Almost everything I do in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth involves interacting with or talking to Chadley. I’m not even done with Square Enix’s massive RPG sequel yet, and I’ve had enough. I’m done. Stop this Chadley-stravaganza, I want to get off.
On February 27, Game Freak announced its next Pokémon RPG will return to the Kalos region with a new game in the Legends subseries. Pokémon Legends: Z-A is still many months away, as The Pokémon Company is skipping a year and releasing the Switch game in 2025. But the announcement was also pretty open-ended, so we…
On February 27, Game Freak announced its next Pokémon RPG will return to the Kalos region with a new game in the Legends subseries. Pokémon Legends: Z-A is still many months away, as The Pokémon Company is skipping a year and releasing the Switch game in 2025. But the announcement was also pretty open-ended, so we…
A few months ago, director Dwight H. Little – the director of such films as Rapid Fire (starring Brandon Lee), The Phantom of the Opera (starring Robert Englund), the Steven Seagal vehicle Marked for Death, Free Willy 2, the Wesley Snipes mystery Murder at 1600, Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid, Tekken, and my favorite of the Halloween sequels, Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers – released a memoir called Still Rolling: Inside the Hollywood Dream Factory (copies can be purchased at THIS LINK). In one passage of the book, Little discusses the series of mistakes and oversights that led to Brandon Lee’s tragic shooting death on the set of The Crow. With a remake of The Crow set to reach theatres in June and Rust armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed having just been found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the case of the shooting death on the set of that film, this seemed like a fitting time to look back on what happened to Lee in 1993.
Little writes, “The tragedy was so eerie with the death of his father, also at such a young age. I went to the memorial service where Melissa Etheridge sang ‘Ain’t It Heavy.’ On top of everything else, Brandon was engaged to be married. … All these years later, these are the ‘facts’ that I have been able to gather, though I’m not sure I have the full story. The night before the accident, the second unit was doing some shots on a different set from the main unit. There was a big (close-up) shot looking up the barrel of a gun. The camera people were worried that the barrel might seem to be empty, so a ‘slug’ or ‘dummy bullet’ of some kind was put into the barrel to keep light from getting through. When the second unit wrapped, the gun was put away for the night. No one remembered to take out the slug.
When the first unit needed the gun the next day, it was taken out and a blank charge was put in for a set-up. No one from the first unit crew knew that the slug had been put in the night before and no one checked. When the actor aimed the gun at Brandon, the blank went off and the slug discharged. The slug hit Brandon in a main artery in his abdomen and he lost consciousness almost immediately.
Two things. One, the prop man or AD always looks down the barrel of the gun to see that it is clear. (The prop man is obliged to show the director that the gun barrel is empty.) Two, the actor with the gun is instructed to never aim the gun at the other actor directly. The shot is always supposed to be ‘off angle’ and the lens and composition makes it ‘look like’ the gun is aimed properly. How all these mistakes could have been made in succession is almost impossible to imagine. The odds of Brandon being shot and killed by this forgotten slug were so long that of course the speculation about a ‘curse’ began.“
You can read more about the series of mistakes and oversights that led to Brandon Lee’s death on The Crow Wikipedia page. At the root of it all: time and money constraints, with executives making cost-cutting decisions like replacing the firearms specialist with an inexperienced prop assistant.
I still remember the day Brandon Lee died. I was only nine years old at the time, but already a fan from seeing him in movies like Laser Mission, Showdown in Little Tokyo, and Rapid Fire. It’s a heartbreaker that we lost him at such a young age for such stupid reasons… and that a similar accident could still occur on the set of Rust so many years later.
The post The Crow: Rapid Fire director on the series of mistakes that led to Brandon Lee’s tragic death appeared first on JoBlo.
One of the most stunning PlayStation games in recent years, Ghost of Tsushima, will no longer be exclusively relegated to Sony’s hardware. In just two short months, Sucker Punch Productions’ samurai epic will launch on the Epic Games Store and Steam with everything PlayStation fans have enjoyed, as well as better…
One of the most stunning PlayStation games in recent years, Ghost of Tsushima, will no longer be exclusively relegated to Sony’s hardware. In just two short months, Sucker Punch Productions’ samurai epic will launch on the Epic Games Store and Steam with everything PlayStation fans have enjoyed, as well as better…
Today, Prime Video opened the vault to the official trailer for the upcoming post-apocalyptic series Fallout, based on the immensely popular retro-futuristic video game franchise. The cinematic trailer, which maintains the game’s expansive world-building and signature dark humor, sees vault dweller Lucy (Ella Purnell) struggle to adapt to the twisted and dangerous world of the irradiated wasteland and offers the first glimpse of Moldaver (Sarita Choudhury) and Ma June (Dale Dickey). Prime Video’s Fallout series will premiere all eight episodes on April 11 on the streaming platform, one day sooner than previously announced.
Fallout is a post-apocalyptic role-playing video game series heavily influenced by 1950s post-war culture. Much of the franchise occurs hundreds of years after a great war over resources decimated the planet. The U.S. government set up a series of self-sufficient fallout shelters known as Vaults, but there wasn’t enough room for everyone, and those who survived the nuclear fallout became horribly mutated.
In the Fallout trailer, Ella Purnell is Lucy, “an optimistic Vault-dweller with an all-American can-do spirit. Her peaceful and idealistic nature is tested when she is forced to the surface to rescue her father. Aaron Moten is Maximus, a young soldier who rises to the rank of squire in the militaristic faction called Brotherhood of Steel. He will do anything to further the Brotherhood’s goals of bringing law and order to the wasteland. Walton Goggins is the Ghoul, a morally ambiguous bounty hunter who holds within him a 200-year history of the post-nuclear world.”
Jonathan Nolan directed the first three episodes of the Kilter Films series. Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner serve as executive producers, writers, and co-showrunners. The series comes from Kilter Films and executive producers Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy. Athena Wickham of Kilter Films also executive produces, along with Todd Howard for Bethesda Game Studios and James Altman for Bethesda Softworks.
“Fallout is one of the greatest game series of all time,” said Nolan and Joy in 2021 when Prime Video announced the project. “Each chapter of this insanely imaginative story has cost us countless hours we could have spent with family and friends. So we’re incredibly excited to partner with Todd Howard and the rest of the brilliant lunatics at Bethesda to bring this massive, subversive, and darkly funny universe to life with Amazon Studios.”
Wow! Prime Video’s Fallout trailer is outstanding! This show resembles an honest-to-goodness adaptation of the video game franchise from people who genuinely care about the property and understand its dark humor and cast of bizarre characters. I was skeptical about this project, but now I’m counting the days until its release! Let’s go!
The post The new Fallout trailer announces a new release date as Vault Dwellers, the Ghoul, and more explore an irradiated wasteland appeared first on JoBlo.
PLOT: Recently released from prison, former thief and drug addict Rob gets a job caring for Doctor Nina Jekyll, who’s recovering from a broken leg. But the more time Rob spends around Nina, the more it becomes clear there’s something strange going on in the Jekyll mansion.
REVIEW: Founded in 1934, the Hammer film production company became very popular when it started releasing horror films in the mid-1950s. From that point through the early ‘70s, Hammer was one of the biggest names in horror… but then they found it hard to compete with the big horror films of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, and things gradually fell apart for them. In 1979, the company went into liquidation. Attempts to revive the Hammer brand began in 2008, and we’ve seen some notable releases from the company in recent years: Let Me In, The Resident, The Woman in Black, and The Lodge among them. In 2021, the revived Hammer Films teamed with the UK’s Network Distributing to form a new company called Hammer Studios Ltd. In 2023, that company was acquired by the John Gore Organisation – and now, the first release from Hammer: A John Gore Company is director Joe Stephenson’s Doctor Jekyll, “a modern interpretation” of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. This wasn’t a project that was developed by Hammer, it’s one that was already in the works when they picked it up, but it’s fitting that this new Hammer should get rolling with an update of a classic horror story. Especially since this is material the original Hammer dealt with in The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll (1960) and Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971).
Films like those have helped ensure that most of us are quite familiar with the concept Stevenson came up with so long ago: London-based doctor Henry Jekyll, “a reputable gentleman,” finds a way to transform himself into a repugnant, evil fellow called Edward Hyde, and is then horrified by his alter ego’s violent behavior while his transformations into Hyde become more and more difficult to hold off. Scripted by Dan Kelly-Mulhern, this film’s take on the idea moves the setting into modern day and centers on Doctor Nina Jekyll, the granddaughter of Henry Jekyll who has inherited the family mansion – and has also taken up the research that caused her grandfather so much trouble. Just like the Jekyll of the source material, Grandpa Jekyll made a discovery that turned him into someone twisted and evil, with dimmed empathy receptors. So of course, why wouldn’t Nina want to dig into that same research?
This version of Doctor Jekyll is getting a lot of attention due to the fact that the title character is a trans person played by gender fluid comedian/actor Eddie Izzard, who prefers the use of she/her pronouns. But Nina being trans has nothing to do with the overall story, and the fact that young Nina is played in a flashback by child actress Lettie De Beaujeu indicates she must have transitioned at a very young age. The mention of Nina being trans is really just a way to allow Izzard to play the character, which was a great choice, because Izzard has always been awesome, whether in (as she puts it) “boy mode” or “girl mode.” The only down side to this situation is the way Stephenson and Kelly-Mulhern chose to portray the Jekyll-to-Hyde transformations. Instead of there being a physical transformation to differentiate the Jekyll and Hyde characters, the switch between personalities in this film are imperceptible. Characters (and the audience) can never be sure exactly when Izzard is playing Jekyll and when she’s playing Hyde, because this Hyde is a schemer and a manipulator. It’s an interesting approach, but it means that Izzard isn’t able to really let loose in the Hyde persona until very late in the 89 minute running time.
For the most part, Doctor Jekyll plays as a drama rather than a horror film. We enter the world (or the mansion) of the reclusive doctor from the perception of a young man named Rob Stevenson, played Scott Chambers – who, under the name Scott Jeffrey, has produced nearly 100 low budget genre films over the last decade, including Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey. Rob is a former thief and drug addict who has just been released from prison and needs a job so he’ll be able to see his daughter, who was born while he was locked up. Although Jekyll’s assistant Sandra Poole (Lindsay Duncan) doesn’t believe Rob is right for the job, Jekyll is drawn to the young man and hires him to be her caretaker while she recovers from a broken leg. We’re then treated to a lot of scenes of Rob settling into his job at the Jekyll estate, interacting with Jekyll (or is it Hyde?), and just hoping to stay on the right path. Even though his ex Maeve (Robyn Cara) is trying to pull him back into a life of crime.
I didn’t expect Doctor Jekyll to be such a low-key drama when I started watching the movie, but it’s interesting enough as the dramatic scenes play out and really didn’t need the occasional attempt to create a jump scare by dropping loud noise on the soundtrack. How are we even expected to jump at a moment like the one where Jekyll finds Rob snooping around in a hallway when Rob has a goofy smile on his face as he turns to face his employer? Rob is a goofy, awkward fellow in general, which I assume was a choice made by Stephenson and Chambers. It makes this a unique performance to watch, as Chambers certainly wasn’t leaning into the ex-con stereotypes.
Hammer doesn’t have a new classic on their hands with this new take on Doctor Jekyll, and horror fans who check it out hoping to see some rampaging Hyde action are going to be disappointed, but it’s an okay drama that plays around with some familiar concepts. Then the horror kicks in, leading to an ending that I’m not quite sure about. I enjoyed watching the film overall, but I’m not going to feel compelled to have more viewings in the future. So I would recommend checking it out and giving it a try, but be aware that the pace, tone, and the presentation of Hyde are probably not what you were initially expecting.
Doctor Jekyll will be available for digital download as of March 11th.
The post Doctor Jekyll Review appeared first on JoBlo.
Deadpool & Wolverine, the third entry in Ryan Reynolds’ series of comedic comic-book films, will be missing a beloved character from Fox’s X-Men movies when it releases this summer. The character in question is Juggernaut, best remembered (cinematically, at least) for his appearance in X-Men: The Last Stand in which…
Deadpool & Wolverine, the third entry in Ryan Reynolds’ series of comedic comic-book films, will be missing a beloved character from Fox’s X-Men movies when it releases this summer. The character in question is Juggernaut, best remembered (cinematically, at least) for his appearance in X-Men: The Last Stand in which…