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The Last Dinosaur Chomps Your Nostalgia on Warner Archive DVD

The Last Dinosaur Chomps Your Nostalgia on Warner Archive DVD

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Last Dinosaur Warner Archive DVDIt follows that if I write about The Bermuda Depths and its manufacture-on-demand DVD release, I must also write about its sister film, the dinosaur-hunting marvel of a Saturday afternoon dreamland, 1977’s The Last Dinosaur — also available on MOD DVD from Warner Archive. “Richard Boone vs. a T. Rex in a Primeval World.” You don’t need a large marketing team to work on your movie if you have a tagline like that.

The Last Dinosaur is a 1950s giant monster movie filmed in the 1970s and filtered through the visual effects style of 1960s Japanese special effects (tokusatsu) films. If that sentence gives you a frisson of joy, then the movie won’t disappoint. And The Last Dinosaur is a touch better than that description suggests, with a solid script and an excellent main character who can carry the outrageousness of a giant monster movie and make it seem like Moby Dick.

Touring around the ‘net looking for reviews of The Last Dinosaur will mostly unearth “bad movie snark” having a laugh over its economical special effects. You won’t find much of that here: I think The Last Dinosaur is a top-shelf B-budgeted “lost world” film that delivers all it should, occasional chuckles and groans included. Make all the sly comments you want about the “man-in-suit” monster effects — and there are some amusing moments — they still offer far more creativity and fun than most CGI-driven contemporary movies. Compare The Last Dinosaur to anything from SyFy and you’ll see the talent we lost when the Machines won the war.

Shot in Japan at the same time Amicus Productions in the U.K. was making their Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptations (The Land That Time Forgot, At the Earth’s Core, The People That Time Forgot), The Last Dinosaur sports a similar style that captures the spirit of ERB within a contemporary setting. It’s the best Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptation not actually based on one of his novels; if Burroughs were alive and writing in the 1970s, he might have written something just like this.

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Did Entertainment Weekly Reveal that Benedict Cumberbatch is Playing Khan?

Did Entertainment Weekly Reveal that Benedict Cumberbatch is Playing Khan?

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Entertainment Weekly Star TrekIn a sharp-eyed bit of investigative reporting, Tor.com has reproduced screenshots from the Entertainment Weekly Back Issues store that name the villain in the upcoming J.J. Abrams film Star Trek Into Darkness as Khan.

As we reported back in December, speculation has been rampant around just whom Benedict Cumberbatch will be playing in the new film. IMDB originally listed his character as Gary Mitchell, the Enterprise officer who becomes an all-powerful psychic loonie in one of the show’s earliest and best episodes, “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” Rumors that he was playing Khan, the genetically-engineered supervillain originally portrayed by Ricardo Montalban in the episode “Space Seed” and the film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, eventually led the otherwise tight-lipped Cumberbatch to deny it.

As shown by Tor.com however, screen captures for the February 15 cover-dated issue of Entertainment Weekly allow you to select one of two covers, the “Spock & Kirk” cover, or the “Kirk & Khan” version.

EW hastily deleted the notations, and the latest version of the page gives no such identifiers.

In its current cast list, IMBD now lists Cumberbatch as playing “Khan (rumored),” and Alice Eve as playing Dr. Carol Marcus, Kirk’s ex-flame and baby mama from Star Trek II.

The latest Super Bowl TV trailer for the film has been posted on YouTube. Star Trek Into Darkness is directed by J. J. Abrams, and is set for release on May 17, 2013. As we reported in January, Abrams was also selected as the director for the next Star Wars film.

Meanwhile, there’s no truth to the rumor floating in fan circles that J.J. Abrams will also be tapped as the new pope.

Rue Morgue Magazine’s 200 Alternative Horror Films You Need to See

Rue Morgue Magazine’s 200 Alternative Horror Films You Need to See

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Rue morgues magazine's 200 alternative horror filmsI had a clever title in mind for this post, something about a book you need to see, but the name of the book was so long nothing else would fit. Rue Morgue Magazine’s 200 Alternative Horror Films You Need to See. See what I mean? Damn near had to start a new paragraph just to say it again.

200 Flicks (which we’ll be calling it going forward) is a marvelous little treasure I found on the B&N magazine rack while digging around for the latest issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I’m vaguely aware of Rue Morgue magazine (and should probably be moreso, granted), but that wasn’t what caught my eye. No, it was the title, and the fact that this perfect bound “magazine” is an impressive 162 pages.

I flipped through it, and was sold instantly. This is the kind of invaluable reference work I’ll be drawing on for years. It’s packed to the brim with text, with plenty of color stills and crisp reproductions of 200 movie posters and DVD covers. The heart of the book is the carefully-selected collection of well written and informative reviews of overlooked horror films.

A quick check showed many of my favorites are here, including a guilty pleasure or two: Session 9, Let the Right One In, Psycho II, Something Wicked This Way Comes — and plenty more that I’m not familiar with. And isn’t the joy of discovery the true reason you lay your money down for this kind of thing?

The entries are organized alpahbetically, but it’s really something you browse rather than read cover-to-cover. It has numerous lists: 10 Made for TV Terrors You Need to See, 10 Foreign Zombie Films You Need to See, plus lists covering vampire flicks, foreign zombie movies, family fright fests, gore films, slashers, and many more. There are also interviews with directors and film personalities like Guillermo del Toro, Tobe Hooper, Roger Corman, Fred Dekker, Larry Cohen, Stuart Gordon, and others.

The book is so inexpensive (a criminally low $9.99, or $4.99 for the digital version) and so packed with content that the only way it can possibly be a money-making venture is if it’s primarily recycled material from Rue Morgue magazine. Which is fine by me — if the magazine is a fraction as interesting and entertaining, I’ll be getting a subscription.

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The Weird of Oz Gabs About Groundhog Day

The Weird of Oz Gabs About Groundhog Day

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groundhog dayIn this day-after-Groundhog-Day edition of “The Weird of Oz,” I’ll consider how — and why — the 1993 film Groundhog Day has quietly joined the ranks of American classics.

First, let me quickly situate this film with regard to how it warrants discussion on a website devoted to fantasy media (an interesting issue David E. Harris raised in his post of December 26, 2012). Although billed as a comedy, and by no means a traditional fantasy or supernatural tale, it does fall under the umbrella of speculative fiction.

Tolkien, in his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” noted that all imaginative fiction begins by posing a question: “What if?” He offers the example of someone imagining a green sun: “To make a Secondary World inside which the green sun will be credible, commanding Secondary Belief, will probably require labour and thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft.”*

How would the world be different given the changed variable(s)? The “what if” question puts the speculative into speculative fiction. What if ghosts are real? What if werewolves existed? What if a ghost, a werewolf, and a vampire shared a flat? What if corpses began rising from the dead? What if an alien lord traveled through time and space in a British police call box?

Groundhog Day’s premise is that the protagonist wakes one morning to discover the day he just lived is repeating itself. What if a person were caught in a time loop so that he kept living the same day over and over, never aging yet retaining all his memories?

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Poetry in Action: The Return of the Mucker by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Poetry in Action: The Return of the Mucker by Edgar Rice Burroughs

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Return of the Mucker FrazettaThis upfront: The Return of the Mucker is less effective a novel than last week’s topic, The Mucker. The strange genre-mashings of the first book give way to the more familiar settings of the American southwest and northern Mexico. The Return of the Mucker plays as an outright Western for most of its length, and offers nothing as lunatic as samurai cannibals. As a story, it doesn’t hold together as well as The Mucker, getting weighed down with too much plot “business” while the first book stripped away extraneous aspects the farther the story advanced until it came down to only the hero and heroine, Billy Byrne and Barbara Harding.

Yet The Return of the Mucker is still a strong work that glosses over its shaky plot elements with a breakneck action finale, fitting developments of Billy Byrne’s personality that merge together his extremes, and one of Burroughs’s most intriguing characters: a hobo-poet hero named Bridge.

Burroughs’s working title for The Mucker’s sequel was Out There Somewhere, the name of a poem that inspired the character of Bridge. (More about that later.) Burroughs submitted the novel to All Story in March 1916, soon after completing it. Editor Thomas Newell Metcalf purchased the story immediately, and the first of five installments appeared two months later under its more marketable title. The Return of the Mucker was published in hardcover in 1921 from A. C. McClurg as Part II of a volume simply called The Mucker.

When the story begins, Billy Byrne is no longer “the mucker.” ERB makes that clear as a cloudless blue sky in the second paragraph: “Billy Byrne was no longer the mucker.” Barbara Harding cured Byrne of his criminal life and coarse ways: everything that defines the now outdated slang term “mucker.” But Billy Byrne surrendered his love for Barbara so she could marry William Mallory at the conclusion of the first book, and he’s now a man without direction — or a complete personality. If he isn’t the mucker, and he’s not with the woman who changed him, what is he? …

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Goth Chick News: The Haunted Mansion Gets the del Toro Treatment

Goth Chick News: The Haunted Mansion Gets the del Toro Treatment

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image002Among the laundry list of scary projects Guillermo del Toro currently has his name attached to (including the recently-released, love-never-dies horror flick Mama, a creepy version of Pinocchio, and the-house-is-haunted-get-the-heck-out Crimson Peak), is the somewhat exciting news of a reboot of The Haunted Mansion.

This would be Disney’s second attempt at adapting my all-time favorite Magic Kingdom attraction for the big screen; the first being that train wreck of a 2003 effort starring Eddie Murphy and let’s say no more about it.

Back in 2011, Del Toro was rumored to be writing a script, but little has been heard about it since. However, during an interview earlier this week with MySpill.com, del Toro confirmed that the new Haunted Mansion is happening.

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Adventure on Film: Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather

Adventure on Film: Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather

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Hogfather DeathHaving been all but dared, following my rather critical summation of The Color Of Magic (2008), to view a subsequent Pratchett adaptation, Hogfather (2006, made for TV), I confess I embarked on this quest with great trepidation, especially when I learned the production team responsible was essentially identical to that assembled for Color.

However, I am happy to report that Hogfather is a much superior effort. First, the comedy is spot on. Second, the concept of assassinating Santa Claus (or whatever) is fine dramatic fodder. Third, the film continually asks questions that we (the viewers) really want answered.

Questions such as, who is this Susan woman who looks like Keira Knightley (but turns out to be Downton Abbey‘s Michelle Dockery), and why exactly is she posing as a monster-fighting governess, when it’s perfectly clear she’s some sort of extremely powerful something or other –– and when do we get to find out what?

Great art has been made from less.

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Goth Chick News: Getting A-head at Airport Security

Goth Chick News: Getting A-head at Airport Security

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Paging Dr WestAnd you thought your holiday travel was a nightmare…

On Tuesday of this week, “sources” from Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport reported to the Chicago Sun-Times that 18 human heads had arrived from Rome just before Christmas and were on their way to a research facility in the suburbs when they were stopped by security.

For attempting to smuggle in a wheel of pecorino cheese…?

Nope. Officials initially said it was a paperwork problem that prevented the heads from reaching their final destination, but apparently the crack reporters at the Sun-Times have just discovered the hold-up is actually connected to “an ongoing investigation at the suburban facility in question.” But before you jump to all conclusions, the investigation is “absolutely not” connected to the shipment of the heads, the source said.

Paging Dr. West… Dr. West, please pick up the nearest red courtesy phone…

The heads were unceremoniously shipped as cargo on a Lufthansa Airlines flight, but “were properly preserved and tagged as human specimens,” said Tony Brucci, chief investigator for the medical examiner’s office.

The Coalition for Airline Passengers’ Rights has filed a complaint with the FAA saying the heads were confined to the cargo hold for the 9 hour and 15 minute flight without the benefit of inflight catering or entertainment.

Okay, that’s not true.  But the rest of this is.

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Childhood Resurfaced: The Bermuda Depths on DVD

Childhood Resurfaced: The Bermuda Depths on DVD

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Bermuda Depths posterThe rise of Manufacture-on-Demand (MOD) DVDs from major studios has at last permitted numerous obscure and second-tier features to reach the trembling hands of collectors. Movies that a small coterie of fans despaired would only be available on bootlegs are now only one-click shopping away on a DVD-R. MOD eliminates the need for “demand” and “profitability” that once stood between the collector and a decent legal copy of The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing.

Apologies to that great Burt Reynolds Western, it’s The Bermuda Depths that best exemplifies the MOD movie and gives a reason for the format to exist: a work unknown to most, but holding in the minds of a few the status of a childhood Holy Grail. And now the Warner Archive Collection, the MOD branch of Warner Home Video, has made available the first and only romantic tropical ghost story with a giant turtle.

Released in 1978, The Bermuda Depths is a quintessential “Did I Dream It?” nostalgia pic. All of us can recall some movie from our elementary school days — glanced late nights on television, on a slow Sunday afternoon, or rented on a blurry Betamax tape — that captivated our imagination in a fuzzy way. It left fleeting, haunting impressions, so that ten years or more afterwards, it feels that maybe the movie never existed at all and we made it up from the flotsam of other childhood ephemera. We wander through life occasionally asking others if they recall “that film where…”, and then getting uncomprehending slow blinks in response, followed by:

“You made that up.”

“No, I swear I didn’t. I mean … I don’t think so. It was this film with a ghost girl on a beach, and she had glowing eyes, and then there was this gigantic turtle that knocked over a boat…”

“It must be a Gamera film.”

“No, no! I saw a lot of Gamera films. Yeah, I can’t tell them apart, but I know this wasn’t a Gamera film.”

“You’ve just got a Gamera film crossed with something else. Look, eat your yougurt and take your pills. I’ll call the doctor.”

No, you were not crazy. This is a case where the memorial reconstruction dredged up from the back of the old junk drawer is exactly right. The Bermuda Depths is indeed “That movie that took place on a tropical beach with this beautiful woman who might have been a ghost and had glowing eyes and there was also this giant turtle that had something to do with it.” That rambling sentence is a spot-on description of the plot and experience of this movie.

It exists. And, unfortunate to report, it isn’t as exciting to revisit as its description might indicate.

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Goth Chick News: Nice Warm Bodies on a Cold Winter Day

Goth Chick News: Nice Warm Bodies on a Cold Winter Day

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Warm BodiesFrom Shakespeare to American Werewolf in London, audiences have always appreciated a little graveyard humor.  And for those of us who thoroughly enjoy having the snot scared out of us in the theater, there’s almost nothing more sublime than the added adrenaline rush of not being able to decide whether to shriek with horror or laughter.

Therefore it was with double satisfaction that last week I got a look at the opening scene for a new flick called Warm Bodies; once because it furthers my prediction that zombies are the new vampires (following the polyester bell-bottoms that were the Twilight franchise, something had to give…) and twice because the clip was well, just so darn amusing.

Coming to theaters on February 1, just around the time when all of us in cold-weather states can relate to a zombie trapped in an airport terminal, Warm Bodies takes us into the mind of “R” the film’s protagonist zombie played by Nicholas Hoult (late of X-Men First Class and Clash of the Titans) as he tries to make sense of his current situation and potentially save mankind.  The cast is rounded out by Dave Franco as “Perry” (James’ younger bro), Teresa Palmer as “Julie” and John Malkovich as “General Grigio.”

The fact that it has John Malkovich alone would be enough to get me to Warm Bodies on opening night.

So is it a horror movie?  An action film?  A romantic comedy?

Apparently it’s a little of everything including Shakespeare.  According to IMDB:

The film is based loosely on Romeo and Juliet. “R” = “Romeo”; “Julia” = “Juliet; “Perry” = “Paris”; “M/Marcus” = “Mercutio”; “Nora” = Juliet’s “Nurse” (the character of Nora is also a nurse).

See for yourself… (embedded trailer after the jump).

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