The late Frank Hampson’s classic spaceman hero, Dan Dare, was once again reincarnated for a new audience with his own title from Virgin Comics.
Edited by Tom Pomplun, Graphic Classics Volume Fourteen: Gothic Classics from Eureka Productions featured six illustrated adaptations of classic works, including J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla”, Mrs Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and Jane Austin’s Northanger Abbey.
Published by Fantagraphics Books, The Grave Robber’s Daughter was an original graphic novel by Richard Sala. This odd little fable featured short-tempered girl sleuth Judy Drood trapped in the cursed town of Obidiah’s Glen, which had been taken over by demonic clowns.
With Rob Bowman, Ridley Scott, James Cameron, Michael Bay and Guillermo del Toro all previously attached to direct, and at one time set to star Tom Cruise, Michael Douglas or the current Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Francis Lawrence’s dull $100 million-plus I Am Legend, the third version of Richard Matheson’s classic 1954 SF/vampire novel, featured Will Smith as the last man on earth, battling CGI zombies in New York. The film broke The Lord of the Rings’ record for a US December weekend opening with a take of $76.5 million and went on to earn around $200 million before the end of the year. In the UK it went straight to #1.
Shia LaBeouf spied on his neighbours in Disturbia, a teen version of Rear Window that debuted in the US at #1 with a surprisingly low gross of $22.2 million. However, the twenty-year-old actor enjoyed a far bigger success later in the year playing a geeky teenager who discovered that his new car was actually a transforming Autobot in Michael Bay’s big, loud and stupid Transformers, inspired by the 1980s children’s TV cartoon series. Executive produced by Steven Spielberg, it had the biggest non-sequel opening ever in the US, debuting at #1 with a gross of $155.4 million. The film went on to make more than $300 million in America and shifted an impressive 8.3 million units in its first week on DVD.
An alien entity possessed Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) and turned him into the black-suited “Venom” in Sam Raimi’s dreary Spider-Man 3.
Gore Verbinski’s Pirates of the Caribbean: At the World’s End, the third in the overblown Walt Disney franchise, was better than the first sequel but still did not make a lot of sense.
Although Christopher Lee’s singing cameo was cut when filming shut down in March after star Johnny Depp’s daughter became seriously ill, Tim Burton’s pared-down version of Stephen Sondheim’s Broadway musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street still featured an impressive supporting cast that included Helena Bonham Carter (as pie-maker “Mrs Burton”), Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall and Sacha Baron Cohen.
In Next, based on a story by Philip K. Dick, Nicolas Cage’s Las Vegas magician helped Julianne Moore’s FBI agent prevent a nuclear attack on LA by seeing two minutes into the future. Much more successful, at the box-office if not in content, was Ghost Rider, in which the actor was miscast as Johnny Blaze, the flame-headed Marvel supernatural superhero. It set a President’s Day opening record, taking $52 million in the US over its first weekend, passing the $100 million mark in just four weeks, and going on to amass a worldwide gross of more than $200 million.
Although the first film didn’t deserve a sequel, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer opened at #1 in the US and eventually made $130 million.
David Slade’s unimaginative 30 Days of Night was based on the 2002 graphic novel by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith, which used the hoary old idea about vampires existing in Alaska, where there is no sunlight for thirty days each winter. Stealing its ideas from Dracula, Salem’s Lot, EC comics and a (much better) 1980s Twilight Zone episode, Josh Hartnett played the sheriff who discovered that the walking dead had come to his little town. It still managed to top the US box-office charts in October with a meagre $16 million gross.
Jim Carrey’s obsessed dog-catcher was driven mad by a mysterious book in Joel Schumacher’s mind-bending The Number 23, while John Cusack’s travel writer checked himself into the titular haunted Manhattan hotel room in 1408, based on the story by Stephen King.
Thomas Jane led a band of small-town survivors battling monstrous creatures in Frank Darabont’s The Mist, based on King’s 1980 novella with a surprisingly downbeat denouement. Despite being one of the best Stephen King film adaptations ever, the film barely scraped into the US top ten during its opening week.
Kevin Costner’s urbane family man Mr Brooks was really a serial killer goaded on by his dark alter-ego (played by a cackling William Hurt), and Sandra Bullock’s perfect housewife couldn’t work out whether her husband (Julian McMahon) was dead or not in The Premonition. Despite poor reviews, the film was Bullock’s best opening ever, taking $17.8 million in its first week.
Hugh Jackman played an immortal conquistador and Rachel Weisz his dying wife in Darren Aronofsky’s ludicrously pretentious fantasy The Fountain.
Although the character was dead, Tobin Bell’s “Jigsaw” reached out from the grave through flashbacks in Darren Lynn Bousman’s redundant Saw IV. It became the third entry in the sequel franchise to top the US charts with an opening weekend gross of $31.8 million.
Again presented by Quentin Tarantino, Eli Roth’s “torture-porn” Hostel Part II failed to do much on either side of the Atlantic, despite making his victims women this time.
Soon-to-be-divorced couple Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsdale ended up in a creepy motel in Nimorod Antal’s neat little chiller Vacancy, and a catwalk model (TV actress Elisha Cuthbert) was abducted and tortured by a hooded tormentor in Captivity, based on a script by Larry Cohen and directed in Russia by a slumming Roland Joffe (Oscar-nominated for The Killing Fields).
Despite opening at #1 over the Labor Day weekend with a record-breaking $30.6 million, Rob Zombie’s reworking of the classic slasher Halloween, with Malcolm McDowell in the Donald Pleasence role, came and went long before that iconic night. However, it still managed to become the third highest-grossing film in that particular series, behind the 1978 original and Halloween: H20 (1998).
Although it co-starred Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, Oliver Hirschbiegel’s $65 million The Invasion, the fourth screen version of Jack Finney’s 1955 classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers, had the summer’s third-lowest major opening in the US, taking just $6 million. Following a couple of title changes and an on-set car accident involving Kidman, German film-maker Hirschbiegel’s original cut failed to impress producers in 2006. Andy and Larry Wachowski were reportedly brought in to re-write around a third of the movie, while James McTeigue directed an extra seventeen days of shooting at an added cost of $10 million.
Sean Bean took over the role of The Hitcher from Rutger Hauer for David Meyers’ pointless remake of the 1986 classic.
Michael Caine (who was in the 1972 original with Sir Laurence Olivier) played a cat-and-mouse game with Jude Law in Kenneth Branagh’s reworking of Sleuth, scripted by Harold Pinter and based on Anthony Shaffer’s play.
Following the murder of his family by a crazed Craig Fairbrass, Nathan Fillion discovered he could see dead people and other people’s auras in the workmanlike sequel White Noise: The Light.
A group of National Guard soldiers found themselves battling nuclear mutants in the disappointing sequel The Hills Have Eyes 2, and who knew we even needed the appalling inept Alien vs. Predator: Requiem?
The third entry in the video game franchise, Russell Mulcahy’s Resident Evil: Extinction went straight into the US #1 slot at the end of September, taking $23.7 million over its opening weekend. This time, Milk Jovovich’s moody heroine Alice briefly battled zombies in a ruined Las Vegas.
Despite being based on a novel and script by creator Thomas Harris, the misconceived prequel, Hannibal Rising, took just $13.1 million during its US opening weekend, apparently putting an end to the tired franchise.
When released in American movie theatres in April, audiences didn’t really understand that they were getting two “B” movies for the price of one with Grindhouse, a homage to the explo
itation double-bills of the 1970s. As a result, Quentin Tarantino’s psycho road movie Death Proof and Robert Rodriguez’s superior zombie sci-fi flick Planet Terror were subsequently re-cut and re-issued in extended versions on DVD, but without most of the fake trailers (directed by Rodriguez, Edgar Wright, Eli Roth and Rob Zombie) and reel “damage” that made the initial cinema experience so special.
Lindsay Lohan found time between her various trips in and out of rehab to star in I Know Who Killed Me, which took just $3.5 million during its opening weekend.
From the makers of the Saw movies, the excellent Dead Silence attempted to turn a cursed ventriloquist’s dummy into a new franchise character.
Hilary Swank experienced the “Curse of Oscar” when she starred as a debunker of miracles investigating a Louisana town beset by the ten plagues of Egypt in The Reaping. Meanwhile, Adam Green’s derivative “slasher” Hatchet was located in a Louisiana swamp and hyped as “old school American horror”.
Directed by Hong Kong twins Danny and Oxide Pang, The Messengers was a derivative Asian-style horror movie set in a haunted North Dakota farmhouse.
Primeval featured a giant CGI crocodile attacking a US TV news crew in war-ravaged Burundi, and Lucy Liu played a victim turned vampire assassin is Rise: Blood Hunter.
A team of astronauts had to reignite a dying sun in Danny Boyle’s low budget Sunshine, while American troops claimed control of a virus-infected London as survivor Robert Carlyle tried to protect his family from the scourge of the walking dead in Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s zombie sequel 28 Weeks Later.
Carrie Anne Moss and Billy Connolly starred in the low-budget Canadian zombie comedy Fido, and Ron Perlman battled the elements, literally, on an Alaskan oil-drilling station in Larry Fessenden’s “B” movie chiller The Last Winter.
Brit actress Emily Blunt played an American college girl menaced by a possible psycho and something creepy in the woods in Greg Jacobs’ atmospheric Wind Chill, produced by George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh.
From New Zealand, Black Sheep was a silly low-budget movie in which genetically modified killer sheep went on a bloody rampage, while college kids on a remote island were terrorized by wild dogs in The Breed, executive produced by Wes Craven.
The impressive ensemble cast of David Fincher’s intricate Zodiac investigated the real-life Bay Area serial killings of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Based on an Off-Broadway play, Ashley Judd played a woman who shared her boyfriend’s paranoid hallucinations about invisible insects in William Friedkin’s Bug.
David Lynch’s three-hour Inland Empire starred Laura Dern as an actress who lost all sense of reality – apparently much like the director. Gael Garcia Bernal couldn’t tell dreams from real life in Michel Gondry’s equally perplexing The Science of Sleep.
Brad Dourif played an alien working for the CIA in Werner Herzog’s baffling The Wild Blue Yonder, and Francis Ford Coppola only managed to alienate audiences with his self-indulgent Youth Without Youth, about a Hungarian linguistics expert (Tim Roth) who mysteriously grew younger after being hit by lightning.
Despite a cast that included Dwayne (“The Rock”) Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Justin Timberlake, the futuristic flop Southland Tales indicated that Richard Kelly’s debut success, Bonnie Darko, might have been a fluke.
A photographer was haunted by the woman whose death he caused in the Thai ghost story Shutter, and teenagers were menaced by zombies and psychos in Zibahkhana (Hell’s Ground), shot in a month in Pakistan.
The Russian-made Day Watch was the second in the contemporary vampire trilogy, following Night Watch, while people battled their zombie doubles in a haunted Russian mansion in The Abandoned.
Vincent Cassell portrayed a homicidal shepherd preying on a group of French teens in a ruined chateau in Kim Chapiron’s Satan (Sheitan).
After her mother was murdered in her own home, Emilie Dequenne’s TV sound engineer started recording sounds from the past to discover the culprit in Alante Kavaite’s Ecoute Le Temps.
Building on its Christmas 2006 release, Night at the Museum took more than $200 million in just five weeks at the US box-office.
Morgan Freeman’s God told Steve Carell’s everyman to build an ark in the flop comedy sequel Evan Almighty, while Vince Vaughn played the bitter older brother of Santa Claus (Paul Giamatti) in the Christmas comedy Fred Claus.
From the same team behind the overrated Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz was an enjoyable British comedy that owed more than a nod to The Wicker Man and the Italian giallo genre.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was the best in the series to date, with the boy wizard leading a Hogwarts resistance movement against Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) and the forces of evil and repression. David Yates’ darker fifth instalment in the Harry Potter franchise had its premiere in Tokyo in June. When the film opened the following month in forty-four territories, it was #1 in every market in which it played, making it the biggest-ever opening for a Warner Bros, picture. Although it took $77.4 million in the US and Canada across its debut weekend, it still opened behind Spider-Man 3, Shrek the Third and the latest Pirates of the Caribbean. However, Order of the Phoenix ended up grossing nearly $1 billion dollars worldwide, and in some territories the climactic battle scene was shown in 3-D in IMAX cinemas.
Christopher Lee had a blink-and-you’11-miss-him moment in Chris Weitz’s The Golden Compass, based on the “His Dark Materials” trilogy by Philip Pullman, which also reunited stars Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig. Despite costing New Line an estimated $250-300 million to make and market, the film only took $25.8 million on its opening weekend in the US, although it did debut at #1 on both sides of the Atlantic.
Michelle Pfeiffer’s wicked witch was on the trail of a fallen star (a miscast Clare Danes) in Matthew Vaughn’s fantasy adventure Stardust, based on the graphic novel written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Charles Vess. Despite a disappointing US opening weekend gross of just $9.2 million, mostly positive reviews and good word-of-mouth resulted in it taking almost £15 million in the UK, where it was the #1 movie, and grossing more than $125 million worldwide.
The first entry in a proposed series loosely based on Susan Cooper’s superb series of award-winning children’s fantasy books, The Dark is Rising was released in America under the pointless title The Seeker. Despite a cast that included Ian McShane and Christopher Eccleston, it quickly died at the box office on both sides of the Atlantic.
Based on a Swedish young adult novel, The Invisible involved a poetic high school student (the likeable Justin Chatwin) returning as a spirit to haunt and ultimately fall in love with the delinquent classmate (Margarita Levieva) who was responsible for nearly killing him.
Agnes Brucker played a teenage werewolf in Bucharest in Blood and Chocolate, adapted from a YA novel by Annette Curtis Klause.
Dakota Fanning teamed up with a talking spider (voiced by Julia Roberts) to save a pet piglet in Charlotte’s Web, the second film version of E. B. White’s classic 1952 children’s book.
A young boy (Daniel Magder) befriended a Canadian lake monster in Mee-Shee: The Water Giant, while two Scottish children in 1940s Scotland discovered a mysterious egg that hatched into a friendly sea monster in The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep, directed by Jay Russell (not to be confused with the horror author of the same name).
Bob Shaye’s The Last Mimzy was a children’s film based on the 1943 SF story by “Lewis Padgett” (Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore), and two children created their own fantasy world in the disappointing Bridge to Terabithia.
Natalie Portman inherited a magical New York toyshop from an eccentric 243-year-old magician (Dustin Hoffman) in the family fantasy Mr Magorium’s Wonder Emporium.
Susan Sarandon’s evil queen banished a cartoon fairy-tale princess (the impressive Amy Adams) to real-life New York City in Walt Disney’s delightfully referential live-action and animated spoof Enchanted. It opened at #1 in the US with a take of $49.1 million.
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nbsp; Filmed in the “performance capture” technique previously used for The Polar Express, a digitally-enhanced Ray Winstone battled a hideous monster (voiced by Crispin Glover) and its sexy demonic mother (Angelina Jolie) in Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf, scripted by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avery and based on the tenth-century Anglo Saxon saga. During its November opening weekend in America, when it went to #1 with a below-expectation gross of $28.1 million, the filmed earned twice as much from IMAX theatres equipped with digital 3-D projectors than it did in all the other cinemas combined.
Disney/Pixar had to explain to audiences how to pronounce the title of Ratatouille, about a French rat that became a gourmet cook. Peter O’Toole was among those who supplied the voices. Meanwhile, Disney’s loud and frenetic animated time-travel comedy Meet the Robinsons had seven credited scriptwriters.
The busy Shia LeBeouf and an iconic Jeff Bridges supplied the voices of surfing penguins in Columbia’s animated Surf’s Up.
The CGI-created TMNT (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) did better than anyone expected, topping the US box-office with a $24.3 million gross when it was released in March. Made for under $40 million, with most of the animation being produced in Hong Kong, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Patrick Stewart were among the voice cast.
Jason Lee played songwriter David Seville, creator of Alvin and the Chipmunks, in Tim Hill’s CGI film about the high-pitched rodents from the 1960s. The film opened at a healthy $44.3 million in the US and even managed to take more than £7 million in the UK.
Robert De Niro, Madonna, Snoop Dog, David Bowie and Harvey Keitel were among some of the surprising names that contributed their voices to Luc Besson’s CGI fantasy Arthur and the Invisibles.
The third and fourth books in Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic fantasy series were adapted by Japanese animator Goro Miyazaki as Tales from Earthsea, featuring the voices of Timothy Dalton, Willem Dafoe and Mariska Hargitay.
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