HEART EYES, the well-reviewed new horror offering serving as the first Valentine’s Day thriller in numerous years, stumbled over the finish line this weekend with a disappointing $8.5 million in receipts. Considering that’s not even half of its reported $18 million budget isn’t reassuring for distributor Sony Pictures Releasing, but hopefully it gains steam when it hits streaming outlets.
Horror fans weren’t the only ones who didn’t turn out to cinemas this weekend. The action-comedy LOVE HURTS got bruised even worse than HEART EYES did, and Universal’s animated DOG MAN took a big shit by losing approximately 62% of its audience in its second week.
Lesson learned: Don’t ever open a movie on Super Bowl weekend.
Osgood Perkins, still basking in the $125 million glow of LONGLEGS, is at it again already!
I’m sure you’ve already heard that Perkins will be at the helm of the film adaptation of Stephen King’s short story, “The Monkey”, but just in case you haven’t seen the nasty red-band trailer, get yo’ monkey butt over to to YouTube and check that shit out! It’s cra-zay!
The story was originally published in Gallery back in 1980 before undergoing a massive redraft for inclusion in King’s 1985 anthology, “Skeleton Crew”. The adaptation looks like it could be another bullseye not just for Perkins but for producer James Wan. We’ll all find out for sure once THE MONKEY hits theaters on February 21st.
After dealing with a lot of fuckery over at CBS in the closing years of THE TWILIGHT ZONE’s run, a burnt-out Rod Serling gave the network one more chance (with the short-lived western series, THE LONER) before he jumped over to NBC for his next endeavor.
Though NIGHT GALLERY never consistently reached the heights of Serling’s previous classic, it nevertheless provided a few thought-provoking chills during its three-season run. No better example is the segment “Class of ‘99”, found in the second episode of season two.
At his hammy, piercing best, Vincent Price plays a college professor about to give his graduating class their final exam. Unfortunately for his pupils, it turns out to be an oral exam. Soon, Price is dispensing stringent queries randomly to the sea of nervous faces in front of him, sniping and reloading as he moves from one student to another. When one undergraduate is unable to rattle off the precise answer Price’s professor is looking for, we witness a haughty wrath that can only be mustered by educators who’ve gotten to where they are through a routine abuse of trust and power.
However, the Behavior Science portion of the exam is where things truly start to get crazy. Here, the professor goads students into acting out the narrowest of human prejudices. The wealthy are snobbish, the poor uneducated and without distinction. The Blacks are pushy and inferior to Caucasians, who are illogical and bigoted. However, it’s to be understood that Asians are the lowest rung on society’s ladder, a distrustful enemy worthy of death.
The reasons we find for all of this are horrifying, even more so because of how prescient they seem to be in the 21st century, when the divide between races and classes traverses borderlines, political parties, and even families. If you think all this sounds edgy now, imagine what prime time audiences were thinking in 1971 when this segment originally aired. Serling was never one to shy away from the darker tendencies of mankind, but in just ten jarring minutes “Class of ‘99” undeniably cements its place as the most important episode of NIGHT GALLERY.
I have conflicting emotions about Roman Polanski’s low-pitched, character-driven adaptation of Ira Levin’s genre bestseller, ROSEMARY’S BABY. One thing no self-respecting movie fan can deny is the film’s impact on the next decade of horror cinema. The original ‘satanic panic’ all started here folks, paving the way from everything from blockbusters such as THE EXORCIST (1973) and THE OMEN (1976), as well as veritable deluge of lesser genre efforts such as RACE WITH THE DEVIL (1975) and TO THE DEVIL…A DAUGHTER (1976).
Horror’s green motif for Old Scratch, whether it was Regan MacNeil’s pea-green vomit in THE EXORCIST or the emerald goop in the glass canister highlighting John Carpenter’s PRINCE OF DARKNESS (1987), possibly came from this very poster. It’s a striking jade-tinged image of a baby carriage perched precariously on a jagged precipice while a shorn Mia Farrow softly blends with the backing sky. Not often does a movie’s poster so fittingly telegraph the danger awaiting its audience. This is a masterpiece in simplicity, folks, and there isn’t much better praise than that.
Director Tom Holland (CHILD’S PLAY, THE BEAST WITHIN) took a swipe at adapting a Stephen King story with the release of THINNER, which was originally published in 1984 under King’s ‘Richard Bachman’ pseudonym. Here’s one of the film’s original newspaper ads from the greater NYC area dated October 24th, 1996.
Listen up, all you Sawyer family fans! Anchor Bay Entertainment is soon looking to release a new documentary highlighting the life of Leatherface actor, Gunnar Hansen. DINNER WITH LEATHERFACE will drop on February 25th, and you can already pre-order the blu-ray at Amazon.
The documentary will feature interviews with fellow CHAIN SAW alumni, along with a number of Hansen’s friends and industry partners to give a more well-rounded look at the man behind the mask.
For more info, as well as a neat trailer, head over to the original article courtesy of the fine folks at Bloody Disgusting.
Originally rumored to be castoffs from the short-lived ABC series “Darkroom” that were deemed too violent for television, Universal Pictures actually cobbled together NIGHTMARES during the early 80s horror boom to serve as a TV pilot for a new series. Typical of many anthologies, it’s a hit-and-miss affair, but there are some fun scares to be had while checking out pre-fame screen appearances from the likes of Emilio Estevez and Lance Henriksen.
This was something I kept from an L.A.-area showing, circa 1987.
Those crazy bastards at Fangoria come through again! This time we get a nice poster of an unmasked Jason Voorhees from his face off with Tina Shepard in FRIDAY THE 13th PART VII: THE NEW BLOOD.
Like Prince once sang: “If de-elevator tries 2 bring u down…go crazy – punch a higher floor!”
Some films defy classification. You can’t really say THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW is just a musical or that RUBBER is merely a horror-comedy. This is where THE LIFT comes in. What was promoted as a straight up horror film, sporting a banger of a tagline begging “Take the stairs, take the stairs…for God’s sake, TAKE THE STAIRS!”, quickly melts into a squishy, malleable sludge of black comedy and snarky commentary on the encroaching computer age, including an early example of 21st-century machine learning.
When a high-rise elevator starts to maim and kill innocent and not-so-innocent businessmen alike, blue-collar technician and family man, Felix, is hired to poke around to find the reason for it. The answer is not what anyone is expecting: the elevator is actually alive, driven by an organic brain center that is slowly allowing it to become a sentient being.
After directing some music videos by rock outfit Golden Earring, including a famous clip for the band’s 1982 classic, “Twilight Zone”, filmmaker Dick Maas offered up THE LIFT as his feature debut. The film walks a tightrope of straight-faced parody, and given its rather famous reception on video when it hit U.S. shores in 1985, I’m surprised we were never given a sequel to THE LIFT’s techno nuttiness. Both audiences and critics seemed baffled but intrigued by Maas’ unique, low-key approach, allowing him to continue to blur genre lines with his well-received action/slasher/crime drama AMSTERDAMNED (1988).
Ultimately, THE LIFT joined the ranks of such low-budget offerings such as THE PREY (1980), THE FOREST (1982), and THE FINAL TERROR (1983) as an oddball, VHS-era standalone that proved a memorable video campaign was worth way more in nostalgia dollars than a memorable movie. Nevertheless, it certainly deserves some credit for daring to be different in the face of an overstuffed horror marketplace.
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