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 News
Since the unfortunate death of Heath Ledger, rumors have abounded about whether or not his performance will be re-edited. The latest is that a now controversial scene of Ledger’s Joker pretending to be dead and is shown in a body bag has been excised from the final print. Cinema Blend reported it was taken out, Moviehole reported it is intact. Guess we’ll all have to wait till July to find out.
Today is a sad day for movie fans, the great Charleton Heston passed away last night. I’m not going to talk about his conservative political stance or his run in with Michael Moore when he was head of the NRA, quite frankly an actor’s politics are his business and don’t really influence my own views on the issues, I generally prefer to concentrate on their actual work. Heston had quite a run from his Hollywood debut in the Noir classic Dark City (1949) to his cameo in the remake of his own sci-fi blockbuster Planet of the Apes (2001). Some of his high lights have included two films for Cecil B. Demille, The Greatest Show On Earth (1952) and The Ten Commandments (1956), one for Orson Wells, another Noir classic Touch of Evil (1959); and then there are his historical epics like the Lord of the Rings of it’s day Ben-Hur (1959), El Cid (1961), and The Agony and the Ecstacy (1965). But for me he was at his best in the pre-Star Wars sci-fi adventures like the original Planet of the Apes (1968), The Omega Man (1971), and Soylent Green (1973). His passing so close to Richard Widmark’s is like a one-two combination sucker punch to our cinematic history.
