Cinefantastique Online

You are browsing the archives of 2009 July.

James Watkins’ EDEN LAKE won Empire’s Best Horror Award 2009, and was also nominated for their Best British Film Award. The film has some fine, young, British actors performing brilliantly as the threatening teenagers, most notably Jack O’Connell [ring leader Brett], Finn Atkins [Paige] and Thomas Turgoose [whom the London Critics’ Circle awarded their Young [...]

[ November 13, 2009; ] It’s another global disaster movie from director and co-writer Roland Emmerich. This time the high-powered cast includes John Cusack, Thandie Newton, Amanda Peet, Woody Harrelson, Danny GLover, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Oliver Platt, Morgan Lily, John Billingsley, George Segal, Liam James, and Patrick Bauchau.

On the one hand, Emmerich’s shtick is so old that it should be getting [...]

[ November 20, 2009; ] This computer-generated cartoon comedy turns the usual alien invasion on its head: it’s all about an astronaut from Earth who lands on the titular PLANET 51 and finds it inhabited by happy suburban beings terrified of an alien invasion. Jorge Blanco and co-directors Javier Abad and Marcos Martinez helmed the film, from a script by [...]

Love Bites: Jenny Spain as the DEADGIRL
Wow, midnight movies. I know they still happen, I just hadn’t recently heard of anyone basing a distribution pattern solely around the phenomenon. Nevertheless, the producers of DEADGIRL are rolling the dice on it, debuting their film at midnight this weekend (July 24 & 25, 2009), and dispatching the [...]

Tuesday July 21st’s DVD and Blu-ray releases offer something for cinefantastique fans of every stribe, whether your personal tastes run toward science fiction, fantasy, or horror. The top title of the week, at least in terms of sales figures, is WATCHMEN. The sprawling plotlines of Alan Moore’s well-regarded graphic novel did not translate well to [...]

WARNING: If you hate spoilers, do not read this review. If you want to see the new HARRY POTTER film without knowing what happens, do not read this review. If you do not want the entire plot, from beginning to end, totally revealed before you even buy your ticket, do not read this review. In [...]

Remember how scared you were when you first saw THE GRUDGE? Want to feel that way again? Well, it’s a good thing home video allows you to pop the 2004 film in the DVD player, because watching THE GRUDGE 3 is not going to invoke any of the atmospheric, irrational thrills you recollect from the [...]

American audiences are sick and tired of American J-Horror remakes and sequels, and who can blame them after ONE MISSED CALL, SHUTTER, and especially the dismal directo-to-video disturbance known as THE GRUDGE 3? Yet Japan continues to produce modern kaidan eiga (”ghost story movies”), and the most recent examples look pretty good, judging by the [...]

In WASTING AWAY, a tongue-in-cheek riff on RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, one of the characters has a penchant for creating weird food combinations, such as soft serve ice cream mixed with beer. Unfortunately, this culinary experiment hides the flavor of a toxic element that finds its way into the mix after a barrel falls [...]

This DVD collects the first two season’s worth of episodes from Aardman Animations’s British stop-motion television series, along with the 1990 Oscar-winning theatrical short subject on which the show is based. Each episode recreates the formula of the original film, mimicking a documentary format, with actual recorded interviews serving as dialogue spoken by a series of colorful [...]

CREATURE COMFORTS is the first Oscar-winning film from the unbeatable team of Aardman Animations and director Nick Park. Presented as a documentary, the 1990 stop-motion production features a series of interviews with zoo animals, who express an amusing variety of views regarding their stay in captivity – sometimes hilarious, sometimes poignant.
Much of the humor derives [...]

One of the most important works in the history of cinefantastique is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. Although not as widely read as it deserves to be, the novel has had a huge impact that lives on to this day, thanks to the many science fiction film and television adaptations, beginning with the 1925 [...]

Slashing swords, splashing blood, and flashy CGI – not to mention a hot chick in school uniform – sound like a cool combination, but the life bleeds out of BLOOD: THE LAST VAMPIRE long before the final reel.
Hey, you! Mr. CGI development guy - I’m talking to you! The one who created the software that renders [...]