Posted by Jonathan in Games, Latest News on March 16th, 2010
Hate waking up not knowing where you are? Well, so does Daniel. But unfortunately for him, an easy answer like “tequila shots the night before” won’t explain the fact that he awakens in a desolate castle with few memories of his past.
Soon PC and MAC users (hooray, more games for OS X!) will be able to jump into Daniel’s shoes in Amnesia: The Dark Descent, an upcoming survival horror game developed by Frictional Games. Left with only your wits, gamers will explore the eerie pathways of the castle’s chambers, tackling demons on the outside as well as inside Daniel’s trouble memories. So far the game kind of looks like Myst on caffeine.
For those of you not familiar, Frictional Games previously developed the Penumbra series, an intended trilogy of adventure/horror survival games. On February 5 it was announced The Dark Descent had reached the alpha stage of development for all platforms, and it set for release August 2010.
Below is an actual gameplay teaser — pretty scary stuff!
Posted by Jesse in Arts, Books, DVD & Blu-Ray, Events, Latest News, Movies, Television & Web Series, Toys & Collectibles on March 16th, 2010
We here at Famous Monsters love the Rondos, and who wouldn’t?
Begun in 2002 by David Colton and Kerry Gammill over at the scare-tastic Classic Horror Film Board, the Rondo Awards are dedicated to honoring achievements in classic horror, recognizing everything from “Best Movie,” to ”Best DVD Commentary” to “Best Horror Host.” Lucky winners receive a beautifully sculpted bust in the likeness of famed horror star Rando Hatton (The Pearl of Death, House of Horrors), for whom the award is named. And now, every year, the cool ghouls of the internet come together to celebrate the best and brightest in the world of classic horror, science fiction and cult films.
The best part is that anyone can vote. Your voice matters! As a fan of all that is classic horror (and surely that is you, fair reader, for who else would frequent the abode of the Ackermonster?), it is your sacred franchise to cast your ballot in favor of your favorite fiends.
Hit up the Rondo Awards’ official site when it is Kong-venient, and cast your vote!
While every category should be of great interst to FM readers, we wanted to single out a few awards and nominees that have particularly wowed us this year.
A bounty of excellent films from 2009 is present In the Best Movie category. Last year was a particularly rich one for genre fans, and pictures like Henry Selick’s beautiful Coraline, Neill Blompkamp’s astounding and provoking District 9, Sam Raimi’s delerious Drag Me To Hell and Duncan Jones’ mind-bending Moon represented the best of what genre cinema can be.
Fan favorites from the TV category include the final season of SyFy’s milestone Battlestar Galactica, Fox’s brilliant head-scratcher Fringe, as well as perennials Lost and HBO’s vampire drama True Blood.
This writer needs to single out the extremely overdue release of Night of the Creeps in a wonderful collector’s edition, for the Best Classic DVD category, as well as the Beware the Moon documentary from last fall’s excellent An American Werewolf in London special edition. When it comes to Best Commentaries, we were blessed with an embarrassment of riches last year, with Fred Dekker offering insights into the aforementioned Night of the Creeps, ace film historians Greg Mank and Tom Weaver (with guests Bob Burns and Charlotte Austin) lending great depth and context to classic Karloff creepers The Walking Dead and Frankenstein 1970, respectively, as well as another great duo of commentaries from Japanese film experts Steve Ryfle and Ed Godziszewski for the Toho Science Fiction Collection.
If you head over the Rondo site, you’ll be greeted by the incredible nominees for Best Magazine Cover, including a Plague of the Zombies/The Reptile tribute, in the form of a startling contribution to Little Shoppe of Horrors by Bruce Timm.
Best Website has a daunting number of nominees (including yours truly, a-thank you), and surely one of the coolest of the bunch has to be director Joe Dante’s amazing Trailers From Hell, where Joe invites several celebrity buddies in to provide commentary for some of the greatest genre trailers. Everything from Attack of the 50ft. Woman, to Stanely Kubrick’s classic crime caper The Killing is up for your amusement, with commentators like Larry Cohen, John Landis, Eli Roth, Edgar Wright, and Roger Corman himself!
Nominated for Best Article is Steve Vertlieb’s excellent “The Most Famous Monster of Them All: A Personal Remembrance of Forrest J. Ackerman,” a feature FM is proud to have re-presented on our site. Also relating to Forry, Joe Moe’s wonderful tribute to the Ackermonster at the Egyptian Theatre is nominated for Best Fan Event.
The Best Toy, Model or Collectible category has too many goodies to name, but who wouldn’t want that Dracula ornament for the tree? Or to have Boris Karloff (with three changeable heads!) glaring down at you from the top of your desk?
And we would be remiss if we didn’t remind readers that we’re all partial to Eric Powell’s fantastic The Goon and Mike Mignola’s always brilliant Hellboy, which are both nominated for Best Horror Comic.
Count Alucard’s Controversy of the Year has some gems, including fans’ debate over whether or not a snippet of Bela Lugosi’s original Monster dialogue can be heard in a scene from Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, as well as the growing trend of big studios pressing specialty DVD’s by order, as opposed to standard releases.
There’s so many more categories and so much more to choose from, so head on over the Rondo Awards site for a full list of nominees and be sure to cast your vote! The polls are open until midnight, April 3rd.
Posted by Natasia in Books, Home Page Top Story, Latest News, Movies on March 16th, 2010
With ongoing Frankenstein adaptations in the works, it is sometimes hard to believe that the original story Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, written by feminist author Mary Shelly, is almost 200 years old!
The first film adaptation of Frankenstein, produced by the Edison Studios in New York, will be celebrating its 100th anniversary this Thursday, March 18.
Eclipsed by the successful 1931 version produced by Universal Studios and subsequent adaptations, the 1910 Frankenstein was almost completely forgotten, until recently.
The picture, which is regarded by some to be the oldest horror film in existence, was discovered by author and film historian Frederick C. Wiebel, Jr. as he was researching the film for a magazine article. The film was originally thought as ‘lost’ by the American Film Institute when in fact one copy of the film survived, lying in the Wisconsin basement of an eccentric film collector named Alois Dettlaff, Sr. who acquired it in the 1950s.
Wiebel then arranged for the film’s restoration and release on DVD. His subsequent findings about the picture lead him to expand his magazine article into a book, entitled “Edison’s Frankenstein,” published by BearManor Media.
The centenarian film was produced by Edison Studios, the film production company run by the famed inventor Thomas Edison.
The studio went to great lengths to promote their film, with the managers bringing their best director and screenwriter, J. Searle Dawley, to head the picture. They also used their best actors, sets, costumes and special effects.
Dawley was instructed to adapt the source material with great care, with the studio publicist at the time stating: “In making the film the Edison Co. has carefully tried to eliminate all the actually repulsive situations and to concentrate its endeavors upon the mystic and psychological problems that are to be found in this weird tale.
Wherever, therefore, the film differs from the original story it is purely with the idea of eliminating what would be repulsive to a moving picture audience.”
The film deviates from subsequent adaptations in that the Monster is shown being born from a cauldron of noxious chemicals, instead of the familiar scene of a creature assembled from discarded corpses and brought to life by mechanical and electrical forces.
The Monster himself was played by Charles Stanton Ogle. The love interest of the film was played by famed silent film actress Mary Fuller, and Victor Frankenstein was portrayed by Augustus Phillips, a stage actor in New York.
Filming for Frankenstein began on January 17, 1910 and lasted a few days. The budget of the film is estimated to be around $500. It was released March 18, 1910 for a weekend premiere and received positive reviews.
At that time, Mary Shelley’s novel was already 92-years-old. It had been produced on stage for years and was already part of the culture through references like “creating a Frankenstein.”
Today, this historic film is in the public domain, and can be downloaded legally at Archive.org.
Posted by Peter Schwotzer in Books, Reviews, Terror Tales with Peter D. Schwotzer on March 16th, 2010
“They were just a group of high school kids looking for a place to party. They didn’t know the end of the world was coming. Now, alone and trapped below ground in a state-of-the-art bomb shelter, they are being stalked—and the creatures that come for them through the dirt and ash are like nothing anyone has ever seen before.
There is a new ruling life-form on earth, and these six humans are the only remaining prey.
Welcome to your worst nightmare. Welcome to…Sparrow Rock “
Sparrow Rock is Nate Kenyon’s fourth book with Dorchester Publishing and, I think, his best so far. Bloodstone was his first (in 2005 it was named a Bram Stoker Award finalist in hardcover, winning the P&E Horror Novel of the Year); The Reach (also a Bram Stoker Award finalist) was his second; and The Bone Factory was his third. (You can read my reviews of the latter two by clicking on the links.)
Sparrow Rock is a spine tingling, claustrophobic, creepy end-of-the-world tale that will leave you shuddering in its wake. Nate goes for the throat with the opening prologue and doesn’t stop until the very last page.
Though it doesn’t have the sprawling story lines and multitude of characters as King’s The Stand or McCammon’s Swan Song, it has the visceral impact that these inspired, and in my opinion deserves to be put on the same shelf as these classics.
I literally could not put this book down. Nate’s writing has continued to improve with each book and he focuses his tremendous talents on the small group of teenagers trapped in the bomb shelter while the world is destroyed around them.
How they handle the seeming inevitability of their situation (discovering that they don’t know as much about each other as they thought that they did), and the discovery that there are other things that lived through the bombings moves the story along at a breakneck pace.
And there are frights aplenty; if you’re claustrophobic like me this book will make you sweat. Kenyon has a sure winner on his hands and I can safely say it is the best book I’ve read so far this year.
Do yourself a favor and head over to Dorchester Publishing and pre-order Sparrow Rock, you will never look at ants the same way again.
Posted by Jesse in OBITS by Harris Lentz, III on March 16th, 2010
Sandy Kenyon was a familiar face in films and television from the early 1950s, and was featured in several episodes of the original Twilight Zone including “The Odyssey of Flight 33″, “The Shelter”, and “Valley of the Shadow”.
He was born Sanford Klein in the Bronx, New York, on August 5, 1922, and served in the Army Air Corps as a pilot during World War II. He returned to New York after the war to pursue a career as an actor. After several years on the New York stage, he moved to Los Angeles to further his career. He starred as Des Smith in the television adventure series Crunch and Des with Forrest Tucker from 1955 to 1956. His numerous television credits also include episodes of Steve Canyon, Richard Diamond, Private Detective, Boris Karloff’s Thriller, Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, The Wild Wild West, I Spy, The Invaders, The Most Deadly Game, Kung Fu, The Delphi Bureau, Wonderbug, The Bionic Woman, and Airwolf.
Kenyon was the voice of Jon Arbuckle in the 1982 animated tele-film Here Comes Garfield, and was also a voice actor in 1985’s The Romance of Betty Boop. He was also featured in a handful of films during his career including Sweet Kill (1973), Lifepod (1980), When Time Ran Out… (1980), The Loch Ness Horror (1981), and Larry Buchanan’s Down on Us (aka Beyond the Doors) (1984) as assassin Alex Stanley, who kills Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix as part of a government plot.
Kenyon died at his home in Los Angeles, California, on February 20, 2010, at age 87.
Posted by philip in Events, Latest News on March 15th, 2010
As a purveyor and reporter of all things genre, our readership might ask what is the significance of a tradeshow that focuses on “behind the scenes” business and secret lives of theater owners. Famous Monsters of Filmland believes that our audience shares our same interest in the technology to come, the technology that will transform the way we consume our content. Ten years ago, no one would have thought we would be watching a movie on a 3.5 inch screen. ShoWest happens to be the event of the year for theater owners to be on the receiving end of some good love by equipment manufacturers and distributors alike. This is where the battle begins and often ends when it comes to what the theater goers will get when it comes to the ever-evolving theater experience.
We are on the floor of ShoWest in Las Vegas at the Paris Hotel which started Monday March 15th and will conclude Thursday March 18th.
Posted by Jesse in OBITS by Harris Lentz, III on March 15th, 2010
Bernard Kates was a leading character actor on stage, screen and television from the 1950s. He was featured as Dr. Sigmund Freud in the 1993 Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Phantasms”. He also starred as Doc Roller in the sci-fi/horror film Seedpeople (1992), and was Falkmoore the Butler in 1996’s The Phantom starring Billy Zane. He was also seen in the 1996 sci-fi film Robo Warriors.
Kates was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on December 26, 1922. He studied acting in New York and began his career on radio. He served in the military during World War II, and resumed acting on the New York stage after his discharge. He was best known for his numerous television performances from the 1950s, guest-starring in such series as Suspense, Captain Video and His Video Rangers, One Step Beyond, Michael Shayne, several episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Outer Limits as Dr. Whorf in the episode “Nightmare”, Picket Fences, and 3rd Rock from the Sun.
Kates died of complications from sepsis and pneumonia at a Lake Havasu City, Arizona, hospital on February 2, 2010, at age 87.
Posted by Jesse in OBITS by Harris Lentz, III on March 15th, 2010
Charles B. Pierce was a popular regional filmmaker who made his feature film debut as director, producer, and cinematographer for the 1972 docu-drama The Legend of Boggy Creek. The low-budget film dramatized the legend of a Sasquatch-like creature known as the Fouke Monster, that was reputed to terrorize the small town in Arkansas near Texarkana. Boggy Creek became a major hit on the drive-in circuit. Pierce also directed and wrote a 1985 pseudo-sequel, The Barbaric Beast of Boggy Creek, Part II, and appeared in the role of Professor Brian C. `Doc’ Lockart.
Pierce was born in Hammond, Indiana, on June 16, 1938, and moved to Hampton, Arkansas, with his family as a child. He operated an advertising agency in Texarkana, and began working in films as a set decorator in the mid-1960s. He worked on numerous film and television productions including Chuck Jones’ animated feature The Phantom Tollbooth (1970), and the films Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971), Skyjacked (1972), Shadow of Fear (1973), Wicked, Wicked (1973), and Black Belt Jones (1974). He was also set decorator for the tele-films Earth II (1971), The Invasion of Carol Enders (1973), The Night Strangler (1973), Killer Bees (1974), and The Return of the Man from U.N.C.L.E.: The Fifteen Years Later Affair (1983).
He followed his success making Legend of Boggy Creek with the 1974 rural comedy Bootleggers, and appeared onscreen in the role of Othar Pruitt. His other films include the westerns Winterhawk (1975) starring Michael Dante, The Winds of Autumn (1976) with Jack Elam and Jeanette Nolan, and Grayeagle (1977) with Ben Johnson and Iron Eyes Cody. He produced and directed the 1977 thriller The Town That Dreaded Sundown, starring Ben Johnson as a Texas Ranger hunting a hooded serial killer in Texarkana in 1946. Pierce again appeared onscreen in a small role as a local policeman. The Viking action film The Norsemen (1978) starring Lee Majors, and the low-key horror thriller The Evictors (1979) starring Vic Morrow and Michael Parks, soon followed. He returned to westerns with 1983’s Sacred Ground with Tim McIntyre as a mountain man who accidentally violates a Native American burial mound. Pierce also supplied the original story for the 1983 film Sudden Impact, starring Clint Eastwood in his fourth outing as `Dirty’ Harry Callahan. He was featured in the role of the Preacher in Jim McCullough’s sci-fi western The Aurora Encounter (1986), and wrote and directed 1987’s Hawken’s Breed starring Peter Fonda and Jack Elam.
Pierce died in a Dover, Tennessee, nursing home on March 5, 2010, at age 71. His survivors include his son, Charles Pierce, Jr., who was also featured in many of his father’s films.
Posted by Jesse in Movies, OBITS by Harris Lentz, III on March 15th, 2010
Russ Marker was a regional filmmaker and actor in Texas who made his film debut as Col. Curtis in Edgar Ulmer’s 1960 science fiction film Beyond the Time Barrier starring Robert Clarke. He produced, directed, and scripted the obscure 1963 sci-fi film The Yesterday Machine starring Tim Holt, about a Nazi scientist who invents a time machine to travel back to World War II to change the outcome. Marker also co-wrote and directed the unfinished early 1960s horror film Demon from Devil’s Lake. It was remade several years later starring John Agar under the title Night Fright (aka E.T.N.: The Extraterrestrial Nastie) (1968), and featured Marker in a small role.
He was born Hirom Monroe Kennamer in Tishomingo, Oklahoma, on October 11, 1926. He was featured in small roles in the films Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Finding North (1998). He was also seen in various roles in several episodes of the television series Walker, Texas Ranger.
Marker, died in Dallas, Texas, on February 22, 2010, at age 83.
Posted by Jesse in Latest News, Movies, OBITS by Harris Lentz, III on March 15th, 2010
John Clifford wrote a single feature film during his career, but it proved to be memorable. He teamed with director Herk Harvey to write Carnival of Souls in the early 1960s. The 1962 release starred Candace Hilligoss as a woman haunted by eerie apparitions after a car accident, and was filmed on a low budget ($30,000) primarily in Lawrence, Kansas. It developed a cult following as a creepy classic, and spawned a less successful remake in 1998.
Clifford was born in Springfield, Illinois, in 1918, and was raised by relatives in Chicago after the death of his parents. He began his career writing jokes for radio comedian Ken Murray. He served in the military during World War II, and studied screenwriting after his discharge. He began writing industrial and educational films at Centron Films in Lawrence, Kansas. He worked on numerous productions there from the 1950s through the 1980s.
He also penned the western novel The Shooting of Storey James, and teamed with composer Angelo Badalamenti, to write lyrics for such songs as Another Spring and I Hold No Grudge, that were recorded by singer Nina Simone.
Clifford died of a heart attack in Lawrence on March 2, 2010, and age 91.
Posted by Movies Unlimited in Featured Columns, Home Page Top Story, Latest News, Movies, Movies Unlimited on March 15th, 2010
There are Famous Monsters…and then there are famous monsters.
Both Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre were inspired by the real-life crimes of mass murderer Ed Gein; The Silence of the Lambs, book and film, incorporated character traits of multiple serial killers in the depiction of Jame Gumb, the psychopath hunted by FBI agent Clarice Starling — with a little help from the imprisoned Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter, himself a (still-mysterious) amalgam of stranger-than-fiction monsters of past and present.
While the profoundly disturbing thriller Se7en reeked with authentic nihilism, and films like Dawn of the Dead and Hostel took blood-soaked pains to offer satiric commentaries on the sorry state of humanity, there’s an entire genre of films that bypass the more commercial goals of “escapism” in favor of more directly dramatizing the horrific tales we’ve read about in the newspapers, pored over in paperback, or seen described in lurid detail on the television news and the Internet.
Filmmakers surely feel they’re walking an awfully fine line when it comes to mounting productions where the names and places aren’t being changed, or where the events depicted are so thinly disguised as to make those changes irrelevant. The line gets even thinner and more slippery when the films are based on incidents in the not-so-distant past. Remember that horrifying-but-hilarious-because-it’s-true line offered by Alan Alda in the Woody Allen film Crimes and Misdemeanors?
“Comedy is tragedy plus time.”
Alda’s reptilian character — a morally compromised TV producer — was arguing that while no one could make a funny sketch about Lincoln being shot right after it happened, after a sufficient amount of time had passed, that tragedy becomes fair game for laughs, and so it must be with any other outrage ripped from history’s headlines. “Springtime for Hitler,” anyone?
But let’s forget about comedy for a moment — what’s the grace period for serious film productions concerning the stuff of which real-life nightmares are made? Probably limitless, for anyone living and involved somehow with the story in question. Filmmakers can’t be forever bound to creating scripts out of whole cloth, however — any given artist’s nature might compel him (or her) to attempt to make sense of the world through a lifelike representation of a tragic true story.
Degrees of responsibility, matters of decorum, issues of good taste — they’ll always be there, and always be debated, just as the desires for exploration (and yes, exploitation), understanding, and catharsis will always manifest themselves in the hearts of filmmakers and audiences alike, once private tragedies become public knowledge.
What are the finest — let’s not call them “entertaining,” at least in that baser sense — pictures in this difficult-to-navigate genre? Here are my own submissions, in chronological order:
Rope No sooner do I give an admonition (to myself) about including films that are purely “entertaining” than I go ahead and list perhaps one of the most completely enjoyable true-crime thrillers of all, directed by none other than the Master of Suspense himself, Alfred Hitchcock. As taken from the stage play by Patrick Hamilton (and adapted by Hume Cronyn), the names and events have been changed, but no one ever had any doubt the plot was an evocation of the infamous Leopold and Loeb case of 1924. In the film, John Dall and Farley Granger make for a truly chilling pair of murderers, carefully choosing a victim to dispatch as their way of demonstrating their superiority over conventional morality. Well known for being filmed in a series of long takes, Rope has been frequently criticized as one of Hitch’s “interesting” failures. I see nothing failed about it, and I find the stylistic conceit only adding to the film’s nail-biting unease. It’s a masterwork of visual choreography and a true showcase for the cast. James Stewart is at his piercing best in a deceptively folksy, darkly humorous role, playing the boys’ former professor who first introduced them to the idea of the Nietzschean “superman” (one who is the master of his own values). Stewart’s focused, gradually more intrusive interrogation of the young murderers — as they attempt to put on a delicately arranged dinner party with the corpse literally under everyone’s noses — eventually leads to an opportunity for Stewart to deliver a powerful climactic monologue that, in lesser hands, could have been supremely hammy. Remaking Hitchcock is like playing Russian roulette with five bullets in the chamber, but I’d love to see this redone. Today’s technology would permit the action to be staged in a completely continuous take, and I’d put it on live television if it were to land safely in the hands of a producer like George Clooney, who proved with Fail Safe that he knows how to make something a little musty new again.
In Cold Blood Truman Capote’s 1966 book about the 1959 murders of a Kansas farming family was, of course, the perfect candidate for cinematic adaptation, due to its unique status in establishing the genre of the “nonfiction novel” — denoting a work that relates a true story utilizing the narrative techniques associated with fiction. Audiences were well accustomed to seeing their movies in color by 1967, but the decision to film this story in black and white was a bold and effective one, and the Oscar-nominated work done here by Conrad Hall — who three times took the Academy’s top prize for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, American Beauty, and Road to Perdition — is positively marvelous, evoking a bone-chilling realism. Scott Wilson and Robert Blake deliver well-rounded and multidimensional portrayals of the inadequate men who leaned on each other, urging one another forward while possessed by greed and bad information, until they become monsters. Once their planned robbery of the Clutter household proves to be less lucrative than they’d initially believed, the duo engages in heartless acts of violence. As in Rope, one killer maintains a sense of defiant bravado in the aftermath while the other begins to crack from strains of fear and guilt. Richard Brooks received richly deserved Oscar nominations for his adapted script and direction, while music legend Quincy Jones was likewise honored for his score. This movie, filmed in actual locations including the home where the murders took place, is required viewing for those wanting to experience one of cinema’s darkest slices of Americana.
Helter Skelter Whenever Roman Polanski’s back in the news (as he has been recently with his capture overseas, not to mention the recent release of the documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired and his own contemporary thriller, The Ghost Writer), the long shadow of Charles Manson is sadly not far behind. As most true crime (and Polanski) followers know, his then-pregnant wife Sharon Tate was among the victims of the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders undertaken at the direction of cult leader Manson—a grotesque series of crimes chronicled in this TV movie, the first adaptation of the book written by Manson’s prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi. The film has long been regarded as one of the most riveting made-for-TV movies in history, due to both its matter-of-fact style and a supremely uncompromising performance by Steve Railsback as Manson, who creates a special brand of charismatic madness rarely seen on screens large or small. Equally compelling is George DiCenzo’s low-key and serious work as Bugliosi (does anyone else consistently confuse DiCenzo here for Powers Boothe? Maybe it’s just always been me. More on Boothe in a moment). Check the winners of Emmy Awards for this year and you’ll run into plenty of titles that have vanished into obscurity, while Helter Skelter continues to live on in legend as one of the best of its kind.
Guyana Tragedy: The Jim Jones Story Has anyone ever accused you of “drinking the Kool-Aid”? If you’re ever on the receiving end of that accusation and are not already familiar with its origin, you’ll want to immediately acquaint yourself with this two-part telefilm about the sad and scary saga of Rev. Jim Jones (Powers Boothe). The Indiana-born Jones was a charismatic leader who began as a minister devoted to the celebration of racially integrated congregations only to devolve into a messianic madman — a womanizing zealot addicted to power, sex, and visions of the apocalypse. After he was rejected by the Christian establishment for his integrationist beliefs, Jones formed The Peoples Temple, and in 1974, established Jonestown — meant to be a “socialist paradise” in the South American state of Guyana. As conditions became strict and the Jonestown commune began to resemble not so much a spiritual Utopia as a sadistic prison camp, defectors reached out to California congressman Leo Ryan, who already had a connection to the group because a friend’s son was an ex-Temple member who was murdered. Jones’ sanctuary came under intense scrutiny, leading to a visit by Ryan, who intended to bring back members who wished to leave but were powerless to escape from Jones’ grasp. Jones then set into motion what he sold to his flock as a “revolutionary suicide,” instructing them to ingest cyanide-laced Flavor Aid (the “Kool-Aid” reference is a common mistake that has long since passed into popular acceptance). Directed by William A. Graham, this film retains its searing power by way of its straightforward approach. A marvelous supporting cast backs up Powers Boothe’s eerie, Emmy Award-winning performance as Jones. Standouts include Veronica Cartwright as Jones’ wife; Randy Quaid as the Peoples Temple business manager; Brad Dourif as a junkie Jones “rescues”; LeVar Burton as a young man who struggles again and again to extricate himself from the cult; and Ned Beatty as Rep. Ryan. Watching it today, it’s impossible to escape its relevance. Figures like Jones convince vulnerable followers that they are their only avenue to the truth; they exhort the like-minded to ignore all other conflicting sources of information and influence; they foment narratives of impending doom and all-encompassing paranoia. Contemporary successors mimicking the leadership style of Jim Jones tell their flocks: They’re out to get you. Listen to me, because following what I tell you is your only hope for salvation. Sound familiar? The movie’s first scene, where Jones stages a mock suicide drill to test the loyalty of his followers, tells us crucially what we need to understand about him—that he is a liar. At Jonestown, a posted placard offered the famous quote from Spanish novelist George Santayana about being condemned to repeat history if you failed to study it. For once, Jim Jones was telling people the truth.
Star 80 One thing the late stage/film director Bob Fosse had in common with Martin Scorsese was an unfailing ability to reveal the infinite capacities men have for pettiness and self-destruction. Such was the case with this mesmerizing film recounting the story of Paul Snider (Eric Roberts), an overly confident small-time hustler who came to court, bed, and manage the career of young Dorothy Stratten (Mariel Hemingway), only to find that her successes made him feel even more inadequate and powerless. Growing ever more resentful and jealous when she achieves a measure of fame as a Playboy centerfold model and aspiring (if limited) actress, he moves forward with a plan to kill her. Following the lead of Richard Brooks’ In Cold Blood, Fosse lensed the climactic scenes of the movie in the very location where Stratten was murdered in 1980, and otherwise saturates the film with a distinctive and showy seediness that perfectly captures the desperate, flashy world the characters occupy. Roberts’ performance as Snider ranks as one of the great lowlife portrayals, in that although we know well in advance the ugly turn his story will take, we can’t help but feel a tiny — emphasize tiny — amount of empathy for him, as he struggles harder and harder to beat down the self-realization that the priorities of his life have always been grossly misplaced, acting to deny him the life he desires so badly.
Prick Up Your Ears “I don’t understand my life. I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was 20, I was going bald. I’m a homosexual. In the way of circumstances and background, I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint. I was programmed to be a novelist or a playwright. But I’m not…” The rage and despair just pour out of Kenneth Halliwell (Alfred Molina), and he’s certain that his lover, acclaimed British playwright Joe Orton (Gary Oldman), must somehow be to blame. Much like Paul Snider, Kenneth was a deeply troubled man long before he met Joe, but it wasn’t until he was in such close proximity to true genius that he realized how enormously inadequate his own literary talents were. Kenneth’s dream of being a great writer is a common one. His desire for fame is now the stuff of one reality program after another, but Kenneth wanted a loftier and more enduring brand of acclaim. Perhaps he simply didn’t possess the artistic gifts that would have elevated him beyond simple craftsmanship. Perhaps if he’d been more socially well-adjusted. Perhaps if he hadn’t had such a high opinion of himself and such a low opinion of so many others. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. You don’t hear so very much about director Stephen Frears’ film these days, and it’s too bad, because its insights into a very specific time and place are deeply felt, and its perceptiveness into human frailties is striking.
Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills /Paradise Lost 2: Revelations Almost never do I leave a movie theater actually angered by the movie. Well, OK, maybe after Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. As I was saying, it’s a rare occasion that a film inspires anger in me, but that’s exactly how I felt after seeing Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s vital documentaries of the 1993 triple murder case in West Memphis, Arkansas, detailing the speedy trial and conviction of three young men also alleged to be involved in Satanism because they dressed in black, listened to heavy metal music, and were regarded as odd outsiders by the community at large. As the victims were 8-year-old boys, the desire for swift justice was certainly understandable. What beggars comprehension is what follows — what appears to be an appalling lack of genuinely damning evidence that nevertheless convinces a jury to hand down one death sentence and two life sentences for the suspects in custody. The second film doles out even more disturbing elements of the case and its aftermath, and paints a very disconcerting portrait of the adoptive father of one of the young victims. Words like “outrage” and “miscarriage of justice” get tossed around a lot, but they’ve rarely seemed more relevant than in the case chronicled by these films.
Elephant Stephen King said he was glad to see Rage (the 1977 novel he had published under the pen name of Richard Bachman) go out of print, troubled as he was by its potential to inspire disturbed teens to follow the example of its psychotic young protagonist, a high school student who arms himself with a semiautomatic weapon, murders his teacher, and takes an entire classroom hostage while playing sadistic, life-or-death mind games over the intercom with the principal he despises. One wonders, then, what King might think of the availability of Gus Van Sant’s deeply disturbing 2003 film—which, while not using any of the same names or places, is plainly designed to evoke memories of the tragic 1999 school shootings at Colorado’s Columbine High School. Maybe some cineastes won’t agree, but in my opinion, it’s well past time to forgive Van Sant the misfire of his 1998 remake of Psycho. After all, when you take an overview of Van Sant’s filmography as a whole, which includes works like Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho, Good Will Hunting, Paranoid Park, and Milk, it’s hard to argue that the director doesn’t enjoy swinging for the bleachers. Elephant is as tough and uncompromising a film as United 93 would prove to be three years later when addressing the events of 9/11—and, released four years after the massacre at Columbine, it is a testament both to the process of grieving remembrance as well as the apparent senselessness of such horrific events. The first two thirds of the film are a rigidly naturalistic account of a day in the life of various children wandering through the hallways of an Oregon high school, going about their everyday business. What clues us in that the day will be a day like no other is the way in which Van Sant flows effortlessly backwards and forwards in time to repeat the same encounters between students from different perspectives, a year before the Oscar-winning Crash would cement the subgenre of circumstance uniting the fates of disparate characters. The camera lingers in very long takes, focused on what appear to be such mundane behaviors—at once distancing the film from conventional drama and re-creating the intensity with which I would imagine family members of such victims must recall their loved ones. You are given a long time to study their faces, watch them walk across a sunny lawn, smile briefly, confide in one another, enjoy their studies, feel inadequate—and simply live, with no knowledge of what is to come. You find yourself taking in the color of his jacket, the texture of her sweater, the style of his hair, the details that make the children—outwardly, which is how most people see one another—who they are. Drawn in closer and closer, you witness a series of small, casual cruelties, the sorts of things teenagers are made to endure every day. By the time the shootings get underway, we’ve been given precious little in the way of information or revelation about the two troubled boys who commit the heinous acts. Even a scene that revolves around one of the killers-to-be trying to play the piano is so carefully calculated not to give us any phony apologies for or contrived “dimensions” to the assassin’s character. Listen to his playing—it’s routine and uninspired, so measured as to be robotic, and in the end, he renders such a dismissive verdict of the classical music and his playing of it that any “poetry” we were led to believe might be suggested in the scene is thrown coldly and definitively aside. The movie ends before the story is over. Of course it does. It had to, because there were plenty of people whose stories ended prematurely on that April day.
United 93 Shoah filmmaker Claude Lanzmann leveled some fairly direct criticisms at Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning Holocaust film, Schindler’s List, referring to it as “kitschy melodrama.” His appraisal of the film is somewhat more nuanced than that microscopic quote suggests (and a simple online search for “Claude Lanzmann” and “Schindler’s List” will quickly yield his writings about it in fuller detail), but it’s fairly clear he disapproves of the film as a whole. My own experience with Spielberg’s picture is that it remains one of my very, very few experiences in moviegoing where I felt I had emerged from the theater a different person. Without going into any further detail than that — and I’m not sure I could put more detail into sensible words — I mention that as a preface to the observation that, of all the films in this posting, United 93’s account of the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks fell victim perhaps to the loudest of criticisms that it was “too soon” or simply inappropriate to make a film – any film — about the events, let alone one to be directed by the man behind a moneymaking blockbuster like The Bourne Supremacy, which would mar it with the whiff (however faint) of exploiting an American tragedy for profit. Astute filmgoers who recalled writer/director Paul Greengrass’ 2002 film Bloody Sunday, about the 1972 Irish protest march that ended in bloodshed at the hands of the British, guessed correctly that perhaps he might just be the ideal filmmaker to create an honorable accounting of the tragic heroism involved in the Flight 93 saga. As the first Hollywood theatrical film to directly dramatize the story, it had an enormous burden to bear. The cast is a mixture of professional actors and everyday people, also including some of those who actually lived through and influenced events on the ground, such as FAA National Operations Manager Ben Sliney. As someone connected to 9/11 only as an American with a friend who worked in Manhattan at the time — no more and no less — I wouldn’t presume to be in a position to decide for anyone whether or not they should watch the movie. I found it to be made with sensitive and deep integrity, upsetting, profound, and above all, an absolutely necessary contribution to the history of relevant filmmaking.
Zodiac Imagine you’ve already helmed what is considered one of the finest movies ever made in the “serial killer” genre. Now, imagine rolling the dice by going back into that very same well, only this time, daring to tackle the story of one of the most infamous — and unsolved — mass murder stories of all time. That’s David Fincher, the director who followed his much-praised thriller Se7en with The Game, Fight Club, Panic Room, and then this meticulously crafted and measured procedural detailing the hunt for the elusive Zodiac killer, the sadistic maniac who terrorized Northern California by attacking seemingly at random, all the while delivering mocking, coded letters to the press in a bid for widespread media attention — which he received. The film focuses primarily on the men drawn into the search, including detectives David Toschi and William Armstrong (Mark Ruffalo, Anthony Edwards), who become obsessed with chasing down every clue left behind at the grisly crime scenes; San Francisco Chronicle police reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey, Jr.), who covered the story and became a specific target of the killer’s attention; and Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), the Chronicle’s ambitious cartoonist, who labored to unlock the Zodiac’s coded correspondence. Can a movie be both ahead of its time and a throwback? Based on the blockbuster account of the case written by Graysmith, Zodiac manages to pull off this seemingly contradictory feat, crafted with the matter-of-fact realism associated with the grittiest TV movies of decades past, the screen stuffed with overwhelming amounts of complex details and the prestigious air of investigative classics like All The President’s Men, while also employing enviably rich digital cinematography that gives the story a wholly modern immediacy. Seamless special effects enhance the wide and deep period landscapes depicted within the frame, with each member of the ensemble cast giving performances of immersive intensity. Zodiac received a good bit of critical praise but underperformed at the box office. I’m predicting with utter confidence that it will not only endure, but emerge to be regarded as a true classic of its kind.
And the next exhaustively researched, sensitively mounted “shocking true story” film waiting to be made? I’d say it’s a definitive movie about the 1981 murder of Philadelphia policeman Daniel Faulkner, for which former Black Panther/activist/radio personality Mumia Abu-Jamal has been convicted and sentenced to death. It’s interesting to note that—at least on Wikipedia–the films as yet completed about the case (granted, they’re all documentaries) are neatly divided into the works that are “pro-Mumia” and “anti-Mumia.” Is it truly impossible to make a film that cannot be pigeonholed (and thus, stigmatized) as either of those two things?
If not, does that have more to do with what’s actually known about the case or the political climate in which we now find ourselves?
Scary times, indeed.
George D. Allen performs directing and postproduction duties on “Ghouly Irv” Slifkin’s MovieFrightFare videos, as well as regular podcasts on the Movies Unlimited blog, MovieFanFare, and is currently shooting the scare-packed short Night of the Moonbats.
Posted by Michael in Home Page Top Story, Latest News, Movies on March 13th, 2010
Fox unveiled its official site for the upcoming summer release Predators earlier today, bringing the sneak peek that was shown at SXSW last night online.
Produced by Robert Rodriguez and Elizabeth Avellan, and directed by Nimród Antal (Armored, Vacancy), the story has its roots in a treatment that Rodriguez developed years before the Aliens Vs. Predator films. Adrien Brody stars as Royce, a mercenary leading a group of elite warriors brought to an alien planet to serve as prey for a new breed of Predators.
“The idea with the film was to not make it feel like it was the fifth or sixth movie in a series, but the first,” says Rodriguez.”You can’t compete with Arnold Schwarzenegger, so it’s much better to go the other direction and do something the audience isn’t expecting.”
The cast also includes Topher Grace, Alice Braga, Laurence Fishburne, Danny Trejo, Walton Goggins and Oleg Taktarov. One of the actors under the Predator mask will be Derek Mears, a guest at our very own Famous Monsters Convention July 9-11, the weekend that Predators opens.
According to the site, the first full trailer will available for viewing online on March 18, while Rodriguez expects the theatrical version to be attached to Repo Men, opening next Friday. Keep checking the film’s site and FamousMonsters.com for more news!
