While the return of all involved should be enough to make "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" worth your time, there is little more than a simple “here we go again.”
Beetlejuice is back in a brand new trailer for the forthcoming "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" starring Michael Keaton and directed by Tim Burton.
Welcome to another “Preview Reel” column, where we look at the week’s upcoming wide-release movies. After a somewhat disappointing start for The Magnificent Seven and Storks last weekend, this week looks to pick things up with three very different wide-release offerings. We have the true-story environmental disaster flick Deepwater Horizon, the return of Tim Burton with Miss Peregrine’s Home for P...[Read More]
There may seem to be glut of scary-themed animated movies this fall – we’ve already had ParaNorman and Hotel Transylvania – and now we have Frankenweenie, Tim Burton’s comparably modest addition to a genre he had a significant hand in popularizing (with a hat tip to Rankin-Bass, et al). Frankenweenie’s first life was as a thirty-minute live-action short in 1984 by the morbid auteur during his slav...[Read More]
The disturbingly more frequent trend of remaking or recycling classic or popular films and/or properties into vehicles designed to appeal solely to a target demographic without any consideration given to quality or whether a remake is actually warranted or needed has really got me annoyed. Witness the recent release of Dredd, the remake of Judge Dredd which starred Sylvester Stallone or this year’...[Read More]
Like most fans of the feature length, live-action Batman motion pictures, I tried to pretend Joel Schumacher’s offerings don’t exist. I usually do a pretty good job of it too, but because I’m a fanatic, and a completist, they get watched once every couple years when a new Batman film is released in the multiplexes across the globe. This time around though, I’m taking you with me. You got to revel ...[Read More]
As I mentioned in part one Batman on Film, Batman (1966) was my first experience with the Batman character. Even though Adam West will always hold a special place in my heart and I’m able to separate his Batman from any of the “modern” interpretations of the character, it’s Tim Burton’s vision of the Batman universe that I grew up with and considered the one true cinematic representation (until Ch...[Read More]
My first real exposure to Batman came as a kid with the 1966 movie starting Adam West as the Caped Crusader and Burt Ward as his faithful ward Robin. Sure, I saw a few Super Friends episodes from time to time, but it was that movie that really hooked me. There I was, watching it for free at an outdoor summer festival in Ann Arbor, Michigan called Top of the Park. I look back on that first viewing ...[Read More]
In recent years, the mash-up novel, a work of fiction which combines a pre-existing text, often a classic work of fiction, with elements of popular genres such as vampire or zombie stories, has become quite popular. The first and arguably most successful of these was Seth Grahame-Smith’s 2009 book Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Now the mash-up novel has been brought to movie screens with a...[Read More]
Having never watched the original 1960s daily soap opera Dark Shadows and holding a steady grudge against director Tim Burton for the abrasive Charlie & the Chocolate Factory and Alice in Wonderland (not to mention Johnny Depp’s last run of disappointments), I went into Burton’s gothic-comic update of the original camp-cult favorite with more than a little trepidation. After two hours of gorge...[Read More]
Congratulations to the winners of our “Win Tickets to Dark Shadows” contest! Here they are: Gary G, Kristen G., polwu, Momto4babas, Donaldthemovieman, Jessica Boroniec, Kandace Meade, softrose, KathleenB, Lempo4, RRichmond, Aswallow14, Billy0806, Lauren T, Nixie72, Teddi, Diana R, Dkitain, Msdoreen, ryan1476, Oldham_april, Teehee3syd, shondira, Daddysb4by, and Charisseryden. If you won, you should...[Read More]
Vampires are so commonplace in entertainment these days that I cannot fathom how anyone could find them mysterious, otherworldly, or especially frightening. In our narcissistic age, people romanticize vampires because the idea of staying young forever trumps any of the existential sadness of such a proposition. Furthermore, the horror aspect of the undead has been entirely co-opted and taken to ex...[Read More]