Cinefantastique Online

You are browsing the archives of 2008 November.

Xbox, the popular game platform, has launched “Horror Meets Comedy,” a series of programs for Xbox’s Independent Video Channel. The series offered horror filmmakers such as James Wan, James Gun, Adam Green, David Slade, and Lucky  McKee an opportunity to create comedic short subjects. Xbox owners can download the films, which debut one per week [...]

Joshua Schwartz (creature of NBC’S CHUCK) will write and possibly direct the next X-MEN features. After 3 films, the franchise currently has spin-off pics devoted to WOLVERINE and MAGNETO; the question was how to do another full-blown X-MEN flick without paying raises to all the stars. Answer may be to focus a new film on [...]

Aaron Eckhart’s battle to save Gotham from the Joker did not turn out so well in THE DARK KNIGHT, but that is not stopping the actor from joing the fight to save L.A. in BATTLE LOS ANGELES. From the Hollywood Reporter:
Aaron Eckhart is attached to star in “Battle: Los Angeles,” a sci-fi actioner that Jonathan [...]

CORALINE is the upcoming stop-motion fantasy film from Henry Selick, director of the uber-wonderful Tim Burton’s THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS. Selick’s follow-ups, JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH and MONKEYBONE, have come nowhere near matching that initial blaze of glory; fortunately, this time out he is working from a piece of source material by Neil Gaiman, about [...]

Reuters warns us that Pascal Laugier (MARTYRS) will be making the jump from France to Hollywood, with a new horror film called DETAILS:
French filmmaker Pascal Laugier, who freaked out audiences at the Cannes and Toronto festivals this year, is assembling a Hollywood career with scary efficiency.
Laugier will write and direct “Details,” a supernatural thriller about [...]

The Return of the Creature Features blog alerts us to a screeening of WATCH HORROR FILMS – KEEP AMERICA STRONG, a documentary about the CREATURE FEATURES television show that ran in the Bay Area from 1971 through 1984, hosted first by Bob Wilkins and then by John Stanley (who went on to write the useful Creature [...]

Black Hole DVD Reviews takes a moment to offer up a 10th anniversary appreciation of the J-Horror wave that began with the release of RING way back in 1998. It reads almost like a personal odyssey – not scholarly at all but something that other fans will appreciate.
That old bete noir, “Horror Movie Violence,” is [...]

J. J. Abrams recently screened footage from his upcoming STAR TREK movie for the genre press. The “reviews” of these excerpts (from four scenes) are now online, and the reactions are fairly predictable: those granted access are reluctant to bad-mouth the high-powered Hollywood hothots that granted them access; plus, the genre press are eager to [...]

Reuters offers the latest news on THE CRAZIES:
Timothy Olyphant has signed on to star in “The Crazies,” a remake of the George Romero horror movie.
The Overture Films project revolves around the inhabitants of a small Kansas town who are beset by death and insanity after a plane crash lets loose a secret biological weapon into [...]

In case you have not noticed, Cinefantastique has been invaded by the Undead over the course of the past few days. In honor of the blockbuster weekend debut of TWILIGHT (which should have been titled “I Was a Teen-Age Vampire’s Girlfriend”), we have posted retrospective reviews of several classic and cult vampire titles: DRACULA, DRACULA’S [...]

Werner Herzog’s remake of the 1922 silent film (directed by F. W. Murnau) has sometimes been dismissed for being too slowly paced and too slavish to its source, but in fact it is superior to the original film. Although occasionally marred by Herzog’s heavy-handed, trademark stylistic tics, NOSFERATU THE VAMPYRE stands on its own as [...]

Vampire cinema has infected popular culture with the taint of the undead. This takes several forms, including night clubs that cater to the Goth subculture. This past Halloween, Knott’s Scary Farm took a cue from this concept and created a walk-through maze called Club Blood – a nightclub that caters to the undead. Check out [...]

This, the fourth Hammer horror film starring Christopher Lee as Count Dracula, is the last solid effort in the franchise. The film charts some interesting thematic territory and features a number of interesting ideas. Unfortunately, the script by John Elder (the pen name of Anthony Hinds) does not weave all of these ideas together into [...]