Cinefantastique Online

Cinefantastique's Los Angeles Correspondent from 1987 to 1993 and West Coast Editor from 1993 to 1999. Currently the webmaster of Cinefantastique Online, I also run a website called Hollywood Gothique that covers Halloween Horror and Sci-Fi Cinema Events in the Los Angeles area.

Blue Sky Pictures offers epic artistry bereft of lively characters or dialogue.
EPIC – the new computer-animated film from 20th Century Fox and Blue Sky Studios – marks an achievement of note, though not of honor: it is the most beautiful boring movie ever made. The 3D virtual photography is not merely eye candy; it is [...]

LA NOCHE DE WALPURGIS (”The Night of Walpurgis,” 1971)  is the third film in which Spanish actor Paul Naschy portrayed Waldemar Daninsky, a nobleman cursed with lycanthropy. As in the previous year’s LOS MONSTROUS DEL TERROR (”The Monsters of Terror,” a.k.a. ASSIGNMENT TERROR), Daninsky is revived when the silver bullets that “killed” him in the [...]

While visiting a Los Angles courthouse last month to testify at the murder trial of Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, I had a strangely irrelevant epiphany: Those of us with a Sense of Wonder are living in the Golden Age of Gods and Monsters. This revelation had nothing to do with our legal system and everything to [...]

20th Century Fox releases this production from Blue Sky Studios (ICE AGE, ROBOTS) on Friday May 24 (with previews starting Thursday evening). The 3-D computer-animated film tells the story of a teenage girl (Amanda Seyfried) who discovers that her father’s belief in a miniature race of forest people is true; shrinking down to their size, [...]

Cinefantastique Online’s first video review boldly goes on a STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS. The second Enterprise outing from director J.J. Abrams does what no STAR TREK film has done before: achieve greatness for the second time in a row. On the CFQ Review scale, STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS earns four out of five stars, making [...]

Director J.J. Abrams is back in the captain’s chair, piloting the U.S.S. Enterprise through more explosions, more lens flare – in fact, more of just about everything that disenchanted Trekkies with STAR TREK (2009) – and this time all of it is enhanced with enough eye-popping 3D to make these angry fans switch their phasers [...]

Having spent the better part of the morning posting new articles about Ray Harryhausen, and digging up old ones from the CFQ archive, you would think I had nothing more to say about the revered cine-magician, who passed away today at the age of 92. Yet even after writing an obituary that attempted to asses [...]

There are several fan-made montages of monsters from Ray Harryhausen films, but this is one of the best, thanks in no small part to its use of soundtrack music composed by Bernard Herrmann (who contributed to Harryhausen’s THE 7TH VOYAGE OF SINBAD and MYSTERIOUS ISLAND).

In this 1974 television interview (including film clips from ONE MILLION, B.C. and JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS), Ray Harryhausen demonstrates of the basics of the stop-motion special effects technique and explains how the special effects sequences were dreamed up for his movies.

See one of the greatest sequences ever crafted by stop-motion magician Ray Harryhausen: the skeleton battle from the climax of JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS.

Courtesy of Warner Brothers Online, check out this video interview with Ray Harryhausen, who discusses the changes he made to Medusa in order to make her work as a stop-motion character in CLASH OF THE TITANS (1981).

On April 23, 2006, Ray Harryhausen attended a screening of THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica, California. The screening, courtesy of the American Cinematheque, was billed as “The Two Rays,” because Harryhausen’s friend Ray Bradbury was scheduled to attend. Harryhausen, of course, provided the stop-motion special effects that brought [...]

Ray Harryhausen, the special effects genius who used stop-motion effects to enchant a generation of film-goers, has passed away. According to The Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation Facebook page, Harryhausen died in London today, May 7 (less than two months short of what would have been his 93rd birthday).
Harryhausen caught the filmmaking bug after watching [...]