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Showing posts with the label werewolf

BEST OF WOLF

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I compile some of the "best" moments from the film Wolf .

HAUNTED HONEYMOON - REVIEW

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Gene Wilder writes, directs and stars in "comedy chiller" Haunted Honeymoon , a homage to old horror-themed radio plays. The film was released in 1986 and was a box-office and critical bomb. On paper, this movie sounds like a riot: werewolves, a Hercule Poirot-style setup, Dom DeLuise playing an over-the-top character in drag, Gene Wilder, the whole thing looks like the spiritual successor to Mel Brooks' classic Young Frankenstein . And yet right off the bat there's something not quite right about Haunted Honeymoon. Billing itself as a horror/comedy, it proves to be neither funny nor scary. The plot is initially quite promising as Wilder's radio actor starts randomly acting strange as his shady uncle shows up to suggest scaring him to death in order to cure him. He then shows up with his fiancée (played by Gilda Radner) at the creepy mansion where he grew up for his wedding and we're introduced to various bizarre characters. Unfortunately, from then on, t

RED RIDING HOOD - REVIEW

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After the resounding success of Twilight , director Catherine Hardwicke went on to direct a more teen-friendly, melodramatic take on a classic Grimm tale with Red Riding Hood . The film, it turned out, had very little to do with Little Red Riding Hood and was mostly just a thinly-disguised excuse to have yet another supernatural love triangle plot involving werewolves and young girls with mixed emotions. Oh, and Billy Burke. Gotta have Billy Burke. Amanda Seyfried is Valerie, the red hood-wearing gal who falls for a woodcutter when her family decides to set her up with another young man who is much more well-off. This is all mostly irrelevant and uninteresting and the movie itself seems more interested in its "whodunit" plot which involves a telepathic werewolf (don't ask) who is terrorising the village and some nonsense about how Mars, when aligned with the Moon, can affect the werewolf's bite or whatever. The big question throughout the film being who cou

TWILIGHT: BREAKING DAWN PART 2 - REVIEW

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SPOILERS Well, this is it, people. The final chapter of " The Twilight Saga ". ... REALLY?! THIS is it? Wow. After sitting through every single Twilight movie, I can safely say that this new installment is one big disappointment. Not so much in terms of lols, it does deliver a good bunch of those, as ever, but just in terms of sheer drama and cinematic competence. Yes this is meant to be like a cheesy vampire Harlequin romance type thing but it's also meant to be a story worthy of an entire franchise and, most importantly, a movie. As it turns out, this "saga" fails on all accounts. Shame, with Breaking Dawn Part 1 , things were finally starting to get borderline insane and mean-spirited just the way I wanted it to! Ah Part 1... You beautiful bastard. Here we have Bella, finally a red-eyed vamp, complete with super-strength, super-powers, moody doochiness and wood-like posture. FINALLY Bella is resembling a strong female lead and an actua

FRIGHT NIGHT PART 2 - REVIEW

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Fright Night was certainly a rarity: a vampire comedy that actually works both as a vamp flick and as a horror movie satire. The film had an irresistible charm with its cool 80's score, its turtle neck-wearing villain and its genius Peter Cushing/Hammer homage. This sequel takes the same formula and introduces new dastardly vampires to add to the mix. It's years later, Charlie (William Ragsdale again) has undergone a lot of therapy and has accepted that everything that happened in the first film had been the result of group hypnosis and never actually happened. Peter Vincent (the ever-reliable Roddy McDowall), however, still remembers the truth of the events that unfolded but being the only one who believes that reality, it's hurting his work to say the least. Basically, the first half of the film is nothing but build-up to resuming the status quo of the first movie: Charlie being a douche to his girlfriend, Peter Vincent losing his job, vampires orgy-biting victims

TEEN WOLF TOO - REVIEW

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There is an irony about Teen Wolf Too that, if intentional, is pretty tragically clever in its own way. I mean the film is essentially about how everyone expects Jason Bateman to become the wolf and live up to Michael J. Fox but due to him... not being Michael J. Fox it proves more difficult to accept than it should. Teen Wolf Too is basically Teen Wolf . You've got a sporting event our hero needs to win NOT as the wolf to redeem himself in the end, you've got a stern principal (dean, whatever), you've got a bitch bimbo, a bully, goofy best friends, a sweet father figure, the red eyes scene, the hairy hands scene, the transformation scene.... it's the same movie! But Teen Wolf Too is to Teen Wolf what, say, Big Top Pee-Wee was to Pee-Wee's Big Adventure . The sequel lacks something that made the original film that little bit more enjoyable. It's not bad, some stinker lines aside it's not bad, just... it lacks something . For one thing it takes some ti

TEEN WOLF - REVIEW

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Watching Teen Wolf as a kid was a treat. I remember just waiting impatiently every time for the first full transformation scene with the dad showing up looking comically fluffy in the end. A fan of the cartoon series, watching the live-action feature was simply awesome. And you know what? I still love that shit! Is it dated? Of course! But that only adds RetroJoy to my RetroGasm. You've got all the cliches of an 80's sports flick, the typical teen movie metamorphosis-as-puberty thing and, of course, a whole bunch of werewolfy events. Like Fright Night , Once Bitten or The Lost Boys , Teen Wolf was an attempt at taking the monster movie genre and making it teen-friendly, reinventing the old genre in a light-hearted horror/comedy setting rather than handling it in the usual gothic style we all know and love. This, of course, was hit and miss depending on the film but Teen Wolf is one that worked. Michael J. Fox is Scott Howard, a regular kid for whom being what he call

TWILIGHT - REVIEW

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Robert Pattinson sparkles in this inexplicably hugely popular first outing of the Mormon Sexless Teen Vamp Saga...sorry, I meant Twilight . The film starts promisingly in a little town where we meet Bella (a whiny Kristen Stewart), her dad and her new life as the new girl in high school. The one thing the film actually has going for it, to be fair, is the way it portrays small town ennui so enjoy this first twenty minutes as you will sorely miss them. And then the vampires come in (lol), strolling in like Purity Ring-wearing badasses into the school canteen looking not-at-all suspiciously pale and blinking with their not-at-all strange yellow eyes. Pattinson's hair defies gravity and he always looks like he's lost a small olive and he's trying to figure out where he might have dropped it. He has tantrums about the perils of biology class and takes 5 days off school because his new lab partner smells like putrid virginity. In a highly perplexing scene, both meet for