Titans Terrors & Toys

Nerd Rant: To See or Not To See The Phantom Menace in 3D

2012-02-15T16:14:00.000-08:00

I sense a three dimensional disturbance in The Force.

I love 3D movies, I love Star Wars, and I love the special effects work done by George Lucas-backed companies such as Industrial Light and Magic. However, I have no desire to see the re-release of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace in 3D. The reason is simple: Based on several reviews I've read, the converted Phantom Menace movie doesn't take full advantage of the new dimension it is supposed to have. It ranked fourth during its first weekend at the box office but I doubt that's enough to justify the cost of converting just one film to 3D, let alone six. Furthermore, if Phantom Menace falls off the top ten list this upcoming weekend, then the future of a complete Star Wars saga in 3D is more doomed than Alderaan.

What gives? This is George Lucas we're talking about here. If there's anyone in Hollywood who has easy and ready access to the latest special effects technology, it's him--and yet Phantom Menace didn't get a decent conversion to 3D? Really?

Naturally, I'm severely disappointed that the Star Wars 3D movie experience that was supposed to be probably won't happen at all. Yet the real reason why I am posting this rant is that deep, deep down inside of my little geeky heart, I'm hoping that someone will give the high-definition 3D treatment to one or more of the older anaglyph 3D classics, classics such as House of Wax and Dial M for Murder. Thus, I'm sure that the box office performance of re-released, 3D-converted titles such as Phantom Menace will have an impact on whether or not that happens. After carefully considering what has happened so far, I think that this could very well be the first time that Lucas' technological savvy has been trumped ... by Disney. Click below to learn about how the House of Mouse has beaten The Flanneled One to the 3D punch.

To be fair, while Lucas has invested a lot in advanced film production technology, Disney has plenty of experience when it comes to distributing their products. Add to that Disney's large catalog of titles, and it becomes clear that it takes more than technological sophistication and a huge built-in fan base to make 3D conversions profitable.

I think that Lucas' mistake is twofold: that the 3D conversion was lackluster and that he released it within months of the Blu-ray release of all six Star Wars movies--and less than two months after the Christmas shopping season, when I'm sure plenty of fans got their Star Wars Blu-ray sets. If you already have a Blu-ray player and a high-def TV, then there's no reason to pay extra cash for a disappointing 3D conversion when you can watch crystal-clear copies of the Star Wars movies (as well as the hours of bonus features that came with them) in the comfort of your own home. Even if you don't own the Star Wars Blu-rays yet, you'd be better off saving your money to get them than to spend it on higher-priced tickets for a 3D experience that doesn't deliver.

In contrast, Disney has been tinkering around with 3D for years by now, both with first-run 3D releases and 3D conversions. Its conversions include Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, Toy Story and Toy Story 2, and The Nightmare Before Christmas. Each time Disney re-releases a converted title, the distribution plan adheres to the same strategy: The title is released in theaters for a limited engagement, which is quickly followed by the release of the title on 3D Blu-ray. This strategy has worked quite well for Disney so far, although it's not the only way to do it. For example, Dreamworks converted its 2D Shrek movies to 3D and then released them on 3D Blu-ray without bothering with theatrical re-releases.

Regardless of which release pattern is followed, each would fail if the 3D conversion process didn't yield impressive results. I don't think that it's a coincidence that the most successful 3D conversions all happen to be animated. CGI animated movies are easier to convert to 3D than another other film, but that doesn't explain the successful conversions of 2D hand-drawn animated features and stop-motion features. Without knowing the exact processes and technology involved, it seems that the less moving elements there are on the screen the easier it is to convert it to 3D. The animation in Lion King and Nightmare Before Christmas is gorgeous, but none of their scenes are nearly as busy as an action scene from a Star Wars film--and there I believe is where the problem lies.

It could very well be that the 3D conversion process--at least for the immediate future--should strictly be limited to the domain of animation. If Lucas really wanted to enter the 3D movie arena, he should have taken a feature-length story arc from the CGI animated Clone Wars TV series, convert it into 3D, and then release it on 3D Blu-ray with a few behind-the-scenes featurettes. Yet even if 3D conversion is limited to animation, that shouldn't rule out the conversion of older, live-action films that were already shot in the 3D into a superior 3D format.

In summary: Disney can keep doing what it does in 3D because it does it well. But for Lucas, James Cameron and all of the other filmmakers who want to convert their older movies into 3D, I can only say this: Don't. There are many older films that I would love to see in 3D (click here to see my 3D conversion wish list) but please, please, please wait for the technology to catch up--even if it means waiting for the conversion of movies into holograms if that's what it takes. In the meantime, work on updating movies that were already shot in 3D, movies that were ahead of their time and are long overdue for a comeback.

Now ... who's finally going to release a high-def double feature Creature from the Black Lagoon/Revenge of the Creature 3D Blu-ray set?

The Many Faces of Mego at Toy Fair 2012 (UPDATED)

2012-02-13T16:36:00.000-08:00

The Mego Corporation may be dead but its influence on the world of toy hobbyists and collectors lives on, courtesy of companies such as Bif Bang Pow!, Diamond Select, and EMCE Toys.

As I've noted before (see here and here), Mego's design of its 8-inch action figure was a work of pure genius in the amount of flexibility it could bring to any toy license. All the figure needed was a customized head sculpt and cloth suit, and it could be used as a soldier, or a superhero, or a monster, and so on. The design also allowed for hobbyists to make their own customized figures using affordable materials that can be purchased at a variety of stores. If the toys that are currently on display at Toy Fair 2012 in New York are any indication, Mego's spirit of adaptability is alive and well. Read on....

Bif Bang Pow! is applying the Mego principle to the licenses of Doctor Who, the Six Million Dollar Man, the Twilight Zone, and the original Battlestar Galactica. Of the figure assortments previewed at Toy Fair, I'm very impressed with its selection of Galactica figures. Imagine if Mego got the Galactica license back in 1978 instead of Mattel--that's exactly what this series of Galactica action figures look like. Of course, the new Bif Bang Pow! figures have many more points of articulation than their Mattel predecessors and they also come with some cool accessories, such as removable Colonial Viper helmets for both Apollo and Starbuck.

In addition to its other lines of Universal Monsters toys, Diamond Select is taking a cue from Mego's previous Mad Monsters line and is expanding its line of Retro Cloth Universal Monsters. Upcoming additions to this line include the Bride of Frankenstein and the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and future additions are scheduled to include the Invisible Man, the Phantom of the Opera, and the Metaluna Mutant from This Island Earth (1955). Diamond Select also has an ongoing series of classic Star Trek figures, which are very similar in appearance to Mego's Star Trek line from 1974.

As a follow up to their previous Create Your Own Zombie Customizable Action Figure Kit, EMCE Toys is releasing a Create Your Own Superhero Action Figure Customizing Kit. Unlike the Mego-sized figures that came with the zombie kit, the superhero kit includes figures that are only 4 inches high and don't require cloth costumes; nevertheless, the new kit continues the spirit of customization that the Mego community has embraced for a long time. I'm betting that EMCE's latest kit will come in handy for hobbyists who have been unsuccessful so far in creating action figures for their favorite non-DC and non-Marvel superheroes. You can learn more about the Create Your Own Superhero Kit on EMCE Toys' Facebook page.

It should be noted, though, that the revival of the Mego figure design standard hasn't always been successful. For example, Mattel's Retro Action series of DC characters started back in 2009 but has since been discontinued due to poor sales. There's something bitterly ironic about this failure, because Mego's line DC and Marvel superhero figures that was released during the 70s contributed greatly to Mego's popularity among toy collectors and hobbyists.

The Thing 2011 Prequel: Body Horror from Another World

2012-02-10T14:23:00.000-08:00

When I first heard about Universal's production of a prequel to John Carpenter's classic The Thing (1982), I wasn't sure what to think. I loved Carpenter's movie, and I kept up with many of its unofficial sequels, such as the three Dark Horse Comics miniseries and the 2002 video game by VU Games. In fact, if you love horror/sci-fi stuff like I do, it's impossible not to notice the lasting influence of The Thing--both in terms of Carpenter's direction and Rob Bottin's innovative creature effects work--in other movies (Isolation, Splinter), TV shows (Something is Out There, Threshold) and video games (Resident Evil, Dead Space). With so many pseudo-Things scurrying around out there, I was disappointed that we Thing fans never got a big-screen return trip to the freezing Antarctic to see more of what cinema's most terrifying shape-shifter could do. Yet with Hollywood's recent tendency to remake and reboot all sorts of horror and sci-fi titles and franchises, I couldn't help but approach news of the prequel with some trepidation, that a new version of the inherently messy and bleak Thing would be dumbed-down and sanitized for a new audience.

Fortunately, the 2011 prequel to The Thing proved to be much better than what I had imagined it could be. Sure, it doesn't reach the same level of intense fatalism as Carpenter's movie (very few movies do), but it still works as a fitting prologue to the grim fate that later befalls the crew of Outpost 31. Considering the amount of studio interference that plagued this film, which features explicit displays of gloriously grotesque body horror, such an accomplishment is worthy of appreciation. Read on for my complete review and a few thoughts as to why both Thing movies are among the most feral and ferocious body horror films ever to hit the silver screen--which may be why they both flopped in the first place.

As its prequel status suggests, The Thing depicts the events that lead up to the 1982 movie of the same name; like its predecessor, it is also based on the short story "Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell Jr. In the prequel, a team of Norwegian and American scientists discover an enormous alien spacecraft buried deep below the surface of Antarctica, as well as what appears to be one of its passengers. After they take the frozen alien back to their base camp, it thaws to reveal its true nature: a highly infectious creature that can assume the appearance of any organism, including humans.

I'll begin this review by saying that as horror movies go, Carpenter's The Thing is a very tough act to follow. His movie bombed at the box office and was trashed by critics when it debuted in 1982. The critics who panned it dismissed it as nothing more than exploitation-style horror that placed gory special effects ahead of plot and characters, so anyone who would do a continuation of Carpenter's film with the same amounts of gore and gloom was inevitably going to face at least some of the same critical backlash as he did. For example, Roger Ebert gave the 2011 The Thing the same number of stars as the 1982 The Thing, and he still concluded that the first adaptation of Campbell's story, 1951's The Thing From Another World, is superior that its subsequent adaptations. Let's face it: Gory horror is tough for some to find entertaining, but gory horror that's also drenched in bottomless despondency is an act of cinematic sacrilege for many.

Another problem with doing any kind of continuation of The Thing is rooted in the titular monster itself, because the creature is almost impossible to stop due to its ability to attack and survive on both macro- and micro-biological levels. Such invincibility puts writers into a corner, which leaves them with only three options for continuation:

1. Have a sequel where the protagonists discover an infallible solution to permanently vanquish the monster;

2. Have the monster leave the Antarctic and arrive in a densely populated area, and then focus the narrative on how the protagonists deal with the new, larger-scale Thing outbreak; or

3. Place the monster in another isolated area with a small number of people, which amounts to repeating the original story but in a different location and with different characters.

Obviously, Universal would reject the first option because it would kill the possibility of a franchise, and it would also balk at the hefty price tag that would inevitably come with the second option. (Case in point: This second option is also why we’ll never see an Alien sequel where the biomechanical parasites invade and conquer Earth.) This process of elimination leaves the third option, so The Thing prequel runs with it by filling in a narrative blank space in Carpenter's movie: the ruined Norwegian base scene. However, Carpenter left that scene in his movie deliberately vague for the purpose of stoking the audience's imagination of what the Thing could do to his protagonists. In other words, that scene served the purpose of providing viewers with examples what the Thing is capable of doing, just as how other horror movies show you the aftermaths of attacks and not the attacks themselves (such as in Jaws, Aliens and Se7en) to keep you guessing with nervous anticipation about what can happen next. Thus, basing a prequel on a narrative device designed to provoke the imagination is tricky, because the number of surprises available are limited.

I have to give the prequel's cast and crew credit: From what I saw, they clearly went into this project knowing the limitations with which they were faced and worked efficiently and effectively within them. They changed the aspects to the story that could be different from Carpenter's while at the same time remaining (mostly) faithful to the details that would fit within the narrative framework provided in the 1982 movie. This may sound unoriginal and derivative but considering that this is the third film inspired by a short story that itself was greatly influenced by the H.P. Lovecraft novella At the Mountains of Madness, I’m not going to quibble about originality and focus instead on execution.

The two most notable changes from its predecessor are the film's character hierarchy and overall mood. In the first Thing, the characters were a group of weary, maladjusted men who seemed to be in the Antarctic because they didn't belong anywhere else; in contrast, the prequel's characters are a team of scientists who just made a revolutionary find and who largely defer to the overbearing authority of Dr. Sander Halvorson (Ulrich Thomsen), their leader. The prequel's mixed cast of male and female, American and Norwegian characters also works well, allowing the story to play around with interpersonal tensions and paranoia in ways that the previous film couldn’t. Indeed, there’s something morbidly ironic about how a completely amorphous organism can exploit differences in gender, nationality, language and professional status--details that are valued greatly as part of being human--to its advantage.

Following the new set of characters, the prequel’s tone is lighter (at least initially) than Carpenter’s film. Part of this is due to the film’s pacing: While the previous movie moved at a measured pace that allowed for its oppressive dread to permeate the story, the prequel moves along at a much faster rhythm. In fact, once the prequel Thing figures out how to imitate humans, it doesn't take long for it to tear through its available human prey. Such a pacing allows the new Thing movie to provide a series of intense shocks in short order, right on up until its hopelessly futile ending. Whereas the characters in Carpenter’s Thing come to embrace the immutable finality of their situation so that they can keep the threat from reaching others, the characters in the prequel frantically run through every solution they can think of to fight the alien menace until there’s nothing left but death itself. The two different portrayals of ice-cold despair complement each other better than you’d imagine.

I could end my review here, but I can’t really do justice to explaining why I enjoyed The Thing unless I go into its elements of body horror. The body horror in the Thing movies is what sets them apart from their most similar cinematic counterparts, the pod clones from the Invasion of the Body Snatchers movies. The pod clones have a sense of structure and purpose; in each Body Snatcher film, the clones replace specific people for the greater purpose of replacing all of human society itself. In contrast, the Thing has no greater drive than the insatiable need to propagate its DNA through infection, assimilation and mutation, like a disease. Furthermore, the pod clones are very rational and they will clearly explain their plans for conquering the Earth when they are exposed to be imposters. In contrast, when a Thing is exposed as an imposter, its reaction is purely biological: It erupts into a contorted, asymmetrical arrangement of writhing appendages, toothy orifices, and vestigial parts. Anyone who has ever experienced a sudden and violent loss of control of his or her body--say, because of a grand mal seizure, a severe allergic reaction or an overpowering panic attack--can appreciate what the kind of body horror that The Thing movies are trying to portray.

It has been suggested by some that the horror behind the modern zombie movie is that it's a twisted parody on how many perceive the relationship between mind, soul and body. Religions place the mind and soul as the intangible, everlasting elements of humanity; the modern zombie movie reverses that notion, portraying thousands of reanimated bodies moving around on their own without a single mind or soul among them and quickly overrunning the living through acts of mob violence and raw cannibalism. The Thing takes that conceptual reversal a few steps forward by making its monster the literal manifestation of the biological imperative to survive by passing on DNA, and that the monster's imperative is not limited by any known biological process (such as cognition, digestion, and sexual reproduction) or structures (organs, bones, and skin tissue). Essentially, Carpenter's The Thing and its prequel takes biologist Richard Dawkins' idea of the "selfish gene" and pushes it to its most nightmarish extreme. This kind of body horror rarely appears in the movie theaters and I think that the Thing prequel did a great job at bring it back, however fleetingly. For an alternate reading of the body horror in The Thing prequel, click here to read Matthew Haigh’s interpretation on his blog site.

Invasion Tip: When sprouting an appendage to absorb another organism’s DNA,

be sure that the appendage is capable of secreting large amounts of lube.

Body horror has never been a blockbuster subgenre at the movies. Even when it’s part of what would otherwise be considered as a monster movie, and it could very well be that the notion of losing control of one’s body on a deep, immeasurable level is simply too terrifying for many people. Other body horror-themed films of late, such as Slither (2006) and Splice (2009), also tanked at the box office, so it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that The Thing prequel tanked as well. But don’t let its failure at the theaters put you off from seeing this movie. If you loved Carpenter’s 1982 movie and appreciate body horror, you should give The Thing prequel a chance to crawl under your skin.

The Brief History of 50s Horror Comics Exposed in The Horror! The Horror!: Comic Books the Government Didn't Want You to Read!

2012-02-07T15:42:00.000-08:00

When I think of horror and sci-fi stuff from the 1950s, three things immediately come to mind: the rise of the "atomic mutant" subgenre of horror/sci-fi movies, the popularity of alien invasion stories, and Hammer Studio's early ventures into horror cinema. On the other hand, I never thought much about horror comics from that era. I knew that there were Senate hearings about the content of comic books in 1954, and that these hearings were prompted by the publication of Seduction of the Innocent, a book by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham. In his book, Wertham accused comic books of inciting juvenile delinquency on an epidemic level. By the end of the hearings, the comic book industry implemented a self-regulating Comics Code Authority (CCA) just so it could stay in business.

Fans of superhero comics (myself included) are well-versed in how the CCA Code sanitized the content of DC's superhero universe, and how also it set the stage for Marvel to introduce a new generation of innovative-yet-CCA-compliant superheroes. Yet in comparison to other genres, horror comics vanished from newsstands overnight because of the CCA. In his book The Horror! The Horror!: Comic Books the Government Didn't Want You to Read!, author Jim Trombetta recounts the hysteria surrounding horror comics during the mid-50s and the people who were involved--the critics, the publishers, and the artists. He also reprints many examples of artwork from these controversial comics, which he uses to critically analyze the comics' recurring imagery and themes. Click below to read my complete book review, and why Trombetta's work is a great addition to the short lists of books that chronicle the most successful act of government-sponsored censorship in the US.

Trombetta begins his book with an overview of the Senate hearings and the hysteria that led up to the hearings, with subsequent chapters devoted to particular aspects of 50s era horror comics (skeletons, sexuality, shrunken heads, race, etc.). Each chapter is separated by pages of reprinted artwork from the comics themselves, including covers, panels and a few complete stories. In one of the initial chapters, Trombetta succinctly describes the reasoning that drove the censorship of horror comics: "(I)n April 1954, comics became the first pop-art medium to be regulated nearly out of existence by the government. ... It was, in true Orwellian fashion, as if the government thought that bad things would vanish if they couldn't be read or thought aloud." Given how comic books have been repeatedly derided by cultural elites as "junk" entertainment, it's astonishing to read Trombetta's account of how influential members of our own government willingly believed that horror comics could do so much harm to society and that banishing them to the point of complete cancellation would ultimately serve the greater good.

What I enjoyed about The Horror! is how Trombetta analyzes horror comics and the fears and insecurities they reflected at the time. Early horror comics feature many of the same ideas and images that many other forms of horror storytelling have, but Trombetta keeps his scrutiny of them rooted in the popular culture of the late 40s and early 50s to give readers a better frame of reference for understanding. To that end, he notices certain overlaps between the horror comics with the then-contemporary war comics and "true crime" comics.

Further contextualizing the horror comics is the inclusion of an episode of Confidential File, which is on a DVD inserted in the book's rear flap. Confidential File was a news magazine show that ran from 1953-58 and was hosted by LA Times reporter Paul Coates; the episode on the DVD shows Coates "investigating" horror comics. If you think that news in our current era of 24-hour cable- and Internet-driven coverage is nothing but empty sensationalism, then you need to see this episode. Not only does Coates lack any meaningful facts or credible "experts" to support his indictment of horror comics, but he uses child actors a provide dramatization of what he thinks kids do to each other after reading horror comics as he prattles on about how reprehensible he thinks the comics are. The dramatization is so blatantly staged to fit Coates' view of what horror comics do to kids (think The Lord of the Flies in suburbia) that it's hard to believe that anyone other than Coates would take this episode seriously. Curiously, the episode was directed by Irvin Kershner, who would later go on to direct Empire Strikes Back.

(Then again, it has been argued by some that horror comics of the pre-CCA era weren't meant for kids in the first place. According to graphic designer Art Chantry, "The artists working this turf back then were virtually all war vets (it seems) with varying sorts of emotional damage (let’s be honest). The writers were virtually unknown haggard hacks and a few really f#$ked up madmen tossed in to the stew. Combine that with a forgotten generation of comic book professional hacks and an entire new generation of adult men who entered WW2 and the Korean war as children (and had to grow up way too fast) and you begin to see a crazy new market emerging. The truth was that these horror comics weren’t really made for 'kids' at all. They were made for new postwar damaged adults taking over the new modern world." Read Chantry's complete post about pre-CCA horror comics over at the Madame Pickwick Art Blog here.)

Trombetta's contextualization of the horror comics would be incomplete if he couldn't convey how popular they were before their government-mandated discontinuation. This point is driven home by the reprints of the horror comic covers from various titles between 1951 and 1954. There are dozens upon dozens of the covers on page after page in the book; I had no idea that there were so many horror comics published in such a short amount of time, which makes their subsequent disappearance from the newsstands after 1954 that much more stupefying to comprehend. If you only buy The Horror! for its reprints of rare comic art, you still won't be disappointed.

Where The Horror! stumbles badly is in its conclusion. Trombetta jumps from the mid-50s to the post-9/11 era in an attempt to make some larger point about censorship and how it functions in two different times in American history, but his argument falls flat due to its lack of substantial connection to the rest of the book. Had he paid more attention to how the horror genre and its fan culture had continued after 1954--and how many times that horror-related materials have been the subject of controversies both frenzied and fleeting in the years since then--he might have been able to build a firmer link between the 50s and now. For example, even though the CCA vanquished horror comics for a few years, it didn't stop Eerie Publications from publishing several horror anthology comic magazines from 1966 to 1981. Trombetta could have used this example to emphasize how futile the anti-comics effort ultimately was and how tragic it was for our government to violate the First Amendment for the sake of appeasing momentary hysteria.

Overall, The Horror! The Horror!: Comic Books the Government Didn't Want You to Read! is a book I would recommend to any horror fan who has a fervid appreciation of macabre visual art (such as horror VHS covers from the 80s and horror special effects work by artists such as Tom Savini, Rob Bottin and Rick Baker) and would like to learn more about the frequently forgotten golden age of horror comics.

Nine Horror Titles that Have Many Film Adaptations but Remain Sequel-Less

2012-02-05T17:12:00.000-08:00

The Woman in Black, a ghost story that takes place during the Victorian era in England, made its debut in theaters across the US this weekend. While it's the first horror film from Hammer Films in decades, it's hardly a new tale. The Woman in Black started as a 1983 novel by Susan Hill, and it was later adapted for the theater, radio, and television.

With that in mind, I've assembled a list of nine horror stories that have three or more film adaptations under their belts. What these stories all have in common is that they started out on the printed page, either as books, novellas or play scripts. Yet unlike Dracula or Frankenstein--two of the most adapted horror novels in film history--none of the stories on this list ever got around to spawning a single film sequel or spinoff.

Click below to see these nine terror tales, which I've arranged according to the number of film adaptations that have been made for each title. Please note that some totals are estimated, because the more popular titles have been adapted so many times with varying degrees of faithfulness to the source material that it's difficult to determine which adaptations qualify as such. For example, the unpublished short story entitled "The Wax Works" by Charles Spencer Belden was adapted twice, once in 1933 and then in 3D in 1953. A third film in 2005 bears the same title as the 1953 version, House of Wax, but it is not based on the same source. Read on....

1. Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber

Number of Movie Adaptations: 3, Weird Woman (1944), Night of the Eagle (a.k.a. Burn, Witch, Burn!) (1962), and Witches' Brew (a.k.a. Which Witch is Which?) (1980)

Skeptics hold a special place in the horror genre. By the end of the novel, TV show or movie, the skeptic usually becomes either a true believer or monster chow (or both)--no exceptions. Leiber took that character type one step further with his Conjure Wife novel, where the skeptic in the story discovers not only that his wife is using witchcraft to advance his career, but that the wife of one of his professional rivals is out to sabotage his career by the same means. No other skeptic in horror ever had it so bad, so much so that this novel has been adapted for the movies three times. Trivia bonus: The second adaptation was co-scripted by horror legend Richard Matheson.

2. Donovan's Brain by Curt Siodmak

Number of Movie Adaptations: 3, The Lady and the Monster (1944), Donovan's Brain (1953), and The Brain (1962)

A human brain kept alive in a jar is one of the many go-to concepts that writers use as shorthand for science run amok, and it can serve as either a main plot point in story or simply a background decoration in a mad scientist’s lab. Donovan’s Brain was the first story to popularize this idea among horror and sci-fi filmmakers, and it has three film adaptations to its name to prove it. Of course, this doesn’t begin to cover the countless Donovan’s Brain rip-offs that have been released since the first adaptation of Siodmak’s novel, rip-offs such as The Brain from Planet Arous, The Brain That Wouldn't Die, and They Saved Hitler’s Brain.

3. I Am Legend by Richard Matheson

Number of Movie Adaptations: 3, The Last Man on Earth (1964), The Omega Man (1971), and I Am Legend (2007)

It’s easy to lose count of the number of films and TV shows that have been adapted from Richard Matheson’s novels and/or from screenplays he’s written, but I Am Legend is the one that has been adapted the most times. What’s particularly noteworthy about this trilogy of adaptations are the diversity of actors who have starred as the main character (Vincent Price, Charlton Heston and Will Smith), none of the adaptations have the same ending as the novel, and that I Am Legend served as an inspiration of one of the most imitated horror films of all time: George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.

4. The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Welles

Number of Movie Adaptations: 3, Island of Lost Souls (1933), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996)

Like Richard Matheson, H.G. Welles has provided plenty of material for movies; in Welles’ case, movie adaptations of his work date as far back as the silent era. While The Invisible Man and War of the Worlds may be two of his most well-known novels due to the popularity of their film adaptations and sequels, The Island of Dr. Moreau remains one of Welles’ most adapted works that has yet to produce a single sequel--plenty of rip-offs, but not a sequel.

5. The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney

Number of Movie Adaptations: 4

If the 1950s are to be a guide about understanding alien invasions to Earth, then we can expect the invaders to attack in one of two ways: They’ll either vaporize us with their high-tech weaponry as they did in War of the Worlds, or they’ll overrun us with human duplicates as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Jack Finney struck a significant chord in the collective human psyche when he envisioned an invasive alien race that did not need any form of advanced weaponry to conquer the human race; instead, they rapidly reproduced like hyper-fertile plants and effortlessly assumed the identities of people while they slept. Such a terrifying idea resulted in four adaptations and countless imitators, but not a single continuation of the original story.

6. The Cat and the Canary by John Willard

Number of Movie Adaptations: 6

The Cat and the Canary is the only title on this list that started as a stage play, which premiered in 1922. It’s also one of the few listed here that has been adapted either as a horror story or as a dark comedy. Nevertheless, its central plot--a group of people who come to a gloomy, secluded mansion for the reading of a will and find themselves stalked by a mysterious killer--was quite influential and has a inspired other titles in the horror genre, particularly in the giallo/slasher subgenre. It should also be noted that a similar play from the same era called The Bat was adapted for film three times, and that The Bat is credited by comic book writer Bob Kane as the inspiration for his most popular character, Batman.

7. Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Number of Movie Adaptations: 10+

Horror and sci-fi characters who develop split personalities through mad science all have a common ancestor in Robert Louis Stevenson’s notorious Dr. Jekyll. Stevenson’s novella has been adapted so many times that it’s hard to get an exact count of what can be considered an actual adaptation. Further muddling the exact total are adaptations of this tale that add an element of gender bending, as was the case in Hammer’s Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde.

8. The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux

Number of Movie Adaptations: 10+

Gaston Leroux wrote many detective novels throughout his career, but his most popular story involves a vengeful, disfigured maniac who lurks behind the scenes at an opera house. Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Phantom of the Opera has been adapted so many times and in so many formats (it was adapted into a musical twice) that the exact total of adaptations remains unclear. It has also been adapted to fit more contemporary settings, as in the case of Phantom of the Paradise and Phantom of the Mall.

9. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Number of Movie Adaptations: 10+

Curiously, the only published novel by Oscar Wilde also became one of the most adapted stories in horror cinema. Even though The Picture of Dorian Gray is a variation of sorts on the themes explored in Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (which was published four years prior to Dorian Gray), Wilde’s book takes the old adage of how beauty is only skin deep to such sinister depths that filmmakers found it too irresistible to avoid adaptation.

Star Wars’ IG-88 Arrives at Sideshow Collectibles

2012-02-03T15:56:00.000-08:00

For a long time, one of the great mysteries for me about the Star Wars universe was the bounty hunter droid IG-88. Sure, he looks cool, he stood among Darth Vader’s lineup of ruthless bounty hunters in Empire Strikes Back, and the subsequent novels and comic books portrayed IG-88 and other IG series droids as the Terminators of the Star Wars franchise. Yet when I got the IG-88 action figure shortly after Empire hit the theaters in 1980, I couldn’t imagine this droid being very tough. He only had dainty little claws to hold his weapons, claws that were smaller than Ewok hands--hardly intimidating. He also lacked any visible knee joints; how could he walk, run or even climb stairs, let alone hunt anything for bounty?

Thankfully, Sideshow Collectibles has brought IG-88 into the world of multi-jointed scale replicas to clarify any misconceptions about what this droid is capable of doing. This new one-sixth scale IG-88 figure features over 20 points of articulation, battery-powered lights in the head, an assortment of weapons, and a deluxe illuminated display base. Judging from the pictures below, Sideshow Collectibles has really gone out of its way to add a new level of detail (as well as knees) to one of the lesser-known characters of the Star Wars universe. Click here to learn more about this fantastic figure and how you can add it to your Star Wars collection.

Build Your Favorite Classic Monsters with Lego

2012-02-01T16:27:00.000-08:00

Even though the annual Toy Fair will arrive in New York in a few days, the recently held London Toy Fair generated quite a lot of buzz about what we'll be seeing when the so-to-be-release toys come across the Atlantic. Among the most exciting news comes from Lego. Not only will they release new toys under the licenses for DC, Marvel and the Lord of the Rings franchise, but they are also releasing a new line of toys called "Monster Fighters". This line of play sets, vehicles and minifigs will revolve around classic movie monster types such as vampires, werewolves, ghosts, zombies, mummies and fish men, and it will feature the classic horror characters of Dracula and Frankenstein's Monster.

The relationship between classic monsters and toys goes way back. I remember when Remco, a subsidiary of Azrak Hamway International (AHI), released its own six figure set of Universal Monster figures during the early 80s. It had figures of Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, the Wolfman, the Mummy, the Creature from The Black Lagoon, and the Phantom of the Opera. Sadly, Remco's line was very limited. It had the same six characters in two different sizes (9 inches and 3 3/4 inch "Mini-Monsters") and in two different versions for the Mini-Monsters (non-glow and glow-in-the-dark versions). There also were only two accessories: a lab table-like "Monsterizer" for both figure sizes, and a cardboard and plastic castle play set/carrying case for the Mini-Monsters.

Remco's Mini-Monster Action Figures.

Even though the Remco toy line was skimpy in its selection, AHI's original line of monster figures that was released a few years prior to Remco's was even skimpier--that line only had five action figures in one size and no accessories at all. Diamond Select has recently released its own small line of classic Universal Monster figures but between their pricing and intricate features, they are much better suited for display than play.

I'm thrilled to see Lego introducing classic movie monsters to kids through toys with which they can play, and Lego's approach is much more fun and creative than most of their monster toy predecessors. Not only will the monsters have vehicles and play sets, but there will also be steampunk-looking monster hunter minifigs with whom they can fight. Earlier monster toys rarely had monster hunters or victims to go with the monsters, which sort of defeated the purpose of having monster toys in the first place. (Aurora tried to add a victim kit to their popular line of classic monster model kits back in 1971, but that didn't go over too well.) All I can hope for now is that kids will love the Monster Hunter line so much that we can finally get a classic monster-themed Lego video game.

A Lego-based zombie survival video game would be AWESOME!

Equinox and the Odd Story Behind a Fan-Made, Theatrically-Released Horror Film

2012-01-31T16:18:00.000-08:00

If you follow the film industry as much as I do, then you'll know how often directors clash with studio executives when determining the final cuts of big-budget films. Such conflicts between the artists who create the art and the people who fund the art and mistakenly think that they are artists too have resulted in a long, long list of expensive failures. (Alien 3 (1992) and The Invasion (2007) immediately comes to mind.) Of course, it continues to happen--so much so with Hollywood productions that it's almost inevitable at this point--but how would you feel if the same thing happened with the theatrical release of a low-budget, fan-made film?

Such was the case with Equinox. It began as an amateur horror fan film made in 1967 (its original title: The Equinox: Journey into the Supernatural), and then it was re-edited, partially re-shot and distributed theatrically by Tonylyn Productions in 1970. For a long time, the Tonylyn version of Equinox was the only version that was available to the public; when Criterion released their two-disc set of Equinox back in 2006, they included both the original 1967 cut with the theatrical cut on the same disc (both with commentaries) for direct comparison. While neither cut are examples of horror filmmaking at its finest, the differences between the original edit and theatrical edit are astonishing and reflect how much the fans got right--fans who meticulously studied the craftsmanship that went into their favorite movies--and how much the so-called professionals got wrong.

Read on for my complete comparison of the two versions of Equinox, and how no movie is too small for creative differences between creators and producers.

In both edits, Equinox is about a group of college students who travel to the cabin owned by college professor, Dr. Arthur Waterman (Fritz Leiber Jr.), to check up on him because of his recent absence from their campus. They arrive to find that the cabin has been torn apart and Waterman is missing. Their search for the professor leads them to a mysterious text called the Book of the Damned that is filled with ancient inscriptions and spells intended to open a portal to a demonic parallel world--a portal that Waterman has already opened....

What Equinox is widely known for is that it features the early work of three special effects artists who would later work on some of the most popular films of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. These artists were Dennis Muren (Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, A.I., War of the Worlds), Dave Allen (The Howling, Willow, Ghostbusters II, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, The Arrival) and Jim Danforth (Clash of the Titans, Creepshow, The Thing, The Neverending Story, Day of the Dead, Prince of Darkness). Muren produced the film for only $6500 and he co-directed the original cut of Equinox with Mark Thomas McGee, who also wrote the film's script. Muren and Allen worked on the stop motion effects, while Danforth provided the cel animation and matte paintings.

A forced perspective shot from Equinox.

Essentially, Equinox is a demo reel for the early effects work of Muren, Allen and Danforth; that the demo reel also happens to have an intriguing and creative story--albeit a poorly acted, poorly scripted and somewhat disjointed story--is simply a bonus. Considering that the film was shot on a tiny budget with amateur talents, the end results are very impressive.

Many aspects of Equinox echo the influence that the horror and sci-fi fan culture of the early-to-mid 20th century had on budding young filmmakers; depending on how you look at it, Equinox is a love letter of sorts to the creature features of that era. Muren and Allen were devoted fans of pioneering stop motion animators Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen, and several of the effects scenes in Equinox are clearly influenced by O'Brien and Harryhausen movies such as Mighty Joe Young and It Came from Beneath the Sea.

Forrest J. Ackerman makes an uncredited cameo in Equinox by lending his voice to an audio recording that plays early in the film (he also provided a video introduction for the Criterion Equinox set). Ackerman's contributions to the horror and science fiction genres were numerous, and his biggest legacy to the fans of those genres was a magazine he published called Famous Monsters of Filmland. Famous Monsters differed from other entertainment magazines of its time by focusing on the artistry that's performed behind the scenes, such as special effects and creature costume designs. Muren and his production crew must've been devoted acolytes of Ackerman's magazine and the movies it covered, because their love of classic creature features and the techniques that brought them to cinematic life is on display in each frame of their original cut of Equinox. Such open affection provides a sort of charm that offsets some of the amateur film's more uneven aspects.

The theatrical release poster for Equinox.

Dennis Muren and Mark Thomas McGee

were not credited on this poster.

The theatrical version of Equinox saw the addition of new footage, footage that was produced by Jack H. Harris and written and directed by Jack Woods. Some of the new footage consisted of re-shoots of what was in the first version, while the other new footage added new scenes, new characters and new dialogue. Unfortunately, the new additions to the story add nothing of value to the film; if anything, Equinox becomes even worse because of it. The dialogue is more wooden and is loaded with redundant exposition, the new subplots weigh down the film's pacing, and some of the original effects footage was cut to accommodate the new footage (!). Adding insult to injury, the theatrical version of the film begins and ends the same way as the original version--which emphasizes exactly how useless the new footage is.

All I can figure is that Woods thought that Equinox would be his big break as a writer and director (hint: it wasn't), so he tried to put as much of his stamp on it as possible. It should also be noted here that the theatrical version of Equinox lists Woods as director and co-writer, while Muren's credit went from being the co-director and producer to just associate producer. Woods even put himself in front of the camera as a new character named Asmodeus, a demon who assumes the guise of a park ranger and exerts his sinister influence over young ladies by making funny faces at them before feeling them up (no, I'm not kidding). Considering that Harris made a name for himself by producing The Blob in 1958 for only $120,000, it's a shame that he was willing to let Woods run roughshod over the work that was so passionately and cost-effectively made by Muren and his crew.

Asmodeus (Jack Woods), as he grimaces, puckers, clenches

and frowns his way into the soul of an innocent victim.

Equinox has long been rumored to have greatly influenced yet another low-budget cult classic, Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead. To be sure, the films are very different from each other, and the Evil Dead films (particularly Evil Dead 2) are much darker, scarier and better plotted than Equinox. However, the Evil Dead movies feature so many of the same details as Equinox--the cabin in the woods, the prominent role of a tape recorder, an ancient book of dark incantations that summons demonic creatures and opens portals to other worlds, a necklace that is key to warding off evil, a group of teenagers being attacked by monsters that appear and disappear, and so on--that it's hard to deny the connection. Click here to see a visual comparison between Equinox and the Evil Dead movies on The Lucid Nightmare site.

The way I see it, Equinox and The Evil Dead are low-budget bookends of sorts to the changes that horror cinema went through during the 70s. Equinox reflects the heavy influence of O'Brien, Harryhausen and Ackerman on one generation of horror film fans, whereas The Evil Dead reflects the heavy influence of George Romero, Tobe Hooper and Wes Craven on a later generation of horror film fans.

Because Equinox at its best is a cheap fan-made film, your interest in seeing it will greatly depend on how much you would like to see this kind of film from another time in film history. In other words, you don't watch Equinox to see a classic horror film; instead, you watch it to see an example of how fans from a particular era applied what they learned about the crafts practiced by their movie idols to a film they financed and produced on their own, and how that film was later changed for the worse by someone else for theatrical release.

I've seen plenty of movies that were released on DVD and Blu-ray as both a theatrical cut and a director's cut, but this is the first and only time I've seen this situation occur with a fan film. For that reason alone, I highly recommend Criterion's release of Equinox for anyone who is interested in horror and sci-fi fan culture. You should also try to see Criterion's Equinox if you believe that modern CGI-based special effects lack the creativity and finesse of older special effects techniques such as matte paintings, forced perspective and stop motion animation. Click here to read Glenn Erickson's review at DVD Talk of both discs that are in Criterion's set; however, if you are interested in seeing both versions of Equinox but have no interested in buying it, the first disc of the Criterion release is available for rental through Netflix.

In 1985, Equinox was distributed on VHS by

Wizard Video under the title The Beast.

2012: The Year of the Ultimate Bruce Shark Collector’s Set

2012-01-26T15:35:00.000-08:00

When it comes to scale-accurate Jaws replicas, you can't go wrong with Shark City Ozark. I've previously posted about their Jaws-related work here and here, and 2012 marks their most ambitious Jaws project yet: The Ultimate Bruce Shark Collector’s Set, which will consist of four 1/12 scale maquettes that are modeled after the mechanical sharks used in each of the four Jaws movies. Each maquette will be released quarterly, with the first one based on the original mechanical shark used in Jaws.

You're gonna need a bigger display case.

The first maquette measures 25 inches in length and it includes the following:

Removable pectoral fins to match behind the scenes photos, as well as accurate fin gaps.
Modeling based on the new and untested platform sharks, before they sustained damages during the location filming of Jaws at Martha's Vineyard.
A free hand-crafted stand and a Certificate of Authenticity.

You can place your pre-order for the first maquette here, which will begin shipping before the end of March. Keep checking back at the Shark City Ozark site throughout this year for the upcoming releases of the maquettes for Jaws 2, Jaws 3D and Jaws: The Revenge.

The Great Book of Movie Monsters Retrospective

2012-01-25T16:22:00.000-08:00

Looking back, I grew up during an interesting time in the history of horror movies. I was in elementary school in the years that immediately preceded the rise of the home video industry, so that left most of us fledgling horror fans with syndicated television, magazines and books to satiate our horror needs in between horror film releases on the big screen. When it came to books, Crestwood House published a series about classic horror monsters and movies that were picked up by school libraries all over the country. These books familiarized monster kids with the best that classic horror films had to offer--which was fantastic, considering that we couldn’t always see these movies ourselves. (Read my post about Crestwood House's movie monster books here.)

In addition to reading Crestwood House books, I was also fortunate enough to pick up a fantastic horror movie reference book at my local bookstore in 1983: The Great Book of Movie Monsters, by Jan Stacy and Ryder Syvertsen. I don’t remember the exact circumstances that led me to purchase this book--or what convinced my parents to let me purchase this book--but to this day I’m glad I have it as part of my personal collection. While it has its share of errors and quirks, The Great Book of Movie Monsters is still one-of-a-kind in many ways and an absolute treat for horror fans of both popular and obscure horror titles. Read on for my complete retrospective, including pictures from the book that provide examples of its unique design.

Stacy and Syvertsen’s book is a reference manual, so it is not meant to be read from beginning to end. Unlike other movie reference books, none of the movies are rated according to their quality; instead, the book’s gimmick is to provide individual profiles of the many monsters that have appeared on the silver screen, from the silent era to the early 80s. The profiles provide basic plot summaries of the movies in which each monster appeared and statistical data about each monster such as method of creation, size and weight, gender, superpowers, habits, and so forth. It is in these profiles that the book assumes a somewhat humorous tone: for example, a monster’s high number of victims is listed under “Accomplishments”, and other movie monsters that are similar to the one you are reading are listed as “Relatives”. Each profile also lists “What to Do If You Meet”, offering jokey solutions as to what you can do to stay alive when having a close encounter with the profiled monster.

At its worst, the humor in book’s profiles is somewhat uneven, particularly when Stacy and Syvertsen profile monsters in such grim and gruesome films as And Now the Screaming Starts, The Brood and I Drink Your Blood. Their humor works best when they apply it to notoriously hokey B movies such as Beach Girls and the Monsters and Invasion of the Saucer Men, which calls into question why they chose to include more serious horror movies as part of their book’s goofy approach. Then again, their selection of movies to profile--and not profile--can be baffling to understand at times. For example, many of Hammer Film Productions’ creature features are listed, but The Abominable Snowman and The Gorgon are conspicuously absent. Likewise, early slasher films such as Psycho and Halloween get profiles for their respective killers, but none are provided for Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Black Christmas.

None of the drawbacks in The Great Book of Movie Monsters detract from how well it works as a reference book for horror movies. The book features four indexes, which allow you to look for profiles according to monster, movie title, director, and studio. Each profile contains a picture of the monster and enough tantalizing details to convince you to seek the movie(s) that feature the monster. Best of all, many, many cult classics and obscure titles are included along with the classic movie monsters. This book introduced me to unique films such as Burn, Witch, Burn!, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, Equinox, The Mutations, and even a really strange, largely forgotten flick from 1953 called The Twonky. I haven’t seen any another horror movie book provide as much loving attention as The Great Book of Movie Monsters does to so many lesser-known titles. Its comprehensive scope alone convinced me that it was a labor of love for Stacy and Syvertsen to produce, and that they probably grew up glued to the TV set whenever their local TV stations ran a classic horror film from Universal’s Shock Theater library. (Click here to read my review of Jim Clatterbaugh's book, Shock Theater: An Illustrated History.)

The Great Book of Movie Monsters is a great addition to any horror fan’s collection, particularly for those who are interested in fan-friendly horror movie books from the 80s. It would also make for a great companion text to John Landis’ recent book, Monsters in the Movies. Below are a few pages from the book, which you can click to enlarge.

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark and The Gate: Tiny Terrors Times Two

2012-01-20T18:02:00.000-08:00

Way back in August 2010, I posted some thoughts about Guillermo del Toro’s then-unreleased remake of Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, a TV movie from 1973 that’s become a cult classic among horror fans. I had an open mind about what the end product would be like based on del Toro’s previous work, although I had some reservations based on de Toro’s decisions to make the movie a “dark fairy tale” and changing the main character from an adult woman named Sally (Kim Darby) who is in a failing marriage to a little girl named Sally (Bailee Madison) who is visiting her divorced father and his new girlfriend. Unfortunately, my misgivings were right: I just saw del Toro’s remake, which he co-wrote and produced, and his changes to the original story only hindered its overall effectiveness as a horror movie. Even Troy Nixey’s capable direction couldn’t turn this remake into something that improves upon its low-budget predecessor.

Yet as I was thinking about how I’d review the Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark remake, I found myself remembering about another movie that pit kids against pint-sized monsters: The Gate, a film from 1986 that was directed by Tibor Takács. The Gate certified its place in movie trivia by outperforming Ishtar, one of the most notorious big-budget flops in American movie history, but it’s also a great example of how to tell a dark fairy tale that’s worth watching. Read on for my comparison, with some minor spoilers.

To be sure, the original version of Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark isn’t one of the best horror films ever made. What made it memorable, though, is that it was made by talented people who understood the significant limitations with which they were faced--especially in terms of a meager production budget and the TV movie format--and successfully applied their skills within those limits. In doing so, the movie not only kept the appearance of the monsters to a minimum, but it also kept the details behind the monsters’ origin as vague as possible.

On the basis of what you see in the movie, you can piece together that the monsters were probably summoned from another hell-like dimension through some kind of dark magic and then couldn’t (or wouldn't) be sent away, although none of the characters say as much. You hear the monsters much more than you see them, and what they say amongst themselves indicate just how sadistic and obsessive they really are. By keeping the monsters as vague as possible--their origins, their capabilities, and their intentions--the movie maintains eerie mood of tense uncertainty. Adding to the tension is how the presence of the monsters accentuates the growing rift between Sally and her husband Alex (Jim Hutton), all the way to the film’s grim, creepy conclusion.

By changing the nature of the monsters and the age of the main character, del Toro winds up putting more limitations on his remake than the mandatory ones faced by his predecessors. In the remake, it is explained that the monsters are some kind of creatures from ancient folklore who may have some connection to the Tooth Fairy legend, but that explanation sets up many inconsistencies within the narrative that are more frustrating than scary. For example, these creatures are said to crave children’s teeth every hundred years, but the end of the movie suggests that they’re just as content to go another hundred years without any children’s teeth at all (?). While I can imagine del Toro thinking that strained relationship between the child Sally and her divorced father would have the same dramatic effect as the original’s adult Sally and her career-driven husband, but that plot thread quickly diminishes into the cliché of parental characters who refuse to believe their children when they see ghosts, monsters, and other improbable frights.

To accommodate del Toro’s changes yet still justify keeping both the title Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark and its PG-13 rating, the remake restrains itself frequently so that it doesn’t become as horrifying and vicious as it could be. In doing so, the characters--both human and inhuman--become dumber than their TV movie counterparts. The monsters appear to be as adept with tools as they were in the original, but they also announce their presence to Sally many times, they attack her in ways that don’t really hurt her, and they ignore the tactic of stealth enough so that even the clueless adults realize what’s happening by the film’s climax. Then again, adults aren’t that much smarter: Even after they accept the danger that Sally is facing, they still are willing to leave her alone in her room. Finally, I don’t care how bad the divorce of Sally’s parents was, she still shouldn’t be talking to strangers--especially strangers who are locked behind a tiny metal door in the basement of a long deserted mansion.

It should be noted that in an interview with Cineaste magazine about Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, del Toro stated, “I love the Welsh author Arthur Machen and his idea that fairy lore comes from a dark place, that it’s derived from little, pre-human creatures who are really, really nasty vermin but are magical in a way, living as they do for hundreds of years. His books are what compelled me to do this.” (Machen is even mentioned by name in one scene of the remake.) With such intentions in mind, I can only wonder: Why doesn’t del Toro make a completely new movie based on the works of Machen, instead of trying to insert a Machen-inspired story thread into a remake of a TV movie that gained its cult classic status without such a thread in the first place?

In contrast to del Toro’s remake is The Gate. The Gate is about a young boy named Glen (Stephen Dorff) who notices that the hole left behind by the tree that was removed from his backyard is starting to exhibit unusual features. While his parents are away and his is left in the care of his sister Al (Christa Denton), Glen and his friend Terry (Louis Tripp) discover that the hole is actually a gateway to a nightmarish dimension populated by Lovecraftian horrors that are determined to take back the world, and the gate is slowly opening....

Like Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, The Gate is rated PG-13; unlike Dark, director Takács and his crew had a better understanding of how to tell a spooky, kid-centric story than del Toro and Nixey. In particular, The Gate is told from the perspective of its three adolescent leads, and the few of adult characters that are in the movie only appear for a few minutes. By approaching its horrors from a more innocent, wide-eyed perspective, the movie lets the vivid imaginations of its adolescent protagonists--not the overuse of expensive special effects--set the tone of unease. This works better in establishing a dark fairy tale setting, as opposed to literally placing monstrous folklore characters into a story that's largely populated by adults. Then again, The Gate uses its own kind of folklore: in particular, the 80s era belief of some that heavy metal music is a deliberate recruiting tool for Satan worship. The movie's running gag is how Glen and Terry regularly consult the liner notes from a Canadian heavy metal album for information about demons, magical incantations, and inter-dimensional portals. (Blame Canada, indeed!)

The Gate’s loose and relaxed rules about the monsters that emerge from the hole in Glen’s backyard appropriately match the story’s setting and characters. There seems to be no limit to what can emerge out of the hole: a rotting zombie, shape-shifters, forces of levitation, telephone-melting possessions, and even a gigantic, multi-limbed demon all come out of the hole. (In that aspect, this movie feels like what one of Lucio Fulci’s “Gates of Hell” movies would’ve been like if he decided to make one with kids as the main characters.) Yet what this film is most known for is its horde of pint-sized demonic minions that terrorize Glen, Terry and Al. What the minions lack in intellect they more than make up for number and determination, and the forced perspective effects techniques that were used to bring the foot-tall freaks to life are much more impressive than the CGI-created monsters in Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark.

When looking at The Gate and the remake of Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, I can only conclude that the imaginative application of low-budget practical effects to a simple yet solid script create a much more memorable film than the erroneous application of big-budget effects and sets to an overcomplicated and underwhelming script. Even though I admire del Toro’s other work and his understanding of the horror genre, his attempt to breathe new creative life into Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is a frustrating failure that’s best left unseen. The original 1973 movie left plenty of room for improvement (if not direct continuation), but del Toro chose to impose his own ill-fitting vision on an original story instead of exploring and enriching the strengths that the story already had. I would recommend that horror fans either revisit the original Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark or see The Gate for great examples of how big scares that give kids big nightmares can come in very small, low-budget sizes.

A Look at Wii's Epic Mickey

2012-01-18T12:40:00.000-08:00

I have a confession to make: I've never been a big Disney fan. Sure, I've enjoyed many of the Disney movies and the theme park in Florida and I know bits and pieces about Walt Disney's early attempts at getting his animation career off the ground during the early years of cinema. Yet I've never felt the urge to immerse myself in all things Disney ... at least until Epic Mickey came out for the Wii in late 2010.

The concept behind Epic Mickey, where Mickey Mouse ends up in a dystopian world that's the warped mirror image of the Disney universe, was just too fascinating for me to ignore. Now that I've finally gotten my hands on a copy and completed the game, I'm glad to say that it lived up to--and greatly exceeded--my expectations. Read on for my complete review.

Epic Mickey's plot is just that: epic. Taking a cue from "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" segment in Fantasia, Epic Mickey begins with Mickey entering the Sorcerer's workshop after the Sorcerer, Yen Sid, finished a long day of work. Yen Sid was putting the finishing touches on the Wasteland, a magical place where lost, discarded and forgotten Disney characters and ideas can go to continue on in their own special world. Unfortunately, Mickey's mischievous nature gets the best of him and he accidentally unleashes a dark force called the Shadow Blot into the Wasteland. Decades after Mickey's mishap, the Blot suddenly appears and drags Mickey into the Wasteland as part of a plot to take over the entire Disney universe. Armed with only a magic paintbrush, Mickey sets off to fix the damage he caused and to befriend many of the Wasteland's inhabitants as part of his quest to foil the Blot.

Epic Mickey tells a whimsical, touching story and its game play, which alternates between 3D and 2D platforming, is simple and fun. Yet what really sets Epic Mickey apart from other platforming titles are its magic paintbrush features and the Wasteland itself, which overflows with over 80 years of Disney history.

The magic paintbrush allows Mickey to use paint or thinner when interacting with the Wasteland and fighting the Blot's minions, and you use the Wiimote to aim where the paint or thinner should be applied. Using the thinner will dissolve enemies, while using paint will convert enemies into allies. The game tracks decisions that you make throughout the game, such as how often you use paint and thinner when dealing with enemies: If you use thinner more than paint, the game assumes a somewhat darker tone. Like Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, your choices are supposed to change the game's outcome, although from what I've heard only a few cut scenes are changed and the game's overall ending isn't affected at all. Thankfully, the game's story is entertaining enough to compensate for this feature's shortcomings.

The paintbrush also allows you to draw in objects that the Blot destroyed (objects such as walls, platforms and gears) to progress through an area, and to erase objects that conceal hidden passages, power-ups and other bonus items. Since Epic Mickey centers on cartoon characters and cartoon logic, the usage of paint and thinner as weapons and tools make perfect sense and add much to the game's entertainment value. That said, I kept expecting Judge Doom from Who Framed Roger Rabbit? to show up with a few drums of his deadly Dip mixture.

What impressed me the most about Epic Mickey was the Wasteland itself. Many areas of the Wasteland look like an alternate, skewed versions of Disney theme park attractions. For example, Wasteland areas such as Mean Street and OsTown are analogous (both in form and function) to the Main Street and Toon Town attractions in the Disney parks. There's also a Wasteland area called Mickeyjunk Mountain, which looks like a landfill made up of nothing but Mickey Mouse merchandise. These areas feature all sorts of visual nods to Disney's long history, and many of the game's characters were pulled from Disney's earliest efforts at animation. The most noteworthy of these characters is Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, a character that Walt Disney created with cartoonist Ub Iwerks before they created Mickey Mouse. In Epic Mickey, Oswald is portrayed as one of the first residents of the Wasteland. The game's central story revolves around Mickey and Oswald and it utilizes that relationship as a way to reflect how Disney has changed from its early, modest beginnings to the entertainment giant it has become since then.

(In the real world, Walt Disney lost the license for Oswald to Universal in 1927, which is why Disney had to create Mickey as a replacement star for his animated shorts. To get Oswald back for Epic Mickey, Disney CEO Bob Iger traded sportscaster Al Michaels in exchange for Oswald. Personally, I think that Epic Mickey would've been even more fun if it had Mickey Mouse raiding Universal Studios to get Oswald back--perhaps trashing the Universal Studios Theme Park in the process--although I doubt that Universal would've been very happy with that.)

In addition to the Disney-rich 3D sections of Epic Mickey, there are also the 2D sections. The Wasteland's areas are connected to each other through portals that are represented by film screens, which Mickey jumps into to enter a portal. To make it to the other end of a portal, Mickey has to traverse a 2D side-scrolling landscape. Each 2D portal landscape is based on a Disney short or feature-length film, and they look like they were pulled directly from the original cartoons and put into the game. Even when the platform play gets tiresome from time to time, the 2D screens are absolutely amazing to see. As an added bonus, clips from the animated shorts that inspired the 2D screens play during the game's end credits. You can also unlock and watch two full-length cartoon shorts: "Oh What a Knight" (1927) and "The Mad Doctor" (1933). Both of these shorts feature characters that tie in to the game's plot. With such attention given to Disney's early animation, I think that animation history buffs would enjoy and appreciate Epic Mickey much more than die-hard gamers.

Epic Mickey does have some problems. The most annoying for me were the numerous "fetch" mini-missions, mini-missions where you have to go from one area of the Wasteland to another to fetch a particular item and then come back to the previous area to collect your reward. This wouldn't be so bad if there were only a handful of these mini-missions, but there are dozens of them scattered throughout the game. To make matters worse, many of them are embedded in one of the game's charming aspects, the ability to "talk" to other cartoon characters. After several of them ask you to complete mini-missions for them, it becomes easier to just avoid them altogether as you progress through the game. Then again, I've read complaints in other reviews about the game's camera system, although I did not encounter many significant problems with it. It can be stubbornly inflexible at times, but never enough to hamper my progress and overall enjoyment of the game.

Epic Mickey is a delightful experience from start to finish. It takes Disney's rich and extensive history and turns it into a story-based game that's tailor-made for both Disney and classic cartoon lovers alike. There have also been rumors of a cross-platform, two-player coop sequel in the works for release in December, so I’m hoping that the sequel will live up the original and allow players to explore more of Disney’s early days.

10 Memorable Music Themes from Lesser Known Horror and Sci-Fi Titles

2012-01-13T16:54:00.000-08:00

If you're a junkie of obscure movies, then you'll recognize this scenario: You're watching a film that isn't very popular among mainstream audiences. It could be that the film wasn't widely distributed or well promoted during its initial release but it nevertheless became a cult classic with a devoted fan base; it could also be that the film just wasn't that good. A few days (or weeks) pass and you'll notice a particular tune bouncing around your head that you can't identify ... until you remember that it's from the obscure film that you saw. This same scenario can also occur with TV shows and video games.

With that in mind, here are ten examples of horror and sci-fi movie, TV and video game themes that got stuck in my head over the years. This list is organized chronologically and most listings have a link to a YouTube video so you can hear these tracks for yourself (and perhaps get them stuck in your head, too). Read on....

1. Dune (1984)

Say what you will about David Lynch's flawed adaptation of Frank Herbert's classic sci-fi novel, but one thing is certain: Unlike the countless space operas that were appearing on both the small and big screens during the late 70s and early 80s, Lynch's Dune was the only one that neither looked nor felt like Star Wars. Adding to such distinction was its soundtrack by the rock group Toto, their first and only film score. Of particular note is the opening theme, which establishes the vast scope and dire mood of the story that follows.

2. Wings of Honneamise (1987)

I saw this anime movie shortly after it arrived on VHS in the states. The animation is fantastic, even if the story itself--which tells of humankind's first steps into space on an alternate Earth--isn't particularly great. Ryuichi Sakamoto composed the movie's mesmerizing soundtrack, which reaches its apex with a suite that concludes the film and accompanies the transition into the end credits.

3. Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988)

There have been many, many spoofs of alien invasion films from the 50s, but few are as warped and wicked as Killer Klowns from Outer Space. The opening theme song by The Dickies perfectly captures the manic, over-the-top nature of this unique sci-fi parody.

4. Communion (1989)

For a film that features Christopher Walken having close encounters with probe-happy aliens, Communion isn't quite as interesting as you think it would be. (This is especially tragic in light of Walken's gold watch monologue from Pulp Fiction.) The best thing about this film is its main theme, which was composed by rock legend Eric Clapton.

5. Big O (1999)

Whoever composed the opening theme song of this giant robot anime series must've been psychically channeling Queen, because this sounds so much like something they'd perform.

6. Crimson Rivers (2000)

As a thriller, Crimson Rivers has a lot going for it. It's based on a best-selling novel about a series of brutal murders on a French college campus that are somehow connected to a Nazi experiment in eugenics, and it features the ever-cool Jean Reno as one of the leads. Unfortunately, everything that works is largely undone by director's insistence on cutting out all of the "boring" explanations that give clarity to the plot, resulting in a film that looks great and is paced well but makes little sense. Regardless, the opening theme is memorable even if the solution behind the film's mystery is not.

7. Ginger Snaps (2000)

Ginger Snaps is one of the best werewolf films ever made, and its two sequels are pretty good as well. (However, because the third entry in this franchise is a prequel, I'm a bit frustrated that we'll never see a continuation of the nasty ending seen in Ginger Snaps II: Unleashed.) Many werewolf films have a tragic element to them, and Ginger Snaps is no exception; thus, its mournful theme perfectly complements this frightening tale of teenage lycanthropy and sisterly love.

While the closing credits feature the entire theme, the visuals that accompany the opening credits are just as interesting.

8. Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects (2005)

Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects isn't an innovative button-masher of a fighting game, but what sets this superhero slugfest apart is its dark, foreboding (and somewhat surreal) art direction and visual style. Adding heavily to the game's uneasy mood is its soundtrack by Trevor Jones, particularly its "Imperfects Theme" and "Superheroes Theme" tracks.

9. The Broken (2008)

The Broken is the only title on this list that does not have any soundtrack clips available on YouTube. This movie features Sarah Connor Chronicles alumna Lena Headey as a woman who is slowly putting her life back together after a horrible car wreck, a wreck that happened while she was pursuing someone who appeared to be her doppelganger. The closing theme, which is partially played backwards, is a fitting conclusion to a chilling tale of fractured realities and fragmented identities.

10. Skyline (2010)

The only noteworthy things about Skyline are its modestly budgeted special effects and its outrageous ending. To emphasize such a crazy ending is the rocking "Damage Control" track from the film's score, which plays during the end credits.

The Hidden Book Review: An Undead Apocalypse of a Different Kind

2012-01-09T16:29:00.000-08:00

Of the many horror comic writers/artists I've read over the years, I consider Richard Sala to be a special find. I can't think of anyone else who can balance the goofy, the gory and the gothic within a single story so effortlessly, both in terms of plotting and visual style. His stories are rife with absurd characters and situations, yet they feature grizzly acts of violence and body counts that are higher than many "serious" horror comics. The best description I can think of to summarize Sala's work would be what horror comics would look like if the late cartoonist Charles Addams had decided to apply his dark humor and unique illustrations to expressionistic tales of terror. Yet even that fails to capture what makes Sala's work so unique and entertaining.

Over the holidays, I received a copy of The Hidden, Sala's latest book. (Note: Sala's The Hidden is not to be confused with the awesome 1987 space parasite movie of the same name.) Sala retains his distinct style in this new title; however, by placing it in a story about the end of the world, he takes themes he has previously explored into eerie new territory. Read on for my complete review.

The Hidden tells the story of a young couple who discover that the world has begun to violently fall apart while they were away on a hiking trip in the deep wilderness. During their search for survivors, they encounter a man who can't remember his name or where he's been ... but he may hold the key to understanding the mystery behind the apocalyptic horrors. To say anything more about this story would give too much away.

Other critics have noticed the similarities of themes and ideas between The Hidden and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which is true. The story also reminded me at times of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, Edgar Allan Poe's The Masque of the Red Death, and Lucio Fulci's unofficial "Gates of Hell" trilogy of movies. Yet the central subtexts of the story--the futility of denying one's own mortality and inevitable horrors that arise when death is cheated--have appeared in Sala's other works, such as Mad Night. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if a sequel to The Hidden (something I'd love to see, of course) would include nods to Septimus A. Crisp and Massimo Ibex, characters who have appeared in Sala's other stories.

While Sala remains true to his style in The Hidden, it differs from his other work in a few significant ways. Some of his prior tales of terrors have featured multiple conspiracies and covert plots that somehow fit together no matter how convoluted or preposterous they got. In contrast, The Hidden features a few subplots and details that are never fully explained or developed further. Such a fragmented approach adds to the characters' lingering anxiety and the story's dour atmosphere--much more so than Sala's previous works.

Welcome to the end of the world. Have a nice day!

In spite of its depressive mood (you know, with it being about the end of the world and such), The Hidden exemplifies the effectiveness of Sala's application of a "less is more" visual style to broad, complex stories. His drawings are simple and cartoonish, a style that provides an ample amount of flexibility to match whatever kind of story he aims to tell. Where humor and horror are mixed into a single setting, such drawings both facilitate and accentuate shifts in mood; in situations where the horror has both corporeal and existential dimensions, Sala uses his drawings to bestow a palpability of sorts to the most fantastic of frights. It is as if by portraying the possible and the impossible in a modest, straightforward fashion, both achieve the same sense of presence. Thus, when the ghastly, gangly reasons for the world's end finally appear alongside of the survivors in The Hidden, the cartoon pictures assume qualities of menace and shock.

I can't recommend Sala's books enough, and The Hidden is one of his best works to date. Be sure to pick up a copy if you're looking for something more than global plagues and cannibalistic zombies in your world-ending entertainment. Go to Richard Sala.com for more information about The Hidden and other Sala books.

Goodbye JawsFest DVDs, Hello TalkFest Online Radio Show!

2012-01-08T17:15:00.000-08:00

When we last left Lou and Dianna "Yana" Pisano, they had finished their trilogy of excellent JawsFest DVDs (read my reviews of the DVDs here and here). At the conclusion of the third JawsFest video, the Pisanos announced that they would not make any additional JawsFest DVDs. Thus, the Pisanos' contributions to the fan culture of the Jaws franchise is over ... or is it?

Last month, I heard that the Pisanos were considering their own online radio show called Lou and Yana's TalkFest. They aired their first episode on December 23, and Lou and Yana are as affable as ever. They take calls from fellow fans, play music, and discuss their many favorite franchises, such as the Jaws, Halloween and Superman movies and TV shows such as The Incredible Hulk and The Six Million Dollar Man. They also broadcast material they collected from their previous fan endeavors, including Lou's interview with Joe Alves that he recorded as part of his Jaws 2 retrospective that's being published in SCREAM magazine. They are on the air every Tuesday at 6:30 PM EST, and each episode is about an hour in length. It's a great fan-friendly radio show, and you can listen to episodes here on the BlogTalkRadio site.

Yet if you miss the Pisanos' video productions now that their JawsFest trilogy is over, never fear. Lou has set up his own channel on YouTube, where you can see some additional JawsFest snippets and two HalloweenFest video shorts. Check it out here.

A Look at Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop

2012-01-05T16:14:00.000-08:00

With Nintendo closing shop on Wii game development and focusing its attention on the upcoming Wii U system, I've decided to catch up on games that I missed earlier in Wii's run, particularly horror games. With other planned Wii horror games such as Last Flight and The Grinder stuck in development hell, it seems that the older Wii horror games are the only options I have until the Wii U arrives. During the recent holiday season, I got a copy of Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop, which was released by Capcom in 2009.

I initially avoided Capcom's remake of their first Dead Rising game for the Wii because it seemed like a lesser version of something that was already done better on the Xbox 360. Yet as an avid zombie fan, I found it too irresistible to avoid playing a game that's so similar to George Romero's original Dawn of the Dead (more about that later). It turned out that my initial impressions were wrong, and that Chop Till You Drop is a satisfying and addictive game in its own right. Read on for my complete review.

For those of you who know absolutely nothing about the original Dead Rising game, here's the basic plot: Freelance photojournalist Frank West goes to Willamette, Colorado to investigate why the town has been sealed off by the National Guard. His search leads him to the gigantic Willamette Parkview Mall, where he becomes trapped inside with a horde of flesh-eating zombies. While West waits for a helicopter that will pick him up from the mall within 72 hours after his arrival, West fights off zombies, rescue survivors, battle a variety of non-undead psychopaths, and search for the truth behind the zombie outbreak.

What surprised me the most about Chop Till You Drop was how Romero-esque this game is. It has many of the narrative beats that I've come to expect from a Romero zombie movie--in particular, a dwindling number of surviving main characters throughout the course of the story and the appearance of human adversaries who are as bad as or worse than the zombie menace. Throw in a shopping mall setting where survivors take shelter in an area that the zombies can't access and then go on treks into the mall to find supplies in the various stores--as well as a comic book visual style and an anti-consumerism subtext--and Dead Rising is near-perfect video game version of Dawn of the Dead. The similarities are so close that the MKR Group, which holds the copyright to Dawn of the Dead and its 2004 remake, filed a lawsuit against Capcom in 2008. The lawsuit was dismissed, although I'm somewhat baffled as to how that happened.

(Here's another interesting Dead Rising/Dawn of the Dead comparison: The gun shop in the game appears to occupy its own corner of the mall, in an area that's mostly under construction. In Dawn of the Dead, the weapon store scenes were shot at a location outside of the mall, but were edited into the film to look like it was a store in the mall. A similar comparison can be made to where the survivors take shelter in the mall.)

Capcom's decision to release a horror survival game that closely follows the narrative style of Romero's zombie movies is a sharp contrast to its Resident Evil games, which use the Umbrella Corporation and its ever-changing T-Virus conspiracy to keep their stories distinct from Romero's work. (Ironically, Romero was on board at one point to write and direct the first Resident Evil movie, and you can read his unproduced script here.) Even though Dead Rising is not like Resident Evil in terms of atmosphere and narrative, the game engine from the Wii edition of Resident Evil 4 was used to adapt Dead Rising for the Wii; as a result, there is much more gun-based zombie killing in Chop Till You Drop than in the original game.

As if last-minute Christmas shopping wasn't bad enough ....

For as much as I hate seeing Romero get cheated, it would've been a shame if Dead Rising never reached the store shelves. Capcom hyped Dead Rising as the horror survival game where players could use anything they can find in the mall--an open world sandbox environment--to bludgeon, stab, burn, shred and/or decapitate as many zombies as they can. That feature is still present in the Wii version, albeit with some limitations in terms of weapon variety. This isn't to say that there isn't a central narrative thread in the game, but the utilization of an open environment where everyday objects can be utilized as weapons gets closer to the frantic, chaotic mood present in many monster movies. Such a setup encourages you to get creative in how to survive and save others, an element that's missing from many first-person horror shooters due to the overabundance of firearms. That said, I would encourage you to look up a walkthrough of Chop Till You Drop before playing it so you can familiarize yourself with all of the items, attacks, and special features you can use to make the most of you gaming experience.

Creative zombie killing isn't the only thing that this Capcom game has to offer. If the various survivor-rescuing missions get a bit boring, you inner anarchist will be entertained by the mall environment itself. You can take whatever you want from the stores (clothes, books, weapons, power tools, cosmetics, money, food, etc.) and if a store is locked, you can smash one of its windows to gain access. You can even ride the roller coaster in one of the mall areas. Indeed, vandalizing the mall was almost as fun as killing the zombies; in that sense, the game could've been re-titled Grand Theft Zombie Mall.

Curiously, even though the game's expansive mall setting was not modeled after any particular shopping mall, it reminded me so much of the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota. In fact, I'm kind of miffed that Capcom didn't design the Willamette Parkview Mall directly in the image of Mall of America. Such a design would've offered a wider range of zombie killing environments, including a complete amusement park, a water park (zombies on a water slide!), a miniature golf course, an aquarium (zombie fish!), and four floors worth of stores and restaurants to pillage.

If you ever had the overwhelming desire to kill hordes of zombies while wearing

a goblin mask and a summer dress, Dead Rising is the game for you!

Whatever technical limitations are present in the Wii version of this Xbox 360, it didn't keep the game from being fun or telling an interesting zombie story. (Click here to see a complete overview of differences between the Xbox 360 and Wii versions of Dead Rising.) Because the Wii's processing capabilities only allow for up to 100 zombies to appear on the screen at once (as opposed to the Xbox 360, which allowed for up to 800 zombies), zombies have a tendency to suddenly appear in front of you as you proceed through the mall. This feature never bothered me because it played much like the randomly appearing zombies that populated Hunter: The Reckoning, another horror game that the Mrs. and I used to play on the GameCube. I also thought that the controls were easy to use, and I much prefer the multi-file save feature available in the Wii version than the game save feature in the Xbox 360 version.

Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop ranks alongside Dead Space: Extraction, House of the Dead: Overkill and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories as one of the best horror games for the Wii. Furthermore, if it isn't mandatory that all die-hard George Romero fans must play this game at least once, it should be.

The House That Screamed (1969) Review: Revenge of the Repressed

2012-01-03T16:11:00.000-08:00

Common knowledge dictates that if a film is good, it will be rewarded through various means of distribution (TV, VHS, DVD, and so on) for years and decades after its release so that multiple generations of viewers can enjoy it. Yet if you’re a veteran horror film fan like me, you know that not all high-quality shockers are rewarded with studio-facilitated longevity. One noteworthy example of this unfairness is the film I am reviewing in this post: The House That Screamed (a.k.a. La Residencia, a.k.a. The Boarding School), a 1969 gothic horror film from Spain that was written and directed by Narciso Ibáñez Serrador.

Despite its ample display of talents both in front of and behind the camera, The House That Screamed didn’t achieve much success during its initial release and it never found a worthy means of distribution since then. Over the years, the film has been released under different titles and different edits; its most current release in the U.S. is part of a double bill on a DVD in the Elvira’s Movie Macabre series. (You can also see it on YouTube here.) This is a shame, because this a film that deserves so much more--rarely are horror films as sumptuous as The House That Screamed, and it deserves to truly shine in a Blu-ray format. Read on for my complete review.

The House That Screamed begins with the admittance of new student, Teresa (Cristina Galbó), at a boarding school in late 19th century France. While Headmistress Fourneau (Lilli Palmer) insists that her school is an institution of refinement and higher learning, it is actually a draconian reformatory for teenage girls with “troubled” behaviors and backgrounds. When Teresa arrives, the school has been placed under tight security to deter the students from running away, as several have already done. However, what no one appears to realize is that the girls haven’t been running away at all--they’ve been brutally murdered by an unseen killer who stalks the halls of the school, and anyone could be the next victim.

The House That Screamed has a unique pedigree: It’s a Spanish production with an English cast that takes place in a French setting and was made with the intent of international distribution. From what I have been able to gather, this film has been dubbed over so many times as part of its initial and subsequent releases that the only surviving English language track is in desperate need of remastering. With such a wide range of distribution planned for its release, Serrador spared no expense at making this a high-quality movie. Even in its current unaltered state, The House That Screamed is gorgeous to look at, with sharp cinematography and detailed set design. Its musical score by Waldo de los Ríos perfectly matches the film’s ornate visuals, and its main theme--a haunting, creepy waltz--will stick with you after the end credits roll. If Hammer Studios had decided to make a slasher movie during its heyday, it probably would’ve looked and sounded like The House That Screamed.

Because The House That Screamed is a horror film that takes place in a girl’s school, it has far too often been lumped together with low-budget (s)exploitation films that use all-female settings (boarding schools, prisons, convents, etc.) as opportunities for titillating sex, nudity and violence. However, Serrador’s film is the polar opposite of its grindhouse counterparts in that it is an exploration of the fears and tensions that arise from emotional and sexual repression through physical and psychological abuse, not a voyeuristic depiction of humiliation and sadomasochistic debauchery. Serrador shows just enough of the abuses and moral failings at Fourneau’s school to let us know that it is far from the civilizing force that Fourneau believes it to be, but those portrayals are a small part of the movie. Most of the school’s atrocities are left to your imagination and remain unseen, securely hidden behind the school’s many locked doors and secret rooms, although they make their presence known though the strained, nervous exchanges the students have with Fourneau. Overall, it’s a very restrained film that burns at a slow boil, taking its time to give you all of the details you need to make sense of its gruesome, insane ending.

Serrador ably directed his cast to sustain the film’s mood of quiet nervousness and dread, with the most compelling performances provided by Palmer, Galbó, and Mary Maude, who plays Fourneau's contemptuous student assistant Irene. Such a sustained mood heightens the shock of the on-screen killings, of which there are few; most of the killings happen off-screen--like the aforementioned abuses--but that doesn’t dull the impact of the film’s ending. That said, I highly recommend that you avoid most other reviews and descriptions of this movie if you want to get the most out of it. I’ve noticed that many of them give away key plot points, including the ending. (Schmucks.)

As the film draws to its conclusion, the killer’s identity becomes more obvious; indeed, the identity of the killer is less shocking than the killer’s motive. Yet for all of the film’s deliberate red herrings, I don’t think that Serrador wrote and directed this film as a mystery but as a criticism of oppressive, authoritarian regimes that are rife with corruption and where dissidents have a tendency to “disappear” without explanation. Serrador was born in Uruguay and he moved with his family to Spain during his adolescence in 1947 during the dictatorship of fascist leader Francisco Franco, which lasted between 1936 and 1975. Even though I can’t confirm that this was Serrador’s intent behind his movie, I think it’s a plausible possibility since his film was intended for international release and thus would maintain his vision in other countries even if it met with disapproval from Franco and his supporters. In light of this historical and thematic background, I would say that The House That Screamed is a spiritual predecessor of sorts to Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone.

The House That Screamed is a rare find: It’s an exquisite horror film from another era that didn’t find the appreciation and distribution that it deserved in the decades since its initial release. For those of you who enjoy finding such rare diamonds of horror cinema, this film is for you.

The Great Japanese Robot Invasion of '84

2011-12-28T06:48:00.000-08:00

A Diaclone Multi-Force 14 Robot toy from 1984.

Before this holiday season comes to an end, I thought that I would wrap up 2011 with a dose of holiday-themed geek nostalgia before we spring-launch into 2012. It's a flashback to another holiday season, when a particular trend that would impact all robot geeks for decades to come dominated toy store aisles across the country. This trend was the import and repackaging of Japanese robot toys, of which there were many. Read on for my eyewitness account of this amazing time, when Japanese robots of all shapes and sizes ruled Christmas wish lists.

The import of Japanese robot toys didn't start in the 80s and it certainly didn't end after the 80s were over, but I'll always remember 1984 as a major milestone for the stateside distribution of Japanese toy robots. By the time the Christmas shopping season of that year had rolled around, the Transformers and Gobots toy lines--toy lines of repackaged transforming robot toys from Japan--had already hit the shelves and proved to be a success, so retailers were gearing up to claim their piece of the Japanese robot pie.

While transforming robots were very popular at the time, they weren't the only Japanese robot toys that were arriving in the states in 1984. Revell had also released a series of robot model kits under the name "Robotech", which left many kids gawking for hours at these amazing, highly-detailed robot designs when they appeared in toy stores and hobby shops. (The anime series with the same title wouldn't debut in the U.S. until the following year.) The Japanese toy company Tomy had already released a few of its motorized Zoids robots and by 1984, it released more Zoids and the Starriors action figure line. But Tomy didn't stop there--it also released programmable, battery-powered robot toys of varying degrees of complexity, toys such as Omnibot, Omnibot 2000, and Verbot.

As if the transforming robots, model kit robots and programmable robots weren't enough, the fall of 1984 also saw the arrival of the Voltron toy series by Matchbox. The Voltron TV series and accompanying toy line was supposed to consist of episodes and toys from three different combiner robot anime series: Beast King GoLion, Armored Fleet Dairugger XV, and Lightspeed Electroid Albegas. While the Albegas series was eventually left out of the Voltron TV package and thus never aired in the U.S., Matchbox kept the Albegas robots in the Voltron toy line anyway. That decision left kids like me somewhat confused to see this third set of combining Voltron robots advertised and displayed alongside the two Voltron sets we recognized, but that didn't matter--it just meant that there were more robot toys for us to enjoy.

Matchbox's Voltron II Deluxe Gladiator set
(a.k.a. DX Chogokin Kosoku Denjin Albegas Denjinbox).

To clarify, the aforementioned toy and model lines--Transformers, Gobots, Robotech and Voltron--consisted of robots from different Japanese toy lines that were assembled and repackaged into U.S. toy lines. Some additional Japanese robots that were not picked up under the other lines were released under different, more Japanese-like toy line titles, such as Godaikin. While these other lines weren't as successful as their Americanized counterparts, the robot toys they provided were like nothing else offered in the U.S. at the time. Some of them were even available for mail order in the Sears, JCPenney and Montgomery Ward Christmas catalogs, which was a pretty impressive feat for imported toy lines that lacked name recognition.

From the Godaikin line: Abega, a three-robot combiner vehicle . . .

. . . and Gardian, a three-in-one robot combiner. Gardian currently has a recurring
cameo role as a detective's desk decoration on the Rizzoli and Isles TV show.

All of these imports led up to the Christmas shopping season of 1984, when the trend hit its peak. I remember walking into a toy store at the beginning of this shopping season and beholding a huge display devoted to Matchbox's Voltron toy line (both complete sets and individual toys), which was flanked by other Japanese robot toys (some Americanized, some not). I fell into a state of Japanese robot nirvana when I saw this massive display--it was like witnessing the second coming of the Shogun Warrior line.

A display of Matchbox's entire Voltron toy line from 1984.

Sure, the Transformers line is as popular today as it was back then, Voltron still shows up every now and then, and plenty of Japanese robot toys and model kits are readily available now for purchase online and in toy stores and hobby shops. Nevertheless, I haven't seen anything like this 1984 toy store display before or since then--it's the stuff of which robot geek Christmas memories are made.

Five Monstrous Melodies for Merry Christmas Madness

2011-12-19T17:16:00.000-08:00

Christmas is my second favorite holiday after Halloween. Where Halloween allows you to indulge in all things morbid and spooky, Christmas allows you to wallow in all things colorful, cheerful, and gaudy. Yet with Halloween being my first love, I feel the need to temper my Yuletide warmth with a few ghoulish chills--and what better way to do that than through music?

Here are five musical suggestions I have to keep the horror in even the happiest of holidays, complete with YouTube videos for each. Read on....

5. The Gremlins Theme, by Jerry Goldsmith

Gremlins is one of my favorite Christmas movies (click here to see my list top Christmas movies), so it's only natural to include the theme composed by veteran movie composer Goldsmith as part of my Christmas music recommendations. Not only does it capture the wild, madcap nature of Gremlins, but it's also festive enough in its own right that you could play it as background music at your office holiday party and no one would notice.

4. "It's The Most Horrible Time of The Year", by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society

Oh, may the Old Ones bless the H.P. Lovecraft Historical society. They produced A Very Scary Solstice, an album of Christmas music that features lyrics tailored to fit snugly within Lovecraft's warped, bleak universe. My favorites on this album are the ones where the darkest of lyrics are set to the most cheerful of melodies; this one is my favorite, with "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Fish-Men" ranking a close second.

3. "Shouldn't Have Given Him a Gun For Christmas", by Wall of Voodoo

There are plenty of Christmas songs out there that involve fire arms in the wrong hands, but none of them are as deliciously deranged as this ditty by Wall of Voodoo. It's like a gory, 50s era public safety film about gun safety that you can dance to on Christmas eve.

2. "Christmas At Ground Zero", by Weird Al Yankovic

Weird Al may be known for goofy parodies of popular rock songs, but he sure does love gallows humor. This is one of his most merrily morbid songs, about World War III starting on Christmas eve. Adding to the fatalistic festivities is the official video, which blends together atomic bomb footage with vintage Christmas movie clips.

1. "Red Water", by Type O Negative

This is the only song on this list that doesn't feature an ounce of satirical humor--a rarity for off-center holiday songs--which is why this is one of my favorite Yuletide-themed tunes. Type O Negative was a fantastic band and this song is one of their best, about a man coping with severe personal losses and the tortured memories that come with them during the holiday season by seeking solace in the titular crimson liquid. Goddamn ye merry gentlemen, indeed.

The Cult of LEGO Book: Behold the Blessed Bricks

2011-12-15T16:12:00.000-08:00

If you're still looking for a Christmas gift for that special nerdy someone, consider this: The Cult of LEGO, by John Baichtal and Joe Meno.

According to the book's description, "LEGO is much more than just a toy—it's a way of life. The Cult of LEGO takes you on a thrilling illustrated tour of the LEGO community and its creations. ... In this full-color coffee table book, you'll find page after page of photos showcasing the fantastically creative and complex models built by the LEGO community. You'll marvel at a life-size stegosaurus, a microscale Yankee Stadium, a 22-foot long World War II battleship, a MINDSTORMS-powered monster chess set, and a remote-controlled Jawa Sandcrawler (with moving conveyor belt!). Visit the conventions where LEGO fans gather to socialize and show off their work. And discover the serious side of LEGO, used in therapy, prototyping, and teambuilding."

I've never had any LEGO sets myself, but I'm a big fan of the LEGO video games and I've admired the countless inventive models and miniatures that LEGO fans have built all over the world. Since I already have the LEGO Star Wars: The Visual Dictionary (which is a pretty sweet inventory of LEGO-ized Star Wars stuff, both official and fan-made) to go with my other Star Wars reference books, I'll probably pick up this up sometime soon. What can I say? They had me at "remote-controlled Jawa Sandcrawler".

Furthermore, if you order a print version of The Cult of LEGO from its publisher No Starch Press (click here), you will also get the e-book version for free. That means that you can actually read the book anywhere you want with your e-reader of choice while the print copy remains safe at home in your geek collection. Sweet!

Lou and Yana's JawsFest 3 DVD Set Review

2011-12-12T18:29:00.000-08:00

It has been said that all good things must come to an end. With that in mind, I bring you my review of Lou and Yana's JawsFest 3: The Invasion of JawsFest '10 two-disc DVD set. This is the final entry in the trilogy of JawsFest fan films produced by Lou and Dianna "Yana" Pisano. What started out as a fan love letter to Jaws in the first JawsFest DVD has grown to the size of a three-part romance novel with the release of JawsFest 3. (Click here to read my review of the first two JawsFest DVDs.) While it's sad to see this particular chapter of Jaws fandom draw to a close, the Pisanos saved the best for last. Read on for my complete review of this two-disc set.

JawsFest 3 follows the Pisanos and their jolly Jaws touring group as they travel around Martha's Vineyard to visit the locations used in three of the Jaws films: Jaws, Jaws 2, and Jaws: The Revenge. In terms of presentation, JawsFest 3 follows a style similar to the previous two DVDs: the Pisanos first present their footage and charmingly candid description of a particular location, and then insert a clip from the Jaws movie that features the same location for direct comparison. Of the sites visited in this installment, I particularly enjoyed the tour of Katama Bay, the location where the Orca confronted the monster shark in Jaws. For scenes that look like they were shot out in the middle of the ocean, the Pisanos’ Katama Bay footage shows you just how small the ocean really was in Jaws.

Indeed, after you watch all three JawsFest films, you will have seen every Martha's Vineyard location that was used in the Jaws franchise. To help you keep score, JawsFest 3 comes with a official JawsFest map of Martha's Vineyard that highlights these locations; there are even “map alerts” in some parts of JawsFest 3 that show you where they are in a particular scene in relation to the map. The inclusion of this map with the DVD is a nifty treat for Jaws fans: If you can't afford to visit Martha's Vineyard, it gives you a sense of what the various casts and crews of the Jaws franchise had to work with when they filmed there. If you do get to visit Martha's Vineyard, the map tells you where to go to see where parts of Jaws history were made.

The complete JawsFest 3 set, with the official JawsFest map.

There's much more to JawsFest 3 than just site seeing. JawsFest 3 features great interview footage with some of the cast and crew from the Jaws franchise, including Lee Fierro (Mrs. Kintner in Jaws), Roger Kastel (the artist who painted the iconic Jaws poster), and Tom Dunlop (Timmy Weldon in Jaws 2). The Pisanos also got the chance to talk to Joe Alves, the Production Designer from Jaws who also worked on Jaws 2 and Jaws 3D. It's a fun interview of the man who first scouted Martha's Vineyard for Steven Spielberg, and his interview is complemented by footage of a Jaws presentation that Alves gave at Martha's Vineyard.

As a feature-length video, JawsFest 3 is more polished than the previous two JawsFest DVDs. Lou Pisano put a lot of hard work into shooting and editing his JawsFest series, and it's clear that he put what he learned from his first two videos to good use in the third. There are some running gags throughout the movie that stem from the previous JawsFest films, such as a funny Spaghetti Western-esque showdown between two rival Jaws fans--"Sir" Edward McCormack and Mike "Quint" Hadji--that cleverly ties in to a cameo appearance by one of the more popular Jaws cast members. Yet for all of the extras that JawsFest 3 has to offer, the real star here is Martha's Vineyard itself. The island is lovingly photographed, and you will come away from this DVD convinced that Martha's Vineyard was just as essential to the blockbuster success and enduring legacy of Jaws as its cast and crew.

The Pisanos setting up a shot for JawsFest 3 with cameraman Justin White.

The second disc in the JawsFest 3 DVD set has many fun extras (including a peak into Lou Pisano's huge collection of Jaws collectibles), but the crown jewel of them all is a featurette by Justin White entitled, "The Making of Lou and Yana’s JawsFest Trilogy". This featurette lets the Pisanos and a few of their friends who helped with the JawsFest videos share their thoughts about the history of the videos, what it was like to shoot them on location, and the many other Jaws fans they met along the way.

While JawsFest 3 may be the last of the JawsFest videos, it is hardly the last that the Pisanos have to say about the Jaws franchise. At roughly the same time that the JawsFest 3 DVD set became available, the UK publication SCREAM magazine published the first part of Lou’s three-part Jaws 2 retrospective entitled, “The Guts of Jaws 2: Appreciating An Underappreciated Sequel”. Not only does Lou’s article include an analysis of the plot and production of Jaws 2, but it also features interviews that Lou conducted with Joe Alves and some of the actors who appeared in this 1978 sequel. Even though the other two parts of this article will continue in the next two SCREAM issues, this is already shaping up to be one of the most thorough Jaws 2 retrospectives available and is thus a worthy read for avid Jaws fans (as well as for JawsFest completists, of course). Click here to order your copy.

Lou and Yana’s JawsFest trilogy may have begun out of the Pisanos’ love of the Jaws franchise, but what it has grown into is a fun and informative example of the Jaws fan community at its best. As a Jaws franchise fan and movie monster buff, I couldn’t give this series of fan-made videos a higher recommendation. Click here to learn more about how you can own a copy of the JawsFest trilogy.

The Samurai Predator: An Interstellar Big Game Hunter from Medieval Japan

2011-12-11T15:43:00.000-08:00

For those of you who have an die-hard Predator fan on your Christmas gift list and have ample amounts of cash to spend, you're in luck. Sideshow Collectibles is currently taking orders for the Alien vs. Predator Samurai Predator figure from Hot Toys.

This is what the title creature would've looked like

if Akira Kurosawa had directed a Predator movie.

This figure was designed and painted by Takayuki Takeya and sculpted by Yuji Oniki, and it features a newly sculpted head and body, detailed accessories, weaponry, and a diorama base with a partially decapitated Alien corpse. Looking at a figure that's as detailed as this one makes it hard to believe that there was a time when the only Predator figures on the market were those made by Kenner back in the mid-90s.

Of the many never-before-seen Predator collectibles that have been released in recent years (including the organic-looking Ceremonial Predator Mask and the sleek Stalker Predator Mask), the Samurai Predator feels like a story that's waiting to be told. It's easy to imagine this Predator constructing his hunting attire from the armor he collects from his trophies, and then customizing his weapons and gear to match the style of his human prey. The most impressive feature of this figure is its headpiece, which comes in two removable parts: a helmet and a mouth mask. The mouth mask allows the Predator's tusks to protrude through so they are visible on the mask's exterior. Such a fearsome visage makes this Predator look like a monster that came straight from ancient Japanese folklore.

Click here for more details about the Samurai Predator and how to place your order.

Isolation Movie Review: When Genetically Modified Meat Goes Rancid

2011-12-07T16:26:00.000-08:00

One of the best things about the horror genre is its ability to approach certain subject matter in ways that no other genre would. Because of its richness of symbolism and metaphor, horror can explore the irrational and insecure psychological landscapes that lurk underneath topics and events that appear rational, civil and mundane on their surfaces.

Along such lines is Isolation, a 2005 horror movie from Ireland that was written and directed by Billy O'Brien. By borrowing some of visual and thematic cues from Alien and The Thing, Isolation explores the nervous uncertainties behind the application of genetic engineering to livestock farming. The end result is uneven, but it's provocative and stylish enough to recommend to anyone who is looking for a new kind of contemporary body horror. Read on for my complete review, which contains some minor spoilers.

Isolation takes place on a small Irish farm that has seen better days. To earn some extra money to keep his farm afloat, Dan (John Lynch) allows two of his cows to become test subjects for cattle fertility research conducted by a company called Bovine Genetics Technology. The intent behind the research is to speed up the growth rate of cattle so that more cattle can be produced in a shorter amount of time than the normal maturity rate. When one of the cows has trouble giving birth, Dan and veterinarian Orla (Essie Davis) discover that the cow's genetically modified newborn calf is already pregnant with a new kind of organism that poses a contagious risk to humanity.

Before I continue my review, I want to share some of my own experiences with Alien/Thing imitations. Since I grew up during the heyday of home video rental stores, I saw plenty of cheapjack Alien and Thing rip offs, with poor acting, poor writing and poor special effects. The set designs (which were usually laboratories and space ships) were unconvincing, and the creature designs looked like shoddy copies of better, more memorable monsters. Since the rip offs wanted to copy the gooey, icky inter-species biological aspects of Alien and The Thing, they often had monsters that wanted to mate with human women. Not only did this serve as an excuse to put exploitation-style sex and nudity in the movie, but it also saved money on additional creature effects that are often involved with species-hopping parasites.

In contrast to these other Alien and Thing imitators, O'Brien wisely uses the actual practice of livestock breeding as the backdrop of his story. Isolation's production budget was small, so having scenes involving veterinary care of pregnant cows and cattle autopsies add tremendously to the movie's organic, visceral feel without having to spend lots of money on creature effects. Many of these sequences have a feel similar to those in The Thing, particularly Thing's dog kennel attack scene.

The livestock breeding plot enables Isolation to exploit modern fears about the possible dangers of using hormones in livestock and genetically modified foods, as well as the possibilities of foodborne illness epidemics that are spread through careless factory farming and food production practices. Isolation was released four years after the 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak in the United Kingdom, which spread to parts of Ireland and Europe; I would guess that O'Brien's decision to make a movie that centers on a lethal outbreak on a farm was inspired by this incident.

Smart plotting aside, where Isolation really shines is in its overwhelming mood of dread. O'Brien shoots the farm setting so that it feels like the home of unspeakable horrors, and the performances he gets out of his small, talented cast keep the film's level of tension high throughout the movie. Many horror movies have been unable (or unwilling) to build a mood of unease to enhance their tales of terror, so I'm willing to recommend Isolation for its pervasive and vivid atmosphere alone.

Where Isolation falls short is in its monsters. I could follow some of the ideas of how the monsters came to be, how they reproduce and why they need to be destroyed, but they are nevertheless vague in many of their other attributes. They don't appear on screen much and what little is seen is little more than an indistinguishable, slithering mass of blood and bony spikes. It was suggested at times in the script that these monsters are some kind of severely deformed, blood-thirsty calves, but nothing in their appearance would indicate that at all. While I agree with the approach that keeping the monster unseen is an effective way to maintain suspense (particular in movies where the creature effects are limited), I would also argue that showing too little of the monster can cause suspense to wane; Isolation comes very close to doing just that.

Here's what I was able to understand of the monsters' biology, and this is where I reveal minor spoilers. I don't like to add spoilers to my reviews, but I think that in this case they're integral to appreciating the movie's overarching concept. The monsters are parasitic in nature and they feed on blood, both animal and human blood alike. They emerge from the genetically modified calves, but they themselves cannot reproduce by themselves or with each other. Instead, when they bite their prey, they pass along a pathogen that alters the DNA of the prey so that the prey give birth to offspring similar to the calves--namely, deformed offspring that are born pregnant with more monsters. Thus, someone who is attacked by a monster can survive, but his or her offspring will be deformed carriers of disease-ridden monster larvae. It doesn't matter if the attack victim is human or animal, the outcome is the same. So while the monsters in Isolation aren't as virulent and apocalyptic as the monsters in Alien and The Thing, they have the potential to, as one character puts it, "wipe out a generation".

For me, this concept of corrupted science creating a threat that jeopardizes the genetic health of the next generation is what sets Isolation apart from most Alien/Thing clones and other science-run-amok stories. By reducing its scale of damage away from the world-ending threat that many horror films and TV shows use, Isolation is able to end the story--both in terms of narrative and theme--that it started with the idea of genetically modifying livestock. The world doesn't come to an end for the survivors in Isolation because of bad science, but it still changes their lives for years to come.

It is not without precedent in the real world for industry and/or the military to produce something that causes fatal defects and ghastly deformities in the offspring of those who are exposed to it. It has happened with nuclear radiation, thalidomide, DDT, and Agent Orange, and it continues to happen today. (It should also be noted here that bovine somatotropin, an artificial growth hormones for cattle, is banned in the European Union due to various human health risks associated with the hormone.) O'Brien's decision to couch this topic in a movie monster narrative yields mixed results, but basing Isolation on a real issue and the anxieties surrounding it makes this movie stand out in ways that most other monster movies do not.

As one of the many films that were influenced by Alien and The Thing, Isolation stands alongside Slither and Splinter as one of the better examples. While it may seem formulaic at times, O'Brien provides enough creativity, style and intelligence into his movie to make it a worthy viewing for monster movie fans.

Heidi Klum Exposed--In One of the Goriest Ways Possible

2011-12-06T16:34:00.000-08:00

I know that this is dates back to last Halloween, but I just found it and I feel an overwhelming to put it on here because it's so wildly morbid. (Besides, red is a Yuletide color, right?) It turned out that at her last Halloween party, Heidi Klum had her body painted to resemble "a dead body with the first layer of skin ripped off" (Klum's own words).

Excuse me, Ms. Klum? I think you misplaced your epidermis.

In order to make sure that her party guests noticed her unique costume, her entrance was equally priceless: She was wheeled in to the event on an autopsy table by two people who were also dressed as blood-spattered doctors. Did I mention that Klum was wearing high-heeled platform pumps with this costume? I suppose that even the horribly mangled still have to look chic at social events.

I have no idea how I missed this. Maybe I was too preoccupied with Klum's other Halloween costume, a full-body, Planet of the Apes worthy ape suit that she wore to another Halloween party. Her husband Seal wore a matching costume at the same event.

Click here to see more pictures of Klum's anatomically correct costume. I have to give Klum credit: For someone who doesn't earn her living in horror movies, her costume is an amazingly detailed work of gory art.

Two New Jaws Mechanical Shark Replicas from Shark City Ozark

2011-12-04T17:23:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, Universal made an announcement that’s very bad news for Jaws fans. As of January 2, 2012, the Jaws attraction at Universal Studios Theme Park in Florida will be shut down permanently. For those of you fans out there who have never been on the Jaws ride and can’t make it there before its closing, you can check out the high definition video of the ride on YouTube (click here) that will give you a good idea of everything the ride offers. You can also stop by the “STOP The Closing of Jaws The Ride at USF” page on Facebook for ideas on what you can do to try to convince Universal to change its decision. Yet even with the ride closing, never fear--thanks to Mike Schultz and his team at Shark City Ozark, you’ll have a chance to come face-to-face with the legendary monster shark right in the (dis)comfort of your own home.

Back in 2010, Schultz sculpted a 37" long "Bruce Nose-to-Tail (NTT)" maquette, a scale-accurate replica of the full-body shark used in the first Jaws movie. How scale accurate, you ask? It's so scale accurate that it won praises from Jaws franchise veteran Joe Alves himself! Even though the entire inventory of the Bruce NTT maquette has completely sold out, Shark City Ozark is far from finished with Jaws. Available now are two more Bruce replicas, a 1/6-Scale Bruce bust (from snout to gills) and an 18-inch, 1/16th scale “Open Sided Shark”. The Open Sided Shark allows you to see a highly-detailed recreation of the mechanics that made Bruce move. To learn more about these replicas, check out these two videos from Shark City Ozark that discuss the specifics of each product.

Click here to learn more about how you can add either or both replicas to your Jaws memorabilia collection. Orders are going fast, and these two products will be discontinued on December 16th, so place your order soon!

Santa "Scarface" Claus Says, "Say Hello-Ho-Ho to My Little Friend!"

2011-11-30T16:48:00.000-08:00

It looks like we've come a long way from the days when kids were told that they'd shoot their eyes out if they got Red Ryder BB guns for Christmas.

"In this country, you gotta make the toys first. When you make the toys,

you then get the guns. When you get the guns, then you get the power."

From Seattle PI: "An Arizona gun club is offering a chance for children and their families to pose for photos with Santa while holding pistols and military-style rifles. ... Ron Kennedy, general manager of the Scottsdale Gun Club, said the business got the idea for the photo op last year when a club member happened to come in dressed as Santa and other members wanted their picture taken while they were holding their guns. ... Kennedy, whose club offers guns for sale and rental and has a 32-lane indoor shooting range, said the event wasn't aimed at children, but the club supports the right of parents to include their children in the photos and believes that's a personal choice."

This story has been popping up at news sites all over the Internet today. I normally wouldn't post about something like this, but the Christmas photos from the Scottsdale Gun Club that have been circulating because of this story are so gleefully morbid that they belong on a horror-oriented blog like mine. Sure, a violence-prone Santa Claus has been the subject of countless movies, songs, video games, and TV shows such as South Park and Futurama. (Also, don't forget "Raging Rudolph", the classic animated short from Mad TV.) But seeing so many people--toddlers included--eagerly taking pictures of themselves with Santa while proudly brandishing an arsenal of high-powered weaponry just makes my dark, twisted soul shine with holiday cheer.

Looking at these photos, the following thoughts come to mind:

Good little boys and girls get automatic weapons from Santa, but bad little boys and girls only get revolvers in their stockings.
While the Scottsdale Gun Club Santa Claus photos sound like a novel idea, this isn't the first time that Christmas photos like these have been taken. In 1974, Mrs. Claus received a photo that was a lot like the gun club photos, except that the people in it were wearing ski masks and it came with a ransom note demanding $100 million in unmarked bills and five sacks full of free toys.
Fun fact: In 1996, Santa Claus accidentally shot himself in the leg because he forgot to turn the safety on before climbing down a chimney.
Giving toys to children is only a part-time gig for Santa. For the other 11 months of the year, he's an international arms dealer.
In order to keep up with his Yuletide competitor, the Easter Bunny now hands out festively-painted hand grenades and plastic explosive Peeps.
While it's OK to kiss someone under the mistletoe, don't do it when Santa Claus is in the room. Otherwise, he'll want to play a game he calls "William Tell".
The Scottsdale Gun Club also wanted to have a life-size Nativity set for their Christmas photos, but baby Jesus kept dropping the semi-automatic AR-15 with attached grenade launcher.
Now that he has complete control of the North Pole, Generalissimo Franco Claus plans to install his own junta in the South Pole after he stages a coup against Jack Frost.
A holiday tip for kids: To be sure that Santa came to your house, check under the tree on Christmas morning. If you're still not sure, check for empty shell casings and gunshot residue (GSR) around the fire place.

Click below for more pictures of Shotgun Santa and his Merry Christmas Militia, and feel free to make up a few captions of your own.

The Muppets Review: The Return of Everyone's Favorite Felt Friends

2011-11-29T16:57:00.000-08:00

Reviving dormant franchises for new audiences can be a tricky thing, particularly when it comes to franchises that are based on animated characters. As in any franchise revival, there's always the tension between appealing to new fans while maintaining the interest of the original fans; very rarely do these rival tensions balance evenly. When it comes to animated characters, the common approaches to revival appear to be either dumbing down the characters to appeal to kids (for the sake of merchandising), or putting the characters in the "real world" alongside known actors (for the sake of celebrity name recognition value), or both. These strategies rarely work, but they've succeeded just enough for Hollywood to keep them in their franchise revival playbook.

On the other hand, there are the title characters of the new movie The Muppets. They aren't cartoon characters but they are closely associated with kid-friendly entertainment, and they've had a long history of featuring celebrity guest stars. With these two attributes, one would expect to see the Muppets in their latest movie suffer the same grim fate as Rocky and Bullwinkle (see The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle) and the Looney Tunes characters (see Space Jam and Looney Tunes: Back in Action). Thankfully, not only does The Muppets avoid the common revival mistakes, but it succeeds in capturing the very things that made the Muppets so entertaining in the first place. After seeing this movie, two conclusions immediately came to mind:

1. We really did lose something special when Muppet creator Jim Henson passed away back in 1990.

2. The Muppets is a fantastic tribute to what Henson left behind--which is pretty amazing, considering that it was made by the same people who brought us Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Get Him to the Greek.

Read on for my full review.

The Muppets is a musical comedy that tells the story of Gary (Jason Segel) and Walter (voiced by Peter Linz), two brothers and life-long Muppet fans, who find out that evil oil tycoon Tex Richman (Chris Cooper) plans to buy the old Muppet theater and tear it down to drill for oil. To stop Richman, they persuade Kermit the Frog (voiced by Steve Whitmire) to round up his Muppet friends and put on a show to raise money to save the theater. Of course, this plot summary barely covers The Muppets' vast amounts of in-jokes, musical numbers, parodies and guest cameos that keep the movie humming along smoothly from start to finish.

At their best, the Muppets are the embodiment of acute contradictions--they are winners and losers, goofy yet sincere, so real yet so fake, simple yet complicated--and they firmly embrace these contradictions with such exhilaration that you can't help but to go along for the ride. I honestly can't think of any other set of characters that pull off this deliberately imbalanced dichotomy so well, which is probably why parodies of the Muppets--such as Meet the Feebles, Wonder Showzen, Crank Yankers and Greg the Bunny--usually fall apart in comparison to the real thing. After all, it's hard to parody something that so readily makes fun of itself and is able to entertain adults while entertaining kids. Then again, there's nothing mean-spirited about the Muppets no matter what kind of jokes they tell, and this essential attribute is something that most Muppet imitators forget.

The Muppets remains true to the schizophrenic nature that Henson bestowed on his creations, and it mines with manic glee every absurdity that emerges from its characters and plot. Since the movie is a musical, it pokes fun at musicals; the movie is also a comeback story, so it too pokes fun at many comeback story clichés. The Muppets deliver heartfelt (no pun intended) and tender speeches that are truly sincere, yet they aren't afraid to kidnap a celebrity to accomplish their goal. Perhaps the most amusing part of the movie is found in its two main characters, brothers Walter and Gary: Walter is a Muppet while Gary is not, but no one in the movie seems to notice this discrepancy at all (although it does become the punch line in a hilarious musical number, "Man Or Muppet").

There's a fart joke here and there, but that's about as "edgy" as this movie gets; otherwise, the Muppets do their kind of humor the way it's been done before and it shows little need for improvement. Come to think of it, with so many reality TV shows serving as talent contests these days, I can't think of a better time to put The Muppet Show back on the air.

Of course, a movie like The Muppets isn't content just to be a good movie with Muppets--it also contains countless references to The Muppet Show that will keep die-hard Muppet fans re-watching this film for quite some time. I spotted a few secondary Muppet characters in the film that I haven't seen since The Muppet Show went off the air in 1981. The human cast, which also includes Amy Adams and Rashida Jones, appear to be having a blast even when they're taking a back seat to the Muppets, and I lost track of how many celebrities appear in smaller roles or cameos. With that kind of attention to detail, a witty script and the attraction of celebrities for on-screen appearances that only last for a few seconds (with even more appearances winding up on the cutting room floor, no less), I can't recommend The Muppets enough to anyone who is looking for smart yet lighthearted fun at the movies.

The Narrative of Victor Karloch: Haunted Horrors in Miniature

2011-11-26T12:03:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine just let me know about a movie project that sounds like a unique exercise in the genre of horror: The Narrative of Victor Karloch, by Spirit Cabinet.

According to the Spirit Cabinet site, "Victor Karloch is a Victorian ghost story puppet film and live stage performance (at selected theaters) produced by Heather Henson's Handmade Puppet Dreams Films and The Jim Henson Foundation. ... The film incorporates 30" tall bunraku-style rod puppets, shadow puppetry, traditional in-camera effects, and digital atmospheric effects to present a gothic tale narrated by Victor Karloch, an alchemist, ghost hunter, and scholar who has devoted his life to the exploration of the supernatural." Victor Karloch was written by Kevin McTurk, a special effects artist whose previous projects include Batman Returns, Jurassic Park, and King Kong, and it will feature the vocal talents of Christopher Lloyd, Chris Parnell, Lance Henriksen, and Doug Jones.

Judging from the preview trailer on the Spirit Cabinet site, Victor Karloch looks like it's going to be a rich visual treat for horror film fans. Since puppet films are so rare in the U.S. as it is, it's hard to think of a horror film that's performed completely by puppets and miniatures. Yet as the trailer shows, this particular production scale, along with the puppets' physical details and movements, add a distinct sense of dread and disorientation that most live-action horror films lack. Such an unusual approach to telling a cinematic horror tale reminds me of the 2005 film adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's short story, "The Call of Cthulhu". That film, which was produced by Sean Branney and Andrew Leman and distributed by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, was produced in a way so that it would appear as if it were a monochrome silent film from 1926, the year when Lovecraft's story was first published. Between Victor Karloch and the Cthulhu adaptation, it seems that unusual tales are best told in unusual ways in order to maximize their impact on audiences.

Batman: Brave and the Bold Bids Farewell, while Young Justice has a Haunting Halloween

2011-11-22T16:25:00.000-08:00

Last weekend, Cartoon Network aired the series finale of Batman: Brave and the Bold. The final episode, titled "Mitefall!", was written by noted DC vet Paul Dini. In "Mitefall!", inter-dimensional fanboy Batmite has grown tired of Brave and the Bold and decides to sabotage the show so that it will be cancelled and replaced by a darker, more dramatic Batman series. In a curious twist, this is the only episode of Brave and the Bold that isn't so much of a tribute to the Silver Age of DC Comics as it is a satirical jab at how TV shows--both live-action and animated alike--"jump the shark". Each of Batmite's strategies to undermine Brave and the Bold are textbook examples of shark jumping, such as the addition of cute yet superfluous characters, needlessly changing central locations, and casting Ted McGinley. Yet for as unusual as this episode is, it still makes for a fitting finale to one of the smartest Batman shows to air on TV. Adding to the finale's fun is Henry Winkler, who provides the voice of Ambush Bug. It's a shame they saved Winkler for the last episode, because his take on Ambush Bug would have been great to see in more Brave and the Bold episodes.

I've written before about how skillfully Brave and the Bold has paid tribute to the Silver Age (see my previous Brave and the Bold post here) and while this attribute is directly recognized in the show's finale, I think that Dini is trying to make a larger point outside of his shark jumping gags. Some comic book fans begrudge the campiness of many Silver Age superhero stories, but that period of time was an integral part of superhero history. Not only did that era see the birth of Marvel Comics, but it also featured significant and lasting revisions to several classic DC superheroes, superheroes such as Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman and the Atom. Most importantly, the sense of creative, colorful playfulness that permeated the Silver Age played a major role in building most of the DC universe. (It seems that no matter how many reboots DC does, many of their superheroes retain backgrounds and traits that originated in the Silver Age.) If I didn't know any better, it would seem that Dini's underlying message in "Mitefall!" is that even though darker and more dramatic superhero stories are the current style of choice, it would be a mistake for comic book fans to forget the Silver Age, what made it work, and its many contributions to the superhero genre. I couldn't agree more.

Shortly after the Brave and the Bold's finale was "Secrets", the Halloween episode of Young Justice that somehow got pushed back to November. I've been impressed with Young Justice since its first episode, and it continues to hold my hold my attention. Instead of basing a cartoon on some pre-existing teenage superhero team from DC's comic books (such as Teen Titans or the Legion of Super Heroes), Young Justice assembles a cast of sidekick characters in a way that allows for a different approach to the DC universe.

Along those lines, "Secrets" is a stand-alone adventure that places Artemis and Zatanna in Manhattan, where they encounter a bizarre sword-wielding villain named Harm who harbors a gruesome secret. "Secret" starts off as a standard superhero adventure and then grows into a memorable ghost story--a rare feat for any superhero cartoon. As an added treat to this nifty trick, "Secrets" also has a subplot featuring Superboy, Miss Martian and Kid Flash that makes clever references to Orson Welles' notorious Halloween prank of 1938 and to two cartoon Marvins--one a Martian, the other a superhero wannabe who's familiar to die-hard DC cartoon fans.

Rest In Peace 2 Review: The Chronicles of ChromeSkull

2011-11-18T19:51:00.000-08:00

For as much as I love them, slasher films just aren't what they used to be. Naturally, it's hard to recapture the golden era of the slasher film when this horror subgenre was relatively new (at least here in the U.S., anyway), an era that started during the late 70s and began to wane during the mid-80s. Yet for a straightforward plot structure that revolves around a masked and/or disfigured psychopath with a perchance for killing sprees, it seems that the time where slashers can reach the iconic status previously achieved by the likes of Michael Meyers, Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger is largely over.

This is not to say that horror filmmakers have given up their efforts to create memorable movie murderers. Case in point: ChromeSkull, the resident killer in the Laid to Rest movies. When he first appeared in 2009, not much was revealed about this bald, hulking masked killer other than his real name (Jesse Cromeans), his passion for killing lots and lots of people with his big, serrated hunting knives, his preference to communicate through electronic means (such as text messages) rather than talking, and his need to capture all of his ghastly, gory deeds on video tape. (There were also very strong suggestions that he's a necrophiliac as well.)

A few months ago, ChromeSkull did what all killers who yearn for slasher stardom do: He returned in his first sequel, ChromeSkull: Laid to Rest 2. Picking up right where the first film ended, ChromeSkull continues his killing spree in the sequel--but with very mixed results. The best part about this sequel is that it mixes up the slasher formula enough to keep you guessing what will happen next (something that most slasher sequels never do); the worst part is that the story never congeals enough to build dramatic momentum or to introduce new characters who are genuinely interesting. Read on for the complete review of this fearsome yet frustrating sequel.

Since the first Laid to Rest movie received limited release, I had no idea what to expect from it. Thankfully, I wasn't disappointed: It had a memorable killer with an insatiable and uninhibited blood lust, some genuinely chilling kills, and enough creativity to provide a unique interpretation of the slasher formula.

Instead of hinging the story on the mystery behind the killer's identity, Laid to Rest focuses its attention on the unknown identity of the killer's primary target. Known only in the credits as "The Girl" (played by Bobbi Sue Luther), the movie begins with this nameless woman who can't remember how she ended up inside of a coffin in a funeral home and why ChromeSkull (played by Nick Principe) was so hell-bent on killing her and anyone who gets in his way. This sense of anxious uncertainty permeates the entire movie, giving it the feel and narrative logic of a "Lost Soul" movie. (Read my review of the Silent Hill: Shattered Memories video game here for an explanation of what I mean by Lost Soul movies.) In fact, there were a few times in Laid to Rest where I expected The Girl to discover that she's actually dead and that ChromeSkull is a physical manifestation of death itself intent on bringing her and as many other victims as possible to the afterlife, a plot twist that would have been a mash-up of Carnival of Souls and Reeker. That didn't happen, and the final resolution turned out to be a moving (albeit gory) reflection on what it means to save another person's life, no matter who the person is or how steep the cost for such an act of compassion is. In a sense, Laid to Rest is a retelling of the biblical Good Samaritan parable, except in this version there's also a relentless killer with a really big knife who's determined to kill the traveler and all of the Good Samaritans who try to help her.

Even though Laid to Rest 2 begins right where the first film ends, the sequel goes off in a completely different direction from its predecessor, both in terms of focus and mood. Within the first few minutes, the plot breaks into three threads that tie back together in the finale. ChromeSkull receives extensive surgery to heal from the severe injuries he sustained at the end of the first film and while he’s recovering, he plots his next killing spree by identifying his next target: Jess (Mimi Michaels), a girl who is slowly going blind. ChromeSkull’s associate Preston (Brian Austin Green) is busy “cleaning up” after the events of the last movie so that the reign of terror can continue, while at the same time harboring his own desire of replacing ChromeSkull as the man behind the silver mask. Finally, ChromeSkull survivor Tommy (Thomas Dekker) reluctantly works with police detective King (Owain Yeoman) to help find the elusive killer and bring him to justice.

While the first film placed a lot of emphasis on The Girl and people who help her, the sequel is all about ChromeSkull; however, because the filmmakers don’t want to reveal too much about ChromeSkull (in case there’s a Laid to Rest 3), Laid to Rest 2 drops a lot of interesting hints about the killer without actually revealing anything substantial. For example, while the first film hinted that ChromeSkull doesn’t completely work alone, Laid to Rest 2 reveals that ChromeSkull has an entire organization to support his homicidal exploits. The nameless organization answers to ChromeSkull’s wishes, but who bankrolls the organization and why remains unknown. It could be that ChromeSkull set up and funds the organization himself, or that the organization secures its budget by selling snuff tapes of ChromeSkull’s kills to the highest bidder; the latter explanation could also explain ChromeSkull’s compulsive need to video tape the death of his victims. Preston’s desire to become the next ChromeSkull provides some interesting moments, but the backgrounds of both Preston and his organization are so vague that this character arc doesn’t add much depth to the overall story. Perhaps one of the sequel’s most frustrating aspects is that the most startling revelation about ChromeSkull’s past doesn’t appear until after the credits roll (!).

Further hindering the sequel’s effectiveness is its fragmented, unfocused story, which doesn’t compare well to the first film’s sharp focus on a single character and a specific mood. In Laid to Rest 2, the new characters don’t get much time to develop, the surviving characters from the first film are either dispatched too quickly or don’t have anything interesting to do, and the running time is padded by the activities of several dim-witted cops--so dim-witted that they make up the bulk of the sequel’s body count.

By the power of ChromeSkull!

Where Laid to Rest 2 doesn’t disappoint are in its excessive gore and aggressive kills. New weapons are forged, a new chain link chamber of horrors is assembled, and heads, faces, and torsos are graphically hand-sawed apart. The kills are also spaced evenly apart so that they maintain a level of intensity throughout the movie even though the story itself never finds its proper footing.

Laid to Rest 2 is one of those sequels that I want to like because it has enough interesting ideas to set it apart from most other slasher sequels, but I can’t really recommend it to anyone other than Laid to Rest fans and slasher junkies who are looking for something a little different. Whether ChromeSkull will join the horror hall of fame for slasher superstars will depend on Laid to Rest 3, where I hope they can expand upon the ideas from the first two movies to build a genuinely thrilling third chapter.

Green Lantern Arrives On Cartoon Network, with DC Nation Scheduled for 2012

2011-11-14T16:43:00.000-08:00

Last weekend, Cartoon Network aired the one-hour premiere of Green Lantern: The Animated Series, the new CGI cartoon that's devoted to DC's top space cop. This series stands out for two reasons: It's the first DC cartoon series that's completely CGI, and it's the first DC TV series in a long time that doesn't directly involve Superman, Batman, or one of their supporting characters (such as Robin). Even though the box office performance of the live-action Green Lantern movie from last summer didn't live up to Time-Warner's expectations, it's nice to see that they're still willing to invest time and money into Green Lantern, with the hopes that they'll do the same for other DC characters.

For a first episode, the premiere of Green Lantern was fun to watch. It involved Hal Jordan and his ally Kilowog traveling to a remote area of space where Green Lanterns are being killed off by an unknown assailant. From what I could determine from the premiere's pacing, it consisted of two parts of a multi-episode story. Since the Green Lantern's narrative world consists of multiple planets and aliens, I think it's a smart move for this series to have multi-episode story arcs, even though it will inevitably invite some comparisons to Cartoon Network’s other multi-episode space adventure CGI cartoon series, Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Nevertheless, with DC animation vet Bruce Timm serving as executive producer, I have high hopes for what the new Green Lantern series can contribute to expanding the DC universe outside of its comic book base.

The Green Lantern's premiere was peppered with ads for something called DC Nation, which promises to begin airing on Cartoon Network in 2012. The ads gave some idea of what DC Nation is supposed to provide, including video shorts that feature DC characters and news pertaining to the DC universe that will air during episodes of Green Lantern, Young Justice, and Beware The Batman, another CGI DC cartoon series that's scheduled to premiere in 2013. According to the Deadline Hollywood site, DC Nation will be a "multi-platform, branded block of original programming and exclusive content based on the DC Comics library of legendary character properties, DC Nation is developed in partnership with Cartoon Network, Warner Bros. and DC Entertainment. The all-new venture will harness the publishing, theatrical and television assets together for one powerful on-air block on Cartoon Network with exclusive online content."

Will DC's efforts to build a new generation of fans though its efforts on Cartoon Network prove to be as successful as Marvel's recent build-up to the upcoming multi-superhero Avengers movie? Stay tuned to find out--same Bat-time, same Bat-channel.

Eerie Publications' Horror Comics Cover Art: Once, Twice, Three Times the Terror

2011-11-11T18:22:00.000-08:00

During the Halloween season the other week, the Monster Brains blog did a series of posts devoted to the comic book cover art from the various horror titles published by Eerie Publications during the 60s and 70s. These anthology titles included Witches' Tales, Tales of Voodoo, Weird, Terror Tales, Tales From The Tomb and Horror Tales. The covers of these comics are fantastic examples of pulp horror art, both grisly and lurid (and somewhat sleazy) in equal measure. I'm convinced that the artists who produced the colorful VHS cover art for low budget horror movies during the 80s were heavily influenced by these comics.

Yet what surprised me when viewing the cover posted by Monster Brains was how much Eerie Publications reused the same art across their various titles. Not all of the covers are repeats, but just enough are that it's hard not to notice. I suppose there are only so many ways that a comic book artist can show people being bitten, stabbed, dismembered and decapitated in a single panel, as there are only so many ways that one can show vampires, mummies, werewolves, demons, zombies and mad scientists attacking both helpless victims and each other. Some covers are exact duplicates, others are near matches, while even more are combinations of the same characters with different backgrounds. Click below to see how much Eerie Publications believed in recycling.

The Duplicates:

The Near Duplicates:

The Mix-and-Matches:

Puss In Boots Review: A Comedic Computer-Generated Cat Caper in 3D

2011-11-09T16:23:00.000-08:00

When I first heard that DreamWorks was planning a movie spin-off to their Shrek franchise that featured Puss in Boots as the main character, I was somewhat skeptical. After all, Shrek was scraping the bottom of the barrel of fairy tale satire by the end of its four-movie run, so I couldn't imagine that there'd be much left for a stand-alone Puss in Boots movie. Thankfully, I was proven wrong: Puss in Boots is a fun, goofy adventure that's fit for audiences of all ages.

Puss in Boots follows the adventures of its titular character (voiced by Antonio Banderas) as he partners with mastermind Humpty "Alexander" Dumpty (Zach Galifianakis) and feline thief extraordinaire Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek) for a big score: the fabled golden egg-laying goose from a particular giant-dwelling castle in the clouds.

Puss in Boots isn't as cheeky as the Shrek movies, and that ultimately works in its favor. Instead of saturating the script with pop culture references and taking repeated jabs at Disney's interpretations of classic fairy tales--and at Disney itself--Puss in Boots milks most of its humor from the inherent absurdity of fairy tales, action-adventure movies, anthropomorphized animals and eggs, and its own warped interpretations of fairy tale characters. (The versions of Jack and Jill that appear in this movie have to be seen to be believed.) Overall, the movie looks and feels like a Sergio Leone-esque Spaghetti Western set in an off-kilter fairy tale world and it works wonderfully. Hayao Miyazaki fans will also find themselves having brief flashbacks to Castle in the Sky, particularly during the unexpectedly touching resolution to one of the key character's narrative arcs.

The voice acting is solid across the board, but a lion's share of the film's charm lies with Banderas' portrayal of Puss. Banderas clearly has a blast playing this character, and I envy the production team that got to watch him record his lines.

Of course, adding considerably to my viewing pleasure was how I saw Puss in Boots--in IMAX 3D. I have yet to see a feature-length CGI cartoon in 3D that has disappointed me in its visual quality but Puss in Boots in particular makes ample use of the 3D format, which adds an extra crispness to its many wide-angle vista shots of the desert, its action scenes, and its multi-layered city landscapes.

JawsFest 3 Premieres in Chicopee, MA

2011-11-06T11:42:00.000-08:00

Last December, I posted a review of two JawsFest DVDs produced by Lou and Dianna "Yana" Pisano (you can see the review here). These fan-made DVDs are feature-length love letters to the Jaws franchise, and they provide Jaws fans with footage of the original JawsFest event that was held in 2005 and tours of various locations throughout Martha's Vineyard where scenes from three of the Jaws movies were shot. Now, almost a year later, the Pisanos have completed the third and final chapter of the their Jaws fan appreciation trilogy, JawsFest 3: The Invasion of JawsFest '10, and they held a premiere showing of it last weekend in Chicopee, Massachusetts. From what I've heard, the event was a big success in spite of the unexpected snow storm that slammed the east coast during the last weekend of October.

JawsFest 3 is a two-disc DVD set, with over three hours of Jaws fan-friendly footage. One of the bonus features is a documentary produced and directed by Justin White called "The Making Of Lou and Yana's JawsFest Trilogy". The set also includes a map of Martha's Vineyard that identifies the locations where Jaws was shot--an ideal collectible for any Jaws fan who one day plans on visiting these same locations in the future. I already placed my pre-order for the set, so expect to see a review here in a few weeks. Click here to place your pre-order of JawsFest 3 and to order copies of the first two JawsFest DVDs.

Also, be sure to pick up the latest issue of SCREAM magazine that features Lou Pisano's article, "The Guts of Jaws 2: Appreciating an Underappreciated Sequel". Order your copy of issue 8 of SCREAM magazine here.

Ten Terminator Toys That Should Be Made

2011-11-03T16:21:00.000-07:00

When it comes to collecting toys, models and miniatures, it's not easy being a Terminator fan. Unlike the larger and more popular sci-fi franchises such as Star Wars and Star Trek, the number of scale replicas for particular robots and vehicles from the Terminator franchise are limited in variety, are often hard to find, and can be very expensive. Here's a list of Terminator robots and vehicles that should be made available in some form (a die-cast miniature, a highly-detailed toy, etc.) for those who enjoy collecting killer machines from the future.

Quality Terminator replicas have never been easy to find and acquire, even from the beginning. I loved the T-800 endoskeleton design when it originally appeared in the first Terminator movie but between the release of that film and the release of its sequel in 1991, the only available T-800 replicas were in the form of complex model kits which required a lot of money to purchase and a high degree of modeling skill to complete (I had neither, of course). Kenner released a line of Terminator toys after Terminator 2, but only a handful of those items were accurate to the movies and were very hard to find.

Since companies such as McFarlane Toys, NECA, Sideshow Collectibles, Hot Toys and Playmates have acquired the Terminator license during the last decade, there are many more highly detailed Terminator replicas available now but most of them are very costly and are limited in their range of diversity. In some ways, I got my wish--all sorts of T-800 endoskeleton replicas are readily available (I even have one that I can display on my Christmas tree), but replicas of other members of Skynet's army of death machines are either in short supply or don't exist at all.

Here's a list of ten replicas that I'd love to own if more are to be made, organized according to their first appearance in the Terminator franchise.

1. HK-Centurion

The HK-Centurion is like the HK Tank, but with four legs instead of four treads. It was supposed to make its big screen debut in the future war battle scenes in Terminator 2, but it never got past the concept art drawings. However, it did appear in a few Terminator comic books and in the Terminator: Dawn of Fate video game. A perfect miniaturized replica of this machine would include poseable legs, glowing flood lights, and rotating torso and gun turrets.

2. T-70 Infantry Unit

The T-70 is part of the T2 3D: Battle Across Time ride at the Universal Studios theme parks. Several T-70s appear early in the ride, which takes place in Cyberdine Systems' Miles Bennett Dyson Memorial Auditorium. Given its humanoid shape, the T-70 was clearly designed to be a distant predecessor to the T-800 model. Unfortunately, for as fun as the ride is, I was greatly disappointed to see that the ride's gift shop didn't have a single item bearing the likeness of a T-70.

3. T-1

T-1 is the tank-like robot that appears in the latter half of Terminator 3, where it is reprogrammed by the T-X to gun down all of the humans at Cyber Research Systems (CRS). While a T-1 was part of a T3 miniatures set by Dreamazz, the set was so poorly made that this robot deserves a second chance in the world of killer robot merchandising. In particular, a remote-controlled T-1 would make an excellent toy, particularly if it had the same range of motion as its cinematic counterpart. If it's marketed along with a flying remote-controlled HK-Drone, Terminator fans could use these toys and whatever action figures they have to do re-enactments of the CRS massacre. Bliss!

4. T-900

The T-900 was the standard Skynet foot soldier in all of the Terminator 3 video games. It looks like a midway design between a T-800 endoskeleton and a T-X endoskeleton: It has the overall build and skull-like head of a T-800 with the body armor of a T-X. Like the T-1, a T-900 figure was also included in Dreamazz's T3 miniatures set, so naturally I think that this robot design deserves better. The perfect T-900 figure would feature multiple points of articulation, glowing eyes and armor lighting, and removable armor plates that reveal the inner workings of the T-900.

5. FK Reaper

As Terminator video games go, Terminator 3: The Redemption by Atari was a real cornucopia of new Skynet robot designs, including several new aerial and tank HK units. Of these designs, one of the coolest was that of the FK Reaper. Even though it has a head similar to that of the T-1, the FK Reaper looks like a smaller, more efficient successor to the Harvester robot seen in Terminator Salvation. In fact, it would be really cool if a Terminator miniatures set would be produced with a Harvester and some accompanying FK Reapers, each in the proper scale to each other.

6. HK-Hover 2

Another top-notch design from Terminator 3: The Redemption. There have been many different aerial HK designs throughout the Terminator universe, each with designs that are variations of the original aerial HK unit seen in the first two Terminator movies. The HK-Hover 2 is among the sleeker, more streamlined designs, with a greater range of motion than other aerial HK units.

7. T-888 Endoskeleton

The T-888 was the standard infiltrator unit in the Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles TV show. Even though the T-888 endoskeleton looked very similar to the T-800, it featured several improvements to the original design to allow for greater flexibility. In other words, while the T-1000 and T-X models were regarded as the T-800's successors in the Terminator universe, the T-888 endoskeleton was an actual design upgrade of the T-800 endoskeleton. For this reason, a T-888 endoskeleton figure should demonstrate its improvements with more points of articulation than its T-800 counterpart. Then again, if a higher-end company such as Hot Toys put out a T-888 endoskeleton figure, it would be great if it included an optional, newly formed synthetic skin to put on its head and upper torso, a gnarled skin similar to what was seen at the end of "The Turk" episode.

Long Live the New Flesh!

8. T-7T Tetrapod

The T-7T Tetrapod was among the new robot designs for the Terminator Salvation video games and the Terminator Salvation: The Machinima Series videos. The T-7Ts are like squat, crab-like mobile gun pods, and they are very insect-like in their movement and behavior. The T-7T Tetrapod would be another design that's ideal for a remote-controlled toy. It would also be great if a Terminator miniatures set would be produced featuring an aforementioned HK-Centurion that's flanked by two T-7T Tetrapods, each in the proper scale to each other.

9. HK Transport

In retrospect, the Terminator Salvation toy line by Playmates was poorly planned and executed in terms of item selections, product designs, and promotion among its target audience. Nevertheless, had Playmates actually succeeded, then a well-made HK Transport vehicle/play set would've been amazing. The HK Transport is the largest of the aerial HK units, and its primary purpose is to transport human prisoners to Skynet work camps. A HK Transport can also transport a Harvester unit, two smaller aerial HKs, and presumably smaller ground-based Skynet units such as T-600s, Moto-Terminators, and T-7Ts. A scale-accurate replica of an HK Transport that includes opening panels and miniatures of both human resistance fighters and various Skynet units would be an absolute must-have.

10. Terminator Hybrid Endoskeleton

The Terminator Hybrid endoskeleton is what Marcus Wright would've looked like in Terminator Salvation if all of his skin and muscle tissue had been removed. Unfortunately, this intricately designed endoskeleton never appeared on screen in the movie and can only be seen in detail as concept art. There's a Hybrid endoskeleton included in the Terminator Cyberskin Generator Laboratory play set, but that was a poorly sculpted figure with no points of articulation. The ideal Terminator Hybrid endoskeleton figure would have many movable joints, human organs that can be removed from its torso, and a human brain that can be removed from its protective skull casing.

Oxitec is Remaking Mimic--with Mosquitoes!

2011-11-01T16:24:00.000-07:00

My, how times have changed. In the 1997 movie Mimic, scientists genetically engineer a breed of insect that's intended to reduce the population of cockroaches in New York City that are spreading a lethal virus. Fast-forward to 2011, and such a premise is no longer science fiction. According to last Sunday's edition of The New York Times:

"Researchers on Sunday reported initial signs of success from the first release into the environment of mosquitoes engineered to pass a lethal gene to their offspring, killing them before they reach adulthood. The results, and other work elsewhere, could herald an age in which genetically modified insects will be used to help control agricultural pests and insect-borne diseases like dengue fever and malaria. ... Authorities in the Florida Keys, which in 2009 experienced its first cases of dengue fever in decades, hope to conduct an open-air test of the modified mosquitoes as early as December, pending approval from the Agriculture Department."

What could possibly go wrong, you ask? Some of the engineered mosquitoes could develop immunity to the lethal gene and pass that resistance to their offspring, which could very well make them harder to kill in the long run. Since this is for a good cause, I would like to see this effort succeed. I'm just hoping that none of these genetically-tampered bugs wind up looking like this guy:

Finding The Flesh Eaters

2011-10-30T16:56:00.000-07:00

Stop me if you heard this one: A group of people become stranded on a desert island . . . where they encounter a horde of monsters that viciously kill them one at a time!

Oh, you have heard of that? Well, what if the island monsters were the product of MAD SCIENCE! BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

So you've heard of that one too. OK, Mr. Smarty Pants--what if the mad science was NAZI mad science and the monsters were MICROSCOPIC FLESH EATERS!!!

That's the premise of The Flesh Eaters, a creature feature that was originally released back in 1964 and the only movie ever directed by Jack Curtis. The movie's plot follows a charter airplane pilot, an alcoholic actress and her comely assistant, a marine biologist and a shipwrecked beatnik as they struggle to find their way off of an uninhabited island that's surrounded by the titular flesh eaters, whose presence render the ocean water around the island acidic.

For as grim and gory as this premise sounds, don't be fooled--The Flesh Eaters is 87 minutes worth of low-budget camp, with hammy scripting, unconvincing effects, and dramatic performances that vary greatly in their quality. (Several reviews I've read of this movie have even speculated if it was the accidental inspiration for Gilligan's Island.) That said, The Flesh Eaters is not without its charms and it has enough interesting details to earn a footnote mention in American low-budget horror history. Read on for the full flesh feast, with a side order of jellyfish sushi.

I first heard about The Flesh Eaters when it arrived on the shelves of a local video store as a Monterey Home Video VHS release back in the mid-80s. The video stores in my town rarely carried any horror films that were released before 1970, so to see this cheapjack horror B-movie from 1964 placed alongside cheapjack horror movies from the 70s and 80s made it an oddity of sorts. Further helping it to stand out like a rotting, gangrenous thumb was its cover art: While many other horror B-movies had colorful, lurid art to help sell them to the indiscriminate renter, The Flesh Eaters just had a black and white drawing of a man screaming with a red spiral imposed over it.

The slightly truncated VHS cover of The Flesh Eaters,

courtesy of the Affection for OUR collection site.

From what I can recall of the film's description on the back of the VHS box, it hyped the film's gore and how some of the film's production crew members were also involved in the sexploitation film circuit. (Of particular titillating mention was that of Radley Metzger, the film's credited editor, who would go on to make a few adult movies during the 70s.) Obviously, Monterey Home Video designed the VHS cover to give you the impression that The Flesh Eaters was an early pioneer in low-budget girls 'n gore movies. While it doesn't quite live up to that promise, it nevertheless provides an interesting glimpse into the cheap creature features from the early 60s.

The most notorious feature of The Flesh Eaters is its level of gore, which was higher than most other horror films of its time. Yet in comparison to the horror films that were yet to come, as well as the movies made by then-contemporary Herschell Gordon Lewis (a.k.a. the "Godfather of Gore"), The Flesh Eaters is pretty tame. For example, a human skeleton washes ashore early in the movie, the remains of one of the flesh eaters' first victims. Yet the skeleton looks so clean and intact that the shot looks like someone stole a skeleton from a high school biology lab and left it on the beach for someone to find. Watching the actors trying to look shocked and horrified at this skeleton, something that is so far from shocking and horrifying, is one of the film's funnier moments.

Somewhere out there, a doctor's office is missing its skeleton.

Adding to The Flesh Eaters' infamy was its inclusion of brief, suggestive nudity in scenes that were inserted in one of the film’s later theatrical edits. These scenes were flashbacks to the Nazi experiments that were conducted to create the flesh eaters, and the experiments involved scientists forcing undressed women into a water tank where they were to be striped to the bone by the man-made micro monsters. The scenes were included as extras in the 2005 DVD release by Dark Sky Films, since they weren’t part of the Curtis’ original cut.

Nevertheless, the flashback scenes gave The Flesh Eaters the dubious distinction of being one of the early, brief examples of Nazi exploitation cinema (a.k.a. "Nazisploitation"). According to the definition provided on IMDB, Nazi exploitation is "a subgenre of exploitation film and sexploitation film that involves villainous Nazis committing criminal acts of a sexual nature often as camp or prison overseers in World War II settings. Most follow the standard women in prison formula, only relocated to a death camp or Nazi brothel, with an added emphasis on sadism, gore, and degradation." While these scenes hardly come close to the exploitative nature of Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS and SS Experiment Love Camp (both titles our local video stores carried, by the way), it did pre-date Love Camp 7 (1969), the first feature-length Nazisploitation film.

In spite of its seedier aspects, I found The Flesh Eaters to be a fun low-budget horror romp. Some of its appeal stems from the oddball lineup of characters that populate the story (particularly the drunk, bitter actress and the spaced-out proto-hippie), which gives The Flesh Eaters a certain flair that most other films of its type lack. The film is also rife with skilled deep focus cinematography and creative shot compositions that add an uneasy mood to its limited number of sets, which mostly consist of beaches and a tent. It should be noted that the "uninhabited island" in The Flesh Eaters was actually Long Island--the beaches of Montauk, to be exact--and director Jack Curtis makes the most of this scenic location. (This choice of location sort of reminds me of Shock Waves (1977), another film about forbidden Nazi science run amok, where the deserted island was in fact a location just outside of Miami.) With such a polished look, The Flesh Eaters never looks as quite as cheap as it really is. It even makes the film’s bargain-basement gore and creature effects look more interesting than they should be.

If you’re looking for a creature feature that isn’t a classic but an above-average example of a fun campy b-movie from the drive-in era, The Flesh Eaters is a must-see.

The Why of The Fly

2011-10-25T16:31:00.000-07:00

If you're a fan of The Fly movies, check this out: The cover story of the latest Rue Morgue issue is a retrospective devoted to the five Fly films. The retrospective's features include an interview with David Cronenberg, where he briefly mentions the "oblique" sequel script he has written to his 1986 version of The Fly, as well as a look back at the original Fly trilogy and its respective man-fly monstrosities. A noteworthy highlight in this issue is the interview with Chris Walas and Eric Stolz about The Fly II, which provides some fascinating insight into the production of this troubled sequel. Judging from Walas' comments about the original story that he had in mind, The Fly II could have been a much more worthy continuation of Cronenberg's movie had the studio heads just let him do what he wanted instead of forcing him to restructure his story to target desirable-yet-misunderstood audience demographic targets.

Not to be left out of this Fly fan fun, I figured that now would be a good time to post an article I wrote about Hollywood’s most infamous insect hybrid. Before I started blogging about all things monster movie related, I got my first movie monster article published in issue #116 of Filmfax magazine back in the fall of 2007. Having no idea how to get my fan appreciation-oriented writing published, I figured that I’d write about one of my favorite movie monsters in a way that would coincide with Fox Home Entertainment’s release of The Fly Collection, a four-disc DVD box set of the original Fly trilogy: The Fly (1958), The Return of the Fly (1959), and The Curse of the Fly (1965). The article was titled “The Multifaceted Fly”, and it examined one of the more unique horror/sci-fi trilogies in Hollywood history to understand why it continues to bug film fans to this day. Read on…

When I say that The Fly is one of my favorite movie monsters, what I really mean to say is that it was one of the few monsters that really terrified me when I was a kid. When I first began reading about classic movie monsters during the early 80s, The Fly was the only monster that I could truly call hideous, more grotesque and bizarre than any of the other classic monsters. Then there was the plot of The Fly movie, which made my kid-level brain reel. It was a nightmare like none of the other movies: to become an instant abomination as the result of an unexpected switch in body parts with an insect, and then to be stuck in a tiny web screaming “Help me!!!” over and over just moments before you are fed upon by a normal-sized spider that you would otherwise squash beneath your foot.

A resin garage model kit of the human-headed insect from The Fly.

The Fly was not about being stalked and killed by a monster; it was about disfigurement, degradation, insanity and helplessness all rolled up into one single film. Given these themes, The Fly's most logical companion film from the same decade would be The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). There have been other teleportation-related monstrosities lurking in the halls of classic horror, such as the title abominations such as The 4-D Man (1959) and The Projected Man (1966), but even with those pale in comparison to the tragic freak show that is The Fly.

“The Multifaceted Fly” examines the themes in each of the original Fly movies and why I think they hold together well as a complete trilogy. It also looks into the background of George Langelaan, the author of the short story upon which the first Fly film is based, to understand how he could have come up with such a wild concept as an insect-headed man. Click below to see JPG files of the article, or you can order the original issue at the Filmfax site.

Baphomet Says, "Happy Halloween!"

2011-10-22T19:12:00.000-07:00

Now that I have your attention, I just thought that I'd let you know that the fine folks over at the Fierce and Nerdy site have asked me to contribute a few thoughts about the best holiday of the year, Halloween. In my post, I write about how much I enjoy Halloween and why, how horror film fans can best celebrate the holiday, and suggestions of what you can do if you're stuck in a community that treats Halloween like Satan's annual membership drive. You can read the post here.

A Gallery of Low-Budget Gill Men

2011-10-20T17:05:00.000-07:00

Last August, I saw on the Tears of Envy blog a link to a post in The Guardian's Film Blog called "Where's the thrill in today's cookie-cutter monster movies?" by Phelim O'Neill. In the post, O'Neill bemoans the lack of creativity in recent movie monster designs. As his post states, "The big movies this year have been full of monsters, aliens, robots – all sorts of creatures and creations. On the surface, there's never been a better time for lovers of monster movies. But when you look closer at the beasties themselves, you see how similar they are to one another; how they look like they were clumsily Frankensteined together from existing ogres. In truth, there's never been a worse time for movie monsters."

Personally, I think that O'Neill has it all wrong--not so much about movie monster designs, but about monster movies in general. The overwhelming majority of creature features are usually cheap rip-offs of superior films, both in terms of plot and monster design. This was true during the early days of Hollywood and it is no different now. O'Neill waxes nostalgic that "we're not seeing anything like the iconic creatures of old", but for every classic example he cites--Frankenstein (1933), Alien (1979), Basket Case (1982), and so on--he ignores the countless movie monsters that were inspired by the classics but fell far short of being effective and original. Not every monster designer can be the next Ray Harryhausen, Rick Baker or Stan Winston, and even those who are don't always get the recognition they deserve.

To emphasize my point, consider Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954). It's one of the classic examples that O'Neill cites, and rightfully so. Even though the titular Creature is really just a guy in a suit, it's easy to forget that when watching it on the silver screen because the suit was so well designed. Even more impressive was that the suit could be used to shoot lengthy underwater scenes where the Creature swims gracefully among fish, seaweed and other denizens of the deep, thus further convincing the audience that what they were seeing wasn't human. Such an impressive feat inspired many imitators, all of which bear some similarities to the original Creature but come nowhere close to being successful on their own due to lack of creativity, sloppy design and poor funding. This photo gallery is devoted to these bargain-basement beasts, both how they were depicted in their movies' posters and what they actually looked like. Click below to see the gallery.

The Phantom From 10,000 Leagues (1955)

The She-Creature (1956)

The Alligator People (1959)

The Monster of Piedras Blancas (1959)

Creature From the Haunted Sea (1961)

The Horror of Party Beach (1964)

Beach Girls and the Monster (1965)

Destination Inner Space (1966)

Zaat (a.k.a. The Blood Island of Dr. Z, 1971)

Rana: The Legend of Shadow Lake (1975)

Octaman (1976)

Slithis (1978)

Island of the Fishmen (a.k.a. Screamers, 1979)

Humanoids from the Deep (a.k.a. Monster, 1980)

Demon of Paradise (1987)

Epitafios: When a High School Reunion is Murder

2011-10-17T16:11:00.000-07:00

In last week's episode of Criminal Minds, "Painless", survivors of a devastating high school killing spree are being murdered by a similar killer on the eve of the spree's 10th anniversary. While the episode was probably written with real-life high school tragedies such as the Columbine massacre in mind, it was very similar in its style to slasher films where the killer is motivated to seek revenge against those who he/she believes to be responsible for some past trauma. Thus, this Criminal Minds outing reminded me of classic slasher flicks such as Prom Night and Happy Birthday to Me. It also reminded me of Epitafios, a 12 episode mini-series from Argentina that was produced by HBO Latin America in 2004.

Epitafios follows ex-detective Renzo Márquez (Julio Chávez) as he investigates a series of gruesome murders that are somehow linked to four students who died during a high school hostage situation five years earlier. The series' title is a nod to the killer's signature: he writes cryptic epitaphs for each of his intended victims. While the story strains at times to provide enough twists and tension to fill 12 episodes, Epitafios is a must-see for anyone who likes a good giallo or slasher story--particularly a story that isn't restricted to a two-hour (or less) running time.

A second Epitafios miniseries was released in 2009, which centers around a killing spree committed by killer who has dual personalities. Check out the official Epitafios site for more details about this top-notch TV thriller.