2024 marks the 45th anniversary of the release of the sci-fi horror classic Alien, and to mark the occasion the film is getting a theatrical re-release on April 26th (also known as Alien Day, since the moon Alien and Aliens was set on was called LV-426). Tickets are available for purchase through Fandango – and they have also informed us that screenings of Alien during this re-release will be preceded by Alien: A Conversation with Ridley Scott & Fede Alvarez – Scott being the director of Alien (not to mention Prometheus and Alien: Covenant) and Alvarez the director of the new film, Alien: Romulus, which is set to reach theatres on August 16th.
A clip from the Scott and Alvarez interview has been released online, and you can check it out in the embed below. In this clip, the filmmakers discuss the chestburster scene and a call Scott received from Stanley Kubrick.
NEW: We asked #AlienRomulus director Fede Alvarez to sit down with director Ridley Scott to chat up the original #Alien, back in theaters later this month. I LOVE the Kubrick story here. More coming soon, tix on sale now at @Fandangopic.twitter.com/FcUPL3jGsc
You probably don’t need us to remind you of what Alien is about, but I’ll drop this here anyway: Scripted by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett, the film follows the crew of the commercial space tug Nostromo, who, after coming across a mysterious derelict spaceship on an uncharted planetoid, find themselves up against a deadly and aggressive extraterrestrial loose in their vessel.
Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, John Hurt, Veronica Cartwright, Yaphet Kotto, Harry Dean Stanton, and Ian Holm star, with Helen Horton providing the voice of the Nostromo’s computer system and Bolaji Badejo as the alien.
As for Alien: Romulus, Alvarez wrote that one with his frequent collaborator Rodo Sayagues, crafting the following story: While scavenging the deep ends of a derelict space station, a group of young space colonizers come face to face with the most terrifying life form in the universe.
The cast of Alien: Romulus includes Cailee Spaeny (Priscilla) and David Jonsson (Industry), as well as Isabela Merced (Madame Web), Archie Renaux (Shadow and Bone), Spike Fearn (The Batman), and Aileen Wu (Away from Home). Merced has said there’s a scene in the film that’s so disgusting that a lot of viewers will have to look away, so that goes along with the “graphic and gruesome” description. “Graphic and gruesome” is what we expected from this movie as soon as it was announced that it was being made by the director of Evil Dead 2013 and Don’t Breathe.
Will you be watching Alien during its theatrical re-release? Let us know by leaving a comment below – and let us know what you thought of that Scott / Alvarez clip while you’re at it.
Hey, Edgar, you’ve got red on you. Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright had quite a task ahead of him in making his breakout hit, but he probably didn’t bank on a horde of zombie extras going full Romero on him. But that’s just what happened during production of the classic zom-com, something he may have inadvertently prompted himself.
In a new oral history via IndieWire, Edgar Wright recalled that he had some additional sound work to get done to add to the zombification of the citizens of London, with one extra going a bit too far with his contributions. “We were taking a sound recording because we needed zombie noise, just audio only. I was sort of conducting them, and in one take, I said, “OK, come in and attack me!” And of course, they all did and maybe because they felt so cooped up — they’d been on set waiting to be used for days – one of them came at me and bit my leg. The camera’s not even running but he goes straight down and he bites my leg. He was really method: he’d gone deep! I think the zombies had gone feral!”
But faux zombies weren’t the only non-human entities to attack the Shaun of the Dead set: that’s right, teenagers came after the cast and crew with stones and eggs in assaults that became so frequent and disruptive that Wright just gave them jobs at zombies, a tactic that seemed to work.
Twenty years on, Shaun of the Dead remains one of the funniest movies of the century, a non-stop display of laughs and blood, with a little bit of Prince thrown in. Added to that, it has a memorable story of friendship throughout, with plenty of satirical digs at British culture and general consumerism. It might not be Simon Pegg’s favorite of the Cornetto Trilogy (that goes to The World’s End), but I – like many of our readers – would rank it as #1 myself.
What is your favorite scene in Shaun of the Dead? Where would it rank for you in the Cornetto Trilogy? Let us know below!
Ubisoft’s decision to keep a mission featuring everyone’s favorite intergalactic crime lord, Jabba the Hutt, behind the most eye-wateringly expensive versions of Star Wars Outlaws caused widespread internet panic in recent days. Given how much of the game’s promotion has featured the grumpy space worm, was the key…
Ubisoft’s decision to keep a mission featuring everyone’s favorite intergalactic crime lord, Jabba the Hutt, behind the most eye-wateringly expensive versions of Star Wars Outlaws caused widespread internet panic in recent days. Given how much of the game’s promotion has featured the grumpy space worm, was the key…
The Phantom of the Opera is sometimes considered one of the Universal Monsters. I get it. From the 1925 version that gave us one of the most infamous unmasking sequences ever courtesy of the great Lon Chaney Sr., through the Hammer iteration with Herbert Lom, all the way up to the 2004 film that gave a lot of us our intro to Gerard Butler. Speaking of that movie, its inspiration and reason for its existence was the Andrew Lloyd Weber musical that premiered in October of 1986 and has had runs all the way through as recently as 2021. 1989 was the beginning of its U.S. tour and we got not one but TWO Phantom movies that year. Phantom of the Mall: Eric’s Revenge is cheesy and may just be more well known due to our friend Joe Bob featuring it on the Last Drive In recently. Here in the JoBlo Horror kitchen today we are cooking something up for you. Take one part Freddy Krueger, a dash of Cannon Films, and a heaping helping of nonsensical gory fun and you get a recipe for one of the Best Horror Movies You Never Saw.
The other Phantom movie, the one not centered in a mall, is brought to us by an eclectic group of people. (And you can buy it HERE.) The main antagonist is played by Freddy Krueger himself Robert Englund who is at home here under some fun makeup. That makeup is provided by John Carl Beuchler and Kevin Yaeger who had both worked with Englund on Nightmare part 4. Robert does get to play himself sans makeup a few times both in the present and the past, but we will get into that a little bit later. The director would also work with Englund again as Dwight H. Little would go on to direct a few episodes of the Freddy’s Nightmares show. Little is a bit of a genre renaissance man with credits on Halloween 4, Marked for Death, Rapid Fire, both the X-Files and Millennium TV shows, and even an FMV video game from the 90s’. He would go on to stay in the TV realm with shows like Bones and Prison Break amongst others. The writer, or writers, would be Gaston Larue who is credited for the original work, Gerry O’Hara who did the first screenplay, and finally Duke Sandefur. This and the previous year’s Ghost Town are Sandefur’s only feature credits, but he does a good job here.
The movie decides to take the story in an interesting direction. That’s not to say that hasn’t been done before with Phantom of the Paradise, Opera, and Phantom of the Mall all trying their best to make it different and new. This one takes the character of Christine and has an accident that transports her back in time. The Phantom is slightly different than in iterations of the past as a man that sold his soul to the devil. The music would be successful, but the deal is that Erik Destler would be remembered for his music and not his looks. Destler is disfigured and some of the best effects of the movie are Englund putting on or removing parts of his face. Christine is played by channel favorite Jill Schoelen who is somewhat of a forgotten scream queen. She had a hell of a horror run from 87 to 93 that includes the likes of The Stepfather, Cutting Class, Curse II, today’s flick, Popcorn, and the TV sequel When a Stranger Calls Back. She is a solid performer in everything she’s in and that stays true as Christine.
In the present time, Christine is looking for the lost works of Erik Destler with the help of Molly Shannon of all people. Yeah, this was her first role. Christine finds a part of the piece she is looking for and uses it to audition. A sandbag falls and hits so hard that she apparently goes back in time. This movie doesn’t actually have the famous falling chandelier bit that almost every other version of this story has. The reason is that producer Menahem Golan, fresh off of the failure of Cannon Films and into his new venture 21st Century Films, ran out of money and had to change the screenplay around. This also explains the additional writer and why one of them has a based-on credit. The script is based on a script that is based on a book. I still can’t find the budget for this movie, but it sounds like Golan put a ton of money into it and there is no way that it’s 4-million-dollar theater gross covered it.
Christine wakes up shortly after Erik becomes known somewhat as a phantom and we see him systematically go through the standard horror fare. He kills a handful of people in grisly ways and even sets up the new play to have Christine in the lead rather than the admittedly terrible person who currently holds that role. The effects are firmly in the R rated realm, but the movie was originally given the dreaded X rating before making cuts to bring it down a notch. While the gore here isn’t reinventing the wheel, I would love to see what was put on the cutting room floor to push it to the vaunted X certificate. The other important characters are Richard Dutton played by Alex Hyde White, Inspector Hawkins played by Terence Harvey, and Martin Barton played by Academy Award nominee Bill Nighy who is assuredly not a science guy. White has been in over 100 projects but will always be Reed Richards in the Corman Fantastic Four. Terence Harvey was in From Hell in a similar if not more evil version of his role here but also maybe more importantly a 1994 computer game version of Clue as the butler.
Finally, Nighy was first noticed by me as “He’s not my Dad” in Shaun of the Dead but hasn’t shied away from horror or genre. He has also been in the Underworld series, the Pirates series, I, Frankenstein, and The Limehouse Golem. The movie moves along with at least the idea from the original story and the many that have come before it. Heck, the ones that came after it while were at it. The Phantom, or Erik in this case, stacks the deck so that his beloved Christine can take over during the remainder of the production. He kills a critic that review bombed her after her performance, he shows up to a masquerade ball with a callback to both that Lon Chaney classic and the Vincent Price flick The Masque of the Red Death. There he just takes the initiative and kills the original performer Carlotta by taking just a little of the top and its here where the police decide to go full force.
I’ll be honest, I had always seen the cover for this movie on one of those super basic and cheap DVD covers that showed up on your Amazon suggestions list or in the bargain bin in Walmart. I also thought this was the same movie as the Dario Argento version that would come a few years later. I really thought that the two titans of Englund and Argento had made this weird version of a classic tale. I have since seen both and this one is easily the preferred version even though the Italian version is not without its own charms, and Julian Sands of course. The lead inspector and Christine’s love Richard find out where the Phantom resides through the local rat catcher. They go down into the sewers and Freddy takes a page out of Jason’s handbook by systematically hunting them down before the final confrontation. He even gets a few good one liners in while dispatching the rat catcher and extra body police officer.
The final confrontation in the lair of the phantom sees Drestler take out Richard and wound the inspector before being shot by the man. Richard is taken out in glorious fashion when he is stabbed and then set on fire. Christine is able to get the upper hand and crashes a candle holder through a window which is somehow able to send her back to her own time in the late 1980s. She hears the phantom call for her as she wakes up and is able to go meet up with the present-day producer. This take on the story is somewhat original as the director of the play turns out to be Drestler who has been surviving since his accident over a century prior. We see Englund touch up a blemish before Christine figures out that the only way to stop him is to destroy his works. Being in the archaic late 80s, Erik has all his stuff on some sweet, SWEET floppy disk tech.
She destroys it all including a printed version but not before we get some serious Krueger vibes when she tears off his face mask to reveal the final bit of well-done practical effects from Yaeger and team. She passes a violinist who is playing some lines from Drestlers famous work, and we are left, like Christine, to wonder if the phantom is really gone for good. There was talk for the longest time of a sequel to this movie and Englund was all for it. The Phantom of the Opera 2: Terror in Manhattan was written and ready to go and kind of stayed in film purgatory for a long time. Its something that Englund was incredibly passionate about and honestly, straight to video or not, this could have been a blast to experience and see where they took the characters and story. More Jill Schoelen and more Robert Englund? Sign me the heck up.
The movie itself doesn’t reinvent the wheel but it doesn’t need to at all. It takes a ton of interesting and wonderful genre elements and gives us a fun and oft forgotten horror flick that entertains as much as you’d expect from the era. Releasing in November of 89, it ended a decade that is typically the favorite for horror fans while not feeling like a product of its time, well, for the most part. While it isn’t going to end up on any critics list of the best movies of the year or decade, it should be required viewing for horror fans as its random assortment of talents and elements make for a very fun watch. It’s easy to find both streaming and physical and should be one of the next films you cross off your ever-growing list of Best Horror Movies You Never Saw.
A couple previous episodes of the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw series can be seen below. To see more, and to check out some of our other shows, head over to the JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel – and subscribe while you’re there!
With Deadpool & Wolverine being the only film from Marvel Studios getting a release this year and Deadpool’s fourth-wall-breaking meta-humor nature, it stands to reason that the company has a ton of fun with the marketing. Even before being part of the MCU, the first Deadpool film got to play around with concepts as 20th Century Fox released the R-rated movie on Valentine’s Day in 2016. Billboards of Ryan Reynolds and his romantic lead, Morena Baccarin, were showcased in a very rom-com-driven image that made it look as far from a vulgar, violent superhero comedy as it could be.
It was said that the Deadpool & Wolverine footage previewed at this year’s CinemaCon was preceded by a PSA that also featured both characters. The Hollywood Reporter is now revealing that the PSA may now be coming to a theater near you. In the spot, Reynolds’ Wade Wilson is attempting to tell Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine his theories on “Secret Wars,” which is no doubt a reference to the upcoming Avengers film, Avengers: Secret Wars. Unfortunately for Wade, whenever he tries to give his theories, he gets interrupted by a ringing cell phone. According to THR, “Eventually, Wolverine had enough — and addressed the camera directly, flinging (bleeped) F-bombs at the audience and making a rather crude reference to how this was a movie theater, not “your grandma’s nursing home.” Wolverine only stopped after Deadpool calmed him down.” A source tells THR that the PSA is intended to play in theaters, but there is currently no official confirmation from Marvel.
Deadpool & Wolverine stars Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool, Morena Baccarin as Vanessa, Leslie Uggams as Blind Al, Karan Soni as Dopinder, Brianna Hildebrand as Negasonic Teenage Warhead, Shioli Kutsuna as Yukio, Stefan Kapičić as the voice of Colossus, and Rob Delaney as Peter. Deadpool & Wolverine will also star Emma Corrin, who is expected to play the villain, and Matthew Macfadyen as a TVA agent. Of course, the biggest addition to the Deadpool 3 cast is Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, who finally broke down after being pestered by Ryan Reynolds for so many years. The film is also expected to feature cameos from characters throughout the history of 20th Century Fox’s Marvel movies, with a few already being revealed in the trailer, including Aaron Stanford as Pyro.
Deadpool & Wolverine will hit theaters on July 26th, making it the only MCU movie to be released this year.
What makes a good video game adaptation? For some, it’s a rock solid story set in a well-known world, but for a very vocal group of gamers, it’s a faithful, beat-by-beat recreation of beloved source material. Those who fall into that latter school of thought are the same people who are angry that Master Chief had sex…
What makes a good video game adaptation? For some, it’s a rock solid story set in a well-known world, but for a very vocal group of gamers, it’s a faithful, beat-by-beat recreation of beloved source material. Those who fall into that latter school of thought are the same people who are angry that Master Chief had sex…
Life is finding a way to fill the cast of the new Jurassic World sequel from the original Jurassic Park co-writer David Koepp. The new film has been courting actors like Scarlett Johansson, and recently, it is being rumored that Dev Patel and Colman Domingo are being sought out for roles. It’s a new era for dinosaurs. Jurassic World: Dominion concluded the sequel trilogy and in their alternate universe, humans and Earth’s prehistoric creatures are now living side-by-side in the modern world. But hey, at least we don’t have to worry about locusts anymore, right?
Sources have recently told Deadline that Jonathan Bailey, known for projects such as Bridgerton and Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, is currently in talks with Universal about possibly taking the lead role in the popular dinosaur franchise. Bailey is also coming off the recent series Fellow Travelers, in which he co-stars with Matt Bomer, and the actor is due to be seen in the upcoming film adaptation of the broadway hit musical, Wicked.
Plot details for the continuation have yet to be announced, so it is not yet known who Bailey would be playing in this entry. The film is expected to start filming this summer in the UK. Universal’s new Jurassic World movie is being hailed as launching a “new Jurassic era,” with an all-new storyline. This detail implies that characters like Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) won’t be returning for the sequel. It’s also assumed that Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum won’t return either. Gareth Edwards (Rogue One) signed on the direct the new Jurassic World movie after talks with David Leitch (Bullet Train) fell through, and with the movie already slated for a July 2, 2025 release, Edwards will have to get to work pretty quick.
In addition to penning the Spielberg classic Jurassic Park, David Koepp wrote the scripts for The Lost World: Jurassic Park, David Fincher’s Panic Room, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Presence, and more. Presence premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Steven Soderbergh directed Presence from Koepp’s script.
The Movie Brats of the New Hollywood took Hollywood by storm beginning in the late ‘60s, blasting through the studios and marking their territory in modern cinema. Scorsese, Bogdanovich, Ashby, Friedkin, De Palma, Schrader, on and on, made their names during this time. But you don’t get out of an era like that unscathed and even today, some feuds still simmer, like that between Brian De Palma and Paul Schrader, whose collaboration on 1976’s Obsession caused a rift that put an end to one of the could’ve-been perfect pairings of the New Hollywood.
In a recent Facebook post, Schrader was asked if he could ever reconcile with De Palma, to which Schrader replied, “Re: BDP. Not my call.” This would indicate that Schrader is ready to patch things up with his former friend but maybe De Palma isn’t interested. Now, to be fair here, Schrader can be quite opinionated about his fellow Movie Brats and he hasn’t always taken the high road in his relationship with De Palma, going after him a handful of years ago after watching 2007’s Redacted. “Don’t get me started on Brian DP…The script is trite, it is weak. That’s because is Brian is trite, Brian is artistically weak. Skate fast on thin ice. That’s his story. That’s his con.”
De Palma and Schrader had their blow out during the making of Obsession, with the former directing and the latter writing, although both developed the story together. This came about over differences of opinion on the script – especially the ending, which De Palma felt was too long. As such, he broke it down significantly to the point where Schrader removed himself entirely from the production. (The collaboration between himself and Martin Scorsese on Taxi Driver that same year went a bit smoother.)
Paul Schrader also posted a photo of himself alongside Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, teasing their reunion at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where both Coppola’s Megalopolis and Schrader’s Oh, Canada are competing for the Palme d’Or, while Lucas will receive an Honorary Palme d’Or.
While De Palma and Schrader are two of the key figures of the New Hollywood revolution and have a permanent link because of it, that they haven’t been on good terms in nearly 50 years really speaks on just how much creative control can play a role in making a movie..and destruction of a partnership. Really, at this point, it’s hard to imagine the two making nice, especially if it falls on De Palma.
