Some great movie news!

Some quick news that I had to get up and on the site for all of my fellow horror fiends!

Doctor Creepy over at Dread Central just broke the news that Guillermo Del Toro is moving ahead with his version of HP Lovecraft's At The Mountains of Madness!!! I absolutely love all of Del Toro's work and - if there's any director out there today I could pick to do a Lovecraft adaptation - Guillermo's the hombre!

There have been so many attempts to capture Lovecraft's genius on celluloid over the years - and where only a few have actually succeeded (Yuzna's Reanimator, From Beyond, and the incomparable Dagon) - most have been downright abortive in their efforts. Del Toro though is the first director to actually make me feel as though it could be done. I've referred to it before, but I think that scene at the end of Hellboy - when the ultimate evil descends upon earth from the cold wastes of space - encapsulates all that is Lovecraftian. When I saw Hellboy for the first time, I squealed in geekish joy at the horror that Del Toro created and I knew that - someday - he'd get the opportunity to do a full Lovecraft adaptation. And that day has come. Del Toro gets it and if I didn't know better, I'd say he spent some part of his young adult life as I did - sitting in a dark and candlelit room, eating chips, role playing Call of Cthulhu, and battling the insane minions of the Elder Gods and the Great Old Ones.

Combine his ability to capture the sheer, sanity-shattering horror of the Cthulhu mythos with his breathtaking ability to film the surreal and beautiful (as he did in Pan's Labrynth) - and you've got a sure thing, my fellow gorehounds. I'm all twittery and giggly thinking about it!

And - if you have no idea what I'm talking about here, I command you to go the book store and pick up a copy of HP Lovecraft's short stories (preferably something with the longer novella, At The Mountains of Madness). If you've never experienced the joy and wonder that is Lovecraft, you are in for a treat! I can't make any promises that you won't lose your mind or feel the oppressive horror of a cold night sky - because somewhere out there, in the depths of space and time, are things that are cold and alien. Things that care not one whit for the insignificant race that is man. Things that are the stuff of eldritch evil and that are always, always hungry.

You have been warned...

Also speaking of the master, Lovecraft... a few months back, I won a copy of a DVD from the spooky guys over at Goblinhaus. It was a low budget Biff Juggernaut production called Lovecracked. It was basically a compilation of Lovecraft inspired low budget, indepndent, amateur films. Some were comedy, others were more serious.

They were all bad.

I'd been planning on writing a review of it, but completely forgot to as the low quality and extremely bad scripting/humor of the connecting scenes was cringe-worthy. There are ways to do Lovecraft, and there are ways not to do Lovecraft. And - big hint - if your budget is less than a $1000; stay the fuck away from Lovecraft. Seriously.

Let me sum it up more succintly. To give you an idea of the caliber of this compilation, I've got two words for you

Zombie. Porn.

That's right, there was a porn version of The Reanimator on it called.... wait for it... The Repenetrator. And that was the highlight of the DVD.

Yikes.

So, what else...

Oh yeah - I forgot to mention that, when I saw Zombie's Halloween a few weeks back, there was a trailer for a film adaptation of Stephen King's Mist. This is a story I've been dying to see made into a movie for more than 10 or 15 years. It is one of my favorite Stephen King works and it also has Lovecraftian overtones. King's track record for movie adaptations has been equally as abysmal as that of Lovecraft, with only a few standouts (Kubrick's The Shining, The original Salem's Lot miniseries, The Stand miniseries, and Pet Semtary come to mind). Of course, his non-horror stories have faired much better (The Green Mile, The Shawshank Redemption), but few have captured the feel of King's work. And don't even get me started on his own, made for television scripts... yeccch!

Please don't let this suck...


Some great movies on the horizon, also...

October 19th is the release of 30 Days of Night. I actually picked up the novel adaptation of this last spring. I grabbed it because it had some really great cover art and I liked the ide a of vampires taking advantage of the extreme northern winter. It reminded me of a great comic I'd read as a child about just that sort of thing. It was in a Tales From the Crypt, or some other similar horror comic that I seemed to live on as a child (which may explain quite a bit about who I am today, but I digress...) It's a brilliant idea - combining the loneliness of Carpenter's The Thing with the blood sucking goodness of nosferatu overcoming their biggest weakness. I've heard some great things about this flick and, hopefully, I'll be catching it soon...

And I'm also slightly embarassed to say I haven't actually caught the new Resident Evil yet. Time has been something of an issue lately and, truth be told, the series has kind of been a let down. Now I'm not saying that I feel the RE movies are bad - quite the opposite, actually. I enjoy them immensely. The reason I enjoy them though is based in the reality that they are primarily action films. The zombies and horror take a backseat to the heavy metal music and Milla Jovovich kicking ass in all of her brain melting sexiness. And I love Milla with all of my undead soul... its just I'd like to see more brain chomping and less tactical weaponry. The RE games rocked because of the horror and the ambience of the locations. RE1 did a good job of capturing some of this - before it devolved into a rock video - and RE2 threw away any pretense of being anything BUT an action film... but I'd still like to see more horror, ya know? So I may try to catch it this weekend.

So much to do...so few places to hide the mutilated bodies. Sigh.