Titans Terrors and Toys

Since I added The Thing prequel to my Blu-ray collection (read my review here ), I've been on a bit of a Thing kick lately. I watched John Carpenter's 1982 movie again, and I've been looking through various Thing fan sites to see if I can learn anything new about this sporadically active franchise. While the poor box office performance of 2011's The Thing precludes another Thing movie any time soon, I was surprised to discover that there was yet another Thing project in the works even before anyone considered a prequel on the silver screen. The project was called The Thing 2 , and it was designed by Computer Artworks as a sequel to their 2002 The Thing video game. From what I've been able to piece together, development of The Thing 2 was discontinued after Computer Artworks shut down in 2004. I've found some conceptual artwork for this game online, which you can see in the picture gallery I've assembled below. Read on....

Attention, anime and manga fans who live in the Washington DC area: The play Astro Boy and the God of Comics , a tribute to the late manga maestro Osamu Tezuka, is currently being performed at Studio Theater. This production is scheduled to run until March 11, 2012. Astro Boy and the God of Comics was written and staged by Natsu Onoda Power, a lifetime fan of Tezuka's work. In fact, Power earned her PhD at Northwestern University through a dissertation on Tezuka, which she later adapted into her book God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post World War II Manga . Tezuka's Astro Boy, on the printed page...   ... And on the stage at Studio Theater. Power's play weaves together certain aspects of Tezuka's real life with the fictional life of one of his most popular characters, Astro Boy. Even though Tezuka is known for his work in manga, Power uses a wide variety of art--cartooning, animation, video, drawing, illustration, and puppetry--as part of...

When you hear the term "professional photography", certain things immediately come to mind--fashion modeling, photojournalism, art photography, and studios and freelancers who specialize in niche markets such as wedding photos, family photos, graduation photos and so on. Yet professional photographers can be employed to take pictures of just about anything, including cars, appliances, food, and toys ... including toys from a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Meet Pete, an avid collector of vintage Star Wars toys. Due to limited space within his own home that precludes a worthy display of his collection, he opted instead to take pictures of the action figures and vehicles so he could appreciate them on his computer. His photo collection of his toy collection eventually grew into his own blog, which is called Star Wars Action Figures Doing What They Do Best . As someone who grew up with Star Wars toys, the toys that introduced me to the joys of scale replicas...

Killer kids rank as one of the most frequently used shock gimmicks in horror movies. Titles such as The Bad Seed , The Devil Times Five , The Omen , Children of the Corn  and Orphan have milked this idea repeatedly, sometimes even basing an entire franchise on it. Yet very rarely do filmmakers use this plot device to make a larger point--such as how society is repeatedly failing its young in the face of modern, industrialized warfare. Such is the theme of Who Can Kill a Child? (a.k.a. Island of the Damned ), a 1976 shocker that was written and directed by Narciso Ibáñez Serrador. Serrador was no stranger to horror when he did Who Can Kill a Child? . Even though he has done much more work for television during the course of his career, he previously directed the gothic thriller The House That Screamed (read my review of that film here ), which demonstrated his thorough understanding of the horror genre. With Who Can Kill a Child? , Serrador takes the plot device of homicida...

Well, the annual Toy Fair has come and gone yet again. There were many familiar licenses present at this year's event, including Star Wars, DC and Marvel superheroes, and revived 80s-era toy lines such as G.I. Joe, He-Man, Thundercats, Transformers and Voltron. Yet among these popular titles were a few faces from Hollywood's classic creature features, thanks to Diamond Select. I've already posted about how Lego is including classic movie monsters as part of its kit sets, and I mentioned how Diamond Select was continuing its Retro Cloth Universal Monsters line as part of the ongoing legacy of the Mego Corporation. Yet when I was looking through the comprehensive Toy Fair 2012 photo galleries on the Cool Toy Review site , I was very pleased to see that Diamond Select has much more in store for classic movie monster lovers in 2012. Click below to learn more about why you should be saving your money for this fantastic new items, along with pictures that were provided cour...

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 Mena...

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....

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 t...

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 gen...

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 estimate...

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 li...

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 Monste...