When thinking of those who, in our lifetimes, have made major contributions to the shape of pop mythology, let no one forget the name of George Romero. When I was a kid, growing up between the time that Romero's first and best movie, Night of the Living Dead, planted the seeds of his achievement, and the release of its sequel, Dawn of the Dead, cemented it, I spent maybe half my young life watching and reading about horror movies. Partly this was research: at the playground, the jury was still out on whether monsters actually existed, and if they did, I wanted to be ready for them when they stormed the house. Mummies didn't occupy my thoughts to any special degree: they were easy to outrun, and besides, so long as you didn't go violating any Egyptian tombs, it was easy to stay on their good side. Vampires and werewolves were a lot worse, but at least there were clear, set-in-stone guidelines for dealing with them: daylight, wooden stakes, silver bullets, full moons, everybody who dipped a toe into the horror genre knew the drill. But zombies? Now there was a disappointing monster. There weren't many zombie movie classics, and those seemed to be vague on the rules regarding zombiedom. Basically, a zombie was a big, reanimated dead guy with bugged-out eyes and no personality who, under the distraction of the voodoo master who had resurrected him, stagger up and throttle you. No zombie ever looked as if he enjoyed his work, and there was no consensus on how to deal with one, or even if it was the zombie you wanted to target or if you should go over his head and take it up with his boss. Vampires, werewolves, and even most mummies were free agents. Zombies were the hired help.

All that changed thanks to Romero. With two movies and some help from a few enthusiastic Italian imitators, Romero completely changed not just the rule book but the contemporary identity and meaning of zombies in horror movie culture.

Read More...

Fox has canceled Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the expensive TV series spun off from the now 24-year-old movie franchise, after two seasons and a mere 31 episodes. The series was "created" by Josh Friedman, a screenwriter and blogger who, strangely enough, is best known for his association with movies that he didn't work on. (Friedman was co-credited, with David Koepp, with the script for Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds, based on a script he'd written based on the H. G. Wells novel before Spielberg and Koepp got involved, and he got the ball rolling on Snakes on a Plane as an Internet punch line.) The series, which got off to a fast start when it premiered mid-season in January 2008, starred Lena Headley of 300 in the role made famous by Linda Hamilton and Thomas Dekker as John Connor, the role created by Edward Furling in Terminator 2, picked up by Nick Stahl in Terminator 3, and about to become, as of this coming Friday, the now-exclusive property of Christian Bale. The cast also included the dancer-actress Summer Glau, whose picture now belongs in the dictionary next to the term "hot poker-faced killer robot babe." It is an unwieldy term, but clearly it or something with the same meaning belongs in the language.

Read More...

Canadian director Bruce McDonald (Hard Core Logo) has been insisting in interviews that his new film Pontypool is not really a zombie movie, and as someone who has burnt out on zombie movies of late, I have to agree with him. It's a difficult film to categorize at all - sort of like Orson Welles' War of the Worlds in reverse, or a George Romero adaptation of Talk Radio, although neither of those descriptions quite gets at how peculiar Pontypool really is.

Read More...

The fourth Indiana Jones movie has finally been unveiled at Cannes, and it didn’t take long for the initial critical reaction to hit the intertubes. (In fact, indiewire critic Eric Kohn actually texted his review line by line from the theater as the movie was screening. No word yet on whether this caused Armond White’s brain to explode.) The consensus so far hasn’t exactly been one of childlike glee (with the exception of Roger Ebert, who says “If you liked the other movies, you will like this one, and if you did not, there is no talking to you.”). Manohla Dargis of the New York Times sums it up thusly: “I was bored out of my mind while watching the movie, which makes me think that Spielberg was terribly bored while directing it.”

Peter Rainer of the L.A. Times takes that last idea and runs with it, asking the musical question, “Will Spielberg take a walk on the wild side?” Seems like it might be a little late in the game for that, but Rainer does offer an interesting analysis of Spielberg’s career trajectory.

Read More...

Asylum is a small Hollywood production company with a niche. Its recent titles include The Da Vinci Treasure, Snakes on a Train, and Transmorphers. As Rolf Potts explains, that last one might be mistaken, ideally by someone on a late-night raid at Blockbusters, for Transformers, except that the Asylum product "has no recognizable actors, no merchandising tie-ins and a garbled sound mix. Also unlike Transformers, it has cheap special effects and a subplot involving lesbians." Potts calls films like these, which are designed to be viewed by people with another, better-known movie on their minds, as "mockbusters." David Michael Latt, the company's co-founder, calls them "tie-ins", though that term has traditionally been used by people who were actually working together on a mass-marketed product and not by people who were, in effect, letting the big studios unknowingly do their marketing for them. Latt explains that Anchor, which has been around since 1997, just kind of tripped into this; they had made their own cheapo adaptation of H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds, starring C. Thomas Howell, and they noticed that, when Steven Spielberg's own big-time movie of that same name and provenance hit DVD racks, it didn't hurt their sales. Soon, Asylum was making King of the Lost World, starring Bruce Boxleitner and Steve Railsback and featuring a DVD cover with a picture of a big-ass gorilla, which was timed to appear at the same time as Peter Jackson's King Kong. "I’m not trying to dupe anybody," Latt tells Potts. "I’m just trying to get my films watched." And the only way he can do that is by duping people. But at least he's keeping Steve Railsback off the streets. — Phil Nugent