Posts Tagged ‘Sam Raimi’

Derivative dross

TV director Peter Cornwell’s latest effort to revisit the ‘Based On A True Story (Honest)’ craze that was begun by Stuart Rosenberg’s really rather average The Amityville Horror way back in 1979, with screenwriters Adam Simon (Brain Dead (1990)) and Tim Metcalfe (Kalifornia (1993)) along for the ride, suffers very much from all the same faults as its predecessor, coupled with the ever-increasing tendency (see my recent review of Sam Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell (2009)) of mainstream US horror to dumb it down, big time.

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I’ll let you guess which is which…

OK, time for another roundup of all the news that’s fit to…er…all the news I feel like writing about. So, without further ado…

Colin (2009): Finally, films have started getting good titles. If it has to be a boy’s name, you can’t do a lot better, in my humble opinion. The film that took Cannes by storm, shot over 18 months on location in 2 countries (England and Wales) for a mind-blowing 45 pounds sterling, has now got a distributor and we be showing in cinemas proper all over the place (well, the UK, for a start). The premise of the movie is that the eponymous ‘hero’ has been attacked by a zombie, and is himself turning into one. We are let into his life before zombification, and follow his life while infected. A pretty nifty idea, I think, and pretty much the last place to go with the genre, following Shaun of the Dead (2004) and George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead (2007). A cracking name for a film it is too. I wish it every success. The trailer can be seen here, along with more info on the movie.

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Dumber of Sam

Regular readers will, I hope, forgive me for yet another stroll down horror memory lane – as it’s the genre that captivated me from the outset of my life-long love affair with cinema (and is, probably, why I fell for film as quickly as I did), a real disappointment from the form hits me harder than most.

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Scary vampires, back from the dead

Marlow: ‘It’s taken us centuries to convince them that we don’t exist.’

Young director David Slade is fast emerging as a leading light in genre flicks that take you places you really don’t want to go – check out Hard Candy (2005), which could take Lolita’s Revenge as a sub-head, if you don’t believe me.

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