Hollywood Splat Pics and Horrific Indies
By MICHAEL NEEL | January 28, 2010
Will 2010 be a festive romp of eye-gouging, throat-slitting, and disemboweling? Or will it be another crap-tacular lineup of lame remakes and boring PG-13 drivel? Let's see what the year has in store.
The Wolfman
Theatrical release date: February 12
A tornado of delays, negative rumors, and other bad press have threatened to engulf this remake -- excuse me, re-imagining. Are Universal execs micromanaging dicks, or is the film so bad that it needs all the help it can get? No one will know for sure until February 12, when The Wolfman finally hits theaters. One good omen: Danny Elfman's old-school classical score has been reinstated in the film, after it got pulled at the eleventh hour. (After all, Elfman has created some great horror scores, including nearly all of Tim Burton's films and the Tales From the Crypt theme, to name a few.) As a huge fan of the original incarnation of The Wolf Man (the 1941 version starring Lon Chaney Jr.), I pray to the full moon that Universal can pull this off.
Related:
[NSFW?] Photos: Spookadelica at the Somerville Theatre, Review: Ninja Assassin, Review: Red Cliff, More 
- [NSFW?] Photos: Spookadelica at the Somerville Theatre
Black Cat Burlesque join with Something Weird Video to stage an event called "Spookdelica" at the Somerville Theatre on September 25, 2010.
- Review: Ninja Assassin
So much blood splashes across the screen in James McTeigue’s martial-arts madness, you’d think the human body consisted of nothing but.
- Review: Red Cliff
Hong Kong auteur John Woo hit commercial and artistic pay dirt in the US with Face/Off , his loopy Nicolas Cage/John Travolta neo-noir, but once he’d directed Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible II , was there anywhere left to go?
- Deep cuts
The beauty of Kara Walker's silhouettes lies in their concurrent brutality and daintiness, and in her unabashed exploration cutting to the meat of the black-and-white binary in American contemporary culture.
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No director pulls off the bait-and-switch as craftily as Jason Reitman. He gets you thinking that you're watching a hip, caustic comedy subverting the status quo, but by the end, he's vindicated all the platitudes he seemed to scorn.
- Review: Z (1969)
John F. Kennedy wasn't the only political leader murdered in 1963. On May 22 of that year, Gregoris Lambrakis, a left-leaning, pacifist member of the Greek parliament and an aspiring presidential candidate seeking to replace the reigning right-wing government, was assaulted after a peace rally in Thessaloniki. He died five days later.
- Review: The House of the Devil
Have you walked near a college campus lately? You might notice that the ’80s are creeping into fashion, the way the ’70s did a few years back, and with the same lack of irony. It’s happening in cinemas, too — something that’s not entirely unwelcome when it comes to the horror genre.
- Review: Pandora and the Flying Dutchman
In this soupy 1951 romantic melodrama, Ava Gardner plays Pandora, a self-loathing vixen who toys with the affections of sundry panting males while waiting without hope for her real love to appear.
- Review: Defamation
Yoav Shamir, a young Israeli documentarian, goes off to America and Eastern Europe with a camera and a question: is anti-Semitism an important concern today for Jews, or are those anxious about it being unduly paranoid?
- Review: The Strip
In lieu of Steve Carell’s hopelessly inept and earnest manager, we have his creepier duplicate, Glenn. Instead of the boorish brown-noser played by Rainn Wilson, there’s the more obnoxious Rick.
- Review: Brothers
Operation Enduring Freedom seems to have replaced Vietnam as Hollywood's go-to military quagmire from which to dredge gut-wrenching meditations on the psychological carnage of war.
- Less
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