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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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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by Dan Persons

Come to scenic, Mars-based Neo-Venezia, where beautiful, female gondoliers paddle… gondolas and… look beautiful. That’s essentially the gist of the trailer you’ll find here, promoting Rightstuf’s upcoming release of ARIA THE ANIMATION (click the tabs at the left to start the video). Sure looks pretty, in any case.

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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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I am two months late on this, but I wanted to make a comment regarding this post. Appropos of GIALLO, the latest production from Dario Argento (MOTHER OF TEARS), the Blood-Spattered Scribe remarks:

In a way, Dario Argento is like an absentee father for horror fans. No matter how many times he forgets our birthday, bounces a child support payment, or not show up to take us to the zoo, we still love him because…he’s Dario! Just watching 5 minutes of Suspiria or Bird with the Crystal Plumage and we forget all about…well, just about every other picture over the last 10 years.

I like the absent-father metaphor, but I have to object to the time frame: Argento’s last ten years have not been his best, but they have been a considerable improvement over his work in the ’90s. After the brilliant period that culminated in 1982’s TENEBRE (his masterpiece), Argento delivered over a decade of disappointments, with only an occasional flash of the old brilliance. He seemed on the verge of becoming, like John Carpenter, a filmmaker churning out the same old thing over and over without any new inspiration.

Then in 1998, Argento descended to the absolute nadir of his career with PHANTOM OF THE OPERA - which was almost enough to make even hardcore fans abandon their idol. In retrospect, PHANTOM seems like a brilliant career move - a film so bad that everything afterward, per force, seemed like a comeback. SLEEPLESS was a return to form - not necessarily vintage Argento but close enough to be respectable, and the fine performance by Max Von Sydow certainly helped. THE CARD PLAYER’s depiction of online poker was seriously flawed (it’s supposed to be about matching wits, but it comes across like random chance), but the film was slick and effective. DO YOU LIKE HITCHCOCK did not feature the expected bravura visual stylings, but the low-key approach was matched with a reasonably effective thriller scenario that avoided overt brutality in favor of an homage to the American master of suspense. And of course, MOTHER OF TEARS trounced the upstart gore films of the new millennium, putting the young upstart filmmakers in their place.

So yes, Argento is like a absent father whose past neglect we overlook because we remember the good times, but over the course of the past ten years he has at least been trying harder to be attentive. So I think we should forget the past and let bygones be bygones - as long as he doesn’t announce plans to make PHANTOM 2.

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FORBIDDEN ZONE, the 1980 black-and-white cult film written and directed by Richard Elfman, is getting a new lease on life, courtesy of digital colorization by Legend films (the company responsible for recently releasing such neglected titles on DVD as THE MAN WHO COULD CHEAT DEATH and THE SKULL). To promote the July 29 release of the colorized FORBIDDEN ZONE on DVD, Elfman will attend an American Cinematheque screening of the film on Wednesday, July 30 at 8:00pm in the Egyptian Theatre, Hollywood, along with other guests to be announced. Cult movie fans and fans of Oingo-Boingo will certainly want to pick up a copy of the DVD (the director’s brother, Oingo-Boingo front-man Danny Elfman, provided the music and appears in a small role), but the movie is such a wild ride that a cinema screening, along with a theatre full of like-minded fans, adds an extra layer to the entertainment.

Click below the fold to read the press release. Continue Reading »

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by Dan Persons

It’s online, it’s free (until Sunday), and man, is it cool. Spawned from a desire to keep people working during the writer’s strike, Joss Whedon’s serialized, musical, low-budget, love-starved supervillain vs. asshole superhero watchamacallit, DR. HORRIBLE’S SING-ALONG BLOG is being debuted all this week. Act I is now up, with Act II being released July 17 and Act III on July 19. (Past Sunday, you’ll have to pony up to watch, either through download or eventual DVD release.)

Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion, and Felicia Day star & sing their hearts out. Catch it here.

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Vincent Price is rightly noted for his fine speaking voice and suave, polished presence through which he can convey eerie graduations of a sinister motivating force.

—ROGER CORMAN

My voice has sort of been my trademark and I don’t know why, because to me, I sound like everybody else in America. My brother, who wasn’t in the theater at all, had exactly the same voice I had.

—VINCENT PRICE

Introduction by Lawrence French

The following interview with Vincent Price was transcribed and edited from the radio show, THE GOLDEN AGE OF RADIO, that was first broadcast on the Hartford, CT radio station WTIC, in November of 1972 . Many years ago I got an audio tape of this broadcast from a collector, but it only included excerpts from Price’s answers. It was also, unfortunately, after CFQ published it’s special Vincent Price issue in 1989, so I couldn’t include any quotes from this interview in our special Price issue! But, even in it’s truncated form, I felt it was Vincent Price at his best, talking expansively about what he himself called his “favorite entertainment medium: Radio.”

Continue Reading »

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 It was a good weekend for cinefantastique at the box office. If you are only a bit liberal with the definitions of fantasy and science fiction, nine of the Top Ten films fell into the genres. If not for KIT KITTREDGE: AN AMERICAN GIRL at #8 (which pushed INCREDIBLE HULK down to #11), genre films could have gone ten for ten.

HELLBOY 2: THE GOLDEN ARMY climbed out of the pit and scaled its way to box office paradise. The superhero fantasy from writer-director Guillermo Del Toro opened in 3,204 North American theatres, wehre it earned an estimated$35.89-million. That was considerably higher than the first HELLBOY managed on its opening weekend in April of 2004 ($23.17-million), indicating that the franchise has expanded its appeal, thanks to people who saw the first film on television and/or home video.

Last week’s first place winner HANCOCK fell - but not by much - in its second weekend, landing at #2. The superhero comedy starring Will Smith added $33.00-million to its two-week total of $165.03-million.

JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH dug its way into third place. The 3D version fantasy-adventure remake of Jules Verne’s novel opened in 2,8111 hteatres, earning a so-so $20.58-million. Expect a sharp decline next weekend, followed by a slide into the depths of home video.

WALL-E, the cute little robot, showed more legs at the box office than he did on screen, rolling into fourth place on its third week of release - down from second place. With $18.51-million in ticket sales, the film raised its total to $162.77-million.

WANTED also remained reasonably strong with a $11.59-million weekend, blasting its way from #3 to #5. After three weeks the total stands at $112.05-million.

GET SMART also stayed near the top of the class, seating itself in sixth place (down two from the previous session). The $7.11-million weekend raised the four-week total to $111.47-million.

MEET DAVE was not warmly welcomed by the public. The alleged sci-fi comedy starring Eddie Murphy made its debut in 3,011 theatres, earning only $5.3-million - landing in seventh place. Don’t expect word-of-mouth to save this one.

KUNG FU PANDA dropped three slots into eight position, kicking its way to $4.3-million. After six weeks, the total earnings are $202.04-million.

Rounding out the Top Ten was INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL, which went from #7 to #10 with $2.25-million. The eight-week total of $310.48-million is still a shade behind the $311.71-million of IRON MAN.

Dropping out of the Top Ten was THE INCREDIBLE HULK, which smashed its way from #6 to #11. The fifth weekend in theatres netted $2.23-million, for a total of $129.82-million. At this rate, the sequel should just about match the U.S. total of its predecessor, HULK, which earned $132.12-million in American theatres.

Read the complete Top Ten here.

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by Dan Persons

One of the more curious entries in the profile-of-a-serial-killer pantheon, They Pushed Him Too Far subcategory. Shot in Denmark¹, CRAIG suffers from some typical, direct-to-video maladies, including time-padding longueurs in the dialogue, sloppiness in the audio mix (room tone, guys — record it, catalog it, cut it in), and an occasional lack of imagination when it comes to a limited budget (a coma victim winds up in a hospital where the staff seemingly feels no need to hook her up to all that pesky monitoring equipment). Continue Reading »

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The Los Angeles Times notes that somewhere along the way, JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH 3D shortened its title to simply JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH. The 3D process was not abandoned, but exhibitors did not upgrade theatres as quickly as expected, creating a situation in which the original title would have been deceptive, because most engagements will be featuring a 2D presentation of the film:

The film’s producers were confident … that there could be as many as 1,400 North American theaters equipped to show “Journey” in its intended 3-D format by the film’s premiere, so that the film’s startling sea creatures (among other eye-popping effects) really would jump out of the water.

But as July approached, theater owners were converting their auditoriums to 3-D at a much slower pace than “Journey’s” makers anticipated, meaning there would be only about 800 domestic theaters ready to show the film in 3-D. Warner Bros. (which recently absorbed “Journey” maker New Line Cinema) was forced not only to shorten the film’s title by eliminating “3D,” but also had to tweak its advertising campaign to make clear that many theaters — about 2,000, in fact — would be showing the movie in the traditional two-dimensional format.

The article goes on to recount the now-familiar 3D story: Although box office grosses have remained steady thanks to rising ticket prices, actual admissions are down, and many Hollywood heavyweights think that 3D is a way to tear people away from their high-def televisions and videogames. Several major Digital 3D productions (including James Cameron’s AVATAR) are in the works, but so far exhibition is limited mostly to high-end theatres (including many IMAX theatres). Local theatre owners have been slow to purchase the expensive digital equipment. If JOURNEY turns out to be a hit, its success could light a fire under exhibitors.

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In a snarky post titled “Bloggers 1: Science 0,” coeruleus.blogspot takes aim at the conservative blogosphere’s theory du jour to explain away global warming: the rise in arctic temperatures is due to undersea volcanoes. The post offers an even more radical theory for the melting of arctic ice…

The only flaw I can find in this theory is that Godzilla, being of Japanese origin, tends to spend more time in the Southern hemisphere, closer to Antarctica.

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