Category: movies/tv

Man, came home Friday after watching Prom Night, just all conflicted and twitchy from it, and then the next morning woke early, slammed down an essay-thing about it, and then of course hit the wrong button, lost it all, so, when I finally had time (that night), I re-did what of it I could, and bam, now it’s up at PopMatters, one of the sites I respect the most:

Author Stephen Graham Jones looks into the disappointments of the Prom Night remake, finds pause to reflect back on th

Man, I got the year right for The Ruins anyway, back when. And this is another non-review, yeah. Specifically, one with spoilers. Anyway, yeah, Scott Smith pretty much proves that it’s not always a bad idea to let the author be the one to make that book-to-screen jump. He nails it, I mean. I guess there’s something to be said for knowing the material. Not here to say Good job though. Not only that anyway. Just because the end of the movie version of the The Ruins doesn&#…

1. Just got a story, “Lonegan’s Luck,” accepted by New Genre. Like most stories if you peel them back far enough, this one, too, is a zombie western. Nearly forty pages of it.

2. Doomsday opens tomorrow. Very excited. Looks like all the elements I look for in high-calibre, life-altering cinema, they’re here. Which is to say that if Tina Turner waltzes on, starts singing, that’ll only make things twice as good. Too, cool that Rhona Mitra’…

• The Golden Compass is one of the more amazing movies I’ve seen all year. Best fantasy since Pan’s Labyrinth, I’d say. Too, so, so sad I didn’t read the book first. No way to remedy that now, of course, but, can try to make up for it anyway. Also on-list: Inkheart.
• The Girl Next Door is, yes, look-away-from kind of disturbing. It’s like if you took Stand By Me and The River’s Edge and The Lord of the Flies then dialed the squirm factor up to about

Working on a new slasher right now, and leaning towards making it a screenplay, mainly so the form can keep it reined in for me, somewhat. Too, this time, I’m doing what I’ve never done: thinking it all through ahead of time. Which has involved a lot of re-watching, a lot of thinking. And, on the idea that reasoning from first principles (or at least memory) is somehow a pure way to get to something at least in the area of truth, I’ve been intentionall ducking Car…

Movies like this just make me break out my lists, look for a place to wedge this movie, so it can be that much closer to my heart. Which, I know it’s got to be an almost-empty statement by now, but, using Feast as my touchstone, and acknowledging that Leslie Vernon was the best since, and Save the Green Planet the best since Leslie Vernon, then, Severance, it’s the best since Green Planet, for me. Just did every last single thing right, I think. I mean, no, it’s not …

Jeff Stolarcyk over at Conditional Axe has some bad news: Trick R’ Treat, much like All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, has been bumped to some indefinite time later. Very sad. Now Saw 4‘ll have to do. But I trust it will, too. A very tight series so far, I think. And, just back from Resident Evil: Extinction,^* and same for it: excellent; high marks for the whole . . . I guess trilogy so far, though ‘series’ might work too. I suspect ‘trilogy,’ thoug…

What I scribbled down in my trusty notebook^*, moments after finishing all of INLAND EMPIRE when I really only meant to watch thirty minutes or so:

A girl’s gotten pregnant and not by the guy she’s with. She’s haunted by ‘Krimp’ — a ‘crimp’ in the umbilical cord — and by a screwdriver to the stomach, both images of losing the baby, possibly to the violence of her jealous husband, boyfriend, whatever he is. So she, the in

Just a couple of remakes that might have gone below the radar: Wizard of Oz and Hellraiser. And Hellraiser‘s especially interesting, as it likely tangles up everybody’s knee-jerk dislike of remakes: Barker’s (re)writing it himself. Don’t know what to think, myself. I mean, man, the original, I loved it. That and Lord of Illusions were so different from everything else being offered at the time (‘time’ meaning, yeah, that clearly d…

Joon Hwan Jang. Which is to say I just watched Save the Green Planet. I mean, yeah, I’m a fool for Korean movies these last couple of years — not my fault, they’re just exploding, or I’m riding the wake of some explosion when everybody cool was watching Korean stuff, I don’t know — but, man, I went into this expecting something along the lines of Shaolin Soccer, with maybe some The Host mixed in. And then this hit me in a wholly different way. E…