by Dan Persons

What I wanted to believe was that, despite conventional wisdom, one could go home again. What I wanted to believe was that a creative team, given six years to look back and rediscover the passion they once had for a project, would be able to channel that passion into something that would remind us of the best those people have to offer. What I wanted to believe was that the thrill was still there, and the fun. Continue Reading »

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This is a misleadingly titled giallo thriller in the tradition of Dario Argento’s THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE, FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET, and CAT O’NINE TAILS. Director Antonio Bido also borrows several stylistic tropes from Argento, particularly from DEEP RED: harsh violence; point-of-view shots; a repetitive, insistent main theme performed with a pop music arrangement instead of a traditional symphonic score. Consequently, CAT WITH JADE EYES (known in the U.S. as WATCH ME WHEN I KILL) is too derivative to stand on its own four furry paws, but it has enough feline grace to thrill fans of the form.

The story begins with a pharmacist being murdered. A nightclub dancer named Mara (Paola Tedesco) tries to enter the pharmacy, but a voice inside tells her the store is closed. When she later realizes that the voice belongs to the murderer, she enlists the aid of her boyfriend Lukas (Corrado Pani) instead of relying on the police. Coincidentally, an acquaintance of theirs is receiving threatening phone calls from the same unidentified voice. As the bodies pile up, suspicion initially turns upon a recently released convict - the victims sat on his jury - but later evidence points the amateur investigation in another direction, having to do with a grim secret related to the past. Continue Reading »

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The American Cinematheque will soon be launching its eighth annual Festival of Sci Fi, Fantasy, and Horror, which will screen at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood and the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica. Special events will include the U.S. debut of RE-CYCLE (the new film from EYE-directors Danny & Oxide Pang), a colorized, digitally restored version of FORBIDDEN ZONE (with additional guests not mentioned in our first post about the event here), a live presentation called The Lydeckers: Special Effects Pioneers (including a tour of the Lydecker House in Studio City), the debut of BRINGING GODZILLA DOWN TO SIZE (a documentary by kaiju experts Norman England and Steve Ryfle), the U.S. debut of STAR WARS: THE CLONE WARS, a double bill of ALIEN and ALIENS (both of which made their debuts at the Egyptian Theatre), a LORD OF THE RINGS marathon (featuring all three feature films in one day), a tribute to the late makeup effects artist Stan Winston, and a post-apocalyptic weekend (featuring WIZARDS, DAMNATION ALLEY, A BOY AND HIS DOG, THE LAST MAN ON EARTH, THE OMEGA MAN, and 12 MONKEYS).

Read a complete schedule of events below the fold. Continue Reading »

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This movie is so absolutely godawful that it’s almost impossible to know where to begin listing its faults. Perhaps the best place would be its story, which is just an empty rehash of what came before. As bad as I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER was, at least the plot had a bit of an idea built in, with a group of characters haunted not just by a hook-wielding psycho-killer but by their own guilty complicity that has made them targets. Well, the ending of that film pretty much exonerated everyone involved: sure, they’d run somebody over and tried to hide the victim’s body and then tried to kill him when he turned out to be alive-but hey, he was a homicidal son-of-a-bitch even before all that, so what are they feeling guilty about? Continue Reading »

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 By Anthony Montesano

By the late 1980s, the slasher genre had run out of blood. It had its roots in Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO (1960) and really got going with the release of John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN (1978) and FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980). But endless sequels and rip-offs (PROM NIGHT, APRIL FOOL’S DAY, etc) churned out all-too-familiar stories, offering nothing fresh or innovative. By the 1990s, the sub-genre had all but died and was regulated to direct-to-video trash. In 1996, director Wes Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson took a smart, tongue-in-cheek look at the form with SCREAM, which changed all that and gave the genre its first $100 million hit. Following on the heels of that crossover success, Williamson has teamed with director Jim Gillespie and mined a Lois Duncan novel to create I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER. Continue Reading »

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When I first sat down at the old word processor and tried to write a review of this film, I found that I could barely recollect the details, even though I had attended a screening only a couple weeks previously. I could barely remember anything to say. Then I realized: even that says something about the film - like, maybe, it’s not very memorable.The basic impression I have now of URBAN LEGENDS: FINAL CUT is that it’s very much like the first one, which is to say: not very good. As in the original, the essential effectiveness of urban legends is subverted by the usual slasher movie conventions. It’s as if no one really thinks urban legends are good enough to form the basis of a movie, so they embellish them with typical shock tactics (e.g., the masked killer jumping into frame), and you’re left wondering, “If they don’t like the source material, then why even make the movie?” Continue Reading »

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One of the interesting things about Urban Legends is that, although people believe them, many do not hold up to scrutiny: simply examining the details will reveal that they are wildly improbable or outright impossible. This problem haunts URBAN LEGENDS, which asks us to believe in a serial killer who is modeling murders on such folk tales as the Killer in the Back of the Car. Left dangling are the same questions posed by the stories: how did the killer get back there, and why didn’t the driver notice? Compounding this is the script’s having the victims act in ways that conveniently set up the legend that the killer then carries out. Is screenwriter Silvio Horta implying some kind of complicity between killer and victim? (No, its just a lame plot device.) Finally, most urban legends don’t end with the death of their lead character - apparently, the killer is not adverse to rewriting popular folklore. Continue Reading »

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by Dan Persons

A quartet of unemployed actors — inspired by the latest lo-fi film festival winner and retreating to a cabin in the country to plot out their own career-building debut — have the course of their project and, possibly, their lives turned around when one of them espies a mysterious, paper bag shrouded stranger in the woods. Yes, BAGHEAD is SCREAM for the brainy set: a mumblecore horror film about people making a mumblecore horror film, perpetrated by two masters of the form: Mark and Jay Duplass. Cinetantastique Online’s Dan Persons sat down with the directors Continue Reading »

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THE DARK KNIGHT dominated the box office on its opening weekend, selling more tickets than the remaining Top Ten films combined. The latest adventure of the Caped Crusader opened in 4,366 theatres, where it earned an awesome $155.34-million, according to weekend estimates. (By way of comparison, the previous film, BATMAN BEGINS, opened with $48.75-million and went on to earn a U.S. total of $205.34-million.) Even if DARK KNIGHT suffers a sharp drop-off, which seems inevitable, it will easily surpass $200-million, and has a shot at reaching the $300-million mark - a level reached this summer by IRON MAN and INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL. Continue Reading »

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May be the best comic book move ever.

By John T. Stanhope

Here it is, straight up. Mark Hamill has always been the best Joker there ever was, ever. Until now. This means it’s pretty safe to say that just about all you’ve heard regarding the late Heath Ledger (the upcoming THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS) and his performance in THE DARK KNIGHT is true. The young man was driven in his role in a manner that Jack Nicholson could only dream of. But then, 1989’s BATMAN didn’t allow for such a sick, twisted, dark, maniacal take on the character. Let’s face it, the ‘80’s/’90’s versions of the beloved caped crusader were…well, a joke. Continue Reading »

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By Peter McGarvey

You know it’s going to get grim when the film opens with a murky bat symbol against boiling black clouds.

And THE DARK KNIGHT is grim, unrelentingly so. Christopher Nolan’s second round in the Batman saga is the most fully realized superhero film ever made and certainly the most literate. The story this time is much more complex and much more focused, unlike BATMAN BEGINS, which was really two storylines grafted together. Nolan carefully braids the main characters together in an ever tightening storyline that arrives at a stunning and, somewhat shocking conclusion.

THE DARK KNIGHT is truly a movie about monsters – the Joker, Harvey Dent/Two Face and even Batman himself – consumed by hubris and passion. Much has already been written about Heath Ledger’s Joker - he is, in turn, terrifying, brutal and funny - acts as a kind of twisted Jiminy Cricket to Batman’s Pinocchio. The Joker’s main obsession is his desire to release the monster that he knows resides within all of us. Continue Reading »

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by Dan Persons

In New York? Think you’ve got the chops to rock a Peter Parker or a Mary Jane? Think you can tolerate getting the phrase, “All-Slinging, All-Dancing,” repeatedly hurled at you?  Then the producers of the upcoming Broadway musical, SPIDER-MAN, want to talk to you. Continue Reading »

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KUNG FU PANDA is a not-so-little animated film from DreamWorks that is actually kinda “mystical and kung fu-ey.” It could have been a one-joke picture (as I feared from the early trailers), or another film filled with modern, hip jokes & references (like SHREK or A SHARK’S TALE – entertaining though they may have been). Instead, the writers and directors of this project, Jonathon Aibel & Glen Berger (KING OF THE HILL) and Mark Osborne (SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS) & John Stevenson (art dept. on SHREK 2, MADAGASCAR), respectively, have a sincere understanding and fondness of Chinese kung fu films of yesteryear. The result is a film that is cute and entertaining for youngsters, but also serves up a nice helping of fun and nostalgia for us older folk, especially those who really understand and feel all warm & squishy about the butt-kicking martial arts genre. And if you’re paying attention at all, you can see several parallels to the last 3 STAR WARS films. Frankly, it handles those related themes better - certainly more entertainingly. Continue Reading »

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by Dan Persons

No, that title’s not a typo. It’s missing an article, maybe as a favor to multiplex managers who have to conserve marquee letters.

For that matter, I’m not sure what “Adventures” is doing in there either, since Johnny (Matthew Twining) doesn’t do all that much adventuring. The son of one-hit singing wonder Jimmy Dow (get it?), whose magic guitar hangs in the museum/shrine at the back of Johnny’s small-town gas station, the kid takes back seat in a number of the earlier fight sequences, while most of the kick-ass onus falls on agile actress Chris Yen, Continue Reading »

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The eagerly anticipated THE DARK KNIGHT rolls out with a series of midnight screenings tonight, including several IMAX engagements. So far, the film has earned a 92% fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes. The big guns like Roger Ebert and Andrew Sarris are falling all over themselves finding words of praise to bestow upon the film, but just to be contrary, I thought I would link to this negative review by Stephanie Zacharek at Salon.com. Zacharek, who also disliked BATMAN BEGINS, finds little to praise beyond Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker.

Nolan — who co-wrote the script with his brother, Jonathan, working from a story he conceived with David S. Goyer — gives us enough multilayered subplots to at least fool us into thinking this is a work of intellectual and moral complexity. But as a piece of visual storytelling, from shot to shot, “The Dark Knight” is a mess … [that] looks as if it were made from a … blackboard diagram with lots of circles, heavily underlined phrases (”Duality! Good vs. evil — in the same person! Kinship between hero and villain!”) and crisscrossing arrows that ultimately point to nothing.

I actually expect DARK KNIGHT to be much better than Zacharek would have us believe, but her negative remarks may prevent our expectations from going so high that they cannot possibly be met.

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