A psychiatric researcher entered the dreams of her patients as the eponymous Paprika in Satoshi Kon’s adult anime.
DreamWorks’ Shrek the Third may have suffered from the curse of “threequels”, but that did not stop the CGI fairytale opening at #1 on both sides of the Atlantic and taking more than $300 million at the US box-office.
Co-writer Jerry Seinfeld and Renee Zellweger were among the voice cast of Bee Movie, from the same studio.
Blade Runner: The Final Cut was the seventh(!) version of Ridley Scott’s 1982 movie.
How times have changed. Hammer’s classic Dracula starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee was reissued theatrically in the UK for Halloween and provoked a debate in the media when it received a BBFC warning lower than the Harry Potter movies. When initially released in 1958, Terence Fisher’s film carried a “X” certificate, restricting it at that time to those over sixteen years of age. For its latest remastered outing on the big screen, it was given a “12A” rating along with a “mild horror” advisory, allowing anyone twelve years or older to see it, or younger children accompanied by an adult. While sharing the same certification, the most recent Potter films were considered to contain “moderate horror”.
The 79th Annual Academy Awards were hosted by Ellen DeGeneres in Hollywood on 25 February. Among a decidedly mixed bag of nominees, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest won the Visual Effects award and George Miller’s Happy Feet was the winner in the Animated Feature category. Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth picked up three Oscars, for Make-up, Cinematography and Art Direction, but missed out on the more prestigious award for Foreign Language Film.
London’s annual FrightFest fantasy film festival opened on 23 August with New Zealand director Jonathan King’s comedy gore movie, Black Sheep. Other films screened over the weekend included Mexico’s KM 31, about two sisters with a telepathic link, the Norwegian serial-killer thriller Cold Prey, and Shrooms, in which a group of American college students encountered Irish magic mushrooms and yet another crazed killer. When released in November, the latter took a pathetic £31,000 at the UK box-office.
For the second year, Horrorfest was screened in more than 350 American movie theatres for ten days in early November. It again included eight new “Films to Die For”.
The wet summer in Britain resulted in the largest number of cinema admissions in forty years. Numbers were up twenty-seven per cent over the previous summer to 50.8 million, with a record £904 million taken at the box office. This was the third-highest since records began in the 1990s.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was the UK’s top movie, with a gross of nearly £50 million. With a combined income of more than £2.2 billion ($4.47 billion), it was announced in September that the Harry Potter films have now officially taken more in worldwide box-office sales than the twenty-two James Bond movies and the entire Star Wars series (but only if you don’t adjust those films’ grosses for inflation).
Britain’s other highest-grossing films included The Golden Compass (£23.52 million), Hot Fuzz (£20.99 million) and Stardust (£14.85 million).
In early November, the first strike by movie and television writers since 1988 shut down the industry for the rest of the year. Writers were joined by many actors on picket lines outside Hollywood and New York studio facilities as they demanded a large increase in what they are paid for use of their work on digital distribution systems.
Scott Thomas’ Flight of the Living Dead: Outbreak on a Plane was an enjoyable direct-to-DVD movie featuring Kevin J. O’Connor and Dale Midkiff and involving flesh-eating zombies at 30,000 feet.
William Atherton starred in Gregory Wilson’s adaptation of Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door, co-scripted by Daniel Farrands and Philip Nutman, which went straight to DVD.
Ignoring the clever premise of its predecessor, Wrong Turn 2 was about a group of reality TV contestants being picked off in the woods by a family of inbred hillbillies. Henry Rollins’ former marine was one of the first casualties.
Return to the House on Haunted Hill was a direct-to-DVD sequel to the 1999 remake, but without any of the original cast members, and Richard Matheson was thankfully not credited on the belated sequel Stir of Echoes 2: The Homecoming, starring Rob Lowe.
Genre veterans Kane Hodder and Michael Berryman starred in the direct-to-DVD Ed Gein: The Butcher of Plain field.
Species: The Awakening featured a slumming Ben Cross, James Denton starred in the zombie Western Undead or Alive, and Adrienne Barbeau and Bufly’s Nicholas Brendon were top-billed in Unholy, about a occult Nazi legacy.
Dougray Scott played a 300-year-old genetically-engineered vampire who teamed up with Saffron Burrows’ police detective in Perfect Creature.
Blade: House of Chthon was an unrated, extended feature-length version of the vampire TV series pilot, which also included a documentary and commentary by the writers and director.
Network’s first commercial release of the dull 1979 TV version of M. R. James’ Casting of the Runes, featuring Jan Francis and Iain Cuthbertson, was thankfully supplemented with Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance, a rarely-screened James adaptation made for ITV schools programmes in 1976, and the excellent 1995 documentary A Pleasant Terror.
In February, 20th Century Fox Home Video released The Mr Moto Collection Vol.2 featuring Peter Lorre as the wily detective in Mr Moto’s Gamble, Mr Moto in Danger Island, Mr Moto Takes a Vacation and Mr Moto’s Last Warning.
Released for Halloween, Fox Horror Classics contained three 1940s films from the studio, The Lodger, The Undying Monster and Hangover Square, all directed by John Brahm. The set also included informative documentaries on Brahm, the making of The Lodger and star Laird Cregar, plus two radio show adaptations featuring Vincent Price.
Issued by Fox under the “M-G-M Scream Legends” banner, the Vincent Price boxed set contained Tales of Terror, Twice Told Tales, The Abominable Dr Phibes, Dr Phibes Rises Again, Theater of Blood, Madhouse, Witchfinder General and a “Disc of Horrors” containing three new documentaries. Witchfinder General was also available on a separate “Midnite Movies” disc with an audio commentary and documentary.
The second half of the second season of 1960s Irwin Allen TV series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea was also available from Fox.
Monsters and Madmen from Criterion was a four-disc set containing the Richard Gordon-produced movies The Haunted Strangler (aka Grip of the Strangler), Corridors of Blood, The Atomic Submarine and First Man Into Space.
Warner Bros’ four “Cult Camp Classics” boxed sets each included three movies with selected commentaries. Best of the batch was “Sci-Fi Thrillers” that featured Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, Queen of Outer Space and The Giant Behemoth.
Kino’s masterfully restored version of F. W. Murnau’s silent Nosferatu was available on a two-disc set that included a documentary about the film’s creation and a version with German intertitles.
Helen McCrory’s Dr Victoria Frankenstein used stem-cell research to create a sympathetic Monster (Julian Bleach) from the DNA of her dying son in writer/director Jed Mercurio’s updated adaptation of Frankenstein, made for British television and shown in October.
Scottish actor Dougray Scott played contemporary versions of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in yet another redundant variation on the story, this time filmed in Canada.
Dan Castellaneta portrayed Hollywood director Cecil B. DeMille in the Sci Fi Channel’s Sands of Oblivion, in which an ancient Egyptian curse haunted the set of the 1923 movie, The Ten Commandments. Stars Morena Baccarin and Adam Baldwin were re-united from Firefly.
A group of teenage partygoers desecrated a graveyard during a friend’s wake and released three vengeful ghosts in Gravedancers, while the dead rose from their watery graves in a flooded town in Beneath Still Waters.
Kevin Sorbo’s unlikely environmental activist priest found himself battling a slimy subterranean entity in Something Beneath, and backwoods locals (including veteran Richard Moll) tried to sacrifice seven stranded
teenagers to the Headless Horseman, in another variation on the Sleepy Hollow plot.
Adrian Paul returned as the immortal Duncan MacLeod, searching for the origin of his power in Sci Fi’s TV movie sequel High-lander: The Source. Featuring an unlikely Cloris Leachman, Lake Placid 2 was a big croc sequel to the 1999 original, while Pumpkin-head 4: Blood Feud was shot in Romania with Lance Henriksen briefly reprising his role as a ghost.
The actor didn’t fare much better as a crazed jungle doctor using a sacred cave full of spiders to facilitate his organ-harvesting operation in In the Spider’s Web.
Oscar-winner F. Murray Abraham was definitely slumming as a crazed anthropology professor attempting to capture a breed of intelligent prehistoric ape in BloodMonkey.
Gary Busey’s Southern sheriff was on the hunt for an escaped tiger that shared a mystical connection with a young boy (Ty Wood) in Maneater, and a group of dumb college kids who ran over a bear cub were justifiably eaten by its revenge-seeking mother in David DeCoteau’s awful Grizzly Rage.
James Van Beek’s ocean scientist teamed up with a local sheriff (Alexandro Castillo) to battle a giant squid threatening a small fishing community in Gary Yates’ better-than-it-had-any-right-to-be Eye of the Beast.
Sean Patrick Flanery’s small town sheriff had to deal with ravenous ravens in Raw, a surprisingly effective homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds that also featured that film’s star, Rod Taylor.
Patrick Muldoon’s ex-marine turned ski instructor and Vanessa Williams’ scientist encountered six escaped giant mutant arachnids in Sci Fi’s Ice Spiders. Roger Corman executive produced Super-gator, in which a slumming Kelly McGillis’ bio-engineered alligator snacked on Hawaiian tourists.
The crew of a World War II American bomber was forced down behind enemy lines in France, where they discovered that sinister Nazi forces had reanimated an ancient race of monsters in Ayton Davis’ action-packed Reign of the Gargoyles.
Stephen Baldwin’s museum guard was transported to the Dark Ages in Stan Lee’s Harpies. Buffy’s Amber Benson turned up in Gryphon as a princess who battled a flying monster conjured up by a wizard, while Nicholas Brendon, another veteran of the vampire slayer’s show, played a fire-fighter who found himself confronted by an alien creature unleashed as a result of a solar flare in Fire Serpent, created by executive producer William Shatner.
Chris Bruno starred in Grendel, based on the epic poem Beowulf, and Tom Wopat’s brain was taken over by alien-controlled ants in The Hive.
Zooey Deschanel, Alan Cumming and Richard Dreyfuss starred in a futuristic deconstruction of The Wizard of Oz in the Sci Fi Channel’s three-part miniseries Tin Man.
The Gathering was a two-part Lifetime miniseries about a Manhattan doctor (Peter Gallagher) searching for his missing wife (Kristin Lehman), who became involved with a New York coven of witches controlled by Peter Fonda’s charismatic leader.
Teenagers Alexz Johnson and Magda Apanowicz made a date with a book that brought demons to life in the LMN’s Devil’s Diary, which also featured Brian Krause. On the same channel, Victoria Pratt feared she had given birth to Satan’s offspring in Hush Little Baby, a psychiatrist treated a patient literally plagued by demons in They Come Back, and Antonio Sabato Jr was one of the passengers aboard a plane overrun with killer ants in Destination: Infestation.
Also on LMN, The Haunting of Sorority Row was set during Pledge Week and starred Leighton Meester.
In the BBC’s feature-length Empathy, Stephen Moyer played a former convict who used his empathic powers to help a pair of police detectives catch the murderer of two teenage girls.
Tiffani Thiessen and French Stewart starred in the three-hour Pandemic on Hallmark, and Valerie Bertinelli’s eponymous widowed clairvoyant attempted to solve a series of local murders in Claire, from the same channel.
Following The Ruby in the Smoke, Billie Piper returned as Victorian financial consultant/amateur detective Sally Lockhart in the BBC’s The Shadow in the North, based on the novel by Philip Pullman. This time Sally was involved with stage magicians, seances, psychics, ghosts and murder. There was also a nice in-joke involving Bram Stoker.
From BBC Scotland, John McKay’s Edinburgh-set Reichenbach Falls was based on an original idea by crime writer Ian Rankin (who turned up in a cameo). While investigating an ancient mystery, Alec Newman’s police detective found himself haunted by the literary ghosts of Professor John Bell (John Sessions) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Richard Wilson).
Eddie Kaye Thomas’ animal-control officer kept a lycanthropic secret from his fiancée (Autumn Reeser) in the ABC Family werewolf comedy Nature of the Beast.
A girl (Emily Osment) found a strange book that took her into a macabre cartoon world in R. L. Stine’s The Haunting Hour: Don’t Think About It on the Cartoon Network, and nine-year-old Roxy Hunter (Aria Wallace) discovered that her new home was haunted in Nickelodeon’s Roxy Hunter and the Mystery of the Moody Ghost.
Tia and Tamera Mowry were reunited as the twin witches searching for their missing father on the Disney Channel’s Twitches Too.
Hellboy: Blood & Iron was the second animated feature from the Cartoon Network, based on the characters created by Mike Mignola. Ron Perlman, John Hurt and Selma Blair were among the voice artists who contributed to this muddled tale involving Countess Bathory.
The first episode of the 2007 season of the BBC’s increasingly popular Doctor Who had more than a nod to Dracula as David Tennant’s space and time-traveller encountered new companion Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman) on the Moon, where they battled a blood-sucking alien.
Subsequent episodes featured a young William Shakespeare (Dean Lennox Kelly) and a trio of witches, another appearance by The Face of Boe (whose surprising origin was revealed), and a Daleks’ invasion of 1930s Manhattan.
Based on his 1995 novel, Paul Cornell’s two-part episode, which found the Doctor hiding in pre-First World War England, having lost his memory and menaced by an army of creepy scarecrows, was not only the best episode of the year, but one of the best television dramas of 2007. Almost as good was “Blink”, a stand-alone episode by Steven Moffat in which teenager Sally Sparrow (Carey Mulligan) was menaced in a dilapidated house by living statues. The Doctor and Martha were barely featured.
Although the final three episodes included the return of companion Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) and a welcome guest appearance by Derek Jacobi, John Simm’s much-anticipated turn as The Master was sadly misjudged as he overplayed his role as a Tony Blair-like megalomaniac.
Following on directly from the season finale, Tennant’s new Doctor encountered his 1980s incarnation (Peter Davison) in an original bridging sequence scripted by Steven Moffat for the BBC’s Children in Need fundraiser shown on 16 November.
This vignette led into the annual Doctor Who Christmas special. Despite featuring Australian singer Kylie Minogue as a waitress and a bunch of murderous robot angels aboard a Titanic space-cruiser, Russell T. Davis’ Voyage of the Damned was a disappointing rehash of clichés from The Poseidon Adventure. At least the supporting cast featured such stalwarts as Clive Swift, Geoffrey Palmer and Bernard Cribbins.
Meanwhile, the first season of spin-off “adult” show Torchwood limped to an end in January with an episode in which Barrowman’s bisexual Captain Jack and Naoko Mori’s Tosh travelled back in time to a World War II dance hall, while a demonic “Beast” came through the Rift and threatened to destroy the Earth in the apocalyptic season finale “End of Days”.
Another Doctor Who spin-off show, aimed at children, was much better. The Sarah Jane Adventures kicked off on New Year’s Day with an hour-long pilot in which the Doctor’s former companion from the 1970s, Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen), teamed up with her thirteen-year-old neighbour María (Yasmin Paige) and others to confront alien menaces. Ten half-hour shows followed. After dealing with ludicrous aliens the Slitheen, Sarah Jane and her young friends encountered an order of creepy nuns that protected Medusa, Sarah Jane’s life was usurped
by an embittered dead schoolfriend (Jane Asher), and robot dog K-9 returned to save the Earth in the season finale.
James Nesbitt overacted as Dr Tom Jackman, a descendant of the infamous Jekyll, in writer Steven Moffat’s BBC series of the same name. After Jackman discovered that he was the product of a decades-spanning conspiracy, the final show (retitled Hyde) cleverly tied everything into Robert Louis Stevenson’s original novel, but then spoiled it with a silly “shock” revelation. The excellent supporting cast included Gina Bellman, Denis Lawson, Meera Syal and new Bionic Woman Michelle Ryan.
John Simm returned in February as police detective Sam Tyler, thrown back in time to 1973 in the BBC’s second – and presumably final – series of Life on Mars. After doing his best to convince his remarkably un-PC boss DCI GenéHunt (the wonderful Philip Glenister) to clean up his act, Tyler finally made it back to the twenty-first century in the enigmatic last episode but had to choose where his future lay. Ashes to Ashes, a follow-up series set in the 1980s, was announced.
The second season of Showtime’s darkly comic Dexter saw Michael C. Hall’s sympathetic serial killer under suspicion by various characters, including Keith Carradine’s laconic FBI Agent Lundy and sexy stalker Lila (Brit actress Jaime Murray), as his murderous past was discovered decomposing on the Miami seabed and the police started hunting among their own for the “Bay Harbor Butcher”.
After ABC’s Lost hit an all-time ratings low in February, the producers optimistically announced that the increasingly dull show would eventually end in 2010 with the next three seasons reduced from twenty-two to sixteen episodes apiece. Meanwhile, Jack (Matthew Fox) and Kate (Evangeline Lilly) were shown together in the future, and Dominic Monaghan’s Charlie was the series’ latest fatal casualty in the two-hour season three finale in May. Season four kicked off with a number of new characters joining the already overburdened cast on the island, plus even more flashbacks and flashforwards.
Meanwhile, NBC’s equally meandering Heroes featured guest appearances by Star Trek’s George Takei, Doctor Who’s Christopher Eccleston (as “Claude”, an invisible man) and comics guru Stan Lee, introduced the evil Sylar’s mother, and then decided to confuse viewers even further with a “possible future” episode. The second season opened with Hiro (Masi Oka) trapped in ancient Japan. Star Trek’s Nichelle Nichols subsequently turned up as a kindly New Orleans grandmother who looked after two heroes, while Kristen Bell (star of the cancelled Veronica Mars) joined the cast as an electrical-powered Company operative after turning down a role in Lost. The premature December finale (a result of the writers’ strike) left a number of heroes in perilous situations.
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