Filmland - Nightbreed

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This weekend marks the premiere of Tim Burton’s latest film Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.  I’ve heard the movie is decent but haven’t seen it for myself, though the premise is pretty intriguing.  The set-up is essentially X-Men but clothed in Tim Burton’s horror obsessions rather than the colorful palette of mid-‘70s superhero aesthetics.  

Basically it’s a movie where a bunch of horror infused super children are brought together to defend their existence from a bigoted outer world.  That’s an interesting and worthwhile idea, a fact I mainly know because it’s already been turned into a great horror/dark fantasy flick: Clive Barker’s Nightbreed.

Alice Through The Looking Glass Trailer

One of the weird things about the late 2000s trend of up-jumping classic fairy tales, seminal works of literature we all know from childhood, and even bible stories and myths into fantasy blockbusters is that very few of these films have actually been successful.  Sure, we’ve cranked out film after film in this genre like Mirror Mirror, Jack the Giant Slayer, Pan, Hansel & Gretel: Witchhunters, Exodus: Gods and Kings, Dracula Untold, Hercules and countless more but for the most part they’ve all been total failures, regardless of actual quality.  That same disclaimer, regardless of quality, applies to the smattering of financial success within the genre, almost all of which seem to come from the pop culture warriors at Disney. 

To some extent it makes sense that Disney are the folks making the most money on easily accessible revisions to classic fairy tales, myths, and literature given that’s been their bread and butter since before World War 2.  At the same time however, Disney did more than anyone to launch this particular trend with the 2010 mega-hit Alice in Wonderland, which ended up the 2^nd highest grossing film of the year, beating out competitors like Harry Potter 7 and Twilight: Eclipse.  Now, Disney returns to the Alice well 6 years later with a sequel minus Tim Burton entitled Alice Through The Looking Glass.