Two new trailers

Here’s a couple of new trailers that surfaced on the Web recently. The first is the R rated trailer for a film I’ve mentioned before, next month’s The Signal.

The second is for an upcoming film from South America. It’s a flick called Descendents (aka Solos). I love the bleached out look of it. See for yourself.



Thanks to Bloody Disgusting and Twitch for the heads up.

It's about freakin' time!

I heard some great news yesterday. Studio Canal is finally giving the French film Ils (Them) a decent DVD release on March 25th. Yay!

Them was probably my favourite horror film of 2007 and I'm thrilled that I can now upgrade from my current bare bones, non-subtitled version.

For more info, you can check out the original announcement at Bloody-Disgusting.com by clicking here.

I concur, David. I concur.

David Lynch sounds off on his feelings about the Iphone movie player.

2008 Preview

So, another year is upon us. It looks like it’s going to be a good one. Here are my most anticipated genre films of 2008. This list is excluding The Dark Knight, which obviously overshadows everything!

#10 The Ruins (Apr 4th)
I’ve been hearing a lot of buzz on the Net about this movie. I’m sure my hopes that this is going to be The Descent in a Mexican locale will be quickly doused, but I can dream, can’t I?

#9 Midnight Meat Train (May 16th)

A movie based on a story by Clive Barker featuring Vinnie Jones as a serial killer with director Ryuhei Kitamura (Versus) at the controls? ‘Nuff said.

#8 Quarantined (Oct 17th)

This is the American remake of one of my favourite horror films from last year, [REC]. The chances of them fucking this up are large, but with genre familiar actors like Jennifer Carpenter (TV’s Dexter) and Jay Hernandez (Hostel) on board, I at least have some hope.

#7 The Signal (Feb 22nd)

I’ve been waiting for this one ever since it played at Sundance last year. The premise sounds very similar to Stephen King’s 2006 novel Cell. The Signal looks very gritty and intense in a 28 Days Later kind of way. It’s currently slated for release in February, but has been pushed back a few times already, so who knows?

#6 The Strangers (Aug 29th)

A very cool looking poster and a production still of Liv Tyler falling down. That’s all I have to go on right now with this long delayed home invasion thriller. Yes, I know there is a trailer, but I've refrained from watching it. I want this to be great (as most home invasion films are, or least the ones made by the French), but I have a sneaking suspicion that it shares its shtick with another film I saw last year.

#5 Trailer Trash (Aug 22nd)

A lot of people would say that the fake trailers were the best part of Grindhouse. This year, horror’s current poster boy Eli Roth is releasing a movie of JUST fake trailers. In this current YouTube generation we are living in, this project has the potential to not only be huge, but actually immensely enjoyable at the same time.

#4 Funny Games (Mar 14th)

This is the one remake I’m actually looking forward to. Michael Haneke is one of those one-of-a-kind filmmakers. Though having a director remake his own film hasn’t always worked (2004’s The Grudge for example), I think Haneke is up to the task. Left un-Hollywoodized, I think North American audiences are going to be really disturbed when Funny Games come to their town.

#3 My Name Is Bruce (TBD)

Bruce Campbell is back in this little indie. The premise of The Three Amigos meets Evil Dead is the closest thing we will get to a fourth installment of the loved franchise, so fanboys rejoice. All the old Renaissance cohorts are in tow for this, so this should be a rip roaring time. I’m not certain this will actually get any sort of release this year, but here’s hoping!

#2 Doomsday (Mar 14)

No film made more excited about the horror genre in the last few years than Neil Marshall’s The Descent. In 2008, Marshall is back with his third feature. If the apocalyptic storyline isn’t enough to draw me in, Rhona Mitra, Bob Hoskins and Malcolm MacDowell certainly are. I can’t wait to see what Marshall does with a project of a larger scale.

#1 Cloverfield (Jan 18th)

The first blockbuster of 2008. No trailer has had me chomping at the bit more than Cloverfield. Kudos to JJ Abrams and company for keeping this project shrouded in mystery in this day and age. I don’t think there will be any middle ground here. It will either be totally awesome or a terrible way to start the year.

And here are a few others worth mentioning, as well.

-M Night’s The Happening
Even though Shayamalan’s last two films have been pretentious stroke fests, I am still not ready to give up on the little guy. I think if he doesn’t cast himself as the future saviour of the world this time, he’ll be ahead of the game.

-Hellraiser
Not particularly happy about this one, but if there is anybody who can do this remake right, it’s those nihilistic maniacs Alex Bustillo and Julien Maury (Inside).

-The Eye, A Tale of Two Sisters & Shutter

This year sees remakes of three of my favourite Asian films. Given Hollywood’s track record, my curiosity about these must make me a glutton for punishment.

-X Files 2
Even though there are great many people that could give a toss about a new X Files movie, the huge ass fan in me cannot help myself from wanting to revisit something that absolutely consumed me for the bulk of the nineties.

All right, that's it. Less than two weeks until Cloverfield!

Trash Palace

Last Friday, I finally visited an establishment that I had been trying to check out for several months. Toronto’s Classiest Cinema: Trash Palace.

My journey began with a trip to Suspect Video. Since Trash Palace screenings are held in a secret location, one must purchase a ticket from Suspect, at which time you will be given the actual address. I was lucky enough to snag the last available ticket (the place only holds fifty people). A few blocks away, down a back alley and some stairs and I was finally there. It really is a sight to behold. The pictures below don’t really do this cinematic nostalgia factory justice.

Trash Palace is run by film fanatic and collector Stacey Case and his friend Dan Lovranski. Like Phantascope (which is a bicycle repair shop by day), Trash Palace doubles as a printing press studio. Every second Friday, all the equipment gets moved to the side and the area becomes a makeshift theatre. Stacey looked especially ecstatic with the turnout, iterating that he hates to watch these old films by himself. His philosophy is this -

“These old movies should be seen by an audience. Fourty or fifty got together and wrote, shot and acted in something they were passionate about. Then someone spent another six months editing it together. These people cared about this stuff, so why shouldn’t we?”

It’s an interesting theory. It’s hard for me to apply to some of the dreck I’ve endured over the years, but I certainly admire Stacey’s enthusiasm. You can just see it in him when he talks.

Now, onto the reason why we were all congregated in downtown Toronto on this ungodly cold night. It was for the 1978 Canadian film Plague.

Plague was made in Toronto in the winter of ’77 for under $100,000. Stacey had managed to procure a special guest for the showing, co-writer Barry Pearson. He said a few words before and after the screening and looked as equally thrilled as Stacey with the full house.

While watching this movie I was struck with an enormous sense of déjà vu. Dead birds. Twitching hands. The gray haired dude from those old Nabob coffee commercials. Yes. I had seen this movie before, many years ago on late night television. When I told Barry this, he said it was quite possible because Global (a large Canadian television company) had put money into the film. I enjoyed Plague even more this time. It’s low budget, but somehow it makes it all the more charming. The filmmakers tried to be as scientifically accurate as possible, consorting with science icon David Suzuki on many occasions. Experimenting with DNA was still a new thing in the late seventies, so the film was pretty fresh in that regard. Other elements of the film shine, as well. The score by Eric Robertson is perfect and there are countless shots of Toronto back in the day (including some cityscape shots taken from atop a newly built CN Tower).

After filling up on candy, popcorn and Pabst Blue Ribbon, it was time to call it a night. My trip to Trash Palace was a blast! I’ll totally be hitting more of these in the future. I mean, Frogs! Come on! How can I not go back?

Ab-normal Beauty

A Zip.ca queue (Zip is the Canadian Netflix for all you foreigners out there) is a funny thing sometimes. I’ll hear about some obscure movie on a website or show and put on my ziplist where it will sit for months (and in a few cases, even years). Then one day, it will appear in my mailbox. At this point, I will have no recollection about why I ziplisted it in the first place. I have gotten myself into trouble doing this, having to endure many a shitfest like Singapore Sling or All Night Long. So, when Ab-normal Beauty showed up, I was hoping I wasn’t in for another one.

Slipping in the DVD and seeing 'An Oxide Pang Film' come up on the screen gave me some degree of relief though. First, it reminded me of why I would have ziplisted this title in the first place and also that I now had at least a marginal chance of seeing something half decent. Now, I have a love/hate relationship with the Pang Brothers - Oxide and his twin brother, Danny. They are either engineering gold like The Eye (I didn’t see the sequel; if enough people tell me a film is shit on a stick, I am usually compelled to avoid it) or absolute messes like The Tesseract.

Ab-normal Beauty is about this young cutie photography student (played by Race Wong) that one day happens upon a fatal traffic accident. Of course, she does what any well-adjusted person would do and takes some pictures of the corpse laying in the middle of the street. It seems like a bit of a leap, but who am I to judge? She then discovers that capturing death on film gives her some measure of arousal and the obsession grows from there.

The frustrating thing about the Pangs is they know how to use the camera like gangbusters, but they always have to throw in these overdramatic interludes that cheese up the place. I’m not saying they are the only Asian directors that do this (maybe it’s a cultural difference that I, as a North American viewer, don’t get), but the Pangs especially have been known to lay it on pretty thick at times. Their 2006 film Re-cycle was basically ruined by this kind of stuff. The first two acts of Re-cycle were great - imagine a live action version of Spirited Away, but add in a shit ton of aborted fetuses - but was irreparably mired by a climax that was equal parts sappy and absurd. Granted, the atrocious subtitling didn’t help either, but you get my drift. Getting back to the visuals though, the last half reminded me of Saw and Hostel, which is strange considering Beauty was made at the same time as the former. Decide for yourself.

It’s just an observation; maybe they were channelling Guinea Pig instead.

On the unforgivably negative side, I must admit the big reveal at the end made me laugh out loud at its complete randomness and the last line of the film was completely unnecessary, as well. It seems to me that the Pangs never know when they are ahead. The more time that goes by, the excellence of The Eye seems more and more like an anomaly.

I’d say Ab-normal Beauty lies in the middle of the Pangs canon. It’s a film of solid moments and imagery, but stalls when you put it together as a whole.

Carnival Of Souls

The good thing about renting movies via an online retailer is you get to fill in the blanks. Carnival Of Souls is a title I’d heard cinephiles talk about adoringly for years, but I never got around to watching it until it showed up in my mailbox last week. I got a real kick out of this movie. It really encapsulates the time period in which it was made. I can imagine it influencing America’s contemporary filmmakers. While watching the imagery of the climactic fairground sequence, I wondered if dark directors David Lynch and Tim Burton saw this in their youth and filed it away in their twisted psyches. I have no idea if they’ve even seen the movie, but something tells me it’s quite likely. There are also the easy parallels to be drawn between Carnival Of Souls director Herk Harvey and legend George A. Romero. Both started in the business shooting local shorts and both set out to make a low budget horror feature with the help of local investors. A lot of ingenuity and sheer will made their projects rise above their low budgets. History has been a lot kinder to Romero, but Carnival has still garnered a modest following over the years.

I’ll tell you something that baffles me about Carnival though. Why didn’t lead actress Candace Hilligoss have a bigger career? I mean, look at her. The camera loves her. She’s absolutely striking.

If you are wondering, yes, my phone camera is still shit.

I expected to look her up on Imdb and find a string of sixties B movies, but 1964’s Curse of the Living Corpse was the only one. I'm aware that Carnival was shot in rural Kansas - far from the bright lights of Hollywood - and released to very little fanfare, but I still find it extremely curious. I was hoping for another epiphany, like when I saw Edwige Fenech for the first time. After seeing Your Vice Is A Locked Room And Only I Have The Key (yes, no joke, anyone familiar with gialli should know titles like this are par for the course) and being quite taken with Fenech, I was ecstatic to discover a vast filmography to track down. Unfortunately, with Hilligoss, I was not as fortunate.

The score by Gene Moore is so great. It just feels like the sixties, resonating like Bernard Herrmann and H.G. Lewis’s old stuff. Carnival Of Souls plays out like an elongated Twilight Zone episode – which is no surprise since it is fairly similar to Zone ep ‘The Hitch Hiker’ – with a conclusion which has sadly been used countless times since. The antagonist (known only as The Man and played by director Harvey himself) isn’t much to look at – kind of reminded me of Grandpa Munster to be honest – but some of the “scare” setups were way ahead of their time.

Overall, an excellent piece of vintage American horror cinema and should be sought out by anyone who is interested in that sort of thing.