The (Un)necessary Remake Dept – Fame

Fame (1980) Generally speaking, for me watching a musical is like going to the dentist:  I just know at some point it’s going to hurt.  I may not know when, or in some instances even how, but pain is pretty much a given. Which is why I tend to avoid musicals (and dentists), though in reference […]

The (Un)necessary Remake Dept: Creature (1985)

Let’s be clear:  William Malone’s (who also directed the very entertaining reboot of The House On Haunted Hill, among an extensive filmography) 1985 movie Creature is essentially a low-budget knock-off of Alien, down to the monster itself (when you could see it in its entirely that is, which wasn’t often). It’s also not a very good movie, though by no […]

The (Un)necessary Remake Dept: The Manitou

Some people might call William Girdler’s The Manitou a ripoff of The Exorcist, and in a sense they’d be right in that both involve possession of a sort.  Then’s there’s the fact that Girdler’s film came five years afterwards, though other than that it’s a whole other animal and deserves revisiting. The movie, based on the novel […]

‘Prometheus:’ Neither Fish, Fowl Or ‘Alien’

What I referring to is in interviews how Ridley Scott often says that he feels as if he’s taken the Aliens as far as he’s able–keeping in mind that Prometheus as originally written was firmly entrenched in the Alien universe, till Damon Lindelof joined the project and excised most of those elements from Jon Spaiths’ screenplay–yet he keeps […]

‘Tomorrowland’ Trailer

I don’t know about Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland.  Maybe it’s because Damon Lindelof wrote it, and I still haven’t gotten over the silly “smoke monster” from Lost or the way he butchered Jon Spaihts’ original script for Prometheus (I know that it was his job was to remove the Alien-related references, and then stitch things back together […]

‘Alien: Isolation’ Trailer

Alien: Isolation, if the trailer does the game any justice, is gorgeous.  The original Alien, the movie that came out in 1979, directly inspired the videogame and was (and still is to many) considered to be one of the scariest movies ever made. The game play (as far as I can tell) as well as cinematics are directly […]

Why You Need To See ‘Harbinger Down’

Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff, of Amalgamated Dynamics, Inc. (ADI) aren’t names that most people are familiar with, though if you have seen Alien, Predator, The Thing (2011), Monster Squad, Mortal Combat, The Fly, The Fly II among many, many others, then you are more familiar with their work than you think. Despite such a pedigree, the film industry have […]

The (Un)necessary Remake Dept: Krull

Let’s be clear:  Peter Yates’ Krull isn’t a particularly good movie, but it is an awesome one and easily deserving of a remake to correct the problems–which I will go to in a moment–that are there. How can one movie be two seemingly contradictory things?  Mediocre and awesome at the same time?  Quite easily.  Visually, Krull […]

Postmortem: Prometheus (2012)

Ridley Scott, even when his films are sort of silly, like “Legend,” look absolutely remarkable.  He has an eye that manages to catch the smallest details, but his ear for nonsensical story beats is not quite so acute. For instance, while “Prometheus” was gorgeous to look at, but if you give it any sort of consideration, […]