..

Off to the East Coast for a week and a half or so.

I hope (boy, do I hope) everybody enjoys Indiana Jones. See you soon.

Hammer on

Hammer might do a little better than Beyond the Rave if they find themselves able to stick to classier influences than Return of the Living Dead 5: Rave to the Grave. Outbidding Warner Brothers and Paramount for rights is a good start: Hammer has topped the abovementioned giants in a bidding war for remake rights to Let the Right One In, a novel-based Swedish kid-and-maybe-vampire romantic horror picture which won the feature prize at the Tribeca festival a couple weeks back. Tomas Alfredson directed the original; no writer or director has been assigned to the remake yet, but the original Swedish producers will remain involved.

Hammer off

Hammer Film Productions 2008, are you trying to make me look bad?

From previous post:

Beyond the Rave (not to be confused with Return of the Living Dead installment #5 Rave to the Grave)

From Beyond the Rave site:

If I had a Hammer

Speaking of Hammer horror, it was just about this time last year that British studio Hammer Films was purchased by Dutch producer John De Mol and his investment group. Obviously this new 21st century Hammer has no real tie to the original – the more cynical of us might call it a shameless grab at latching onto a niche market with nostalgia for a revered if deceased name brand – but if the rights are still intact, there are quite a few great properties out there, and if it spurs renewed interest in some of those classics (reissued deluxe editions, increased availability), so much the better. If it means remakes of Hammer catalog, well, we'll see how that goes. There's still no announcement of remakes of To The Devil A Daughter or Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, but it's only a matter of time.

The first new Hammer production is Beyond the Rave, a horror serial currently airing episodically on Myspace. Beyond the Rave (not to be confused with Return of the Living Dead installment #5 Rave to the Grave) certainly doesn't look like a Hammer production – if I were De Mol, I'd get on the horn with Scott Bunt, or at least the production design and art direction team on the upcoming (though shot in 2006) Sea of Dust,



which would look pretty great if not for the sinking feeling that the acting is terrible and the script questionable. Actually, if I were De Mol, I'd call up Bunt, see who has UK distribution rights, and redub everything with British voiceover actors, throwing in a few European or Slavic actors whose English is thickly accented. Ingrid Pitt, a Hammer star from the good old days who knows what she's doing, can do her own dubbing. Maybe an Italian or Spanish actor for Tom Savini, whose plays a rather noncanon resurrected Prester John.

Polydipsia

The moviegoing highlight of my blog-free April was undoubtedly the New Beverly's one-time-only screening of Joe Dante's 1968 Movie Orgy, the culmination of a two-week festival curated by Dante. Not a movie as such, the thing's an always enjoyable, often-hilarious (I can't remember the last time I laughed aloud in a theater) medley of TV shows, serials, a couple music videos, commercials real and fake, and whatever Dante and his friends could get their hands on in a spliceable format for addition to their ever-expanding rubber-band ball.

Dante's been relatively silent recently, shooting a couple Masters of Horror episodes and a bit of other TV work since in the five years since he made Looney Tunes, but he's getting back in the director's chair for a remake of Thirst, an underappreciated 1979 Australian vampire flick.

The first 30 minutes of Thirst feel remarkably like a mildly vampiric episode of The Prisoner, and I was tickled to see that director Rod Hardy did in fact helm 19 episodes of that series between 1979 and 1981. Thirst was his feature debut, after which he returned to television directing (working on X-Files, Mission: Impossible, and the new Battlestar Galactica, among many others).

In any case, Thirst is underrated, with solid acting (including from David Hemmings and a couple British imports), that good old Prisoner feel (gets bonus points from me), and a handful of good, creepy moments, including a set piece that better tackles the difficult issue of conveying the real feeling of a reluctant vampire's ineluctable need to feed than any other I've seen. On this note and others, it might make a decent companion piece to George A. Romero's 1977 Martin, another somewhat modernized, deromanticized vampirism pic.

There are other examples to pick from; the 1970s were a fertile time for bringing the vampire into modernity, starting with 1970's Count Yorga, Vampire, and moving on to Dracula A.D. 1972 and The Satanic Rites of Dracula, the latter two each boasting a revealing original title: Dracula Today and Dracula Is Dead And Well And Living In London, respectively, but thematic aspects of Thirst kept me much more in mind of Martin.

Thirst, I think, is more intrigued with technologizing vampirism and how that somewhat stark, procedural, white-roomed Kaiser Permanente approach contrasts with the characters' vision of the vampire culture, their respect for a character who turns out to be distant kin of Elizabeth Báthory, and their Martin-like reliance on a prosthetic, which here seems almost more an emotional relic than a practical need.

In extra-good news, Dante is taking over directorial duties from the largely untalented Mick Garris, who can now get back to his important work of rummaging through Stephen King's trash cans.

Doesn't qualify for that dancing blog-a-thon, probably

Need to double-check my calculations,
but I believe a



minus b























equals c

Liberty City

I get the impression this is probably pretty well documented by now, but I noticed it by hand two weeks ago and by George I'm going to post it myself.

Bugmenot

Easing back into it with some minimal content - there's been plenty of sequel news during my month of alternate pursuits, so there might be a bit of old news while I play some catch-up ball.

Posted on this a while ago, but poster and trailer up more recently.

Some changes since the original mention, but Robocop (and Starship Troopers parts 1 and 2) scribe Ed Neumeier will still be making his directorial debut. Casper Van Dien returns as Johnny Rico, joined by Jolene Blalock, who's appeared in both Star Trek: Enterprise (extensively) and Stargate SG-1 (briefly) TV series.

Starship Troopers 3: Marauder hits DVD in July. I don't know what "It's a Good Day to Fry" means.