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Five Genre Movies to Look Forward to This Summer

Five Genre Movies to Look Forward to This Summer

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prometheus_movie_05Summer is almost here, and the time is almost right, for dancing in the streets. Or sitting your butt down in a movie theater to watch a big green thing in purple pants beat up aliens.

As I more and more become “The Black Gate Movie Guy,” I’ve grown aware of my responsibilities regarding upcoming films of interest to our readership. This summer I promise to post reviews of all the major genre releases, which means that, yes, you will get to hear my thoughts on Snow White and Huntsman. Because you didn’t demand it.

This is also a transparent bid to get officially recognized as a movie critic so that I will be invited to press screenings here in Los Angeles and thus be able to post up reviews of films in the days before they are released.

Looking over the summer roster (posted below — yes, all shall be reviewed), aside from a few groans of anticipatory pain, there are five films that really have my geek adrenal glands turned up to the danger zone. Here are the films I hope will make summer worthwhile.

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Goth Chick Crypt Notes: Jonathan Frid: December 2, 1924 – April 14, 2012

Goth Chick Crypt Notes: Jonathan Frid: December 2, 1924 – April 14, 2012

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image0021Before we had heard of Lestat, Bill Compton or Edward Cullen, one vampire alone dominated our collective pop culture conscious; the formidable and classic, Barnabas Collins.

This week the offices of Goth Chick News are draped in black, or I should say more draped in black, in respectful mourning for Mr. Jonathan Frid, who portrayed the character on the soap opera/horror series Dark Shadows (making his first appearance at the doors of Collinwood on April 18, 1967) until 1971, and who died last Saturday at the age of 87.

As we’ve previously discussed, Johnny Depp will be reprising Mr. Frid’s iconic role in the Dark Shadows remake set for release on May 11th, though it’s probably more appropriate to call is a “redo” as director Tim Burton has elected to make it a… sigh… comedy.

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Celluloid Heroes

Celluloid Heroes

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the-vikings1The year was 1958. I was six years-old. Life was a waking dream filled with magic, mystery, and wonder. It was a year that would have a lasting effect on me.

It was the year I first encountered the cinematic “ancestors” of the warriors and heroes I would go on to discover ten or so years later in the paperback pages of Lancer, Ballantine, Avon, Signet, Paperback Library, Pyramid, and other publishers who had taken up the banner of sword and sorcery, and heroic fantasy.

Of course, I had already become a fan of Disney’s Zorro, had seen the Errol Flynn swashbucklers on television, and had desperately wanted to become a pirate when I grew up. I would also see Spartacus, starring Kirk Douglas, The Mongols, starring Jack Palance, Hannibal, starring Victor Mature, and other films like Genghis Khan, The 300 Spartans, and Ben Hur a few years later. On television I would later see the silent Thief of Baghdad and Siegfried, and other adventure films of the 1930s and 40s.

But the movie theater in 1958 would have the most profound impact on my life.

The film that started it all was The Vikings, starring Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis, Janet Leigh, and the wonderful Ernest Borgnine, whom I recently had the pleasure of meeting.

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Goth Chick News: C2E2 2012’s Best in Show

Goth Chick News: C2E2 2012’s Best in Show

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c2e2Last weekend, Chicago’s McCormick Center played host to the annual Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo (C2E2 for you cool kids), and once again I am reminded that not all the “interesting” people have pulled up stakes for California.

Amidst the oodles of Avengers merchandise, aisles of comic illustrators (many of whom appeared to have a near cult-like following) and celebrity autograph queues, mingled individuals who seemed to have ample expendable income for use on high-end costumes.

Yes, there was indeed a costume contest much later in the afternoon, but that didn’t explain why a very thin dude in a wig and fishnets was walking around posing as Lady Gaga.

It is sights like this which remind me that should I ever venture into the San Diego ComiCon; my head would likely explode.

Still, the popularity of C2E2 continues to grow year over year; so much so that in 2012 it was relocated to a larger venue in the building across the street from 2011’s location.

And though I could have easily grabbed a spot on the floor opposite the entrance and spent the day people-watching, Black Gate photog Chris Z and I waded in with the rest of the press just before the opening bell on Saturday.

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Goth Chick News: Welcome to the Hotel Transylvania

Goth Chick News: Welcome to the Hotel Transylvania

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ht-bannerNothing sends me straight to my happy place faster than a cartoon; unless it’s a cartoon about monsters.

This probably started before I could walk with the Saturday-morning Bugs Bunny episodes; specifically Hair-Raising Hare featuring the first appearance of the sneaker-wearing creature “Gossamer.” As an adult I was still so enamored with Gossamer that I very nearly had him tattooed on my…

Well thankfully I decided against it.

But maybe its comic books or Captain Crunch cereal or anything related to Star Wars which does the same thing for you. You know you held onto those Dark Lord of Sith footie PJ’s and don’t try to say it was for the collectable value either.

Nowadays, what I love most about cartoons (or animated features as we now call them) is their multiple layers of humor. Just try watching those Warner Brothers shorts today and see what I mean. There was a whole different level of funny which was aimed at our parents, thus flying straight over our heads.

And happily this tradition has carried forward to features like The Incredibles and Despicable Me. I own both and even though I’ve watched them dozens of times, I still kill myself laughing over something new I hadn’t noticed before.

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Wrath of the Titans Makes Me Want to Start a Hoax That It’s a Re-make

Wrath of the Titans Makes Me Want to Start a Hoax That It’s a Re-make

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wrath_of_the_titans_9Wrath of the Titans (2012)
Directed by Jonathan Liebesman. Starring Sam Worthington, Rosamund Pike, Bill Nighy, Edgar Ramirez, Toby Kebbell, Danny Huston, Ralph Fiennes, Liam Neeson.

Well, that was trivial.

A sequel nobody demanded from a re-make nobody cared about. There’s no John Carter of Mars “never gonna see a sequel” bitterness here at all. Nope.

But there is some Ray Harryhausen gloating. While watching Wrath of the Titans, I constantly thought of reverse-engineering the movie to create the Ray Harryhausen-Charles H. Schneer original from which it was re-made. I came up with a pretty entertaining film; not as good as Jason and the Argonauts or The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, but right on the level of Mysterious Island, although lacking a Bernard Herrmann score. The scene of Perseus fighting the Minotaur in the labyrinth is one of Harryhausen’s most suspenseful an atmospheric stop-motion creations. In the re-make, the scene is sloppily tossed into the action without any tension, and then fought through without a moment of genuine excitement.

Yes, I’m criticizing this movie by comparing it to a movie that doesn’t exist. But Wrath of the Titans made me do it! It begged me to imagine this better movie from the mid-1980s, one that right now all of us would be geeking-out over on its Blu-ray tie-in release. In fact, I’m going to start an Internet hoax right here: Warner Bros.: Release Ray Harryhausen’s Original Wrath of the Titans (1985) or I Shall Release the Kraken!

Help out, spread the false word. Next year, I want people genuinely confused about the existence of an earlier movie called Wrath of the Titans. It’s almost April Fool’s day, right?

Wrath of the Titans feels exactly like what the Clash of the Titans re-make felt like when I watched it for the second time on DVD: a lifeless spectacle. I gave the re-make a decent review on Black Gate back in the day, but any critic knows that his or her first impressions do not necessarily remain constant. I cannot now, in good conscience, recommend the 2010 Clash of the Titans as even a decent time-waster. It’s a mass of digital nothing that flashed from memory the moment it was over. It is awful.

So Wrath of the Titans is no better or worse than its predecessor — it just reaches the point of minimum returns faster. As in, before the end credits roll.

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Goth Chick News: Full Length Trailers for Shadows and Prometheus: It’s Getting Interesting…

Goth Chick News: Full Length Trailers for Shadows and Prometheus: It’s Getting Interesting…

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image004This week saw all sorts of new goodies being released to moisten your pallet for what will surely be two of the upcoming summer movie season’s biggest box office draws.

Let’s start with Dark Shadows and my assertion that if Barnabas Collins were really in his grave somewhere, he’d probably be spinning like a rotisserie ham.

It’s because the original vampire Collins wasn’t particularly heartthrob material (and proper vampires really shouldn’t be) that I didn’t mind some of the initial low-quality stills that came from Tim Burton and Johnny Depp’s rewind of the 1960’s TV cult classic.

Depp had his hair plastered down and was sporting a seriously pasty complexion.

Okay, fair enough. I did fret ever so slightly about the borderline comical nature of his look but, well, that’s just Burton and Depp.

Then on March 16th we finally get the goods: a series of character portraits and a full length trailer of Dark Shadows to hold us over the 55 or so days until its release on May 11th.

Oh joy, oh rapture, oh…. seriously?

A comedy?

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Peplum Populist: Hercules in the Haunted World

Peplum Populist: Hercules in the Haunted World

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hercules-in-the-haunted-world-us-posterAmong the most popular articles I’ve written for Black Gate is a look at one the goofiest fantasy films of the ‘80s, the Lou Ferrigno Hercules. Two-and-a-half years later, I feel I should give the on-screen Hercules another shot with one of the better films to carry his name. Plus, I just pondered the news that a new Hercules film is on the way. Or maybe I’m just trying to repeat the search-engine magic of the name “Hercules.” So let’s leap back twenty-two years from the science-fiction cheesy glitz of Ferrigno’s film and take a kaleidoscopic trip to Hell on a shoestring budget with Mario Bava.

Among the many movies produced in the “sword-and-sandal” (peplum) deluge in Italy between 1958 and 1965, two stand out for movie fans: The Colossus of Rhodes (1960) and Hercules in the Haunted World (1961). Both were early efforts from directors who went on to re-shape other genres and subsequently turned into legends. Sergio Leone, director of The Colossus of Rhodes, created the style of the Italian Western with his three films with Clint Eastwood and the ultra classic Once Upon a Time in the West. Mario Bava, director of Hercules in the Haunted World, gave form to the Italian giallo film and Continental horror in general, starting with Black Sunday made the year before his one Hercules films.

The difference between The Colossus of Rhodes and Hercules in the Haunted World is that Bava was already in fine form and showing his signature style, while Leone displayed little of his famous “Leone-ness” in his first movie. The Colossus of Rhodes looks like something any competent director could have turned out. Nobody but Bava could have created the colorful fantasy eeriness of Hercules in the Haunted World.

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Is John Carter a Flop?

Is John Carter a Flop?

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john-carterI’ve been enjoying Ryan Harvey’s enthusiastic review of the new Disney film John Carter, although I wasn’t able to make it to the local metroplex to see it myself this weekend. Apprently, I wasn’t the only one.

Entertainment Weekly, in assessing the weekend box office take, calls the film “one of the most high profile box office misfires in years.”

Carter really needed to open to $50 million at a bare minimum. Other films that reportedly cost around $250 million include Spider-Man 3, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, and Avatar, and those four movies debuted to an average of $99 million. John Carter, on the other hand, collected an estimated $30.6 million this weekend… a dismal showing for such a costly project.

Today’s New York Times, in an article titled Ishtar Lands on Mars, estimates the film’s total cost at closer to $350 million:

John Carter, which cost an estimated $350 million to make and market… took in about $30.6 million at the North American box office… That result is so poor that analysts estimate that Disney will be forced to take a quarterly write-down of $100 million to $165 million. The amount will depend on ticket sales overseas, where John Carter took in about $71 million over the weekend, a better total than Disney had feared…

Because of its enormous cost and the way ticket sales are split with theaters, analysts say the film needs to take in more than $600 million globally to break even. The only silver lining for Disney may be a dubious one: last March the studio’s Mars Needs Moms flopped so badly that it also required a write-down, making year-on-year performance comparisons less brutal.

Although the numbers look grim, $71 million overseas is nothing to sneeze at. With a combined weekend take over over $100 million, it may be too early to label John Carter a clear bomb. We’ll see what the future holds… and I still plan to see it this week.

John Carter [of Mars] Is a Perfect Edgar Rice Burroughs Movie

John Carter [of Mars] Is a Perfect Edgar Rice Burroughs Movie

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johncarterposter-with-apesJohn Carter (2012)
Directed by Andrew Stanton. Starring Taylor Kitsch, Lynn Collins, Willem Dafoe, Mark Strong, Dominic West, Samantha Morton, Ciarán Hinds, Thomas Haden Church, James Purefoy, Darryl Sabara.

Update: Thank you to all Black Gate readers who have shown the love for John Carter and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and who boosted me with positive comments and emails regarding my long-term project of reviewing all the Martian novels. I’ve never felt so much support from the Internet in the eight years I’ve been an active blogger and reviewer, four of them at Black Gate.

Don’t expect the brackets in my post title John Carter [of Mars] to endure. People who have already seen John Carter will know what I mean: Walt Disney Pictures could not stop director Andrew Stanton from making John Carter of Mars the true title of his adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s century-old classic A Princess of Mars. Stanton, a fan of the Martian novels since he was a child, has given the perfect fan treatment to the material. If you’re a fan as well, then John Carter will carry you from the beginning until the end on a wave of childhood joy until you choke up at the final title cards.

If you’ve been reading my reviews of the Martian novels, then you already know my bias; I am also an Edgar Rice Burroughs fanatic from a young age. As with Captain America: The First Avenger, I am inclined to love this film more than most viewers. But, as with Captain America, I feel confident that the majority of viewers will enjoy this film, with a few caveats. Burroughs fans, however, may purchase with rock solid confidence.

In fact, the fan-service the film offers might end up a problem. If anything holds back John Carter from being a sizable hit — aside from some poor marketing choices — it will be that it is relentlessly “Burroughsian.” Never has an adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs caught so closely his spirit and his style. But John Carter goes even farther than finding the tone of its source: it is steeped in the mythology of Barsoom — ERB’s fantasy version of Mars — crammed with its politics, its biology, its language, its technology. For general audiences who know little about The First Citizen of Tarzana, the film may confuse them. Director Andrew Stanton shows how much he loves his source material in the way he refuses to water down any of it. The intricacies of Martian politics and its array of races appear on screen without apology and without hand-holding the audience.

I applaud that in a movie that on the surface looks like nothing more than a standard science-fiction popcorn event offering big action thrills and beautiful people armed with swords and guns. But I wonder if this will turn off the casual viewer. I hope not, because John Carter far exceeds other recent films of its genre with strong characters and CGI that enhances the experience instead of turning it into Transformers 3-style noise. Perhaps the movie isn’t a classic, but I have a sense that if Andrew Stanton gets a shot at making the next movie in the series, The Gods of Mars, then classic-dom is within his grasp. And ours.

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