Cary Fukunaga (TRUE DETECTIVE) to direct Stephen King’s IT

Stephen King’s greatest monster movie coming to a theater near you?!!

Stephen King for four decades (This year marking the 40th anniversary of his first novel, CARRIE) has been the undisputed king of the horror blockbuster. His name on a novel, for longer than most of you have been alive, a straight shot to the bestseller list.

That said, as someone who has read much of his output, I’ve personally found him hit and miss. However his 1000+ page novel… IT, I consider a masterpiece and King at his apex.

Some factions will argue THE STAND, but these are misguided types who should be avoided. :). THE STAND emphasing the bloat for bloat’s sake, and caricature finally falling into stereotype that would become too prevalent in King’s work, it cannot stand, when placed against his… IT.

And the TV mini-series adaptation of IT starring a great cast (including the late, great John Ritter) I was a huge fan of as kid, and remain so as an adult. It is, for all its horror, a sentimental and bitter-sweet ode to friendship and faith and childhood’s gains and losses.

So the news that this celebrated property is slated to come to the big screen in the 21st century, has me interested. King Adaptations are typically a hard sell, for the reason… most aren’t very good at adapting King.

What is oft strongest in King’s work is the internal monologues and scene setting that don’ t lend themselves to the pacing or the look of the big screen blockbuster.

But I will be happy for the new film to be an exception to recent King adaptations, and surprise me in a goodway. However I am concerned about talks of splitting this into two films, recent history showing studio’s moneygrubbing greed, comes at the expense of a quality, satisfying story.

But time will tell, read the above link for the details.

 

PACIFIC RIM aka TITANS OF THE PACIFIC

The posters for PACIFIC RIM I don’t think do the trailer I saw justice.

“We are canceling the Apocalypse!” That’s just a kick-ass trailer! The posters not so much. They remind me of a poor man’s Transformers. The trailer however makes me very excited for the film.

You can view/download the trailer here!

Oddest Website of the Day: MONSTER UNIVERSITY

Okay, I don’t want to say that the fine animators at Pixar have too much time on their hands, but if the following site is anything to go by…

Monster University

They have too much time on their hands. :)

Tech Talk of the Day and…. Lizards?!!

“What good is wisdom, if it gives no solace to the wise?”
— Dark Side of the Moon

I do think, somewhere the military was fighting Godzilla, as we had helicopters in formation, and fighter planes roaring above our heads, in a hurry to get somewhere.

And it could have been my imagination, but in the distance I could just make out a sound that could have been the roar of a righteously pissed off, gigantic atomic lizard. :) .

Well enough with my perhaps peyote inspired dinosaur diatribe, onto today’s tech tips:

If you use Firefox there’s a feature called Pipelining that’s turned off by default. Here’s an article about turning it on to offer a marginal increase in page load times/responsiveness:

Firefox and Pipelining!

A decent read. And so far I’m testing it out, with no issues.

A couple other tweaks…

A few items I had turned on in the Firefox browser by default, that I’m currently testing in disabled mode, as I don’t use fancy high-faluting graphics when I surf, Plus some of them have, like WebGL, known security issues:

webgl.disabled;true
media.webm.enabled;false
html5.parser.enable;false
html5.offmainthread;false
geo.enabled;false

browser.sessionstore.resume_from_crash;false

And yes I know HTML5 is all the rage these days, but I’m not really a rage type guy. :). Still toying with it and seeing what it offers enabled as opposed to disabled. So I’ll report back on the effect of these tweaks after I’ve browsed with em for a bit.

Oh and here’s a pretty cool read if you are, like me, a newbie to the Opera browser:

Recent versions of Opera by default have a web server built-in, and TURNED ON. Who does that? The vast majority of people using a browser have no need for it to be broadcasting and requesting information like it is a web-server. So if you don’t need your computer/browser to be a web-server, you should consider disabling the Unite and Web Server functions of opera. Here’s more discussion on the pros and cons:

Webserver in your browser?
thoughts on opera browser

So if you read all that and decide you want to disable Unite/Webserver in Opera do the following:

• Enter opera:config in that browser.
• Expand the “User Prefs” section and turn OFF the checkbox for “Enable Unite”.
• Expand the “Web Server” section and turn OFF all those checkboxes, especially the 2 labled UPnP.

For more details go here!

Okay that’s all for this installment. Hope you’ve found some of that useful.

And goshdarn it… is that sound getting closer?!!! GOJIRA!!!! Ahhhh!! Ahhhh! (Yes I have watched too many Godzilla movies :))

MOVIE TRAILER OF THE DAY: GHOUL MASSACRE

Just saw the trailer for something called ZOMBIE MASSACRE.

I don’t like Ghoul movies (If they eat people, and they are rotting they are not EFFING ZOMBIES! THEY ARE GHOULS!!! Get it right!! Pet Peeve. Sorry.)

And I don’t care for any of the extreme films I’ve heard of from Uwe Boll (woman tied to a chair and hit in the face with a hammer on camera. Using real life Ugandan atrocities to sell as entertainment, etc. He’s too close to a snuff film director for my liking. I like my horror less gory, less irresponsible).

However the actual director-writer team on this film is not Uwe Boll, but an Italian writing/directing team of Luca Boni, Marco Ristori. A neophyte team they have only one film to their credit, something called EATERS, another ghoul pic, that has lukewarm to poor reviews.

So all that, does not endear me to see this latest flick. And it’s a Ghoul flick, so even good Ghoul flicks are not my thing.

That said I think the trailer is tremendous. Sight unseen I’m willing to go on the line, and say the best thing about the film will probably be this brief trailer. Especially for me, that has only about 2 minutes worth of patience for the premise of any ghoul flick, which generally has nothing creative to say outside of 2 minutes.

So no intention of seeing this flick, but the trailer… worth a look here!

Movie Review: Drew Goddard & Joss Whedon’s CABIN IN THE WORDS

So I was able to finally see CABIN IN THE WOODS, Drew Goddard’s directorial debut (from a script by Goddard and Joss Whedon) and the film manages to keep itself compelling on the share audacity of its script. This will be a relatively spoiler free review, for those wondering.

Goddard’s CABIN IN THE WOODS film manages to harpoon the idiocies of the traditional slasher/horror flick, without devolving into SCARY MOVIE parody, by use of a surprisingly imaginative script, that by the end tosses in everything and the kitchen sink.

So while the film is for the most part a quick moving ride, it does suffer a bit of being too much of what it parodies (parody being a bit strong, self referential being more accurate). The central characters are largely, as in most films of this type, caricatures rather than characters, so it’s hard to get really too invested in them. And by the end, while visually dynamic, I am quite bored of the whole ghoul fad (if they are rotting and eat flesh they are ghouls, not zombies– What can I say? I know my Monster lore :) ), and just throughout, felt not very invested in any of the characters or their outcome.

CABIN IN THE WOODS is a technically sound and imaginative film, that unfortunately suffers from its conceits… of horror movie tropes and bland protagonists. I felt surprisingly empty after leaving the film, not excited, not disappointed, just… uninvolved. So the film while not immediately forgettable in its script, is also not especially memorable in its execution.

So final grade: It’s worth a viewing at matinée price, but otherwise just wait for DVD. B-/C+

Free Movies of the Day: DRACULA’S GREAT LOVE

No one, and I mean no one is going to confuse any of today’s selections of movies with great movies. Let’s get that out of the way, these are not great movies. They are not even good movies.

That said, they are not exactly horrible. And they have their particular charms. :)

INVASION OF THE BEE GIRLS- What to say about this movie… it’s like a porno movie without the porn. :) It’s harmless enough, brain-dead fun, and who is not a fan of uncomfortable 70s acting, and bare bosoms. And hey… it’s free. :)

CURSE OF THE SWAMP CREATURE- Despite its shortcomings, it’s an okay flick. Plus I’m always an easy audience for mad scientist and swamp movies. Also I like how it plays out the local population/voodoo storyline. And compared to other Buchanan films this one at 70 minutes moves relatively briskly… and more or less keeps you watching till the end. So nothing to jump up and down about, but satisfying enough. And this flick is yet another one you can view at Archive.org for the price of a click. :)

COUNT DRACULA’S GREAT LOVE- This is more watchable than most of Paul Nashy’s films. Nice bit of atmosphere and an intriguing if absurd story makes for good viewing. Well that and the women. Four pretty gorgeous lasses in various states of undress give suitably nice bosom heaving performances.

Infact the biggest drawback of the film is Paul Naschy himself who defines wooden, he makes a worse Vampire than he does a Wolfman. And the ending is so nonsensical that the entire last half of the movie is this incredibly moronic running voice over to try and make sense of the senselessness you’re seeing.

All those faults acknowledged it sports at times nice photography, a couple decent slow-mo and special effects scenes, and generally is not a bad way to while away 80 minutes or so.

But man that is really one incompetant performance by Naschy as Dracula. And a pretty lame death scene.

But actually there’s an intriguing germ of a script here, and if remade with decent actors, direction, and better dialog could actually be a good film.

You can view all the films here!