Cinefantastique Online

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Writing for Hollywood Reporter’s Heat Vision department, Dan Carlson offers us a blog-y account of the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival’s preview of PREDATORS, in Austin, Texas. Carlson’s take is that the new sequeldirected by Nimrod Antal and produced by Robert Rodriguez, plays up the horror aspects while returning the franchise to its roots (i.e., [...]

[ August 21, 2009 to August 23, 2009. ] Warner Brothers releases another fantasy-kid flick from the creator of SPY KIDS. The plot follows a boy who discovery of a rock that grants wishes, but things go wrong when local adults get hold of it. Can our young hero and his two new-found friends save the residents of Black Falls from themselves? The studio must be hoping that this colorful comic fantasy is not another SPEED RACER at the box office.

Since this weekend is focused on the horror and fantasy films of Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez, including the latter’s 1996 film FROM DUSK TILL DAWN (scripted by Quentin Tarantino), we thought we should share this video clip of Salma Hayek as the vampire queen Santanico Pandemonium, dancing to the uber-cool song “After Dark.” This [...]

With the back-to-back home video releases of  THE SPIRIT and SIN CITY, now seems like an opportune moment to take a brief look at the cinefantastique of Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez. Although neither artist is a specialist in science fiction, fantasy, or horror films in quite the same way as someone like George Lucas, their [...]

SIN CITY is out on a new 2-Disc Blu-ray set this week. This was one of those uber-cool projects that actually lived up to its hype. There had been previous films with digitally created environments (SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW), but SIN CITY really used its technique to create something memorable. It wasn’t just Frank Miller’s [...]

Two years after the fact, this documentary about the making of FROM DUSK TILL DAWN reaches screens, and what an amusing account it is. Much of it is off-the-cuff and entertaining, but some parts have also clearly been staged for the benefit of the documentary, particularly the hilarious opening, wherein George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino [...]

It’s not easy being God – just ask Eric Clapton. Quentin Tarantino has achieved iconic status, to the point that it was widely assumed his involvement in this crime-horror hybrid would guarantee blockbuster success. What people forget, however, is that Tarantino has only one blockbuster to his credit (PULP FICTION). Not that artistic achievement should [...]

The Kevin Williamson formula (rewrite familiar horror scenarios and have the characters note the familiarity) has gotten to be a bore, and in this case it makes no sense. In a story patterned after INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (though it stumbles closer to INVADERS FROM MARS), the characters surmise that films like MIB and [...]

A Ground-Breaking Piece of Film-Noir Fantasy
Jessica Alba in "That Yellow Bastard"
This is a small milestone in the history of cinema: a $45-million film shot, on co-director Robert Rodriguez’s sound-stage in Austin, Texas, using actors in front of green screen to combine the cast with CGI backdrops, thus creating an artificial environment that simulates the [...]

The SIN CITY Blu-Ray is an easy early candidate for any 2009 discs of the year list.
Released almost exactly four years ago, the massive impact that SIN CITY had on the way Hollywood makes movies has been somewhat blunted by subsequent efforts utilizing the tools without the talent. SIN CITY was filmed using state-of-the-art digital [...]

This homage to exploitation cinema of decades past seeks is not so much a movie as a gimmick that links together two feature films, plus a handful of faux trailers and advertisements – all appropriately scratched and faded to recreate the experience of attending a second-rate “grindhouse” theatre playing beat-up old prints. As amusing as [...]