Cinefantastique Online

You are browsing the archives of 2008 May.

This 1967 series, created by Larry Cohen, featured Roy Thinnes as “architect David Vincent,” who takes a wrong turn on a lonely road one night and ends up witnessing the landing of a flying saucer – vanguard of an alien invasion. The rest of the series follows Vincent’s attempts to track down the aliens and [...]

Peter Benchley was working on quite an impressive streak in 1980. Jaws and The Deep, published respectively in 1974 and 1976, became blockbusters of the literary world – but it was their film adaptations (each released in the year following publication) that made Benchley’s name into a household word and catapulted him into the rarefied [...]

Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman star in this thriller from writer-director Bryan Bertino. The story (allegedly “inspired by” real events) follows a couple who return to their isolated home after a friend’s wedding reception and are tormented by home invaders at 4:00am.

So far, the film has received a 44% rotten rating in a survey of [...]

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 [...]

As far as cinefantastiquegoes, this week seems to be filled with home video releases of classic and cult titles: there is no new theatrical blockbuster hitting store shelves, but there are lots of familiar titles showing up. Chief among these is Alexander Korda’s classic 1941 film THE THIEF OF BAGDAD, which is commonly regarded as one of [...]

Once upon a time there was a little eight-volume Japanese manga that was very popular. It was so popular in fact that the powers that be decided there should be a live-action version (and a sequel) of it. And thus it came to be so.
The end? Oh, contraire, my friends. DEATH NOTE (DESU NOTO) made [...]

HOBBIT MOVIES MEET DIRE FOE IN SON OF TOLKIEN: The Sunday Times reports on Christopher Tolkien’s legal attempt to quash the two Hobbit prequels currently in pre-production. He claims that New Line Cinema owes $150-million based on a 7.5% profit sharing agreement from 1969, when J.R.R. Tolkien sold film rights to pay off a tax [...]

Kaiju Shakedown, the Asian film blog of Variety, takes a look at POSSESSION, the new film starring Sarah Michelle Gellar. Surrprise, surpise, the spooky flick is a remake of an Asian horror film – although, unlike THE GRUDGE (which was based on a Japanese horror film), this one is based on a Korean film called [...]

Time has a funny way of proving science-fiction predictions wrong. This is actually a good thing, because few if any of us really wanted the year 1984 to turn out like George Orwell’s novel of the same name; it was a relief that 1999 went by without the wrath of Godzilla and cohorts unleashed worldwide [...]

SPEED RACER is just latest Wachowski effort to misfire with critics and audiences. After the tremendous success of THE MATRIX everyone’s gotta be wondering why. Well, as far as SPEED RACER is concerned, from one person’s perspective (mine) there are three main reasons: 1) the film was too long for a cartoon concept of its [...]

Hoping to stretch the Memorial Weekend even longer, INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL opened a day early – on Thursday instead of Friday – earning $25-million in 4,260 U.S theatres. The impressive number put it as the fourth biggest Thursday opener ever, after STAR WARS: EPISODE III - REVENGE OF THE SITH, [...]

It is one of those weeks: almost everything released for home video – at least when it comes to cinefantastique – is either an old title being repackaged or some obscure direct-to-video property of little interest. Fortunately, there is at least one big, bright shiny piece of news for horror fans: the DVD release of [...]

INDIANA GROANS: Rich Heldenfels of Beacon Journal laments the latest RAIDERS movie, INDIANA JONES AND THE KINDGOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL:

Crystal Skull, the fourth big-screen movie in the Jones series, puts up a fight here and there. But history is too much for it. Crystal Skull ends up a disappointment and, even more sadly, an [...]