Play Misty For Me

Since I saw The Mist last November, not a single foggy day has passed without me wanting to watch it again. Walking outside into a milky vapor instantly transports me back to the theater, and I find myself worrying less about whether or not I remembered to wear socks and more with how I’m going to survive an encounter with acid-web-spinning spider thingies, should any cross my path. I’m pretty sure I’ve come within inches of killing a pedestrian or two on my way to work, staring up at a blank, murky sky in search of six-legged, tentacled AT-AT walkers instead of watching the road in front of me. When I go to the supermarket, I subconsciously hoard boxes of Cocoa Pebbles just in case some religious zealot should suddenly label them a tool of Satan and ban them from stores.

Contrary to popular belief, this is not my normal behavior.

I don’t often get this fixated on a single movie. The last time I can remember it happening was the first time I saw Scanners, when I kept rewinding and rewatching the head explosion to see if I could figure out what happened to the guy’s nostrils. Poorly rendered tentacles notwithstanding, I’ve got mad, mad love for The Mist, the kind of affection most people reserve for sports teams and hair care products. And now that the movie’s out on DVD, I’m determined to infect everyone else with that love, until the point where the movie sits in its rightful spot beside The Thing and other what the fuck were we thinking when we collectively let this tank at the box-office movies.

I’m not prone to hyperbole (unless I’m talking about Steve Guttenberg), but I can’t escape the feeling that this must become a horror classic. Even if it costs me my Cocoa Pebbles.

More Mist:

• Dread Central Podcast interview with Frank Darabont
• Darbont, Greg Nicotero, and Thomas Jane discuss the making of the Mist monsters
• Darabont on adapting Stephen King

Johnston's Got Nards

So implies Scott Stuber, one of the producers on Universal’s Wolfman remake, in this interview with Empire. He goes on to elaborate a bit on the narrative, the special effects (no CG!), and Benicio Del Toro’s wolfmanphilia. Mostly, though, he talks up director Joe Johnston, which some are interpreting as a direct reaction to negative press that bubbled up when original director Mark Romanek left the project.

While I’m just as excited as everyone else about the two promo stills that emerged last week, and at the prospect of Rick Baker doing another werewolf movie, the idea of Universal doing damage control this earlier in the film’s gestation does raise some questions.

Right now my only question is: anybody got a spare $8,000?

Starting March 28, four of Stan Winston’s original monster costumes are up for bids on eBay. You can see the rest of the bunch here, here, and here.

Scream Streams: GINGER SNAPS BACK: THE BEGINNING

”What a lovely shade of dead.”

When you’re really attached to a set of characters, you’re willing to follow along on their adventures no matter where they lead. Even if they lead to Wal-Mart; or, in the case of the third and final chapter in the Ginger Snaps series, the 19th Century Canadian wilderness.

Abandoning the continuity of its two kinda-sorta awesome predecessors, Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning strands teenage sisters Ginger and Brigitte at an early 1800s French-Canadian trading outpost frequently besieged by werewolves. Apparently not even time-travel can keep their paws off Katherine Isabelle. It may not hold a Canadian candle to the first two films, but it’s better than the third Howling movie. And it’s free this week on FEARnet.

Highlights include:
• Typically strong performances from Katherine Isabelle and Emily Perkins (in period clothing, to boot)
• A spooky Native American soothsayer
• Fantastic cinematography
• Numerous arrow-induced wounds
• Ginger’s spot-on, period-specific dialogue, including such commonplace Colonial phrases as “these people are fucked.”

Love is Strange

How do you call your loverboy?

Right now I call mine The Strangers, the object of my first full-on movie crush in what seems like years. It had me at “hello,” which in this case was a green band signifying approval for all ages, followed by a simple pick-up line and 90 seconds of spooky flirtations. I think we’re going to go all the way.

In the meantime, though, I just lovingly stare at its picture – the most awesome theatrical poster I’ve seen since the 28 Weeks Later teaser.



As if the Alice, Sweet Alice/Dolls-ish vibe weren’t old-school enough, dig the fold crease marks that make it look like it’s been sitting in a drawer in the basement of some downtown dive since 1981.

When the film hits DVD it will probably be masked in the airbrush jowls of Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman, and by then the honeymoon may be over, anyway, but as of this moment, I remain so recklessly infatuated that I can’t help but carve our initials in the interrnet.

Postcards From the Post-Apocalypse

Sometimes I get the feeling that come the end of the world, I’ll feel fine.

For about as long as I can remember (which at times stretches as far back as the day I split my two-year-old lip open and calmly explained to my mother that I thought a visit to the emergency room might be in order), I’ve had a thing for post-apocalyptic dystopias. From telling my grade school principal to take her stinking paws off me to welcoming 1997 with a Snake Pliskin drinking game, I’ve spent a lot of my formative years longing for the end of days.

In honor of the Final Girl-sponsored Hey Internet, Stop Being Such Cynical Fucking Douchebags Blog-a-Thon (and Neil “I Somehow Manage to Keep Living Up to All the Hype” Marshall), I take a break from berating Rob Zombie today and instead present these loving wishes to black leather, nuclear fallout, and the drinking of one’s own pee.


Escape From New York
Growing up in the Midwest, by the time I was about four I had developed a serious case of Los Angelenvy. This is the condition one acquires by watching a constant string of early ‘80s movies that were all filmed in the suburbs of L.A. Every time a swimming pool was dug in my neighborhood, I secretly hoped corpses would start popping up out of the hole and paranormal investigators would show up and rip off their own faces. In the sixth grade, I desperately wanted to take my first-ever date to Golf N’ Stuff. But at some point in my adolescence, I finally discovered a cool movie that had not been filmed or set in SoCal. In fact, said cool movie had actually been filmed on my home turf (apparently the streets of New York were not run-down and shitty enough to pass for a post-apocalyptic warzone, but St. Louis fit the bill perfectly). I heart pretty much any John Carpenter movie from the ‘80s, but there will always be a special pocket of love reserved for EFNY. There will always be a special pocket of love reserved for Harry Dean Stanton, too, but that’s a post for another HISBSCFD-blog-a-thon.


Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
The third Mad Max movie is not better than the first two. It’s not even anywhere near as good as either of them. In fact, it’s not really good at all. But come on, the word Thunderdome is in the frickin’ title! Incidentally, do you remember how those rumors about Michael Jackson buying the Elephant Man’s bones started circulating in the late ‘80s? I always thought Trent Reznor had perpetrated a similarly ridiculous purchase of the Thunderdome for use in his 1992 “Wish” music video (this was right after the rumor about him having his ribs surgically removed so he could fellatiate himself on stage emerged, so I assumed he must have gotten some kind of deal on the ‘dome from Tina Turner).


Waterworld
Like just about every summer movie that came out after 1993, seeing Waterworld was supposed to be more important than having sex. Or eating. Or going to college.
It was not.
But it did feature and still holds the record for the best scene ever filmed in which a man who once made out with Susan Sarandon drinks his own urine.


Tank Girl
Coinciding with my lifelong fascination with post-apocalyptic movies is my lifelong fascination with girls who could kick my ass. This affair sort of reached its pinnacle when I saw Lori Petty’s performance in Tank Girl. If The Donnas collectively ate Japan and washed it down with a bottle of Manic Panic, the morning-after result would be Lori Petty as Tank Girl.


A Boy and His Dog
In my junior year in college I took an eight-week Friday night class on science fiction movies. With nearly 20 years as a nerd under my belt, I thought for sure this would cover material I was already familiar with and be an easy ace. Instead I ended up seeing eight movies I’d never seen of, most of which I hadn’t even heard of. A Boy and His Dog was one of those movies. I didn’t particularly care for it, but I wanted to include it on this list because I think it’s noteworthy that I received college credit for watching a movie starring Don Johnson.


Doomsday
Worried about how the dollar is doing against the Euro right now? Just wait till Neil Marshall gets a hold of it. Not even Shaun of the Dead duo Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg know how to rescue a traditionally American horror subgenre that’s flagging the way this guy does. I’m pretty sure the man secretes awesomeness from his pores and just sprinkles it on whatever movie set he’s working on at the time. This movie might as well be The Road Warriorette Escapes From Edinburgh, which is exactly why it’s the greatest thing to ever happen in the month of March, 2008.

The next best thing is the HISBSCFD blog-a-thon, so go read the other entries and don’t come back till somebody drops the big one.

Scream Streams: PARENTS

Lately there’s been an influx of great bad movies popping up for free online viewing, so I’ve decided to start spotlighting one weekly. I figure it’ll ensure at least a semi-regular posting schedule, and help me earn my merit badge in Randy Quaid appreciation.

To that end, if you find yourself with 81 free minutes this week but no copy of Caddyshack II handy, just point your finger clicky thing over to Hulu.com and take in the next best example of Quaidness in the 1988 suburban cannibal satire Parents.

Highlights include:
• A delightful mid-century production design
• Meat that comes to life
• A scene in which an elementary school teacher sneaks into the young hero’s home, hides inside the kitchen pantry when she hears someone else in the house, and then inexplicably grabs hold of a carving knife, slicing open her own hands.
• Randy Quaid writhing on a blood-soaked bed.

Creating A Monster?

In a later chapter of Susan Tyler Hitchcock’s entertaining Cultural History of Frankenstein, the scholar/instructor/Frankenut notes how the rising popularity of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s classic novel in the mid-late 20th century spawned a legion of literary “adaptations” designed for a variety of reading levels, mostly the Scholastic Book Fair crowd – condensed versions that skip the literary whipped cream and present a bare-bones story in a simplistic fashion: guy makes monster, monster kills guy’s wife, guy and monster go ice surfing. As I considered the proliferation of these, it occurred to me that I couldn’t remember for sure if I’d ever actually read the real novel, or just some Golden Books knockoff.

While exploring the labyrinthine recesses of a recently released DVD, desperately wishing for a trail of digital breadcrumbs, I started wondering if the same thing could someday happen with movies – if it hasn’t already. Last summer, following the release of Rob Zombie’s Halloween The Michael Myers After School Special, “the boards” predictably filled up with fan reaction and commentary, but the bulk of the horror kids weren’t LOLing about what was shown in theaters. A significantly different “workprint” of the film that had leaked online a week prior dominated most of the chatter. Even some major news sites slanted their coverage/reviews toward the workprint, most of them citing it as a superior film. I didn’t see the workprint, preferring to spend my time studying the art of noodling rather than waste another 90 minutes on Rob Zombie’s vision of Haddonfield, but I couldn’t help but wonder about the origin of the workprint and how its widespread exposure might affect the overall legacy of the film. Was it Zombie’s initial cut? A test print used to gauge audience reaction? And what happens if the workprint becomes more popular and commonly regarded than the “official” cut? What makes the “official” cut… official?

The matter was muddied even further when the film was released on DVD, including one disc that presents a version that incorporates some of the elements that appeared in the workprint, but not all – a hybrid cut. Is this now the definitive cut? Is Zombie going to pull a Blade Runner and wait 25 years before he makes up his mind? By that point, Halloween will have been remade four more times, each with fourteen different home video releases featuring variant holofoil/scratch-n-sniff covers. How can one be bothered to even watch a movie when there’s a scratch-n-sniff cover?

The new I Am Legend DVD raises similar questions by providing the film’s original ending as part of a second full-length presentation of the film. Those who prefer the original ending can now throw out Disc 1 and pretend like the theatrical version didn’t even exist. But what happens if their tastes change over time and suddenly they decide they want to like the theatrical release better? Do they remain faithful? Do they develop split personalities, each with his or her own favorite version of the film? Will Pop Rocks and Coke kill you?

While we wait for the answers, check out Hitchock’s Monster Sightings blog, which chronicles the appearance of Frankenstein references throughout culture and society. I wonder if this post qualifies.

Slightly Less Lame, But No More Legendary

I think it’s a given that the literal ending of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend novel translates rather unsatisfactorily to the screen (see the ending of the otherwise excellent Last Man on Earth for viewable proof), but I’d take an inadequate rendering of Matheson’s scribbles over what Warner Brothers and Francis Lawrence gave us in the most recent Legend adaptation.

That ending was a late-in-the-game reshoot, prompted either by the studio’s or test audiences’ displeasure with Lawrence‘s original conclusion. The WB is including the original ending as a bonus feature on the film’s upcoming DVD, but those who can’t wait to start debating the pros and cons of each can see it here now (hurry! Warners’ lawyers come out at sundown in search of video pirates’ blood).

Based on the commentary that accompanies the clip at the above link, there are some who clearly feel that the original ending was vastly better than what made it to theater screens. If Lawrence continues to have a solid career, there may even be film classes fifty years from now in which students and instructors point to Legend as yet another example of a Hollywood studio quashing the far superior vision of a director. But I’m not biting.

I’ll agree with anyone who feels that the last minute or so of the theatrical cut felt like a church bake sale tacked onto the end of a two-hour striptease, but I can’t say that Lawrence‘s original closing does the film that preceded it any better justice. My disappointment with the film started twenty minutes before its conclusion, when two needless characters crashed Will Smith’s party and what had been an impressive lead performance degenerated into a Tom Hanksian train wreck, an error Lawrence failed to correct with his original capper. And while the biggest gripe about the theatrical release among Legendites is its complete disregard for Matheson’s central theme and the inspiration for the title itself, this clip doesn’t come any closer to solving that problem. If anything, it’s even less faithful to the spirit of the book; imagine if Spielberg’s adaptation of Duel had ended with the diabolical semi making junkyard love to Dennis Weaver‘s Plymouth -- Legend’s original close is basically the same thing.

Just nowhere near as brilliant.

EDIT: After revisiting the film (and both endings) on DVD, I'm feel compelled to retract some thoughts above and align myself with the original ending. It may not maintain the themes of the novel as explicitly as the theatrical ending, but at least it doesn't pander or bludgeon me over the head with its intent.

Now, on to more pressing questions regarding the film -- like, for instance, why don't the putty vampire people wear more clothes?

Hail to the King, Baby

While I was in Hollywood this weekend enjoying good times with good friends (and a peanut butter & honey milkshake chaser), King Kong celebrated his 75th anniversary. It’s not too late to send him a birthday present; I hear Peter Jackson’s severed head is right near the top of his list.