Best New Horror #26, page 7
Following an online campaign to build a potential audience, the independent Canadian movie Wolf Cop starred Leo Fafard as alcoholic street cop Lou Garou, who was transformed into an avenging werewolf during a strange ritual in the woods.
Who would ever have guessed a town called Lupine Ridge would be inhabited by werewolves? That turned out to be the case in actor/screenwriter David Hayter’s Wolves, which featured Stephen McHattie and Jason Momoa in the cast.
Filmed in Wales, the embarrassingly awful Extinction: Jurassic Predators involved a group of researchers in the Amazon rainforest being attacked by an unconvincing dinosaur.
Leprechaun: Origins was a disappointing re-boot of the popular 1990s series, while Australian producer Antony I. Ginnane remade both his original 1978 film as Patrick: Evil Awakens and his 1982 movie Turkey Shoot.
Kino Classics released a new version of the creaky murder mystery The Death Kiss (1932), starring Bela Lugosi and David Manners, on Blu-ray and DVD. The archival 35mm restoration included original hand-tinted sequences.
Long before there was Stephen King’s Under the Dome there was Arch Oboler’s The Bubble (1966), which Kino reissued in a newly restored “Space-Vision 3-D” version on Blu-ray.
The four-disc Blu-ray boxset The Vincent Price Collection II from Shout! Factory featured a mixed bag of titles, including The House on Haunted Hill, The Return of the Fly, The Raven (1963), The Comedy of Terrors, The Tomb of Ligeia, The Last Man on Earth and Dr. Phibes Rises Again, along with trailers, new featurettes and commentaries, and a 32-page booklet by David Del Valle.
Odeon Entertainment’s welcome digitally remastered release of Michael Reeves’ The Sorcerers (1967) included amongst its extras an interview with Johnny Mains (who also wrote the insert booklet) about John Burke’s neglected involvement in the film, a documentary about Reeves, and the cult director’s short film Intrusion.
Guillermo del Toro’s interview with star Paul Williams was just one of the extras on the Collectors’ Edition of Brian De Palma’s classic Phantom of the Paradise, which made its debut on Bu-ray.
Ghostbusters celebrated its 30th Anniversary on Blu-ray, while the 40th Anniversary Blu-ray of Young Frankenstein came with deleted scenes.
Halloween: The Complete Collection was a fifteen-disc Blu-ray set from Anchor Bay/Scream Factory featuring a number of new extras.
From Scream Factory, Nightbreed: The Director’s Cut restored twenty minutes to Clive Barker’s 1990 monster movie, along with a new making-of documentary. A special three-disc set only available from the distributor’s website included deleted and lost scenes, concept art and a newly restored version of the original theatrical release.
The Blu-ray of Thor: The Dark World included the fourteen-minute short film Marvel One Shot: All Hail the King, which featured a welcome return for Ben Kingsley’s Mandarin impersonator from Iron Man 3.
The British Film Institute and the BBC teamed up to release several classic DVDs just in time for Christmas, including the seven-disc set of Out of the Unknown, which included all surviving twenty episodes from the 1960s anthology SF series. The Changes, a 1975 serial based on Peter Dickinson’s trilogy of young adult books received its DVD premier, as did the 1978 adaptation of Alan Garner’s Red Shift and the 1971/1980 BBC serial The Boy from Space.
Also from the BFI, Out of This World: Little Lost Robot was based on the story by Isaac Asimov and is the only surviving episode from the ITV anthology series hosted by Boris Karloff in 1962. The extras included an audio commentary, audio-only versions of two other episodes, a downloadable script for the first episode, and an illustrated booklet.
Uncle Forry’s AckerMansions was a visual tour through all three of Forrest J Ackerman’s legendary homes, stuffed to the rafters with memorabilia.
Two years after his apparent dive off the roof of St. Bart’s Hospital, Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) finally resurfaced in London, much to the surprise of a still-grieving John Watson (Martin Freeman). Although the first two feature-length episodes of the third season of the BBC’s contemporary Sherlock were spoiled by too much comedy and not enough plot, the third and final show almost made up for it.
‘His Last Vow’ featured Lars Mikkelsen as master blackmailer Charles Augustus Magnussen, along with a surprising secret about Watson’s new wife Mary (the wonderful Amanda Abbington), before the cliff-hanger revelation that Moriarty was back.
In the UK, 8.8 million tuned into the final instalment and, in a nice touch, Holmes’ parents were played by Cumberbatch’s real-life parents, Wanda Ventham and Timothy Carlton.
When all three seasons of Sherlock were released on Blu-ray, the deluxe set included mini-busts of Holmes and Watson.
The long-awaited fifth season of Jonathan Creek on BBC was a huge disappointment, mostly due to the lack of on-screen chemistry between the always excellent Alan Davies and Sarah Alexander as his nagging new wife. The three cosy murder mysteries involved a “locked room” musical, a retired psychic’s unlikely prediction and an apparently cursed Aladdin’s lamp.
Vanessa Redgrave starred as a reclusive author being interviewed by Olivia Colman’s damaged journalist in the BBC-TV movie The Thirteenth Tale, Christopher Hampton’s overwrought adaptation of Diane Setterfield’s novel about sinister siblings and incestuous relationships.
Predictably, British TV and radio did almost nothing to celebrate Hallowe’en in 2014. However, the following month the BBC showed Ashley Pearce’s Remember Me, a creepy three-part contemporary ghost story by Gwyneth Hughes in which a curmudgeonly old pensioner (Michael Palin in a rare dramatic role) was haunted by water, the folk song ‘Scarborough Fair’ and a murderous guardian from his childhood. The supporting cast included Mark Addy, Jodie Comer and Julia Sawalha.
Nick Willing’s The Haunting of Radcliffe House (aka Altar) starred Olivia Williams as an interior designer who discovered that her artist husband (Matthew Modine) and two children were gradually falling under the spell of the remote old house on the Yorkshire moors that she had been hired to renovate for its mysteriously absent owners.
After the destruction of Air Force One, Linda Hamilton was an unlikely Admiral searching for the President of the United States (John Savage) in the Bermuda Triangle in Syfy’s awful Bermuda Tentacles (aka Dark Rising).
Antonio Fargas was a Louisiana bayou local dealing with a sharp-toothed fish curse in SnakeHead Swamp, while a group of guardians unwisely decided to transport the Jersey Devil and his human half-sister to a new location in Dark Haul (aka Monster Truck), starring Tom Sizemore.
The best thing that could be said about Anthony C. Ferrante’s Sharknado 2: The Second One was that it was marginally better than the first one, as returning stars Ian Zierling and Tara Reid attempted to stop it raining sharks in New York City. It included a neat Twilight Zone gag, while Vivica A. Fox, Kari Wuhrer, Judd Hirsch, Downtown Julie Brown, Billy Ray Cyrus, Andy Dick, Robert Hays, Perez Hilton, Matt Lauer, Al Roker, Kelly Osbourne, Kelly Ripper, Michael Strahan and an uncredited Wil Wheaton were amongst the celebrities who thought it would be cool to appear in this rubbish.
The concept behind Syfy’s Mega Shark vs. Mecha Shark, starring Christopher Judge, Elisabeth Röhm and singer Debbie Gibson, was a straight steal from King Kong Escapes (1967).
Ascension, a three-part mini-series on Syfy, began with a murder on a 1960s-style spaceship halfway through its 100-year journey to another galaxy, as the First Officer (Brandon P. Bell) was forced to learn investigative techniques from watching recordings of Fritz Lang’s M. As the plot became more intriguing, anyone familiar with Hammer Films’ The Damned (aka These Are the Damned) would have had a pretty good idea about what was actually going on.
Zoe Saldana co-produced and starred as the hysterical mother of the Anti-christ in NBC’s pointless two-part remake of Rosemary’s Baby, which relocated Ira Levin’s 1967 novel (and its also credited sequel) to contemporary Paris. Carole Bouquet and Jason Isaacs played her seductive Devil-worshipping neighbours.
Heather Graham and Ellen Burstyn headed the cast of the Lifetime movie of V.C. Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic, which was even worse than the 1987 feature adaptation. Incredibly, a few months later the network screened a sequel, Petals in the Wind.
Laura Allen’s wife and mother had to deal with a psycho babysitter (India Eisley) in the Lifetime movie Nanny Cam, and The Good Witch’s Wonder marked the seventh annual outing on the Hallmark Channel of Catherine Bell’s magical Cassandra Nightingale.
Sean Patrick Thomas’ New York doctor relocated his family to a small rural town that turned out to be controlled by creatures in the nearby forest in Chiller Network’s Deep in the Darkness, which also starred Dean Stockwell and was based on the novel by Michael Laimo.
Also on Chiller, a group of friends were trapped in an isolated cabin by a bloodthirsty predator in the monster movie Animal, while 5 States of Fear was an anthology of short films told through a series of nightmare hallucinations.
Produced by Ridley Scott and pieced together from a five-part mini-series on Xbox One, the mostly incomprehensible Halo: Nightfall was based on the popular shooter video game. It concerned a group of soldiers trapped in a hostile alien environment and menaced by deadly Hunter Worms.
John Hamm, Rafe Spall and Oona Chaplin starred in Black Mirror: White Christmas on Channel 4, a Christmas special of Charlie Brooker’s anthology series, which featured three interconnected stories about the dangers of technology.
In a reversal of the 1985 movie Weird Science, two tech-savvy teens (China Anne McClain and Kelli Berglund) used military software to create the perfect boyfriend (Marshall Williams) in the Disney Channels’ How to Build a Better Boy.
Probably the best genre show on television in 2014, and arguably the best for years, was HBO’s eight-part slice of Southern Gothic, True Detective, created by Nick Pizzolatto and directed by Cary Fukunaga.
Two contrasting Louisiana detectives (impeccably played by casting heavyweights Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson) were forced to revisit a case they thought they had closed in the mid-1990s, involving a cult of ritualistic serial killers whose mythology was linked with that of Robert W. Chambers’ 1895 collection The King in Yellow.
Although the show ultimately pulled back from its inevitable cosmic horror climax, other sources directly or indirectly cited included the fiction of Thomas Ligotti and Karl Edward Wagner.
Now the most expensive and most-watched TV show on the planet, the fourth season of HBO’s multi-layered Game of Thrones saw the sadistic boy-king Joffrey (Jack Gleeson) poisoned, Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage) murder his father Tywin (Charles Dance), and Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) lock up her dragons, as the zombie Winter came ever closer.
In July, scripts and two rough-cut episodes of the BBC’s eighth new series of Doctor Who were leaked online prior to transmission, after a security breach at BBC Worldwide’s Miami, Florida, office.
In the show, Peter Capaldi replaced Matt Smith as a more adult Time Lord to excellent effect. Unfortunately, the stories he was stuck in (mostly co-written by Steven Moffat) weren’t up to the exuberance the actor brought to the role.
The newly regenerated twelfth Doctor and his increasingly annoying companion Clara (Jenna Coleman)—occasionally accompanied by her mopey new boyfriend (Samuel Anderson)—encountered a dinosaur in Victorian London, found themselves trapped inside a Dalek, joined forces with a robot Robin Hood (Tom Riley), battled alien spiders on the Moon and an alien mummy on an interstellar Orient Express, and confronted the Cybermen (yet again). The latter episode featured a nice tribute to the late Nicholas Courtney’s character “Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart”.
At least an old foe of the Doctor was revealed in an unexpected new guise, and Victorian detectives Vastra, Jenny and Strax showed up again (they really should have their own series). However, the BBC was criticised by gay rights campaigners when it cut a “lesbian kiss” between Vastra and Jenny when the episode was shown in Asia.
The now-obligatory holiday special, ‘Last Christmas’, found the Doctor and Clara teaming up with Nick Frost’s Santa Claus in a cut-price version of The Thing, with support from Michael Gambon, singer Katherine Jenkins, and Michael Troughton, the son of second Doctor Patrick Troughton.
Creator John Logan plundered classic literature and Hollywood “B” movies for Sky/Showtime’s handsome-looking mash-up series Penny Dreadful. Timothy Dalton’s Sir Malcolm Murray put together a league of extraordinary gentlemen (and woman)—including possessed psychic Vanessa Ives (the wonderful Eva Green), a tortured Dr. Victor Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway) and werewolf gunslinger Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett)—to save his daughter Mina Harker from an ancient nosferatu.
Meanwhile, Reeve Carney’s Dorian Gray hung around looking pretty, Frankenstein’s homicidal Creature (Rory Kinnear) demanded a mate, and David Warner turned up as an ill-fated Professor Abraham Van Helsing.
David Bradley played another vampire-hunter named Abraham, trying to warn the citizens of New York that the plague spreading through their city was caused by the nosferatu-like Master smuggled into the country, in the FX Network’s refreshingly adult horror series The Strain, based on the trilogy of novels by executive producers Guillermo del Toro and crime writer Chuck Hogan.
To tie-in with the premiere of the show in the UK, veteran author and paranormal researcher Lionel Fanthorpe was commissioned to discover the country’s “Horror Hotspots”. Compiling the findings from archives, police reports and eye-witness accounts over the past 100 years, he uncovered more than 200 reported vampire sightings in Britain—compared to just eight in Transylvania—and the county of Yorkshire came out top with 615 unexplained encounters.
Replace vampires with zombies, NYC with a secret Arctic research station, add a touch of The X Files, and you had the first season of Syfy’s Helix, which started off well but never really knew where it was heading.
Another group who had no idea where they were going were the meandering survivors of season five of AMC’s interminable The Walking Dead as they made their way to the supposed sanctuary of Terminus, where—predictably—all was not quite what it seemed. A documentary special, Inside the Walking Dead, was a behind-the-scenes look at the production.
Made on a fraction of The Walking Dead‘s budget, at least Syfy’s gory Z Nation was more fun, set three years after a zombie virus has decimated America, while the same network’s Town of the Living Dead was an unscripted docu-series set in a small Alabama town trying to make their own indie zombie movie. Robert Englund guest-starred.
The second, six-part season of the BBC’s thoughtful In the Flesh saw those suffering from Partially Deceased Syndrome (PDS) battling zombie extremists and an MP’s political machinations.
As always, the best thing about The CW’s Supernatural was the show’s easy humour and well-drawn supporting characters—whether it was likeable self-styled “King of Hell” Crowley (the wonderfully droll Mark Sheppard), compassionate Sheriff/Hunter Jody Mills (Kim Rhodes) or a werewolf-loving Garth (D.J. Qualls).
As the war between the angels dragged on, Dean (Jensen Ackles) was cursed with the Mark of Cain, and by the beginning of the tenth season was transformed into a devil-may-care demon himself as the series passed its 200th episode with a fun meta-episode based around a fan fiction-inspired high school show.
Supernatural‘s ‘Bloodlines’ episode was a back-door pilot for a series about five powerful clans of monsters running the city of Chicago.
Clearly inspired by Tod Browning’s Freaks, Sunset Blvd. and American Psycho, the fourth season of the Fox’s American Horror Story, subtitled Freak Show, continued to push the envelope of good taste.
Now set in 1952 Florida and based around a travelling carnival run by former cabaret star Elsa Mars (series regular Jessica Lange, camping it up with a Marlene Dietrich accent), it featured Sarah Paulson as a pair of conjoined twins (a remarkable optical effect), Kathy Bates as a bearded lady, and Michael Chiklis as a strongman with a temper, while John Carroll Lynch played a truly terrifying homicidal clown.
American Horror Story‘s two-part Halloween episode, in which the carnival was visited by the spectral Edward Mordrake (Wes Bentley), was classic Dark Shadows stuff, and there were some surprising crossovers with the earlier season’s American Horror Story: Asylum.
After the first season of the same network’s Sleepy Hollow ended with a resurrected Ichabod Crane (Tom Mison) and his witchy wife Katrina (Katia Winter) discovering that Henry Parrish (John Noble) was actually their son and the second Horseman of the Apocalypse, the second season concentrated on Henry’s attempts to raise the demon Moloch on Earth.
Meanwhile, Ichabod and detective Abbie Mills (Nicole Beharie) found themselves dealing with, amongst other things, Benjamin Franklin’s Frankenstein-like monster, a Pied Piper creature, the Weeping Lady, a succubus and a vengeful Headless Horseman.
Somewhat less fun was NBC’s Grimm, which lived up to its title as crazy Adalind (Claire Coffee) had her royal baby kidnapped by Nick’s mother (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), a new teenage Grimm (Jacqueline Toboni) turned up in town, poor Sgt. Wu (Reggie Lee) thought he was seeing things, and the wedding between Monroe (Silas Weir Mitchell) and Rosalee (Bree Turner) didn’t go quite as planned. Season 4 opened with Nick (David Giuntoli) having lost his powers but still dealing with a golem, a werewolf, El Chupacabra and a group of Wesen purists.
With the vampires and humans of Bon Temps finally working together to survive, the talky seventh and final season of HBO’s True Blood ended with a wedding and the death of a major character, as all the loose ends were obsessively tied up and original author Charlaine Harris had a blink-and-you’ll-miss-her cameo.
Robert Rodriguez remade his 1996 movie From Dust Till Dawn as a ten-part series on his own El Ray Network starring D.J. Controna and Zane Holtz as the criminal Gecko brothers. Unfortunately, the undead bar belonging to Eiza González’s vampire strip-club queen Santánico Pandemonium didn’t show up until half way through the limited season.
