The Screengrab : near dark

Coming Soon: 55 Remakes!

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Almost every weekday morning we bring you news of a new, usually ill-advised remake in the Hollywood pipeline, but a site called Den of Geek has gone the extra mile by compiling a master list of 55 movies slated for the recycle bin. “Some are finished, some have only just been announced, and one or two are rumoured,” a brief intro warns, before diving into a pigpile of retreads and rip-offs. Here are just a few of them:

Fantastic Voyage – “The 1966 classic about a submarine that’s shrunk and injected into a man’s bloodstream to try and stop a potentially fatal blood clot is on director Roland Emmerich’s slate. Cormac and Marianne Wibberley – who wrote the National Treasure movies, among others – are on script duties.”

Meatballs – “The original: directed by Ivan Reitman and starring Bill Murray. The proposed remake: potentially to be directed by John Whitesell, he who gave us Big Momma’s House 2 and Deck The Halls.” Wow, this could be even better than Meatballs 4.

Near Dark – “Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes company is behind the remake of Kathryn Bigelow’s 1987 vampire flick.” Clearly Bay will not stop until he has remade every horror movie, at which point he will begin remaking his own remakes.

Angel Heart – “The Robert De Niro/Mickey Rourke horror, originally directed by Alan Parker, has been picked up by the man who used to run New Line Cinema, Michael De Luca.” Our guess is that both De Niro and Rourke are available for the remake.

If you have a strong stomach, check out the full list here.

Screengrab Presents: The 25 Greatest Horror Films of All Time (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 20:00:00 GMT

This may be the scariest Halloween in recent memory.

Whatever happens in the election, it's going to be a nightmare for tens of millions of Americans. But until then, we’ve got a few days to dress like Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin, drink pumpkin-flavored beer and relax with ghosts, vampires and zombies instead of all those scary talking heads on TV.

There was some debate here in the Screengrab Crypt regarding whether this was a list of the BEST horror films of all time or the SCARIEST (or if there’s a difference)...which naturally got us thinking about just what makes a film scary in the first place.

When my mother-in-law was a wee little French-Canadian, she went to a screening of Murders in the Rue Morgue where a theater employee in a gorilla suit popped out when the lights came up, sending the audience screaming into the streets of Nashua, New Hampshire...now THAT’S scary.

On the other hand, there are some horror movies that skip the gotcha! moments in favor of sheer dread, a creeping mood of hopeless, helpless paranoia that haunts your nights long after the adrenalin rush from the guy in the gorilla suit has faded. I remember squirming my way through all the maggots and vomited intestines of Lucio Fulci’s Gates of Hell as a teenager, but what scared me the most was the Italian film’s pervasive sense of inescapable doom...

...not that I have especially fond memories of the film. Just because it scared me didn’t mean I liked it, in the same way I’d rather read a 700-page grad school dissertation on the cultural significance of the torture porn craze than sit through Saw V.

Like comedy, it’s hard to nail down the secret of great horror, but we know it when it lurches up...RIGHT BEHIND YOU!!!!!

Just kidding. Enjoy the list, and Happy Halloween from your pals here at The Screengrab!

25. RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD (1985)

What is it with zombies? Why do we love them so? We’ve got at least a half dozen killer corpse movies on this list...but personally, I’ve always had a special place in my braaaaiiiiiinnnssss for Dan O’Bannon’s punk-rock tribute to the genre, starring the venerable, indispensable B-movie staple Clu Gulager as the boss of two medical warehouse employees who accidentally unleash a zombie apocalypse. According to the film’s clever, way-better-than-it-has-to-be script (also by O’Bannon), Night of the Living Dead was a true story, but the government covered the whole thing up...and they would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for a mishap involving a missing barrel of deadly zombie toxin and the aforementioned bumbling warehouse employees: Freddy (whose friends are rockin’ out to the Damned and the Flesh Eaters -- and, for some reason, getting naked -- in a nearby graveyard) and Frank, whose eventual fate is actually kinda touching thanks to a horror movie hall-of-fame performance by character actor James Karen. One of my all-time favorites in the “disappearing characters” genre, Return is frightening, funny and exciting by turns, and pioneered “fast zombie” technology long before Danny Boyle hogged all the credit in 28 Days Later. Plus, the soundtrack totally kicks ass...and, of course, BRAAAAIIIINNNSSSS!!!!!

24. THE INNOCENTS (1961)

One of the most effective ghost story movies ever made is also perhaps the finest of all the attempts to adapt Henry James to the screen. (John Mortimer and a pre-In Cold Blood Truman Capote worked on the screenplay, which is based on a theatrical adaptation of James' The Turn of the Screw.) Deborah Kerr is a fascinating jangle of authoritative command and nervous anxiety as the new governess who thinks she's seen the apparitions of her predecessor and that woman's lover, the valet Quint, who both came to mysterious ends. Ten years later, Michael Winner's The Nightcomers would offer a speculative version of what happened before, with Marlon Brando as Quint. That movie is best remembered as a cautionary tale involving how it came to be distributed in this country: Universal agreed to pick it up as part of a deal to cancel its contract with Brando, who they assumed would never have another hit in his life. Of course, his next picture was The Godfather. Hollywood: it's a scary place.

23. THE STEPFATHER (1987)

A wholly unexpected high point for the slash/fill-in-the-blank-from-Hell genre, with an original script by the matchless crime novelist Donald Newlove which achieves just the right balance of wit and nastiness. Terry O'Quinn makes anonymity terrifying as the title character, a serial murderer of the type known as a "family annihilator" -- unable to deal with cracks in his fantasy ideal of a perfect family, he keeps wiping out one domestic unit and moving on to another. The movie was inspired by Newlove's meditating on the case of the infamously colorless John List, who butchered his family in 1971, and who was still unapprehended when the movie came out; he was arrested in 1989, after being the subject of an episode of America's Most Wanted, and died in prison last March. A TV movie about List was made in 1993. He was played by Robert Blake.

22. NEAR DARK (1987)

Kathryn Biglow's artspolitation movie about a "family" of white trash vampires traveling the back roads in a van with the windows blacked out has an unusually potent mix of striking visual beauty and cutthroat action. Bill Paxton and Lance Henrikson have never looked closer to shitkicker heaven than in the movie's bloody set piece in a roadhouse; the wonderful, and much-missed Jenny Wright is hard to resist as the teen-sister figure, who winsomely infects the country-boy hero (Adrian Pasdar) with vampirism so that she'll have someone nice to talk to between massacres. And where have you gone, Jenette Goldstein? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

21. THE MUMMY (1932)

The legendary cinematographer Karl Freund, whose credits ranged from Metropolis and The Last Laugh to 149 episodes of I Love Lucy, worked as a director of English-language films for only three years in the early-to-mid '30s. This was his Hollywood directorial debut; the last film he directed was the 1935 horror movie Mad Love, and that title would have been a neat fit for this one, too. It stars Boris Karloff as a 3,000-year-old Egyptian who was entombed alive for trying to restore his dead beloved to life; resurrected, he gets right back on the case, having identified the heroine, Zita Johann, as the woman's reincarnation. Slow and dreamily poetic, this is very different from later mummy movies -- Karloff is unbandaged for most of the picture -- and also very different from most of the other classic Universal monster movies. It's the rare film about eternal love than makes you appreciate the fact that most loves have a natural shelf life.

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four, Five, Six & Seven

Contributors: The Zombie Andrew Osborne, Kill Nugent

Taverns On The Screen: The Top Ten Barroom Scenes of Cinema (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

So, last week (as those of you who didn't black out may recall) we here at The Screengrab took you on a very special Pub Crawl through some of the most distinctive gin joints of celluoid.

This week, it’s hair of the dog time as we return to the world of booze (although we can stop anytime we feel like it...really!) for a survey of movies where the dives themselves may be forgettable, but not so the people (and, occasionally, vampires) who inhabit them.

So belly up to the bars and join us for another round of the finest alcoholic action, drunken destruction, boozy balladeering and sudsy seduction in cinema!

LOST IN TRANSLATION (2003)

Sofia Coppola’s fantasia about a depressed movie star and a directionless young woman stranded in a Tokyo luxury hotel is short on plot but long on atmosphere and the pleasures of indolence...and it’s hard to think of two better people to kill time with than Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson (in what, hopefully, won’t turn out to be her career zenith). The fizzy high point of Lost In Translation takes place during a haphazard bar hop (involving strange Japanese...spud guns? Anyone?) that ends (as all the finest bar hops do) in a private Plexiglas karaoke pod high above the city, where Murray’s Bob Harris surprises Johansson’s Charlotte (and, possibly, himself) with the naked romantic yearning in his rendition of Roxy Music’s “More Than This,” leading to lots of platonic foreplay and climaxing in one of the greatest smooches in all of celluloid. (And if you think your warm, fuzzy memories of the movie would be ruined forever if you ever discovered just what, exactly, Bill Murray whispered into ScarJo's ear following that famous kiss, then for God’s sake, don’t CLICK HERE!)

AFTER HOURS (1985)

Our own Phil Nugent recently covered the convoluted history of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours and the question of its true authorship. Whoever really wrote it and whoever deserves credit for it, though, it’s a deftly made and smartly directed little comedy, and plays up Scorsese’s rarely credited ability to handle comedy. Despite taking place in the wards and dungeons of Manhattan, After Hours focuses on only a few locations; but the one it gets the most use out of is the punk club Berlin, where the tortured soul Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne), already punished beyond reason for the high crime of trying to get into Rosanna Arquette’s pants, must visit in an attempt to do the only thing in the world he wants to do: go home. Just getting in to Berlin is hard enough: he must confront a side-of-beef bouncer (Clarence Felder) who quotes Kafka at him. When he finally gets in the door, he finds that the price of entry is being forcibly corralled by the staff and given a Mohawk as a filmmaker (a cameo by Scorsese himself) shines a spotlight in his face and Bad Brains’ “Pay to Cum” blares on the the P.A. system. And even that isn’t the end: when, later in the wee hours, Paul is forced to return to Berlin to avoid the fury of a mob who think he’s a housebreaker, he finds it nearly deserted save for an avant-garde artist (Verna Bloom) who ‘saves’ him by encasing him bodily in a shell of shellac and old newspapers. For this he paid a five-dollar cover charge?

THE HUDSUCKER PROXY (1994)

Look, we’ve all found ourselves in the same situation as Tim Robbins’ Norville Barnes once in a while. Broke, hopeless, down on your luck; everyone thinks you’re crazy, your best girl thinks you’re a heel, and your former elevator operator is stealing your ideas. (Well, okay, maybe not that last one.) And, to make things worse, it’s New Year’s Eve, and you don’t even have a date. So the least you can do is to stumble into the nearest bar and kill the pain with a slow, steady supply of martinis. But when Norville hits Ann’s 440 – the beatnik bar favored by his gal Friday, the fast-talking Amy Archer (Jennifer Jason Leigh) – even that doesn’t help: Ann’s, as the exasperated bartender played by Steve Buscemi in the Coen Brothers’ screwball homage The Hudsucker Proxy explains time and time again, doesn’t serve “al-key-hool”. It’s a juice bar, with coffee drinks for the extra-adventurous, and no matter how many times Norville asks for a martini (and he asks a lot), he can’t get one, and is forced to live on the ten or twelve he’s already got percolating in his bloodstream. Finally, Amy arrives and tries to talk him down to earth – even favoring him with a rendition of the Muncie High fight song – but it’s no good; Norville flees the bar and before the night is up, he’ll end up on a ledge. Frankly, we can’t blame him; Ann’s 440 looks cool enough, but as Norville drunkenly asks, what kind of bar is it if you can’t get a martini?

FAT CITY (1972)

John Huston's comeback film is set in Stockton, California and stars Stacy Keach as Tully, an alcoholic boxer who's managed to become a has-been without ever having been much of anything in the first place, and Jeff Bridges as Ernie, a younger man who Tully takes a shine to. Tully encourages the kid to take up boxing, as if encouraging anyone to follow in his own career path counted as a favor. The movie has its fair share of scenes in rowdy, darkly lit bars full of people with nowhere else to go in the middle of the day, but its most haunting moment comes at the end, in an unnaturally bright-looking cafe bar that seems to be a hangout for dry drunks. Tully has pulled Ernie there after the kid, spurning his offer that they go out together for a drink, has agreed to grab a cup of coffee. After an exchange of ideas on the subject of the ancient looking bar man ("How you like to be him?" "Maybe he's happy." "Maybe we're all happy."), Tully looks around the place, and Huston freezes the frames to pinpoint the moment of horrified sobriety. Ernie starts to leave, only to agree to Tully's desperate plea that he stick around and "talk some," but the two men have nothing to say to each other, and the credits roll over the image of them sitting together not talking. The actors move just enough to remind you that this time the frame isn't frozen. Maybe they're happy.

PENNIES FROM HEAVEN (1981)

Christopher Walken earned his hoofer's stripes in this phantasmagorical Depression musical, in which he appears as Tom, a politely soulless pimp who meets his latest employee, Bernadette Peters, when she's sitting in a bar trying to recover from being fired from her job as a schoolteacher for being pregnant by a married man who she hasn't heard from lately. In the movie, the characters use music-inspired fantasies to help them get through what their lives have turned into; here, Peters, who can't think of any way to support herself besides turning tricks, is doing her limited best to deal with the awful fact that she's actually met someone who can teach her how, and Walken, who can dance like a son of a bitch, has no problem making you believe that you're seeing something that a person could only pull off in a daydream. After the number is over, Tom rudely snaps her back to reality by warning her that if he discovers she's a tease who's wasting his time, "I'll cut your face." Walken doesn't have any problem with that part, either.

NEAR DARK (1987)

"Just how old are you, Jesse?" someone asks Lance Henriksen, and Henriksen, smiling like a redneck crocodile, replies, "Let me put it this way, son: I fought for the South." Henriksen's Jesse is the father figure in a brood of vampires who look like a white trash family and travel around in a van with the windows blacked out. In the movie's money scene, they wander into a roadside bar that Bill Paxton -- the "big brother" -- declares to be "Shitkicker Heaven" and proceed to use it as their own personal buffet table. A young Adrian Pasdar plays the hero, an innocent young dude who's been inducted into the family by the bite of a winsome, lonely blonde bloodsucker (Jenny Wright) and is still learning the ropes. Once the bodies start dropping, the bartender pulls out a shotgun and blasts Pasdar in the torso. Reflexively, Pasdar reacts as if he were dying and then stops and stands there with a hole in his chest, registering his surprise that he isn't. "It's a trip, ain't it?" says Paxton. There have been a shitload of reworkings of the vampire genre in the last twenty or so years, but in few of them does the blood flow so red and thickly potent as in this scene.

Related Stories:

Taverns On The Screen - The Top Ten Barroom Scenes of Cinema (Part Two)

Sweet Nothings: The Lost Words of Lost In Translation, Translated

Separated at Birth: "After Hours" and Joe Frank's "Lies"

Screengrab Pub Crawl - The Top 15 Bars of Cinema (Part One)

Screengrab Pub Crawl - The Top 15 Bars of Cinema (Part Two)

Screengrab Pub Crawl - The Top 15 Bars of Cinema (Part Three)

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

Freddy and the Furious Go to Cloverfield

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 17:30:00 GMT

Are we really sure we want the writers' strike to end? For now, it's the only thing standing between us and an unending parade of sequels and reboots. Here's the latest from the Hollywood recycle bin:

Despite its second weekend plummet at the box office, Cloverfield is still a massive hit considering its $25 million dollar budget, so it's no surprise that Variety reports a follow-up in the works. Director Matt Reeves may have to delay his "Hitchcock-style thriller" The Invisible Woman, but no doubt Paramount will make it worth his while.

Vin Diesel tells MTV, "I'm a little bit slower than the average actor that just jumps into the sequel, but I think the time has come to revisit Dom Toretto." If that character name rings no bells for you, perhaps its been a while since you've seen the first installment of The Fast and the Furious. After two largely Diesel-free sequels (the chrome-domed lunk did make a cameo appearance in Tokyo Drift), the original star is aboard for the fourth installment, as is his partner in crime. "Gotta have Paul Walker," says Diesel, who is the first person on earth to ever utter that sentence.

And then there's our main man Freddy Krueger, who already survived the seemingly fatal Freddy's Dead and either won or lost the battle of Freddy vs. Jason. (We can never remember.) Now there are reports that none other than Michael Bay is set to revive A Nightmare on Elm Street. (We'd like to suggest the title A Recurring Nightmare.) According to Zap2It, "No writers can be attached to Nightmare on Elm Street until after the strike ends, which is fine. Bay and his Platinum cohorts already have remakes of Near Dark and The Birds in various stages of preproduction for Rogue and Universal respectively."

Strike on, brothers. Strike on.