Cinefantastique Online

Randall Larson contributed “The Score” column to Cinefantastique magazine from 1983 to 1999. The author of Musique Fantastique, A Survey of Film Music in the Fantastic Cinema (1984) and Music from the House of Hammer (1996), Larson also published CinemaScore: The Film Music Journal during the 1980s. He currently writes a bi-weekly film music column for buysoundtrax.com, reviews horror soundtrack CDs for Cemetery Dance magazine, writes for Music from the Movies and Film Music magazines, and writes soundtrack CD liner note books.

A thoroughly entertaining, likable, and satisfying zombie thriller, despite its obvious low budget.
Unlike other half-baked attempts at low-budget horror-making, Marc Fratto’s movie has a great plot, convincing performances, effective camerawork, and a well played-out storyline. In Fratto’s take on the NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD zombie concept, the newly dead becomes zombies and crave human [...]

A very enjoyable cyberpunk action thriller. Despite often murky photography and less than convincing CGI, the storyline provides an interesting set of characters and a fair amount of heart that works together to provide a satisfying little film that is fairly well handled by first-time director from Singapore, Pearry Teo (who went on to write [...]

Tyler Bates’ Music for Doctor Manhattan & Friends
With his pulsating and edgy score for Scott Derrickson’s revisualization of the science fiction classic THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL behind him, composer Tyler Bates now reunites with Zach Snyder, his director on both the 2004 DAWN OF THE DEAD remake and the graphically-intense 300 to compose [...]

Reflecting back on 2008’s most interesting scores for science fiction, fantasy, and horror films, one can’t help noticing once again how few genre scores (and, in fact, genre films) are recognized when the Oscars come around. While Thomas Newman’s tune-pleasing WALL-E score and Alexandre Desplat’s sublime music for THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON received [...]

A Tasty Terror Treat from Korea
This  remarkable and effective, if uneven and a tad overlong, dark fantasy from Korea takes the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale, grafts it into the essence of the “It’s A Good Life” TWILIGHT ZONE episode and tells a story about lonely and abused children seeking a normal and loving family. [...]

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Japan has taken over the Hong Kong franchise from Stephen Chow in this stylized off-shoot of SHAOLIN SOCCER, and like that film it’s a fun mix of comedy, kung fu action, wire-fu fantasy, intrigue, and yakuza.
Kou Shibasaki plays a small town Japanese girl sent to Hong Kong’s famous Shaolin Temple to train in [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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Tyler Bates’ has crafted a primarily dissonant, pulsating, and edgy score for the 2008 interpretation of the classic science fiction cautionary tale, THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, one that is well in keeping with director Scott Derrickson’s epic of near-cataclysmic destruction while also sharing the film’s sense of humanity and harmony. Bates’ [...]

Composer Elia Cmiral with SPLINTER actress Jill Wagner
Composer Elia Cmiral’s recent score for SPLINTER is the latest in a dozen or more horror or fantasy film scores concocted by the composer since he emerged in 1986. While he can be equally adroit at action-thrillers like RONIN, science fiction like BATTLEFIELD: EARTH, television series like NASH [...]

Film composer Irving Gertz, a significant contributor to the music of the Universal science fiction film boom of the 1950s whose music was heard in dozens of the studios classic sf and horror films of the decade, died on Nov. 14 in Los Angeles, at the age of 93.
The youngest of eight children, Gertz was [...]

New Zealand director Peter Burger’s horror film THE TATTOOIST, recently released on DVD, has a way of imprinting itself on the viewer. It’s a unique horror film that envelops itself with Samoan culture and develops a very interesting ghost story out of that culture and the spiritual aspects of Samoan tattoo. Taking place in the [...]