Horror, Fantasy & Science Fiction Films
In New York? Think you’ve got the chops to rock a Peter Parker or a Mary Jane? Think you can tolerate getting the phrase, “All-Slinging, All-Dancing,” repeatedly hurled at you? Then the producers of the upcoming Broadway musical, SPIDER-MAN, want to talk to you. Continue reading “News & Views: Open Casting Call for Musical "Spider-Man"”
Come to scenic, Mars-based Neo-Venezia, where beautiful, female gondoliers paddle… gondolas and… look beautiful. That’s essentially the gist of the trailer you’ll find here, promoting Rightstuf’s upcoming release of ARIA THE ANIMATION (click the tabs at the left to start the video). Sure looks pretty, in any case.
No, that title’s not a typo. It’s missing an article, maybe as a favor to multiplex managers who have to conserve marquee letters.
For that matter, I’m not sure what “Adventures” is doing in there either, since Johnny (Matthew Twining) doesn’t do all that much adventuring. The son of one-hit singing wonder Jimmy Dow (get it?), whose magic guitar hangs in the museum/shrine at the back of Johnny’s small-town gas station, the kid takes back seat in a number of the earlier fight sequences, while most of the kick-ass onus falls on agile actress Chris Yen, Continue reading “Adventures of Johnny Tao (2007) – Film Review”
It’s online, it’s free (until Sunday), and man, is it cool. Spawned from a desire to keep people working during the writer’s strike, Joss Whedon’s serialized, musical, low-budget, love-starved supervillain vs. asshole superhero watchamacallit, DR. HORRIBLE’S SING-ALONG BLOG is being debuted all this week. Act I is now up, with Act II being released July 17 and Act III on July 19. (Past Sunday, you’ll have to pony up to watch, either through download or eventual DVD release.)
Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion, and Felicia Day star & sing their hearts out. Catch it here.
One of the more curious entries in the profile-of-a-serial-killer pantheon, They Pushed Him Too Far subcategory. Shot in Denmark1, CRAIG suffers from some typical, direct-to-video maladies, including time-padding longueurs in the dialogue, sloppiness in the audio mix (room tone, guys — record it, catalog it, cut it in), and an occasional lack of imagination when it comes to a limited budget (a coma victim winds up in a hospital where the staff seemingly feels no need to hook her up to all that pesky monitoring equipment). Continue reading “Craig (2008) – Film Review”
By Dan Persons
You get the sense that this whole thing kicked off when somebody got a look at all the spikes, picks, hammers, crampons, grapples, etc. used by ice climbers and said, “Shit, this stuff’d be great for killing people!” They would, actually, so points to the producers for that. Unfortunately, instead of taking this relatively inspired idea and placing their insane, spectral mountaineer in a suitable setting (and, really, how much would it’ve cost to mock up a tent interior and a couple of snow banks?), the producers have decided just to resurrect the old reality-webcast-gone-horribly-wrong scenario from 2002 and have quit with it. Continue reading “Death on Demand – Film Review”
By Dan Persons
Wait, MY WINNIPEG is a documentary? You mean all the stuff about horses freezing in the river and becoming a major attraction for strolling lovers, and the law requiring that former homeowners be permitted entry into their old abodes for the night, not to mention the rooftop homeless community and the faux Nazi invasion, all that stuff is real? Yup, the director swears it. But then again, the director is Guy Maddin, he of the dream-state narrative and the retro shooting style, the man who has made a virtue of taking incredible notions and making them feel as if they’d always been part of the landscape. Tapping pasts both personal and municipal, wrapping them in a Mobius strip fantasy about an endlessly thwarted, train-bound escape from the city of his youth, the director has created a factual film that feels no less incredible than his most surreal efforts. Cinefantastique Online’s Dan Persons had a chance to sit down with the director: Continue reading “Guy Maddin Makes MY WINNIPEG Everyone's Winnipeg”
by Dan Persons
Just where exactly in The Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbookdoes it say that, if you get a pedestrian lodged in your car’s windshield, you should drive straight home, get high, and fret over taking the poor bastard — still jammed on your hood and bleeding into the glove compartment — to the emergency room? That’s the actual scenario that one not-necessarily-Einstein-caliber motorist found herself in a few years ago, and it’s the core predicament of STUCK, Stuart Gordon’s newest melding of social satire, black comedy, brooding horror, and patented Gordon splooshiness. Casting Mena Suvari as the driver and Stephen Rea as her unfortunate victim, the director has managed to cross-fertilize a snapshot of life in these Bush-ravaged times with the bad decisions that sometimes ensue. Cinefantastique Online’s Dan Persons had a chance to speak to Gordon by phone:
Continue reading “Stuart Gordon on "Stuck" & "Fear Itself"”
I keep forgetting that Takashi Miike can do other things besides shoving needles into a whore’s gums (those guys at Showtime are a buncha pussies). ZEBRAMAN is more in the HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS mode, but going even lighter on the black humor. There’s still a bit of splooshiness here and there, but if what you know of the director is AUDITION and IMPRINT, his expansiveness here will surprise you.
The supplemental disc of the two-disc AQUA TEEN HUNGER FORCE COLON MOVIE FILM FOR THEATRES FOR DVD set contains a “deleted movie” (a quasi-Leica reel of the released feature whose main distinction is a sub-plot about “hypno-rims”); a set of “fake endings” that range from STAND BY ME sensitive to Romero zombie-fest; a collection of deleted scenes that for some reason also includes the “Star-Studded Xmas Spectacular” that Adult Swim aired to recycle all of that excised hypno-rim footage; and some behind-the-scenes music video clips (yes, it is pretty funny watching metal-rockers Mastodon commit to such lyrics as, “If I see you videotaping this movie/Satan will rain down your throat with hot acid). Continue reading “Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theatres for DVD”
