With Victorian pictures of canines throughout the centuries, Man’s Best Friend is already laughably pretentious. The insistently obtrusive and downright ear-ravaging score from Joel Goldsmith is another misstep. Writer-director of the equally underwhelming Child’s Play 2, John Lafia is utterly tone-deaf and the film teeters uncomfortably near spoof territory if only it wasn’t so staggeringly lumpen.
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F.W. Murnau’s 1922 picture was a revolutionary landmark for the silent film era and it was an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula which is why the monikers (a giggling Renfield is still intact) and situations have been slightly modified to avoid copyright infringement. Nevertheless, with a live orchestra, the film is still an audacious shocker. It would almost be sacrilegious for anyone to remake it. However, the pugnacious team of Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski were dithyrambic enough to embark upon it.
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Peter Hyams is not only a director but he is also his own cinematographer. One of his stipulations with this film is that it not be deluged with artificial lighting. Because of that, the film oozes nyctophobic atmosphere as the hallways and corridors of Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History are barely discernible and therefore, something could be prowling within the shadows.
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Normally, I would be beleaguered about the prospect of a belated, mostly disconnected sequel to a beloved 1978 miniseries. However, the X-factor is Larry Cohen’s name across the credits from his penmanship to his direction. Cohen is always a distinctively Homeric, astute, streetwise New York helmsman.
Continue readingFor members of the audience who are hazy on the details of Tom Holland’s masterstroke Fright Night, Tommy Lee Wallace rejiggers a highlight reel during the opening therapy sessions in which Charley Brewster’s (William Ragsdale) vampiric battle is expostulated by his psychiatrist as delusions. Strangely, despite the popularity of the predecessor, the home video release of this oft-forgotten sequel is out-of-print and can be exorbitant to acquire.
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Not all Stephen King short stories should be cushioned and expanded to feature length. Although this adaptation of a 2012 novella is a father-son collaboration with Joe Hill, the film itself is an interminable, lackluster hodgepodge of King’s previous motifs (religious fanaticism of The Mist, the insular claustrophobia of 1408, the sinister, rural setting of Children of the Corn, etc.).
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Checkered production histories occasionally yield far more engrossing narratives than the films that surround them, Such is the case with 1981’s Venom which was originally a Tobe Hooper picture until “creative differences” splintered his directorial participation. Likewise, the on-set friction between Oliver Reed and Klaus Kinski was an example of art-imitating-life as the two madmen squabble frequently much to the dismay of director Piers Haggard.
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From the time-travel aspect to a soldier with a dinosaur exhibit who venerates Godzilla as almost a pagan god who saved him on the battlefield, Godzilla Vs. King Ghidorah is one of the more loopy and exuberant of the Toho series. For that, I concede a standing ovation since it isn’t another belabored exercise in conference room scenes where scientists and bureaucrats are bellicose about Gojira’s resurgence.
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In a scarcity for me, I had only seen the 2010 remake before indulging in this 70’s slice of misogynistic, rape-revenge depravity. The remake definitely constructed byzantine contraptions to castrate and otherwise disembowel the chauvinistic molesters behind the heinous crime. For its part, I thought it was an adequately manipulative exploitation flick
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Though the adaptations are less frequent, Clive Barker’s book-to-screen translations have been much more consistently spectacular. Movies such as Nightbreed, Lord of Illusions, Candyman, Midnight Meat Train and of course, Hellraiser all range from ghoulishly copacetic to magnificently depraved. Rawhead Rex is not one of the more celebrated titles despite Barker receiving solo credit for the script and it is festooned with his bitingly wiseacre wit (“How can you be bored? This is the land of your forefathers” “Yeah and they left.”).
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