgar Rice Burroughs’s book series. Tarzan suddenly gained a full mastery of the English language, and the story acquired a more adult tone.

Because of Weissmuller’s continued domination of the Tarzan-on-film image to this day — even the mighty Disney machine cannot overcome him — it’s hard to imagine the latter-day movies in the series as being any good. But Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure is excellent; it’s the ERB-fan’s Tarzan film. Not that I don’t love Weissmuller’s first two movies, but this is actually something pretty damn special for any Burroughs bibliophile. Even if it isn’t based on a specific novel, Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure ranks with last year’s John Carter of Mars and The Land That Time Forgot as a movie that honestly captures the style and feel of ERB’s work. Had he been alive to see it, Burroughs would definitely have approved of the film. He might have objected to Tarzan’s non-monogamy, if it can really be called that, since Jane’s existence is questionable at this point in the movie series.

Also: a pre-007 Sean Connery as one of the villains. And it was actually shot in Africa!

…

Read More Read More

Adventure on Film: Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey

Adventure on Film: Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey

Comments 3 comments

Under a fearsome black-and-white moon, a boy, perhaps twelve, enters a fever dream of navigator2orange-fired torches whirling down infinite chasms, of men clambering up a towering church steeple, of skies moving too quickly for thought. The boy’s careworn, grubby face melts into black and white rippling water, and the nightmare — if nightmare it is — comes to a sudden end.

Welcome to Fourteenth Century Cumbria, a snowy, monochromatic waste, all bare rock and snowdrifts and blackwater lakes. In a hardscrabble mining village, young Griffin, plagued by his apocalyptic visions, waits for his idol, Connor, to return from a visit to the wider world. But even before Connor’s return, all talk is of death, for the Plague is come, marching inexorably closer.  The villagers quickly convince themselves that only a holy quest can save them, and on the slimmest of evidence — Griffin’s disjointed prognostications — Connor, Griffin and four other men set off, bound for a mineshaft so deep (it is said) that it leads straight to the other side of the world. Griffin’s band brings a copper cross that they hope to mount to a titanic cathedral as an offering, a Cumbrian plea to stave off death itself.

Griffin finds the mineshaft right enough, together with a mechanical battering ram with which the men bore a hole to the far side of reality. And what do they find once there?  Twentieth century New Zealand.

…

Read More Read More

Goth Chick News: Stand by With the Defibrillator Paddles: We’re Flatlining Again…

Goth Chick News: Stand by With the Defibrillator Paddles: We’re Flatlining Again…

Comments 0 Comment

flatlinersOkay, follow me on this one for a minute…

It’s 1990 and you, along with a small group of your fellow-medical-student friends (the majority of whom are smoking hot by the way) start daring each other to prove the claims made by patients who have had near-death experiences.  You figure the best way to do this is to take turns being brought medically to the brink of death in your underwear, then being shocked and mouth-to-mouthed back into existence by your friends.

If you can now imagine that two of your friends are a pre-24, post Lost Boys Keifer Sutherland and a pre-Eat, Pray, Love, post Pretty Woman Julia Roberts, then this next bit will come as no surprise.

This week reports started springing up all over that the latest film to get laid out on the cinematic operating table and given a Hollywood defibrillation is Joel Schumacher’s 1990 supernatural horror Flatliners.

The original film followed medical students played by Keifer Sutherland, Julia Roberts, William Baldwin, Oliver Platt and Kevin Bacon, all of whom were overly interested in seeing what happens during the afterlife, but whose experimentation dragged a bunch of supernatural baggage into the here-and-now.

On the positive side, this reboot has attracted the talent of Swedish filmmaker Niels Arden Oplev (of the original, sub-titled version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo).  Oplev will be working from a script written by Ben Ripley, who is better known for his Source Code screenplay than the latter two Species sequels.

With that talent, a Flatliner remake will likely equal — if not surpass — the 1990 version.  As much as I love the original, it’s more for the abundance of eye-candy than the campy, often painful storyline and dialog.

…

Read More Read More

The Real Argo: The Lord of Light Film and the Lost Jack Kirby Sketches

The Real Argo: The Lord of Light Film and the Lost Jack Kirby Sketches

Comments 16 comments

Kirby-Lord-of-LightI was pleased to see Ben Affleck’s Argo win the Academy Award for Best Picture last night. It was the best film I saw last year, although I admit I didn’t see all the nominees.

But I was a little annoyed during parts — especially scenes which included dialog from the fake movie, Argo. It’s clear that Affleck (and his characters) have little respect for science fiction, as the script and its source material are portrayed as utterly terrible sci-fi at its pretentious worst.

Which was particuarly annoying because the source material in question — the script used by real-life CIA agent Tony Mendez, the man portrayed by Affleck — is based on my all-time favorite SF novel, Roger Zelazny’s brilliant Lord of Light. The man who wrote the original Wired article that inspired Argo, Joshua Bearman, explains it this way:

Argo was the name Tony gave to a script that was in turnaround and sitting in a pile at [makeup artist John] Chambers’ house. That script was called Lord of Light and had been adapted from a successful Roger Zelazny science-fantasy novel of the same name. A small-time self-starting dreamer… named Barry Geller had optioned Zelazny’s book himself and raised money to get the project started. He hired Jack Kirby to do concept art and Chambers to make the alien masks. But the whole project fell apart…

It was hard to see the script for Lord of Light merciliessly skewered for laughs in Argo. Still, something good has come out of it all. As a result of the recent spotlight on the film, Jack Kirby’s original sketches — thought lost for years — have come to light.

BuzzFeed has reproduced eleven of the sketches in an article by Richard Rushfield. If you’re a Kirby fan, or a fan of Zelazny’s SF masterpiece, they are well worth a look. Check them out here.

Adventure on Film: Mirror, Mirror

Adventure on Film: Mirror, Mirror

Comments 1 comment

Stand back, comrades, the gloves are off.mirror-mirror-440

I hate this movie.

Unfortunately — and somewhat confusingly — I also love it.

Help.  I’m so confused!

Riddle me this: why exactly did Mirror, Mirror’s good king have to marry the wicked stepmother queen? Perhaps it’s because she’s so smartly played by Julia Roberts, but no: the reason given, in a sassy prologue, is that the king discovered certain things (martial skills) that he could not teach his daughter. Therefore, he had to marry anew, his first wife having conveniently died giving birth to Snow White.

Let’s stop right there. This is an example of what we Black Gate critics call GLOSSING OVER. In certain circles, it’s also called DELIBERATE OBFUSCATION.

The information that the king must remarry is presented so fast, and with all the confidence of a logical fait accompli, that we are supposed to ignore its hypocrisy, stupidity, and outright vapidity and quickly move on.

Well. This lil’ critic ain’t fallin’ for it.

…

Read More Read More

Goth Chick News: The Vatican Tapes – We’re Nothing If Not Timely

Goth Chick News: The Vatican Tapes – We’re Nothing If Not Timely

Comments 0 Comment

image004Earlier this week, we learned Pope Benedict XVI resigned his post, reportedly due to “advanced age.”

But could the real reason have anything to do with a misplaced video of a botched exorcism?

Okay, probably not. But as a new pope must be found, so too has a new director been recruited for a long-awaited exorcism tale from Lakeshore Entertainment.

Tuesday Lakeshore released a statement indicating Mark Neveldine, one half of the directing duo behind Gamer, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance and the two Crank films, will be at the helm of Lakeshore’s possession project, The Vatican Tapes, but without his usual co-director Brian Taylor. James Marsh (Man on a Wire) was in the director’s chair for a while, but dropped out for unknown reasons; advanced age perhaps?

It’s been nearly three years since I’ve heard anything new about the movie, but as far as I can determine the plot line remains the same. The Vatican Tapes follows a series of events depicted on a tape leaked from the Vatican displaying an exorcism that goes horribly wrong. Christopher Borrelli (Con Air, Armageddon) is scripting based on a story envisioned by he and Chris Morgan, but no cast is attached yet and IMDB still lists it as “in development.”

…

Read More Read More