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Adventure On Film: Westworld

Adventure On Film: Westworld

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westworld-1How any adult, in this day and age, can approach Westworld (1973) in anything remotely close to the appropriate frame of mind is beyond me. To further complicate an open, honest viewing, the film could not possibly telegraph its intentions more bluntly. Will the tourists attending Western World, Roman World, and Medieval World have the time of their vacationing lives? Well, yes –– but in short order, they will be done in by their out-of-control hosts, robots one and all, semi-sentient machines understandably tired of living out their days getting gunned down by their rich and warm-blooded doppelgangers.

Pardon me if in the course of this review I don’t concern myself with spoilers.  If the DVD’s cover doesn’t give the game away, the first two minutes of the film surely will.

Leaving, then… what? A cautionary tale, in which we fragile mortals should learn to stop messing around with simulacrums? Or is it an adventure in which the stakes are high and the six-guns are fast?

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Goth Chick News: Conjuring a Good Old-Fashioned Scare

Goth Chick News: Conjuring a Good Old-Fashioned Scare

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image001Admittedly, I’m a complete sucker for ghost hunting shows.

Yes, they can be painfully cheesy; from Grant Wilson’s (Ghost Hunters – SciFi Channel) earnest takes to the camera while expounding on how blessed he is to be able to help tormented souls, to Zak Bagans’s (Ghost Adventures – Travel Channel) shameless dramatics, I love every one of them.

But here’s a question for those who’ve tuned in: did you ever wonder what would happen if just once something truly horrifying actually reached out and touched one of them?

It’s an amusing thought – there’s Zak asking the “ghost” if it would give a sign it can hear him and suddenly a full bodied apparition shows up, pokes him in the nose, and says, “Yeah, I’m standing right here you tool.”

And the next thing you know, Zak and the whole GA crew are “retired.”

Well apparently I’m not the only one who imagined something similar – only they’ve taken it several steps (miles?) further.

Director James Wan already has some pretty substantial horror “street-cred” as the mind behind Saw, Dead Silence and Insidious.  And as these films represent a more in-your-face kind of scare than generally appeals to me, I am really anticipating his latest outing.

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Goth Chick News: More Fun Than A Pile of Zombies

Goth Chick News: More Fun Than A Pile of Zombies

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image004This week, Paramount Pictures released the first theatrical posters for Marc Forster’s World War Z, the zombie apocalypse movie based on the book by the same name, coming to a theater near you on June 21.

Starring Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, Daniella Kertesz, James Badge Dale, Matthew Fox, and David Morse, both sheets display a mile-high pile of rotting, decaying zombies attacking a helicopter.

Now that’s what I call entertainment.

World War Z has been gaining notoriety ever since action stills of Pitt on set started hitting the Internet. The adaptation of author Max Brooks’s ‘oral history of the zombie war’ has had fans buzzing from the get-go, since the format of the book involved a U.N. employee interviewing survivors of the zompocalypse about their experiences – and the stills appear to show something entirely different.

Having just finished the book myself, I can understand the debate.

The WWZ novel is outstanding for its unusual approach to the first-person narrative, representing a possibly problematic format to translate to film.

Forster could have created the story in the style of a faux documentary, and initial chatter on the underground grapevine indicated that the WWZ film would indeed go this route, with U.N. worker Gerry Lane’s (Pitt) survivor interviews being the basis for flashback footage of grisly, zombie-war action.

It now appears WWZ the movie will be a significant departure from Brooks’s novel in both structure and story.

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Adventure on Film: Why Hollywood Gets it Wrong

Adventure on Film: Why Hollywood Gets it Wrong

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star-trek-game-beams-up-in-april-2013.jpgAs I write this, April is just around the corner, and now that Hollywood’s best and brightest studios no longer know how to calculate the beginning of summer, I smell blockbuster season ripening fast on the vine. Just think, in mere weeks, we can all flock to see Star Trek: Into Darkness, Iron Man 3, Wolverine, Oblivion, Pacific Rim, Elysium, and Man of Steel.

What do nearly all of these movies have in common? I’ll tell you, spoiler-free: the fate of the world will hang in the balance.

Which is why I shall be staying home –– again –– for blockbuster season. If I have learned anything in all my forays into drama, it is this: cinema offers no more boring subject, no greater snoozefest, than global peril.

Heresy, I know.

But I’m right. Here’s why.

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Tarzan and the Valley of Gold, Part 1: The Movie

Tarzan and the Valley of Gold, Part 1: The Movie

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Tarzan Valley of Gold MOD DVDTarzan and the Valley of Gold wastes no time telling viewers of the mid-1960s that this was not going to be their grandfather’s Tarzan. Or their father’s either. With swinging ‘60s big band jazz backed with bongos playing over a Warholian montage of pop art colors projecting scenes from the movie, it’s impossible not to think JAMES BOND! JAMES BOND! from the moment the opening titles start.

No doubt that was producer Sy Weintraub’s intention with this 1966 outing for Tarzan, the first of a trio starring Mike Henry. The credits sequence is a dead-on imitation of the style of Maurice Binder for Dr. No. After the director’s credit fades, the film hops into a Goldfinger-inspired sweep over a tropical resort city, concluding on a helicopter taking off from a luxury yacht in the harbor. Then, in another scene swiped from Dr. No, assassins shoot a limo driver outside the airport, and an imposter chauffeur awaits the arrival of our handsome hero in his impeccable suit and tie. Cue city montage with more swingin’ Latin big band rhythms! Smash into an action scene where a sunglass-wearing sniper tries to pick off our sharply dressed hero in an empty bullring. The crafty Ape Man turns the tables on the gunman and kills him by dropping a giant Coke Bottle advertising prop onto him. Ah, good times.

Sy Weintraub shows with this opening that he has taken the “New Look” Tarzan he introduced in 1959 in Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure one step further to imitate the stratospheric popularity of spy cinema of the decade. Tarzan not only speaks in complete sentences, but he is comfortable donning civilization’s trappings to travel the world to bring savage ape justice to turtleneck-wearing supervillains who adore exploding watches.

The temptation to go this direction must have been hard to resist: by the start of 1966, Bond-mania was approaching its delirious apex; Thunderball came out in December 1965 and was on its way to becoming one of the highest-grossing movies in history. Bandwagon films are often poor quality imitations, but Sy Weintraub already had a famous character available who could cut a dashing a dangerous figure to put at the center of his attempt to grab some Bond cash. It turned out well, better than you might initially think a “Tarzan goes ’60s spy” film would. Tarzan and the Valley of Gold, currently available as a manufacture-on-demand DVD from Warner Archive, lacks the excellent script, performances, and drama of Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure, but it delivers in the breezy fun department.

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New Star Trek Into Darkness Trailer Features More ‘Splosions

New Star Trek Into Darkness Trailer Features More ‘Splosions

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The trailers are coming fast and furious now. This one reveals a bit more of the plot, including a high-level Federation meeting, some shots of 23rd Century London, and a chilling scene in the last few seconds.

We last reported on Star Trek Into Darkness when we asked “Did Entertainment Weekly Reveal that Benedict Cumberbatch is Playing Khan?” here, and in “Star Trek Into Darkness Poster Fuels Gary Mitchell Speculation” (here).

Star Trek Into Darkness is directed by J. J. Abrams, and written by Alex Kurtzman, Damon Lindelof and Roberto Orci. It is the twelfth feature-length Star Trek film and the sequel to 2009′s Star Trek. It is set for release on May 17, 2013.

Goth Chick News: Hansel & Gretel: WTF…?

Goth Chick News: Hansel & Gretel: WTF…?

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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.

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Released This Week: Upside Down

Released This Week: Upside Down

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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

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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.

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Adventure on Film: The Naked Prey

Adventure on Film: The Naked Prey

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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.

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