Six Reasons Why Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem Will Suck
by Daniel Swensen on Sep.13, 2007, under Movie News, Movies
I found my curiosity piqued this morning by a story on Bureau 42 describing the trailer for the new Aliens vs. Predator sequel as “amazing” and “adult.” I’ve made no secret of the fact that I consider the first AvP to be an unwatchable piece of garbage — bad enough to make Alien: Resurrection look like a masterpiece of restraint and nuance. “Amazing” is a pretty strong word, and I’ve always been fond of Bureau 42, so I hopped over to IGN and checked out the R-rated trailer. I thought to myself: “Could Aliens Vs. Predator: Requiem actually be good?”
Doctor Who Spins Off Again With The Sarah Jane Adventures
by Daniel Swensen on Sep.11, 2007, under Television
Following the apparent success of Torchwood (which I’ve yet to see, despite it just having premiered on BBC America), the Doctor Who franchise ventures into more spin-off territory with The Sarah Jane Adventures — a series not about a plucky girl detective tracking down jewel thieves in her cozy little hometown, despite how the title makes it sound.
From scifinews.net:
The new series The Sarah Jane Adventures sees the return of some familiar alien enemies from Doctor Who as the Slitheen are back and out for revenge.
Coming to CBBC on BBC One and CBBC at the end of September 2007, The Sarah Jane Adventures stars one of Doctor Who’s most famous former companions — investigative journalist Sarah Jane Smith.
The series is from the same people behind Doctor Who including multi-award winning writer Russell T Davies.
Russell T. Davies’s stint on the first season of Doctor Who was by far my favorite of the new series (he wrote Dalek, my new number one Doctor Who episode ever), so I’m excited to see this… or will be when The Sarah Jane Adventures comes to BBC America, probably sometime in 2010. Sigh.
Indiana Jones IV Gets a TItle
by Daniel Swensen on Sep.10, 2007, under Movie News, Movies
Well, it’s official. According to Sci-Fi Wire, Dark Horizons, and the official site itself, the title of the fourth Indy movie is Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Internet fans the world over are already expressing their carefully pre-loaded outrage, perhaps disappointed that the title wasn’t Indiana Jones and the Wildly Overused Old-Age Joke like they’d secretly been hoping all along.
Despite my personal misgivings about Indy IV — or, indeed, any movie with Shia LeBoeuf in it — I’m not bothered at all by the title. I definitely heard worse in terms of speculation, and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull evokes the kind of classic, purple, pulp-adventure feel that made Indy famous in the first place. A cool title, Marion Ravenwood coming back — I may get really excited about this if I’m not careful.
San Daikaiju Chikyu Saidai no Kessen (1964)/Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1965), Part 4: American Version and DVD
by Reverend Matt on Sep.07, 2007, under Godzilla Project
The American Version
What ink we got left, yellow? Red? Yeah, that’ll hold ‘em.
American International Pictures passed on this film, for reasons now lost to the mists of history. And so Walter Reade-Sterling and Continental released it in the U.S., in September of 1965. It was marketed on the cheap, with two-color posters and the usual newspaper spots; one memorable bit of marketing, though, was the three-faced, child-sized, paper ‘Ghidrah’ mask distributed as a promotion. Modern Godzilla-merch collectors would gladly slaughter orphans to get their hands on a surviving one of these. And rightly so. Ghidorah – or Ghidrah, as it was called at the time, in America – was frequently put on the lower part of a double bill with Elvis Presley’s Harum Scarum. Of course it was! Ads for the double bill had a line that went, “The beat and the beast make a holiday feast.” Okay, sure. But nothing about the King of Monsters and the King of Rock n’ Roll? Oh, never mind.
San Daikaiju Chikyu Saidai no Kessen (1964)/Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1965), Part 3: Review
by Reverend Matt on Sep.06, 2007, under Godzilla Project
Review
Wait, guys! I think I see a quarter down there!
It is tempting to think of Ghidorah as the point at which the Godzilla series got weird. Certainly, this film is an archetype of the kind of gonzo fun for which the Showa films are rightly known. But it’s hardly the beginning of the bizarre; King Kong vs. Godzilla was just as silly, albeit for satirical reasons (in part). And though Mothra vs. Godzilla was more straight-faced, it is important to remember that it was a movie about a giant, radiation-spewing sea dinosaur and his fight with two gargantuan caterpillars. Godzilla movies exist along a continuum of weird. And Ghidorah does weird right.
