Previews and Reviews that are Z's Views
Matt Ryan Tobin created these two very cool A Quiet Place limited edition prints for Mondo. The variant edition features a red glow-in-the-dark layer for nights without light. Click over to see the cool effect.
Scott Beggs and Mental Floss present 10 Fascinating Facts About It Follows. Here are three of my favorites…
1. ITS TIME PERIOD DOESN’T FEEL REAL.
David Robert Mitchell, production designer Michael Perry, and costume designer Kimberly Leitz coordinated to throw us off-balance without us even realizing it. Almost none of the young characters use cell phones, but they exist—and Yara (Olivia Luccardi) has that clamshell e-reader. The vintage cars all look brand-new, but people also have cars from the 2010s. It’s presumably modern day, but all the TVs are from the 1980s, and all the movies the kids watch are classics. Characters also wear bathing suits or heavy winter coats on the same day without appearing too hot or cold. Essentially the movie takes place during a stretch of impossible weather during an unreal era, making it impossible for you to find your footing. (Craig – This is genius!)
7. ONE OF THE MONSTERS IS JAY AND KELLY’S FATHER.
The monster takes on the form of a middle-aged man when Jay and Kelly try to kill it at the pool. In an incredibly subtle moment, Jay refuses to tell Kelly (Lili Sepe) what the monster has taken the form of, but if you rewatch the movie, you’ll see that the middle-aged man is their father, who is featured in several family photographs in the house but completely absent from their lives. Some viewers theorize he killed himself, and others see his throwing appliances at her in the pool as a nod toward possible abuse, but Jay is definitely protecting her sister.
4. THE PLAN TO KILL THE MONSTER IS TERRIBLE. BUT THAT’S ON PURPOSE.
Jay and her friends plot to electrocute the monster in a pool even though they don’t know anything about what might weaken it, and they were warned directly that it’s not dumb. “It’s the stupidest plan ever!” Mitchell told Vulture. “It’s a kid-movie plan. It’s something that Scooby Doo and the gang might think of, and that was sort of the point. What would you do if you were confronted by a monster and found yourself trapped within a nightmare?”Mitchell specifically wanted to avoid the trope of the perfect nugget of information about the monster’s vulnerabilities magically dropping into the gang’s lap.
Here’s the Hospitality poster and trailer. I love the noir vibe and hope the movie is as good as the trailer makes it out to be. Guess we can find out on December 9th.
Rob Hunter and Film School Rejects present 22 Things We Learned from Joe Dante’s ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ Commentary. Here are three of my favorites …
11. Sam Peckinpah, who has a small role in the film, was apparently very quiet on set. He can be seen in the basement at 37:32.
13. They disagree over when exactly Dr. Dan Kauffman (Larry Gates) became a pod person. Dante thinks he’s one for the first time when Miles and Becky arrive in their bathrobes, but McCarthy says he’s been one since the earlier car ride. “Hmm, interesting,” says Dante, clearly not believing him but choosing instead to be a gentleman and a fan.
16. Siegel once snuck into Wynter’s house and hid a pod prop beneath her bed. No one challenges her on the commentary to prove she’s still human.
This version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is one of my favorite horror films. I fondly remember watching it many times over the years — with my favorite viewings being hosted by Sammy Terry late at night at my grandparents house.
I love the simplicity of this poster and how can you not get excited about, “This is why horror fans go to the movies.”
Matthew Jackson and Mental Floss present 11 Legendary Facts About Enter the Dragon. Here are three of my favorites …
2. THE LOOK WAS INSPIRED BY A COMIC STRIP.
Enter the Dragon was made quickly, on a tight schedule, and with a budget much more constrained than what we commonly associate with action movies today. As a result, Heller and Weintraub had to start concerning themselves with getting sets built in Hong Kong even before Michael Allin’s script was completely finalized. To do that, Heller looked to his childhood and to a comic strip about adventures in China that he’d loved, Terry and the Pirates.“It was high chroma reds, blues, golds, and it just lent itself to this project so closely,” Heller said.
So, with Terry and the Pirates in mind, Heller began working with a sketch artist to design various sets, including Han’s (Kien Shih) underground layer, the banquet hall on the island, and other key areas of Han’s domain. From there, the sketches were turned over to set builders in Hong Kong, and construction was underway
8. THE ICONIC MIRRORED ROOM WAS NOT IN THE SCRIPT.
It’s impossible now to imagine Enter the Dragon without the iconic final fight between Lee and Han, which takes place in a mirrored room that replicates Lee’s movements several times over as he delivers his famous kicks. Once upon a time, though, this was nowhere in the script, and only came about because Heller noticed the effect mirrors had at a Hong Kong hotel where he was eating one day.“I took Bruce and showed it to him. He thought it was too fragmented, that you couldn’t get any action that would mean anything out of it,” Heller recalled. “Bob Clouse and I really fought hard for it, and we created this mirrored room.”
Clouse and Heller pushed ahead with the mirror concept, and once they showed the set to Lee and he was able to move around in the space, he became a believer. A special “closet” made of mirrors with a hole cut in one side for the camera lens was built, so that the cameraman would always blend into the rest of the scene, and filming of the famous sequence began. According to Hubbs, though, working for hours on end in that environment created a unique set of challenges.
“I remember that I would always have to touch, because if I’m looking at something, they might not be there, they might be over there,” Hubbs said. “I found that I could only be in there for a couple of hours, and I’d have to go out and sit down and look at a wall and real dimension, because it’s like there was a fourth dimension in there.”
9. LEE CHOREOGRAPHED THE FIGHT SCENES HIMSELF.
Lee was not just the star of Enter the Dragon. He also played a key role in how it was staged, as the screenplay would often describe action sequences by simply saying “This Will Be Choreographed by Mr. Bruce Lee.” As Heller recalled, Lee would often walk through the various sets, particularly Han’s underground lair, and look for details and props that he could then incorporate into each sequence, with the help of Clouse. Together, they worked closely to engineer the film’s iconic fight sequences, and by the time early footage from the film was available, Lee was so excited that he didn’t want Enter the Dragon to end. According to Weintraub, he later went back to Hong Kong to shoot the early sparring sequence at the monastery with his friend Sammo Hung.
The new Creed II poster and Sins of Our Fathers featurette is here!
What better day than Halloween to post Barret Chapman’s Halloween print? Hero Complex Gallery recently had a Halloween 40 showing and you can see the other art that made it into the show here.
Rebecca Pahle and Mental Floss present The 20 Best Horror Movies of All Time. Pahle’s list is a good one that made narrowing down to my top three tough, but here they are with my thoughts on each…
NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968): is one of those rare movies that influences a genre. Can you imagine the billions (trillions?) of dollars that would have been lost if George Romero had never made NOTLD? Romero made a horror movie with a layer of social commentary that shocked and inspired.
THE EXORCIST (1973): is perhaps the scariest movie ever made. Its the kind of scary that stays with you and invades your mind in the dark hours of the night when you’re trying to sleep. Here’s a true story involving The Exorcist:
Back in the pre-internet days when the only way to see a movie at home was through HBO or a similar service, I was fortunate enough to have both HBO and a video recorder. A friend of mine didn’t have cable but did have a VCR. He asked me to record The Exorcist for him. I did. He lived alone and decided to watch the movie late one night. When he turned off the VCR, the counter was at 666. What are the odds? Needless to say, he didn’t sleep the rest of the night.
THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991): doesn’t usually come to mind when I think of horror movies. It does meet the criteria but I always think of it as a cop movie. Still, it did make Pahle’s list and it is one of the top three films selected, so of course it made it to my selections as well.
Growing up my favorite monster was always the wolfman. Sad thing is, there’s never been a truly great werewolf movie. For me, Curse of the Werewolf comes closest thanks to the best wolfman design ever and the acting of Oliver Reed. Still, a less than great werewolf movie is better than nothing at all.
Liam Neeson is in Cold Pursuit of the mugs who killed is son.
Who doesn’t love a good whacky conspiracy theory? If you do, then check out the Above Majestic trailer below.
Bird Box looks interesting enough that I plan to check it out.
Brad Gullickson and Film School Rejects present The 10 Wildest Horror Westerns. I have to admit, at first I thought, “Have there been 10 worthy horror westerns?” – then I saw Gullickson’s list and agreed there have. So using just Gullickson’s list, I selected three and made sure that they met the western criteria and were scary. So here are three of my favorites …
Westworld (1973)
Set in the future (at the time of its release), Westworld slips into the horror western genre by a technicality. See the monster is a robot cowboy that has gone on a killing spree. Boy, rereading that sentence, Westworld sounds stupid. But it’s not. It’s actually a very entertaining film — especially to the 15 year old me who loved seeing it on the big screen. And have no worries, it holds up well.
Near Dark (1987)
A modern western with a vampire twist. I love Near Dark. It was great to see Aliens cast mates reunited. How cool is it to imagine a family of vampires some who turned during the Civil War, traveling the modern day west and doing what vampires do best. Wrap in a love story, a father’s quest to save his son and a vampire turned as a child who will forever have the child’s body but an adult’s desires and you have one heck of a horror-western!
Bone Tomahawk (2015)
Some may argue that Bone Tomahawk isn’t a horror film. Those that do haven’t seen the movie. What’s scarier than cannibalistic Troglodytes? Nothing. And if you think we’re splitting hairs to get Bone Tomahawk classified as a horror film, then watch it and see what Troglodytes split.
A couple more comments…
High Plains Drifter (1973) – Is one of my least favorite Eastwood movies. And while it does meet the criteria to be a western/horror film, it only does so by the thinnest of margins being a western with an avenging ghost… that’s not scary.
Ravenous (1999) – Is a strange hybrid. A western set in the 1840’s with a few cannibals. Well, one main one anyway. It’s a good movie… but definitely different.
The Valley of the Gwangi (1969) – 10 year old me saw this at a drive-in and loved it! How could I not, I had to be the demographic it was aiming for — Cowboys and Dinosaurs!! Sad to say I saw it years later and it had lost some of it’s coolness. Ok, a lot of it’s coolness.
Here are 9 Things You (Probably) Didn’t Know About Rocky. My guess is that since you’re reading this here, you do know!
