* It blows my mind that Della’morte, Dell’amore/Cemetery Man director Michele Soavi hasn’t directed a horror film since then, and has actually only directed one other movie of any kind in that time (he’s been doing TV work). But Fangoria reports he’s got a project in the works called Catacombs Club, which sounds like it’s got the same intoxicating mixture of romance and morbidity that the earlier film boasted. Click for details, including the news that The Adventures of Baron Munchausen co-writer Charles McKeown is writing the screenplay, and the factoid that Soavi shot second unit on that Terry Gilliam film. (Via Dread Central.)
* BC at Horror Movie a Day pans Blair Witch Project director Daniel Myrick’s supernatural teen thriller Solstice.
* State of the beast update: Loren Coleman at Cryptomundo reprints eyewitness reports from the San Francisco Chronicle that the two surviving victims of the fatal (to both human and animal) tiger attack at the San Francisco View on Christmas had been actively harassing the zoo’s lions shortly before the attack.
* Jason Adams at My New Plaid Pants takes reviewers of The Orphanage, and Roger Ebert generally, to task for overusing Alfred Hitchcock’s famous “surprise vs. suspense” anecdote. He does this in large part because he thinks The Orphange doesn’t earn the Master’s posthumous approval; I’ve gotta see it before I pass judgment and god only knows when that will happen. As an aside, Jason also mentions how scary he found The Others, a movie I think works exactly one time and then is pretty much useless, so badly does its ending skew everything that comes before it.
* Marvel Editor-in-Chief/Amazing Spider-Man artist Joe Quesada and long-time ASM writer J. Michael “Joe” Straczynski continue to very politely but very publicly blame one another for the shortcomings of the poorly received (by this blog and basically every single other one) “One More Day” Spider-Man storyline, in which Peter Parker and his wife Mary Jane make a deal with the devilish Mephisto to remove all traces of their marriage (past, present, and future) from existence in order to save the life of Peter’s wounded Aunt May. The funny thing is that both men focus on the story’s wonky continuity implications and slapdash use of magic as the narrative equivalent of universal solvent, but neither seem to realize that the emotional, psychological, and moral character-based underpinnings of the entire thing are just as shoddy.
* Finally, allow me to recommend the latest iteration of Dick Wolf’s venerable police and D.A. procedural series Law & Order. The Missus and I watched the back-to-back-episodes double season premiere on our TiVo today, and it’s the best the show has been in a long long time. It’s not just that new cast additions Jeremy Sisto and (particularly) Linus Roache hand in strong performances as lived-in, pointedly un-glossy characters–the whole show seems to have been tightened up, with scenes given more time to breathe, actors given more time to react, even better framing and lighting. It’s almost reminiscent of the show’s earliest Chris Noth/Michael Moriarty years, where half the fun of the show came from watching a George Dzundza or Steven Hill reaction shot. The cop material in particular showed a gravitas it hadn’t had since the departure of Jerry Orbach. Good stuff, worth putting off watching Project Runway and catching one of its countless re-airings instead for.
I thought The Others stood up pretty well to a second viewing. Mostly because I thought all of the acting – Kidman in particular, but the kids and Fionnula Flanagan as well – was fantastic, and was worth watching again. Once you know who the ghosts are and who the living people are, sure, it does lose some of it’s scare-factor, but it’s still got atmosphere coming out the wazoo.
There’s literally no threat, though! It’s hard to get worked up on behalf of characters who are revealed as essentially too dense to realize what the hell’s going on.
FYI: If you happen upon an episode of Law & Order: SVU, pay attention to the people in the background. Jessica’s been wandering through a few of ’em.