Cinefantastique Online

News, reviews, interviews & retrospectives about your favorite horror, fantasy, and science fiction films

Practically omnipresent and infinitely versatile, Malcolm McDowell has played, among others, a rebellious private school student, a futuristic sociopath, a degenerate emperor, Michael Myer’s nemesis, and the killer of Captain Kirk. He has worked with directors that have included Stanley Kubrick, Paul Schrader and Rob Zombie. He’s pretty much done it all, including a brief [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

STAR TREK is back, Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) is still flouting the rules, director J.J. Abrams is still dividing the fan base, but amazingly, inconceivably, there’s no dissent within the Cinefantastique Online ranks this time: Steve Biodrowski, Lawrence French, and Dan Persons all agree that STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS is supreme, quintessential TREK adventure. Telling [...]

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 [...]

As MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000′S TV’s Frank, comedian and writer Frank Conniff became possibly the most cuddly mad scientist in history. From his debut television appearance that started with the show’s second season — for which he scripted and also pre-screened the “cheesy movies” that would torture host Joel Hodgson and crew — Conniff went [...]

It is not an understatement to say that, for many who work within the industry of fantastic film and those who cover it, Ray Harryhausen was one of the key godfathers of the Sense of Wonder. In such films as EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS, THE SEVENTH VOYAGE OF SINBAD, JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS, and [...]

Welcome to the banality of evil, Ben Wheatley-style: In his horror comedy SIGHTSEERS, a couple (Alice Lowe and Steve Oram, who also scripted) decides to take a caravan trip across the British Isles. But, really, who could enjoy such marvels as an antique tramway or the pencil museum when such distractions as litterers, rowdy Wiccans, [...]

Editor’s Note: One recurring theme to emerge in the wake of Ray Harryhausen’s death yesterday was the tremendous influence his work continues to exert over today’s filmmakers, over three decades since his last film, CLASH OF THE TITANS (1981). With that in mind, we are publishing this 2006 article, which uses the occasion of Harryhausen’s [...]

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.