The Wild and Crazy Side of Steve Martin

Definition of '00s Horror

2008-02-02T00:03:18Z

Horror movies have evolved over the years. Each decade can lay claim to its own genre, especially those in recent history. The 1980s were the era of the undead slasher, which actually began in 1978 with Halloween, and went on to include Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Child's Play.

In the 1990s, the form morphed yet again. Although slasher flicks were still the way to go, the villain got real. No longer was he a vengeful spirit; now he was a serial killer. Movies like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer adapted the conventions of their predecessors then riffed on them in inventive ways.

]]> Now in the '00s (or as I like to say, the naughts), two strains of fright flicks predominate. One focuses on the supernatural like the Japanese adaptations like The Eye (which hit theaters this month) The Ring and The Grudge; the other goes by the name "torture porn": Saw, Hostel, Turista and soon Scott Smith's The Ruins.

One genre; two styles. Which will define the decade? Will Japanese Ghosts or Sadistic Gore rule? Is there room for both?

Site of the Week: The Greatest Films

2008-02-01T23:50:28Z

Twelve years ago Tim Dirks had the idea to create a website that captured some of the greatest moments in classic cinema history, simply because he believed classic films were being short-changed on the Internet. "In the vast number of film-related sites on the Web," he says, "there are only a few that have any content about classic films. My site was originally designed to help change the perception that classic films were old, irrelevant, black/white pictures of a bygone era."

What he ended up creating was much bigger. "It was clear that each of the scenes needed to be placed in context," he says. In almost no time, The Greatest Films had morphed into a site whose 100 Greatest Films list is constantly referenced by Roger Ebert and described in Variety as "hyper-detailed descriptions and historical analysis of each of the films so chosen, made available on a Web site that's easy to browse and read." Dirks' site also includes a complete history of film organized by decades, an illustrated Film Terms Glossary, a history of the Greatest Visual and Special Effects and much much more.

]]> "So many of our current films 'borrow' from older films," Dirks says. "For instance, Billy Wilder's ahead-of-its-time Ace in the Hole was the '50s version of the '70s Network and of the '80s Broadcast News." The end result, he says, is that anyone interested in films, either past or present, "can come to a deeper appreciation of how to watch motion pictures more intelligently, be more selective in viewing choices, and begin to understand the historical background and perspective of cinematic history."

Horror People: Michael Gingold

2008-02-01T22:10:24Z

The first in a weekly series of the people who work in the horror industry.

Name: Michael Gingold

Job: Managing Editor, Fangoria Magazine

Favorite Horror Movie: Halloween

Q: What exactly does being Fangoria's managing editor entail?

A: Basically, I'm involved with every step of putting the magazine together, from copy-editing to proofreading to going over the final layouts, as well as writing captions, DVD reviews and several of the secondary departments like the contents, ect. In addition, I handle the updating of our website and write a number of the reviews and news items that appear there. One thing that takes up quite a bit of time is keeping up with all the horror DVDs for the release lists I put together both on-line and in the magazine.

I also write an occasional feature story for the magazine or the site; I'm pretty plugged into the independent New York horror scene, so it's nice to be able to promote lesser-known filmmakers that way.

]]> Q: What are some of the perks of the job?

A: Journalistically speaking, in the current horror scene that's crowded with new websites, having the established Fangoria name behind me is a definite plus when it comes to getting interviews and other material. Personally, it's fun to see new and exciting horror films in advance, and even better to discover a good one that no one else has heard of or written about yet.

Q: Where do you see Fangoria magazine in ten years?

A: In today's media age, the very question of whether Fangoria will still be a magazine in ten years is an interesting one. Even with the Internet taking over, the mag has managed to hang in there while numerous other print publications have folded, and we're still selling well. But I'm sure that Fango will be a much bigger and broader web presence a decade from now. We're planning to upgrade the site this year and will continue to do so as time goes on, but the bottom line is that we'll continue to make the coverage as good as can be, no matter what the medium it's being conveyed on.

Q: You've also written numerous low-budget horror movies, such as Leeches and Shadow: Dead Riot. Do you have any more movies in the pipeline?

A: The Ocean, a movie I wrote with director Dante Tomaselli, is supposed to start shooting on location in Puerto Rico this winter. I'm really excited about this one; I think it's some of my best work as a writer, and the collaboration with Dante has been the easiest and most creatively satisfying experience I've had. We've also got a strong cast led by Dee Wallace and Dominique Swain, so I'm anxious to see how it turns out!

I'm, also hoping to shoot a project of my own this year, and I'm working on that script now. It'll be very low-budget, but knowing that in advance is helping me shape the material into something I can afford.

Greydon Clark's Website

2008-02-01T21:43:57Z

Satan's Sadists. Satan's Cheerleaders. Dracula vs. Frankenstein. Psychic Killer. These are just some of the classic, killer B horror movies lensed or written by Greydon Clark in the 1970s and 1980s. Now, Clark has launched his own Web site filled with posters, stills, and videos -- long ones, not just snippets. If you purchase anything from his store, he'll autograph the item for you. But wait, in Ron Popiel fashion, there's more. If you order a poster or DVD, you also get two glossy photos.

Merchandising aside, Clark's blog posts are skimpy. Where are the thoughtful anecdotes, the great stories of low-budget horror filmmaking? He probably amassed enough tales for a book the size of Duma Key, after all.

Kiera as Catherine in the New Wuthering Heights?

2008-02-01T21:30:28Z

If you loved the original Wuthering Heights (1939) with its creepy candlelight and dreams of ghosts, and starring starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, you'll be excited to learn that Variety is reporting that the film will be remade. Director John Maybury, who did the shiver-inducing The Jacket, will direct. Maybury is currently finishing up another period piece, The Edge of Love, with Kiera Knightley--who would be perfect as Catherine in Emily Bronte's gothic romance. For now, here's Kate Bush's bewitching video, Wuthering Heights, shot in the moors themselves.

Matador Sees Red with Barker's Books of Blood

2008-02-01T21:06:16Z

There has been a Clive Barker resurgence in the movies of late. And after The Midnight Meat Train and a Hellraiser remake hits screens, Matador Pictures will find an opening to begin a series of Barker movies based on Clive Barker's Books of Blood, six horror anthologies that hold dozens of stories of sadism, mayhem, and gut-wrenching horror. The first movie, directed by John Harrison (Tales from the Darkside: The Movie) will star Sophie Ward and Jonas Armstrong.

The plot? Says Reuters, "Blood will adapt the first story from Book 1, which centres on a paranormal expert who, while investigating a gruesome slaying, finds a house that is at the intersection of 'highways' transporting the souls in the afterlife." Will the Blood films be done right? They had better be. After all, these small stories, which are close to Barker's heart, launched his career in the 1980s. Hopefully, Barker, who's a producer, will be hands-on.

Four DVDs for I Am Legend

2008-02-01T21:01:13Z

A legend can't just have one DVD incarnation -- and Warner Bros. knows this better than anyone. That's why I Am Legend will street with not one, not two, but four DVD versions on March 18. The standard edition DVD will feature a set of four animated comics -- Death as a Gift, Isolation, Sacrificing the Few for the Many, and Shelter, ShockTillYouDrop.com reports. The two-disc Special Edition has the same animated comics, but also includes a new "controversial ending" and an alternative cut of the film. Both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD/DVD release will also hit the streets the same day.

Who's The Tallest Sci-Fi Monster of them All?

2008-02-01T20:53:53Z

Size does matter to men, just as it does to giant sci-fi monsters. In that spirit, Charlie Anders over at io9 has exhaustively measured sci-fi's classic giant monsters and has come up with a winner.

Godzilla doesn't even come close. The winner is Kroll, a giant octopus that was Doctor Who's only encounter with an enormous monster. His head alone was over 250 meters high.

Who's The Tallest Monster? [io9]

The Scanner's Top Five: Week of 01.28

2008-02-01T20:43:24Z

1. Despite the fact that a film adaptation of Orson Scott Card's seminal Ender's Game will forever remain in production limbo, the author this week green-lighted a video game version. The enemy's gate is down!

2. The final issue of Y: The Last Man hit stands just as rumors surface that director D.J. Caruso is planning on a trilogy of Y films starring Shia LaBoeuf. Casting of his sidekick Ampersand is still underway, however, as the Outbreak monkey is currently in rehab.

3. Just weeks after the premiere of Cloverfield, Paramount has already begun talks with director Matt Reeves to helm a sequel.

4. Can't get enough of an enormous sixties robot screaming "Danger, Will Robinson?" Got $24,500? Now you can have your very own Lost in Space B-9 replica. Dr. Smith sold separately.

5. John Cleese was cast as Dr. Bernhardt in the upcoming remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still. During the announcement, Cleese was quoted saying, "I'm not dead. I don't want to go on the cart."

SciFi Dept. Video: Kevin Maher laments the psychedelic SciFi sequel to 1969's Easy Rider that almost was. Suffice it to say it's titled Biker Heaven and it involves the resurrection of Billy and Wyatt via a Biker God on a gold Harley.

SciFi Talk Forum: With great power comes great responsibility? Maybe not. We want to hear what superpower you would choose for yourself, and what you would use it for. We're also discussing the art of remaking SciFi classics--what makes a remake work, and what makes it fail? Let us know, and enter for a chance to win a DVD of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Log on to the Talk forum now!

RKO Remaking 8 Classic Horror Movies

2008-02-01T20:31:30Z

There's big news today from RKO, one of the original movie companies, which has created a new division called Roseblood. It's dedicated to remaking eight classic horror films directed by Val Lewton in the 1940s. Says Variety, "The slate includes Lady Scarface, which will be written by Tom Puryear; While the City Sleeps, which will be scripted by Shin Shomosawa and Jim Morris; The Monkey's Paw, which will be scripted by Todd Farmer; and The Seventh Victim." They'll also remake Bedlam, Body Snatcher, Five Came Back and I Walked With a Zombie.

But they'll have budgets of less than $10 million each. Why? Head honcho Ted Hartley says, "The most successful (return on investment) in the movie business comes from scary movies that get wide release and cost under $10 million....We saw the opportunity to take the rich Val Lewton library of scary thrillers and create a unique company out of it."

The key here is to update these classic old B movies and to make them really frightening for today's audiences. While the old movies truly had their frights and chills--especially Bedlam--RKO will likely need to include more of the paranoia and sadism that makes audiences jump today.

Dark Floors: Illuminating New Clips

2008-02-01T20:26:13Z

It may seem like a cruel tease that Twitch has just posted a fresh bevy of clips from the movies Dark Floors, a Finnish film featuring the metal monster-band Lordi--considering that no U.S. release date has been set.

The clips introduce you to a small group of everyday people trapped in the corridors of a hospital where something has gone terribly wrong. Concerned father Noah Huntley has decided to remove his autistic daughter Sarah from care, but discovers that actually leaving the building may pose a greater challenge than he had counted on. What happened here, and what does it have to do with Sarah? While of course the monsters remain in hiding for now, these clips showcase the atmospherics of Dark Floors nicely and hint at future scares.

The Joy of Die Hard

2008-02-01T19:49:14Z

If not for director John McTiernan, Die Hard might have reached the screen as a grim vigilante movie about bloody terrorists. The source novel, Roderick Thorp's Nothing Lasts Forever, was much darker and ends badly. Thorp described the original plot this way: "The cop goes berserk - he's on a killing rampage, and he doesn't want it to end."

As McTiernan recalled, "I'd just finished Predator, and the studio had seen it and liked it, so they started giving me scripts, and Die Hard was one of them. I turned it down a number of times, because the original script was really a terrorist incident. It had very little humor and seemed to take itself very seriously. It seemed to me that terrorism wasn't entertaining... I didn't say 'yes' to this project until we figured out ways to put, in essence, some 'joy' in it."

]]> So the director sat down with screenwriter Steven De Souza to see if they could salvage the script. De Souza said, "John began as a writer, and therefore you could have a conversation about structure and dialogue that was very concrete, where sometimes, when you have talented directors who are essentially shooters, the conversation can be very fuzzy - 'We need a feeling of dread,' or 'I see ominous.' One of the first big changes was, 'Hey, what if they're not really terrorists?' So I made the legitimate demands of the terrorists in the book into a cover story. This solved one of the big problems of the screenplay, which was that so much time passes and so little happens."

"Eventually, we found a way to think of it as something other than a terrorist incident," McTiernan added. "I had this notion - although I didn't really tell the studio this - that you could turn it into a sort of Shakespearean comedy-- that it would become a panorama of the people involved in the incident. I basically structured it as a comedy. It was actually 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'. That is, something happens on a festival night that turns the world upside-down, and all the princes become asses and all the asses become princes. In the morning the true lovers are reunited and everyone goes on, but the world is better than it was the night before."

"So I started making changes in the script along those lines," continued McTiernan. "I just tried to find ways to expand the comedy and involve other characters. I guess the major change we made was turning it into a robbery, and that was when I said, 'Yes, I'll do it.' As I said, I've never found terrorism entertaining, but a good robbery is fun."

Despite the demonstrable success of the changes, McTiernan still admits that his solution wasn't perfect. "A lot of people have commented - and they're completely right - that the plot in this is ludicrous, that terrorists pretending to be terrorists so they can be robbers is ridiculous. But it allowed me to get to the essential thing that I was talking about earlier, that we can enjoy an intention of the bad guys - to cleverly snatch a whole pile of money. You couldn't enjoy it if he was trying to get the money because of some political thing. The sense of joy would go out of the movie at that instant, and it doesn't matter how many times they hummed 'The Ode to Joy,' the joy would be gone."

Catch Die Hard -- the enhanced DVDTV version -- on Saturday, February 9, 8pm E | 7pm C

Sources:

Emery, The Directors: Take Two, 2002

Die Hard DVD: Commentary

Sean O'Neill, "Heart of Darkness," LA View, 10/13/95

Should Cloverfield be Watched on Cellphones?

2008-02-01T18:11:14Z

A few days ago, Weblogs' excellent movie blog Cinematical posted one of the first truly eyebrow arching essays in their history, "The Theatrical Inappropriateness of Cloverfield," by Christopher Campbell.

Campbell's argument is simple: Cloverfield, which is shot on a shaky home video camera, looks like a long YouTube video "delivered inappropriately to screens that are designed to present pictures with much more going on in them." As such, it should be watched on home video, or, ideally, on YouTube or an iPod.

If you check out the comment section of the original post, Cinematical's readership is united in one collective WTF. They are right: Campbell seems to entirely miss the point that a film about a 30-story-tall monster destroying skyscrapers is not best viewed on a 200x160 cell phone screen.

But I think Campbell raised an interesting point. There's a market for a post-9/11 sci-fi disaster film that's put together from a thousand camera phone snippets of footage: A Web 2.0 apocalypse film. Once you take a giant honking monster out of the equation, it's a sound, potentially brilliant idea. And it's not just about Cloverfield.

The Exhibitionist: Theatrical Inappropriateness of "Cloverfield" [Cinematical]

Politically Incorrect Sci-Fi: Klingons Hawk Happy Meals

2008-02-01T17:54:08Z

In 1979, anthropological study of Klingon culture was still at its nascent stages, which resulted in racially biased advertisements like this Star Trek themed McDonald's Happy Meal spot from 1979. Make no mistake: This is the sci-fi equivalent of the early 20th century's ooga-booga black face minstrel acts.

Nowadays, we understand that underneath the ridged forehead, the protruding lower jaw, and the breath stinking of blood wine, the average Klingon is a noble poet-warrior. Klingon racial leaders like Worf have shown us all that far from the inhuman extra-terrestrial savages they first appeared to be, the Klingon is as sensitive and proud as any Earthling.

But if this commercial is to be believed, things were different back in 1979. Klingon actors were still having difficulty breaking into Hollywood, and commercials like this were the result. If you wanted a Klingon for your ad, you didn't hire a real Klingon. You just stapled a raccoon's spinal column to a guy's forehead, slathered him in mocha paint, got him so drunk he started screaming gibberish--and then you started rolling the camera. Thank god we're more progressive now.

Iron Man will Rock the Super Bowl

2008-02-01T17:47:09Z

This Super Bowl Sunday the gang at Marvel Entertainment is betting that even if you don't care about the Giants and the Patriots, you'll tune into the game to see their new ad for Iron Man. Paramount Pictures is running the spot around 7:30 PM. Following that, the new trailer will be available on Marvel.com, Apple.com and, naturally, Ironmanmovie.com. Then get ready to be bombarded, because the spot will be showcased on ESPN and Yahoo Sports! Jon Faverau's Iron Man is in theaters on May 2nd.