Week of Review - The Dark Half (1993)

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Let’s talk for a minute about George Romero.  Romero is one of the all-time giants of the horror genre, a skilled and storied director most famed for introducing the world to the streamlined vision of zombies that was the “of the Dead” film series.  However, as excellent as that series is (the first four films and the Romero directed remake anyway) the man did a lot of other high-quality work that’s gone unfairly under-appreciated by the public at large such as Monkey Shines or Knight Riders.  

In 1993, Romero decided to dip his toes into the Stephen King pond and turned in one of the best King adaptations of the decade: The Dark Half.  Starring Timothy Hutton and Michael Rooker, The Dark Half is quintessential King viewing, hitting on a number of his favorite tropes and ideas while still realizing them in their best way.  The film also marks the first entry in this retrospective to tie into the Stephen King shared universe of stories, connecting as it does to the fictional town of Castle Rock, Maine.  So, continuity, quality, and a number of name actors and creators who’ve become beloved in their own right- let’s talk about The Dark Half.

Filmland - History of Doppelganger Horror

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By now you’ve probably at least seen an advertisement for Jordan Peele’s sophomore feature Us, though based on the box office a lot of us have seen the film itself as well.  If you haven’t seen it yet don’t worry, no spoilers here, but the film’s focus on evil doppelgangers has definitely got me thinking.  Killer duplicates of oneself is a pretty great horror concept but one rarely explored in the medium as often as ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and various other forms of more widely accepted monsters.  As such, I’ve narrowed down the history of evil doubles in horror movies and TV in order to look back at the premise that’s given us one of the most memorable horror films of the year. 

Filmland - History of Horror & the Apocalypse

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As the fall season comes upon us once more it’s time for that spookiest of traditions: the new season of American Horror Story.  This year’s season will be about something that’s on everyone’s mind lately: the apocalypse.  The end of days is one of those primal fears that’s been with society pretty much ever since there was a society for us to fear the end of.  However, despite being a fairly ubiquitous terror and one that you’d think everyone held a stake in the Apocalypse’s place in the horror pantheon is actually pretty limited.  

Even setting up this timeline I’ve had to fudge want counts as “horror” a bit to include some stuff that’s more schlocky or was featured a lot in the old horrorathons that channels used to show around Halloween when I was a kid.  With that said, I did find enough apocalyptic horror material to create something of a timeline for the genre and how it reflects the anxieties and apocalyptic scenarios of the time.

Panel Vision - The Humans

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It’d be fair to say 2017 has been a curiously good year for monkeys, by which I, of course, mean all variations of ape and primate because this is a colloquial essay and not an academic one.  But anyway, between Kong: Skull Island and War for the Planet of the Apes monkeys are having a very big year at the box office, if only because TWO ape films at the theater is two more than you’d normally expect.  Obviously, apes have had a long, proud, and storied history in comics going back to the days of DC Comics editor Julius Schwartz’ famous maxim that “Apes on comics sell comics.”  

This definitely won’t be the last time I talk about ape comics this year but it will probably be the only time I really focus in on the actual comics themselves rather than just the covers, mainly because most ape comics are weird old ‘50s stories that the only kind of hold up.  Not so for today’s offering, the supremely bizarre and delightful offbeat indie oddity: The Humans. 

Static Thoughts - Beauty and the Beast (1987)

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This Friday marks the premiere of Disney’s live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast.  The hotly anticipated film will be Disney’s 7^th live-action fairy tale blockbuster and is basically the company’s way of planting their flag onto the fantasy genre.  There were sporadic competitors but ultimately Disney’s brand of big-budget fable has become the defining name in post-Game of Thrones mega-fantasy.  What’s more, the film is the first major live-action adaptation of Beauty and the Beast in decades, certainly the first major attempt to try and realize the Beast with CGI. 

Given the occasion, I thought it’d only be fair to take a look back at the last time this particular fairy tale was given a major release.  Back before Disney’s animated adaptation became the Oscar-winning success that completely defines this story there was another Beauty and the Beast, a bizarre 1987 TV series that time has more or less rejected despite featuring Linda Hamilton, Ron Perlman, and George RR Martin, the father of modern fantasy.  With such a pedigree how is this series not more widely known; let’s find out. 

Film Land - 10 Series that should be Rebooted

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As we continue to burn our way through one of the most disappointing summers in recent memory (seriously 2016, get your act together) the subject of reboots has re-entered the popular forum of discussion.  At this point asking “the reboot question” has become something of a yearly tradition, with volleys of think pieces and lists fired off seemingly ever year with each new triumph or tragedy.  This year the reboot question is much more on the back burner, with most of the summer’s big hits and big failures being sequels. 

We’re still getting a few major reboots this year like WB’s disastrous Legend of Tarzan and the upcoming Ghostbusters reboot that inspired me to write this article.  We’ve had enough reboots over the last six years to know that sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t and there’s no easy way to know which, so I decided I’d throw together my top 10 series that should be rebooted.  Before we dive in, I’ll just clarify that this is only drawn from TV and movies and that by “reboot” I mean “an attempt to restart the franchise while actively distancing itself from the source material through modernization.”  With that said, here are my top 10 series that should be rebooted.

Static Thoughts - Top 10 Underrated Twilight Zone Episodes

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Edited by Robert Beach

This weekend is the Fourth of July. Among the many legitimate traditions of reckless firework use and copious drinking, there’s the very geeky tradition the Syfy channel has of hosting a marathon of the original Twilight Zone show. They do this same thing around New Years, presumably attracted by the winter use of fireworks in our holiday calendar. It’s become a favorite part of the holiday for someone like me who has pets that are incredibly skittish around loud noises. The only downside of the marathon is that it tends to focus on the same handful of big episodes. 

Stuff like the “To Serve Man,” “Time Enough At Last,” “Eye of the Beholder,” “Will The Real Martian Please Stand Up,” “The Gift,” “The Doll,” and “It’s A Good Life” have become such a consistent part of the viewing diet they’ve been grandfathered into the popular lexicon as a whole. So, this year I’ve combed through the depths of the Twilight Zone to bring you my top 10 most underrated episodes. These are ten episodes that often get overlooked for the bigger names of the franchise; the stuff that more people should check out.

12 Series Telltale Should Adapt Next

Edited by Robert Beach 

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Another E3 has come to an end, and even though I’m not a video game blog (I leave that for my day job), I am a citizen of the Internet. Thus, I am aware of the goings on in the nerd domain.  There wasn’t much comic book-related stuff coming out of this E3, but we did see some interesting stuff about Telltale Games’s new Batman game.  

While many folks love their morality test set-up, I had trouble contextualizing it before I realized what kind of games I’d like to see it deployed in. I’m more on board with Telltale now compared to the past, even though I’m not a big fan of them doing a Batman game.  As such, I came up with 12 series that would really benefit from a Telltale game; let us list them. 

Panel Vision - Dr. 13: Architecture & Mortality

Edited by Robert Beach 

Well, May is almost over. The thermometer is headed skyward, and blockbuster movies are hitting the multiplex. It all adds up to one thing: Summer is officially here. For comic nerds, the arrival of Summer is more or less synonymous with the arrival of event comics, the massive cross-universe stories smashing heroes together and reshaping  continuity as we know it for about 9 months till the next one.  

Obnoxious and overused as they are, event comics are basically just a force of nature in comics, which makes our relationship with them a little complicated. While endless retcons and shock deaths are certainly tedious staples of the event comic, fans have become so inundated with them we’ve come to appreciate the subtle differences between garbage event books like Fear Itself and the at least interesting ones like Secret Wars (2015). 

For DC, their event comic this year is called DC Rebirth, a universe-reshaping retcon comic that’s already been spoiled. However, I’m not here to discuss those spoilers, but rather a sister comic to DC Rebirth. The actual plot of DC Rebirth is all about what happens to heroes who’ve been rendered non-canon by the events of a reality-reshaping crisis, a concept that was also explored by one of the greatest comics of all time Doctor 13: Architecture & Mortality, by Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang. 

Cover Story - Top 12 Twilight Zone Covers

Hello and welcome to Cover Story, diving as little into the world of comic books as possible.  Well it’s a new year and with a new year comes the annual Twilight Zone marathon.  In case you’ve never encountered it before, every year on New Year’s Eve and the Fourth of July the SciFi channel hosts a massive marathon of the sci-fi/horror/fantasy anthology TV series the Twilight Zone.  Given that just happened and there’s nothing else topical to base this week’s Cover Story on we’re taking a look at the Twilight Zone comics that were published alongside the original show back in the 1950s.  Given that comics of that era were all about weird stories and anthology storytelling the Twilight Zone was the perfect fit for a comic adaptation.  So, let’s dive into the shallow end and get the cover story on the top 12 Twilight Zone comic covers.

Movie Monthly - Real Steel

So far, all the future film’s we’ve discussed have followed along to the idea of a very distant future.  The defining aspect of them has been that society, as we know it, has been completely swept away due to some great calamity and replaced with a wholly new system of government.  This has mainly acted as a way to up-jump the importance of the futuristic cyber sports within the world of the film.  Most sports movies are fine to let the stakes simply BE winning or losing a sporting event but in the realms of sci-fi, especially nerdier sci-fi, it’s weirdly suspected that an audience won’t necessarily engage with a story unless the stakes are Earth shattering.  So, this week we’re changing it up with a film that’s set in a not too distant future approximation of our world where the only real change is that we’ve invented fighting bots to take up the act of boxing and wrestling.  I’m speaking of course of the underappreciated 2011 gem Real Steel, starring Hugh Jackman.

 

Static Thoughts - Black Mirror, Good Episodes

So, I’m not exactly sure who reads this blog but on the off chance you aren’t clued up on world politics here’s a quick recap: the world has gone completely and comically insane.   I don’t have time to cover the massive cavalcade of political shenanigans that have turned our world from one of sane rationality into a nightmarish, Twilight Zone-esc re-imagining of every political satire script the ‘70s chose not to publish.  However, the latest cherry on the sundae of insanity was the revelation that British Prime Minister David Cameron had stuck his junk in the mouth of a dead pig in order to gain access to the college society that served as his entrance to the world of politics.  This is the kind of incredibly stupid, incredibly embarrassing, instantly mockable story the Internet never dreamed of getting its hands on, except for one man who saw it coming: Charlie Booker, writer and developer of the British dark Sci-Fi show Black Mirror.