Cinefantastique Online

You are browsing the archives of 2009 January.

Henry Selick’s film of Neil Gaiman’s book ranks alongside the classics of fantasy filmmaking

10 years ago, in February, 1999, Cinefantastique celebrated the 100th anniversary of stop-motion with the publication of a special double issue. At the time, it looked very much like stop-motion might be poised to go the way of the dinosaur, as CGI [...]

By the diminishing standards of American remakes of Asian ghost stories – a phenomenon that descended to the dismal depths of  the infernal gulf with last year’s not so terrifying trio of ONE MISSED CALL, THE EYE, and SHUTTER – THE UNINVITED must be reckoned a kind of success, though not an exalted one. This redo [...]

Underworld: Rise of the Lycans
The film franchise that successfully combines vampires and werewolves and which also involves a romantic element hit the theaters once again last weekend and did fairly well in box office returns. I’m not talking about the second installment in the TWILIGHT series, but rather, UNDERWORLD: THE RISE OF THE LYCANS. This [...]

This week’s interesting DVD and Bluray releases are few and far between. A slew of generic DTV titles are hitting shelves, but we separate the wheat from the chaff for discriminating fans of cinefantastique.
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Dead & Buried (Blue Underground Bluray)
Director Gary Sherman’s debut feature, Raw Meat (known under his preferred title, Deathline) was an [...]

BBC News reports that the British cult science fiction comedy, which went off the air in in 1999, will return on digital channel Dave as a two-part Easter special, in which the crew of the titular mining ship Red Dwarf will return to Earth:
Written and directed by Red Dwarf co-creator Doug Naylor, the new show reunites [...]

Rhona Mitra in UNDERWORLD 3
Thanks to the continued success of PAUL BLART, MALL COP, neither of the weekend’s genre debuts managed to nab the top slot at the box office this weekend, but one of them managed to land in second.
UNDERWORLD: RISE OF THE LYCANS opened in 2,941 North American theatres, earning an estimated $20.83-million – about [...]

David Del Valle with Bob Wilkins
As a baby boomer pushing sixty, it is difficult to wrap my mind around the fact that nearly four decades have passed since I did my first on-camera interview as a “film expert”. The first person to ever refer to me in those terms recently passed away, on January7th.
Bob Wilkins [...]

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When NIGHTMARE CITY was released in the U.S. in 1983, it was shorn of 4 minutes of footage and retitled CITY OF THE WALKING DEAD (not to be confused with Fulci’s CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD). Blue Underground has seen fit to re-issue the out-of-print Anchor Bay widescreen DVD release of Umberto Lenzi’s low-budget [...]

TEETH is a deceptive movie on first encounter. The DVD box is fairly tame, showing star Jess Weixler in a bubble bath, only her head showing, her eyes gazing at the camera with subtle menace, or arrogance. “Go ahead, screw with me,” they seem to warn. Turn the DVD box over and you realize the [...]

7th Voyage of Sinbad, produced by Charles H. Schneer
Charles H. Schneer – the producer of 7TH VOYAGE OF SINBAD and numerous other science fiction and fantasy films – passed away on January 21, at the age of 88.
Schneer’s filmography includes over twenty-five titles, but he will be most remembered for the twelve movies he produced [...]

Grim Noir in a Cinematic Splash Panel
Frank Miller’s vivid neo noir version of Will Eisner’s iconic comic hero is a mesmerizing mix of live action and garishly colored illustrated backgrounds, ala SIN CITY. While on the one hand its extravagantly CGI’d visual style may tend to distract from the thrust of its straightforward storytelling, it [...]

Director John Erick Dowdle’s Quarantine is such a faithful recreation of its source material – the acclaimed Spanish shocker [REC] (2007), which documented the outbreak of a virulent disease in a sealed-off apartment complex - that those who have already seen the original won’t see much new in this Americanized counterpart. But while Quarantine doesn’t surpass [...]

Academy nominates BENJAMIN BUTTON for Best Pic, WALL-E for Best Animated Film; DARK KNIGHT gets eight noms, including Ledger.
Taraji P. Henson and Brad Pitt earned two of 13 nominations for CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON
In a year when two of the most high profile films were superhero spectaculars that pleased audiences and impressed critics, and [...]