Still one more day til Halloween (Silver Shamrock!), but as this will be the final Today in Film Bloggery post ever on SpoutBlog, it’s my only opportunity to do a roundup of what the blogs are posting this week related to the holiday of candy and costumes.
I’ll actually be dressing up as something non-film-related tomorrow (”Moss” from UK series The IT Crowd), but I do plan on watching some horror flicks (including Paranormal Activity), which I rarely do, on Halloween or any other day. Maybe if I’m feeling academic — and since my present job situation has me aiming to get my PhD in cinema studies — I’ll break out Mary Ann Sloan’s essay “Film and the Masquerade” and attempt to make it relative to the festivities (I know, it’s a real stretch).
What will you be doing? Comment with your film-related costumes and/or plans after checking out what the film blogs are posting Halloween-related after the jump:
Ti West’s The House of the Devil finds its sweet spot in the paranoid shadow of misdirection, so it’s best not to reveal much of the plot beyond what you’ll know from watching the trailer: it’s the 80s, and a sleepy college town is obsessed with an impeding eclipse, and a young, pretty co-ed in desperate need of some quick cash takes a mysterious babysitting job in a big, secluded manse, for a creepy couple who don’t actually have a kid. What actually happens is less important than what West teases could happen. Duality is the order of the day: there are two houses that could potentially be devilish, two girls — serious brunette Sam (Jocelin Donahue) and the more playful blonde Megan (Greta Gerwig) –– at the mercy of two men (Tom Noonan and AJ Bowen), each with two evident personalities. The final punchline even sets up a new twosome whose story could easily fuel a second film.
It would be easy to peg Devil as a superficial exercise in vintage pastiche –– the film non-ironically borrows the look and feel of the horror produced in the era in which it’s set — but West’s more impressive nod at classic horror is his mastery of misdirection. I was recently asked to make a list of my favorite horror films of all time, and it shouldn’t be a surprise to readers of this blog that all five films I chose were made before 1980, and three of them before 1950. If horror films weren’t unequivocably better before gore and graphic violence and were standard practices available to makers of mainstream scary films, a lot of the Code-restricted frighteners that have survived to become classics (cult or otherwise) are richer in subtext, more evocative of base human fears, and more effectively politically and/or philosophically provocative. In other words, in the classic horror and sci-fi films that I love, there tends to be more than one thing going on: there’s what we see, there’s what we don’t see but imagine or infer is also happening, and there’s what, as a product of the clash between the actual visible evidence and what our psyches produce as an extension or embroidery on what we see, there’s what we leave believing it all really means.
Following Nikki Finke’sreport that pre-production on Halloween 3-D has been halted and therefore the film has been delayed, much of the discussion focused on whether or not it had something to do with The Weinstein Co.’s money troubles and/or possibility of a takeover by Summit Entertainment.
All I could think of, though, was maybe the 3-D threequel can now actually be appropriately released around the time of its namesake holiday rather than in a summer month. The report did after all note that TWC/Dimension is properly re-releasing Halloween II, which underperformed when it opened late last month, on the weekend of October 31st — at least for midnight shows, anyway.
It was actually a bad summer for wrongly released holiday-titled films, as Nia Vardalos’ I Hate Valentine’s Daydid poor business in a few theaters when IFC debuted the romantic comedy in July. So what if it has a title that’s anti Valentine’s Day? It should still have been released in February.
And movies in the Halloweenfranchise should be released in October. I don’t care if horror is supposed to do well in August or if all four installments since Dimension acquired the rights to the series have come out earlier than October. Thankfully I’m not the only person who thinks it’s been stupid of them to put these films out in the summer.
Check out what other film blogs think of the Halloween 3-D delay after the jump:
Coincidentally, just as Roman Polanskifaces extradition for his 30-year-old statutory rape case, we get our first teaser for the pedophilia-centric A Nightmare on Elm Streetremake. At least, I heard there was supposed to be a teaser. All I could find was a pretty full-length trailer that gives everything away.
First we see a snippet of Freddy Krueger’s origin, in which Jackie Earle Haleyunveils the iconic sweater as if he’s Clark Kent ripping open his button-down shirt to reveal his Superman costume, while being burned alive by an angry mob of parents. Then we see a whole bunch of familiar imagery, including the razor glove in the tub, the girl floating above her bed and the creepy jump roping girls, all of which implies this remake is going to be fairly redundant. Yet we finish with something that separates this redo from the original: our first clear glimpse of the new Freddy, looking more realistically like a burn victim. And we hear his voice, which is far less memorable or frightening than the one Robert Englundintroduced to us 25 years ago.
So the things I want to be the same aren’t and the things I want to be fresh are not. The only way I might see this is if the rumors are true about Freddy’s guilt being put into question. That would certainly give him greater reason for revenge.
Check out the other film blogs’ responses to the trailer after the jump:
I don’t care much for scary movies (they tend to bore me), but I do enjoy watching other people reacting to them. That’s why I love the new trailer for Paranormal Activity, a $10,000-budget horror flick that’s been frightening film festival attendees since 2007 and which finally opens in regular theaters next week.
The trailer focuses on footage of the audience of a recent screening of the film while showing very little of the film itself. The idea is to show us that people are indeed scared silly. But what I appreciate, as a strong advocate of moviegoing, is that it kind of tells us we need to see this thing in a theater with a large crowd for the optimum experience.
I guess you could still wait for the film to hit DVD and do your screaming and jumping from your couch, but doesn’t it look more fun with a bunch of strangers? Personally, the trailer makes me want to watch the rest of the night-vision audience-cam footage more than the actual film, but hopefully going to the cinema to see this will be just as good. As long as nobody minds me sitting in a lawn chair in front of the auditorium, facing the seats instead of the screen.
Unfortunately, on September 25, Paranormal Activity is only opening in 13 cities and the closest to my home of NYC is State College, PA (and that’s a very long bike ride to see a movie!). But so far only myself and 429 others have “demanded” it play here, so I’ll probably never get the chance to experience the film as it should be. Maybe I can sneak into the homes of people who’ve rented it, though, and watch their reactions?
Check out what other film blogs are saying about the trailer after the jump:
Being a humorless young man, I’m driven crazy by people who actively seek out bad movies for fun; it seems like that’s a way of avoiding engaging with good art, where the correct response isn’t always obvious. So I was nervous about Best Worst Movie, whose title tells it all. Voted worst film of all time by the normally-none-too-discriminating IMDB users, Troll 2 (Scott Tobias has written about its appeal and cult for his New Cult Canon project) has a bizarre story about people being turned into plants that makes no sense literally or metaphorically, godawful acting and general freefloating incompetence. People love it very much.
I get the appeal — it’s sui generis weirdness that never lets up — but sometimes it bothers me that people indulge in the easy pleasure of celebrating something plainly risible. And yet filmmaker Michael Stephenson makes a case not just for the movie’s appeal, but also the downside of cult filmdom. Best Worst Movie is itself an obvious crowdpleaser that’ll probably find a decent-sized audience, but — fun though it is, and even though the stakes are pretty low, and no dramatic events unfold — it’s actually kind of a downbeat film overall. Stephenson isn’t just a documentarian; he was Troll 2’s child actor. By making this movie, he delves into the appeal of something he’s part of, yet was in no way responsible for the enduring afterlife of.
There’s the SXSW of indie premieres, and then there’s the stuff the fanboys come for; the home of Ain’t It Cool News and the Alamo Drafthouse has an understandably enthusiastic place in its slate for midnight gorefests. So relax fanboys: Sam Raimi’s “work-in-progress” screening of May 29’s Drag Me To Hell (missing ambient sound and end credits, but generally looking ready to judge) showed the final product will give you what you want. There will be cartoonish gore and gleeful bad taste; yes, there will be Evil Dead shout-outs. Alison Lohman shall suffer the punishment of beautiful blonde women everywhere: she will atone for her selfishness, and she will do it in a wet t-shirt.
While Karina (and indieWIRE) sits off to the side celebrating the recent indie box office record-breaker, most of the interweb is talking about the weekend’s mainstream achievements. Well, actually people are mostly focusing on just the shocking success of Friday the 13th, which I believe broke records for its franchise, its genre, its rating and for President’s Day weekend (though not for the month of February). As for the other monumental marker, Paul Blart: Mall Cop, I’ve seen maybe twobloggers comment on how it’s just passed $100 million. How is this a remarkable feat? Well, not only does this make Paul Blart the highest grossing January opener ever, but the oft-derided comedy is also the first film to debut in January to reach the $100 million point (not counting the special edition re-release of Star Wars, that is).
As this is a holiday and most of the web cinephiles are celebrating appropriately by watching North by Northwestor Point Break, there isn’t much else being written about, so here are some noteworthy quotes and links regarding the stunning box office figures:
It could mean, in short, that New Moon will be a little bit bloodier than anticipated. Or certainly the Twlight film after that. Is there any filmmaking/distribution outfit with a more pronounced reputation for being deeply in love with arterial gushings? That’s Lionsgate in a nutshell.
So declares Jeff Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere, in response to Sharon Waxman’s report (for which “executives at Lionsgate and Summit declined to comment”) that Lionsgate (home of the Saw, Hostel and Tyler Perry franchises) may be buying Summit Entertainment, including the company’s library and slate, which includes teenage necrophilia phenom franchise Twilight.
But of course, Wells’ “nutshell” definition of Lionsgate is out of date. It’s an open secret that Lionsgate is so desperate to distance itself from its bloody past that the distributor has spent the past year engineering the failure of its remaining genre stock — dumping Midnight Meat Train in rural dollar theaters; taking the ultra-cinematic The Burrowers off its theatrical release schedule entirely; killing Cabin Fever as a theatrical franchise by releasing its Ti West-directed sequel straight to DVD. If anything, in Lionsgate’s hands, the Twilight sequels are likely to go even more tame.
Both are broadly classifiable as science fiction, but Alien is basically a horror flick and Aliens has all the conventions of a war film. That’s a pretty slick transition from one type of movie to another, especially since the switch was so immediate within the series. Most movie franchises don’t play with genre in such a way until they’ve gone through a number of sequels, and even then the series usually just simply takes its characters into outer space, a la Moonraker, Jason X and Leprechaun 4.
Genre jumping isn’t that easy, though, unless a franchise inhabits a whole universe in which to expand through. Like Star Wars, for example. Originally a film series, the Star Wars franchise spread out into novels, which has allowed for dips into the romance genre and now horror. That’s right, an upcoming novel by horror author Joe Schreiber, titled Deathtroopers, takes the Star Wars universe into frightening territory described by Schreiber as “in the vein of The Shining and Alien, with a little dose of William Gibson mixed in.”
So, if Star Wars can venture into the horror genre, what other movie franchises should attempt a genre jump? To toy with the idea, we’ve selected five film series in need of a change and suggested a possible redirection of genre for each. …Read more
My Bloody Valentine 3D isn’t worth watching in one dimension, let alone three. But it does serve to spark some good conversation. What other gimmicks have boosted the box office of sub-par films? What does good contemporary horror look like? Neil Marshall’s The Descent offers a refreshing palette cleanser. Also, what do horror and porn have in common, besides cheap nudity?
Listen to FilmCouch and win free stuff! Send us an e-mail telling us the most absurd piece of merchandise you’ve seen branded with an image of Che Guevara, and you can win a program from the Che roadshow signed by Steven Soderbergh, a copy of Che’s Diaries, and the soundtrack to the film. Send e-mails to filmcouch (at) spout (dot) com.
Jordan Galland, director of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead, truly has every press hook a Slamdance filmmaker could ask for, from the ample involvement of celebrity children (Jake “Son of Dustin” Hoffman stars, Bijou Phillips has a cameo and Sean Lennon composed the score), to, of course, the fantastic title recalling mid-century “poster first, script later” schlock horror (which, according to Wikipedia, Galland came up with at age 14 — yet another angle!). The director also has the foolhardy balls (or is it savvy?) to admit that his film was influenced by both Masculin Femininand Hudson Hawk, which makes it sound pretty much irresistable. Undead premieres on Monday, January 19 at Slamdance; its trailer is above and Galland answers the 4 Questions We Ask Everyone after the jump.
In its depiction of mid-80s Eastern European Communist social hell, Cargo 200 makes 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2Days look like Sesame Street. There are plenty of films that use real history as the jumping off point for genre fantasy, but Aleksei Balabanov’s brutal, fetid vision of personal sadism and political policy intermingled is the only work of serious, modern social criticism in recent memory that actually made me want to puke. This is a compliment of the highest order.
It’s been a huge week in history, but not so huge at the box office. We decide to take a look back at some classic movies with conscience, each made at a pivotal moment in America history. Movies where the hero doesn’t stand up to a diabolical villain, but instead has to face a latent evil embedded in society. We discuss Fury, The Ox-Bow Incident, 12 Angry Men, and To Kill a Mockingbird, among others.
Karina reports on here disappointing experience of being shut in on Halloween. It wasn’t the lack of social engagement that spoiled the evening, it was sub-par horror programing on Turner Classic Movies. She offers some sound advice for putting together a killer classic horror marathon.
It’s Halloween, a time when sales of candy and rentals of horror movies spike off the charts. Candy has been around since the time of the ancient Egyptians, but the horror film is barely 100 years old. The genre is enjoying a resurgence in popularity over the past several years: right now you’ve got Saw V in wide release, Let The Right One In in limited theaters, the vampy teen Twilight coming up in a few weeks and True Blood making waves on HBO. Studios can’t seem to go more than a few months without releasing some sort of a zombie flick, and vampires are coming back into their own.
But what was the first real horror film? Before movies existed, people had to get their scares from books and the local newspaper, but now you can just switch on cable and tune into NBC’s Chiller channel for instant scares. Check out a brief history of the horror movie after the break, and look just how far we’ve come.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
filmcouch-114
Still one more day til Halloween (Silver Shamrock!), but as this will be the final Today in Film Bloggery post ever on SpoutBlog, it’s my only opportunity to do a roundup of what the blogs are posting this week related to the holiday of candy and costumes.
While Karina (and indieWIRE) sits off to the side 
