Cinefantastique Online

You are browsing the archives of 2007 September.

The debut of MOONLIGHT – a formulaic conflation of vampire and film noir motifs – is prosaic and static, never building any suspense and only slowly developing the action. The lead character is too busy striking a series of poses for the camera, which glides gracefully -and slowly – around him, in order to provide enough [...]

The third season of GHOST WHISPERER launched on Friday night, September 28, with “The Underneath,” which picked up from the conclusion of last season’s finale “The Gathering,” showing series lead Melinda Gordon (Jennifer Love Hewitt) literally having her head examined thanks to a cranial close encounter with a falling object. The new episode suggests that [...]

David Goyer, who scripted the three BLADE feature films and directed the third, has signed on to  helm yet another vampire film, an adaptation of Baltimore, or the Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire. The graphic novel, Mike Mignola (Hellboy) and Christopher Golden (The Myth Hunters), tells the tale of Lord Henry Baltimore, bitten on [...]

It seems this season will be filled with genre television shows. NBC’s BIONIC WOMAN made its debut on Tuesday. Tonight we have the return of CBS’s GHOST WHISPERER at 8:00pm, followed by the vampiric MOONLIGHT at 9:00pm. But according to Variety, the show we really should be anticipating is PUSHING DAISIES, which plants its first seed [...]

Variety’s Festival Central has a nice run-down on Sitges, the venerable festival devoted to fantasy and horror films. Entitled “Sitges – Blood, Gore and Palm Trees,” the article is mostly a history of the fest, with a glimpses of this year’s edition:
Blood and gore amongst the palm trees. That might sound like a B-movie pitch [...]

This film is yet more evidence that, like the walking dead who shuffle across the screen, the zombie sub-genre refuses to die a peaceful death. In a way, this is a good thing: films as diverse as relatively lavish LAND OF THE DEAD and the virtually no-budget AUTOMATON TRANSFUSIONprove that there is life in those rotting corpses [...]

According to Sci-Fi Wire, NBC is planning a remake of KNIGHT RIDER, the silly show from the mid-’80s in which starred David Hasselhoff co-starred with a talking car named K.I.T.T.
NBC has tapped filmmaker Doug Liman to produce a Transformers-inspired reworking of the 1980s hit action-drama Knight Rider, Variety reported.
The network is readying a two-hour backdoor pilot [...]

20th Century Fox has resheduled its planned sci-fi film THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, which is set to star Keanu Reeves. When the remake (of a 1951 classic directed by Robert Wise) was announced last month, the plan was for a May 9, 2008  release, but with production not even begun, the film could [...]

Paramount and DreamWorks want to get a sequel to TRANSFORMERS into theatres on June 26, 2009, and they hope to get Michael Bay back into the director’s chair.
Despite the tensions between them, DreamWorks and Par have plenty of incentive to move forward with the next installment in the budding franchise. “Transformers,” starring Shia LaBeoufand based [...]

Russell Mulcahy has signed on to direct ZEN AND THE ART OF SLAYING VAMPIRES, based on the first of a thre-book series by Steven-Elliot Altman. The story follows a man who is attacked by vampires but struggles to defeat the blood-thirst by utilizing Zen mediation. Altman is writing the screenplay. Mulcahy said he like “the [...]

Dark Horizon’s Garth Franklin reports that Warner Brothers and the Weinstein company have settled on terms to distribute GATCHAMAN and ASTROBOY, feature films produced by Imagi Animation Studios, the company behind TMNT.
ASTROBOY is the seminal Japanese anime television series. Created by Japan’s legendary Osamu Tezuka, it became a syndicated hit on American screens in the [...]

The Sci-Fi Channel is renewing two popular series:

Sci Fi Channel has ordered a third season of its top-rated original series “Eureka” along with a second season of reality show “Destination Truth.”
The cable network has ordered 13 new hourlong episodes of “Eureka.” The dramedy, from Universal Media Studios, is set to begin production on Season 3 [...]

The ratings for the Wednesday night premier of BIONIC WOMAN were the highest for any new television drama this season.
Bolstered by the third consecutive night of “Dancing With the Stars,” ABC edged by a tenth of a point NBC to take its second victory in the first three nights of the new TV season. But [...]