Cinefantastique Online

You are browsing the archives of 2009 January.

Drag Me to Hell opens May 29
The New Year has already given us THE UNBORN and MY BLOODY VALENTINE 3-D. Whether or not they are great, they are certainly better than the initial salvo of horror films back in January of 2008. What other new horrors does 2009 have in store for us? A mix [...]

Newsday has an interview with actor Brendan Fraser, discussing INKHEART.
The fantasy-adventure “Inkheart” features creatures and castles. Medieval hallucinations. Flying monkeys. Ominous, sky-filling specters. Helen Mirren on a motorcycle. It’s not what anyone would describe as “student filmmaking on a moderate budget.” Unless you’re Brendan Fraser. And you mean it as a compliment.
Fraser, the most unlikely [...]

Here are links to two reviews of MOON, the new science fiction film starring Sam Rockwell, which recently screened at the Sundance Film Festival

Film School Rejects
Fearnet.com

In the latter, Scott Weinberg had this to say:
Duncan Jones’ debut feature is one such science fiction film. Anchored by a fantastic Sam Rockwell performance, awash in the evocative sounds [...]

MY BLOOD VALENTINE IN 3D, the remake of the 1981 Canadian slasher film, opens in theatres nationwide today. Last night, director Paul Lussier and writer Todd Farmer attended a preview screening at the Arclight Cinemas Hollywood and answered questions about the film. (Lussier will be appearing after the 8:00pm screening of the film at the [...]

This film goes a long way toward giving remakes a good name. It takes a not particularly memorable film – one of a myriad holiday horror titles to follow in the wake of John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN (1978) – and turns it into a crowd-pleasing horror movie that is actually much better than the slasher films [...]

Well, now we know where those looping entrails in Dario Argento’s MOTHER OF TEARS came from: co-writers Jace Anderson and Adam Gierasch. Working from a script co-written with E.L. Katz, Anderson and Gierasch serve up ten times as many internal organs in AUTOPSY – with about one-tenth the effectiveness. The set-up is so simple, and [...]

“To the last will I grapple with thee. From Hell’s heart I stab at thee. For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee!” – Khan Noonien Singh (Ricardo Montalban) in STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN.
We really can’t blame a generation of Trekkies for perhaps not knowing that those words were not [...]

So far, this is the best of the “8 Films to Die For” in the 2009 After Dark Horrorfest. Rather than filling the screen with gore, violence, and cannibalism, THE BROKEN works from an intriguing premise to create an enigmatic mystery-thriller with overtones of paranoid horror. Shot in cool colors with slick production values and solid [...]

Sad news: actor Patrick McGoohan – who produced and starred in the esoteric cult show THE PRISONER in the 1960s – has died. From the Associated Press obituary by Andrew Dalton:
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Patrick McGoohan, an Emmy-winning actor who created and starred in the cult classic television show “The Prisoner,” has died. He was [...]

QUANTUM QUEST, a new 3-D, computer animated, large format, action-adventure film that interweaves animated sequences with actual space imagery captured from seven ongoing NASA and NASA/ESA space missions, will receive an equally large-scale musical score from award-winning composer Shawn Clement.
A multifaceted composer, Clement’s film credits include WE MARRIED MARGO and LAST CHANCE, with notable scores [...]

Do not buy a ticket to this movie. Do not rent this movie. Do not watch this movie for free. If you have a choice between seeing this movie and being incarcerated in Guantanamo, choose the latter, because sitting through this suckfest is such torture that it qualifies as a crime against humanity that should [...]

It seems as if Wes Craven has spent most of the new millennium executive producing direct-to-video fodder (DRACULA 2000, THE BREED) and/or co-writing remakes (THE HILLS HAVE EYES, PULSE), while only occasionally sitting in the directorial chair (RED EYE, CURSED). Now, in what has the potential to be a return to form, he has written [...]

[ March 13, 2009; ] It is not altogether clear that the world needs another version of LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, but the trailer for this remake (including a haunting cover version of “Sweet Child o’ Mine”)  is enough to intrigue even cynics like me. Since everything else under the sun is being remade, why not this one? The [...]