As if a new PG-13 remake of Prom Night isn’t enough to drive you into giving up on new horror films all together and just watch the Universal classics for the rest of your days, it was announced that Alexandre Aja, director of the new movie Mirrors, is going to be helming a remake of Joe Dante’s late seventies horror satire Piranha. The kicker here, it will be the first R rated horror film to be shown in 3-D. In his statement to the press Aja talked about how fun all the gore is and how the fish will be eating a bunch of drunk, stupid college kids, with an environmental concerns subtext of course. With all the talk of blood, body parts and computer animated fish flying at the screen (sounds like a SciFi Channel movie of the week all you need is Bruce Campbell or Dean Cain in the cast) and the usual platitudes about the deeper meaning just under the surface of the plot, Aja left out something important, like how scary the movie is. My bet is it won’t be too scary. Most film makers still make the mistake of equating buckets of gore with being scary (nobody seems to learn the financial lesson proved by the first Halloween or Signs, what’s suggested is more scary than what’s shown, which equals big bucks in revenue from a bigger part of the populace than just gore hounds). When it comes down to spending what little money I have for film entertainment, I think I’ll skip the 3-D man eating fish gore fest and see Zombie Strippers instead, it’s got zombies and strippers, to quote the great Stan Lee “’nuff said.”
Archive for April, 2008
With the new season of Doctor Who starting on SciFi this Friday I have but one thought on my mind. When are they going to make a big budget Doctor Who movie. The character has been extremely popular here since it debuted on PBS back in the late seventies, the new series is one of the top rated shows on SciFi, gone are are the cheesy effects and cheap budgets. Firefly got a movie, Star Trek has a new movie out, why not a big budget summer blockbuster for one of the oldest science fiction properties around today? Co-produce it with an American company, like Lucas’ or Spielberg’s and you can get some big named Hollywood stars to appear in it for cross promoting purposes. Tennant’s a good enough actor to hold his own against DiCaprio or Hackman. And the film would definitely be better than 10,000 B.C.. Considering how hard Hollywood is hunting for something, anything to draw people into the theaters, Speed Racer for example, I can’t believe this hasn’t been brought up before.
So I’m cruising around Scifi.com the other day, looking for BSG spoilers, ’cause I just have to know who the final cylon is, when I come upon this crazy story. Apparently some irate people have started an online petition to get Uwe Boll (you know the guy who takes popular computer games and turns them into not so popular movies) to stop making films. He has gone on record as saying if they can get a million signatures he will do it, then he started his own petition to keep him making movies and asked all of his fans to sign it. This is either the most surreal turn of events ever witnessed by the entertainment industry, a big joke, or a canny way to help promote Boll’s upcoming film. I personally don’t buy the first option, my money is on the third. But if in fact it is a joke on Boll’s part, I have to tell him to be careful it doesn’t blow up in his face. Remember what happened to Andy Kaufman with the infamous vote to be allowed to continue going on SNL or be banned for life? He lost, and true to his word and the spirit of the prank he never went on the show again. If Boll loses this will he do the same or will he just say it was all a joke then act like it never happened? Being how cynical and self serving celebs can get, I think you know where my bet is being placed.
