Posted in B-movies, Horror, Industry, directors, film, politics on Jul 11th, 2007 No Comments »
Dispatches from this year’s Hay-on-Wye literature festival, courtesy of MovieMail correspondent Graeme Hobbs, confirm that director Robin Hardy is in fine fettle and still promising to deliver a much awaited ‘re-imagining’ of his cult 1973 film, The Wicker Man. Hardy has published a novel called Cowboys for Christ, which presents a new take on the […]
Posted in B-movies, Industry, directors on Jun 18th, 2007 1 Comment »
My recent MovieMail blog, Don’t Bisect Grindhouse, lamented the decision to split the not-yet-released Robert Rodriguez–Quentin Tarantino double-bill extravaganza in Europe and release Tarantino’s segment on its own. It argued, before I had seen the film, that cutting Grindhouse clean in half was against the spirit of the enterprise.
I’ve now had the opportunity to […]
Posted in B-movies, Horror, Industry, Scifi on May 25th, 2007 5 Comments »
I reacted with some caution over the news that the Dutch consortium Cyrte Investments has bought Hammer Films and intends to revive some of the studios old favourites for modern audiences.
Haven’t we been here before?
As early as 1980, four years after its last theatrical horror film (the stillborn To the Devil, A Daughter) Hammer head […]
Posted in Horror, Industry, directors, film, politics on May 23rd, 2007 11 Comments »
If you’re like me, you may have let yourself down by tuning into Celebrity Big Brother earlier this year when you discovered that the incomparable filmmaker Ken Russell was a contestant.
I don’t know what I was expecting from Ken, but he was a disappointment, looking bored and engaging in uninspired conversation with housemates sixty years […]
Posted in B-movies, Horror, Industry, film on May 8th, 2007 2 Comments »
It looks like splitting Tarantino movies in two has gone to Harvey Weinstein’s head – it seems he’s about to do that to the long-awaited Grindhouse before it sees a UK cinema release (if it gets a UK cinema release at all). But the reasons are different from the decision to release Kill Bill as […]
Posted in Industry, film, politics on Nov 25th, 2006 No Comments »
It takes no great insight to say that, a lot of the time, the motive for making a sequel to a successful (or partially successful) movie is to make more money from the same concept without having to match the creative donkey-work that helped to get it off the ground in the first place. But […]
Posted in Industry, Technology, film on Oct 25th, 2006 No Comments »
My aesthetic Luddism kicked in when I was growing up in the eighties. Even though I’d been too young to really appreciate the virtues of Super 8 cine-film, I was already lamenting its replacement with video. Home videos looked ugly, shaky and fizzy; Super 8, although nowhere near a sharp as its 35mm counterpart, had […]