Category: Movies We Love
-
New HuffPost Blog – “Horror for Kids” and the Poltergeist Remake
I got thinking about horror aimed at kids over the last week or so, partly due to a discussion I was having of Facebook regarding the original rating of Poltergeist. It prompted me to write this article for Huffington Post, which recycles a paragraph from a blog post I wrote for this site a couple of…
-
Filmmaking is now a Democracy. Maybe we need more obstacles.
As I’ve mentioned before, there’s pretty much only one reason that my shot-on-miniDV first feature ended up getting decent commercial distribution (which, in turn, led to me being considered a ‘proper’ filmmaker albeit one on a very, very low rung of the ladder). I climbed an obstacle. Cutting footage on a home PC was tough…
-
Little Shop of Horrors: The Theatrical vs The Director’s Cut vs The Workprint
I’m reeling a little. This morning, I was lecturing about screenwriting in general (and pleasing your audience in particular) and I mentioned the 1986 version of Little Shop of Horrors. I spoke about that notorious test screening where the “Would you recommend to a friend?” cards allegedly came back with only 13% of affirmatives, dictating that…
-
Gremlins, Poltergeist and The Exorcist: Age Appropriate?
Gremlins came out when I was 10. My parents were Daily M*il readers (it’s okay, they’ve stopped now. They probably got sick of me complaining endlessly about it from the age of about 15 onwards) and so the first time I ever heard about the flick was from a manufactured moral outrage piece in the…
-
Scene X
There’s a video on YouTube that I don’t want you to watch. You probably haven’t seen it. It’s one of the truly great moments in horror cinema, and I don’t want you to go and check it out under any circumstances. In fact, I’ll be genuinely pissed if any of you do go and check…
-
The Octopus that wasn’t in The Goonies
I think it’s fair to say that it all started with 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. My Mum took me to see a cinematic re-release of the 1954 Richard Fleischer version back in the Seventies. Common sense tells me it must have been around 1978, when I was four, but the official date for the…