David Annandale

Complaining about remakes is a lazy, fish-in-the-barrel sport. Any scribe can and has done it, especially, one suspects, when ideas are otherwise running low. But remakes are on my mind thanks to a recent encounter with a particularly bad one, so screw it, I’m ruminating.

Received wisdom posits that remakes are inherently a bad thing, on a par with sequels (but even more morally suspect, depending on the quality of the original film), and a sign of creative stagnation in the film industry. This is true as f…
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The horror film’s energy seems to move in cyclical patterns from country to country. At different points of the genre’s history, the best work tends to cluster geographically. I admit that my evidence for this is rather anecdotal, but let’s look at the patterns.

France is where it all begins, with Georges Méliès creating the first horror movies in 1896. The genre is, admittedly, in very embryonic form at this stage, but in the early years of the 20th Century, this is where the action is. The American film i…
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Before anything else, some housecleaning. In my piece on BluRay and HD-DVD some time ago, I quoted Video Watchdog as saying the BluRay machines would not be backwards compatible. This has turned out, of course, to be inaccurate. Video Watchdog printed its correction, and I now follow suit.

Right, then. So, after a disappointing opening at the box office, the first reports about how Grindhouse will appear on DVD have surfaced, and that’s all the excuse I need to talk about the film again…
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So Grindhouse is upon us, and fans of exploitation cinema everywhere are no doubt bathing in the warm glow of nostalgia for bygone sleaze and spooky cinemas many of us were too young to enter, but that nevertheless were surrounded by an aura of forbidden fascination. Here in Winnipeg, I remember, in my formative years as a film fan, being simultaneously frightened and attracted by the ad campaigns for movies playing at the likes of the Downtown and the Eve. The era has passed, of course, never to return, but t…
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In theatres now (and no doubt hitting DVD before long) is the Korean film The Host. It’s been a long time since we’ve had a monster movie this good, and even longer since we’ve had one with this much depth.

Any text, of course, has its subtext, and this is as true of giant monster movies as any other work of art. But some films are much more a much richer subtext than others, partly because the filmmakers were quite deliberate in seeing their monsters in a metaphorical or symbolic light. Though the e…
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A tale of three films. One is original. One is its remake. One is a cash-in. And the latter is the one that became a classic.

In 1975, a big-budget SF effort by Norman Jewison hit the theatres with much publicity. This was Rollerball. In a future world with no wars, and everything is controlled by corporations, human aggression is channeled through the titular, extremely violent game. The game has been designed to be such that becoming good at it is impossible, and thus there are no heroes, and the f…
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Gosh, I don’t know if today’s subject counts as cult movies. These are genre films, though. And they’re old.

Really old.

They’re the first.

Horror, fantasy and SF in film effectively owe their existence to one man: Georges Méliès. A stage magician, he attended one of the first shows the Lumière brothers put on with their cinematograph, and was intrigued by the device’s commercial possibilities. Come 1896, he was making his own movies. He built a movie a studio, and here I let Denis Giffo…
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