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Do Do That Career Advancement That You Do So Well: Janet Blair prevails upon supernatural forces to help Peter Wyngarde in BURN, WITCH, BURN.
Tricky situation this week: Two genre releases, but one, while good, is getting a very limited release to start; the other, while making it to more venues, doesn’t quite merit the attention. [...]

As part of Cinefantastique’s 50th anniversary tribute to TALES OF TERROR (1962), we recently posted a podcast discussing producer-director Roger Corman’s three-part omnibus of horror inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe. As scintillating as the podcast conversation might be, it cannot capture the aesthetic achievements of the film, which features impressive production design [...]

With no new horror, fantasy, or science fiction films opening this weekend, Cinefantastique stalwarts Lawrence French and Steve Biodrowski keep their Sense of Wonder alive by turning the clock back five decades for a retrospective celebration of TALES OF TERROR (1962), producer-director Roger Corman’s fourth film inspired by the work of Edgar Allan Poe. With [...]

Despite a trailer that features Santa Claus being shot out of the sky, a stop-motion animated sequence, a baby so stoned that it can crawl on the ceiling, and Neil Patrick Harris insisting he’s straight, we weren’t secure enough in A VERY HAROLD & KUMAR 3D CHRISTMAS’ genre bona-fides to dedicate an entire episode to [...]

Bots that Box: Hugh Jackman (right), Evangeline Lilly (behind bench) and Dakota Goyo say hello to a new contender in REAL STEEL.
The official Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots movie is still in the planning stages, but until then, we have REAL STEEL, the Disney/DreamWorks family-friendly take on a world in which the squared circle has [...]

TWILIGHT ZONE plot goes high tech with Hugh Jackman in its corner.

The L.A. Times says “sources” tell them that John Davis, a 20th Century Fox-based producer who was involved with ALIEN Vs. PREDATOR and the will Smith vehicle I, ROBOT has optioned the rights to Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles.
The book is a loosely connected selection of short stories, some that have little to [...]

USA Today features pictures and press info on the in-production SF film REAL STEEL. (click on photo for larger view)
Directed by Shawn Levy (NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM), takes place in the near-future setting of 2020, by which robot boxers have replaced humans in the ring.
Hugh Jackman plays one of these replaced fighters, now out of [...]

The talented fantasy writer Charles Beaumont died tragically young at the age of 38 in 1967. He is now the subject of a fascinating new documentary film titled “Charles Beaumont: The Short Life of Twilight Zone’s Magic Man.” The doc features interviews with numerous people who worked with Beaumonth, including author Richard Matheson, who shares some stories with CFQ about his good friend and sometime collaborator.

When Richard Matheson’s novel Hell House came out in 1971, its fusion of traditional haunted house elements with explicit sex and violence was quite shocking, as most horror novels prior to William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist avoided graphic material in favor of suggesting the shudders. While not up to the high standard of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting [...]

Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend may not be as famous as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but it is as least as influential on the development of modern vampire cinema. Not only have there been three official film adaptations; Matheson’s science-fiction approach to vampirism prefigures the majority of modern film treatments of the subject, and the [...]

Thanks to the impending blockbuster theatrical release of I AM LEGEND last month, Warner Brothers Home Video dug into the mothballs and unearthed 1971’s THE OMEGA MAN, offering it on DVD, HD-DVD, and Blu-ray disc. THE OMEGA MAN did not much critical respect in its own time, but over the years it has developed a pleasant patina of [...]

With Warner Bros. impending release of I Am Legend, I recently checked out The Omega Man with Charlton Heston, the second abortive attempt at bringing Richard Matheson’s classic end of the world novel to the screen.  That brought to mind a piece by columnist Marilyn Beck, claiming that Charlton Heston wanted to make the movie after [...]