As with all lists, this is personal and nobody will agree with every choice – and if you do, that would be incredibly disturbing. It was almost impossible for me to rank them in order, but I tried and eventually gave up. Enjoy! **** 150: Session 9 Directed by Brad Anderson Written by Stephen Gevedon …
While there are some potentially interesting characters and nice use of color in the comic, Pacific Rim: Tales from the Drift #1 feels like a whole lot of nothing. It’s visually uninteresting and doesn’t seem to want to take any risks storywise with its core concept. It’s not even empty calories. It’s just a straight empty canteen in the desert that is a world without a sequel to Pacific Rim, and that’s somehow even more disappointing than if that canteen was just filled with Kaiju Blue.
It shouldn’t be a surprise to any of our readers that we here at PopOptiq love horror movies. All month long we’ve been counting down the 200 greatest horror films ever made alongside our 31 Days of Horror marathon. And every year just before Halloween, our staff bands together to decide what our favourite horror …
Another Guillermo del Toro film has been released, which is pretty much the same thing as saying that another Guillermo del Toro film has not made money at the domestic box office. Disclosure: I have not seen Crimson Peak at this time, so yes I am part of the problem, but I have nothing but …
‘Crimson Peak’ is an ambitious miscalculation that should have waited for the script to catch up with the visuals.
This week, Guillermo del Toro’s gothic-horror-romance Crimson Peak will haunt movie theaters across the land. It joins the unique crowd of del Toro projects that makes it to the screen instead of vanishing into development oblivion. Del Toro is always cooking something up, and his name is frequently being thrown around for various films that never quite materialize: he’s been working on-again/off-again on a Haunted Mansion film; then there’s the DC Comics adaptation Justice League Dark. Pacific Rim 2 keeps jumping back and forth between being in development and being put on hold. The filmmaker was even going to direct the first of The Hobbit films before things changed, and we ended up with a bloated trilogy filled with nonsense. But the holy grail of unmade Guillermo del Toro films is his adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness.
After taking us into a haunted house in his last film, prior to making giant monsters and robots fight, it seems like Del Toro is looking for something smaller for his next movie. The Guardian caught up with the writer/director while promoting Crimson Peak and he spoke about his follow-up project, which is not Pacific …
The cold opening of episode four connects itself to The Strain in three different ways. The relevancy of the first two to the series are easily discernible. First, the narrative of the black-and-white lucha libre B-horror and the present day horror drama series share the same major conflict: human vs vampire.
Danger escalates within season two’s first three episodes as inter-state highways are closed off and travel becomes heavily regulated. The constant sound of sirens and gunfire mixed with panicked voices in the background serves as a relentless reminder of how quickly humans are succumbing to The Master’s plan.
To fully appreciate Peter Jackson’s last foray into Middle-Earth, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, one must understand it’s actually two separate movies. The first movie is a sour, pseudo-Shakespearean morality play that has nothing to do with Hobbits. The second movie is a heartfelt rumination about friendship and self-sacrifice. For those willing to overlook the sour for the sweet, there are great treasures to be found, as Jackson brings his trilogy to a suitably-epic conclusion.
In this new golden age of television that we are currently living in, the television industry is poaching some of cinema’s greatest minds more than ever to create their own long form stories after being restricted to the hour and a half to maximum four hours that film allows. The gap is getting increasingly small …
YouTube announced a contest this week in collaboration with director Guillermo Del Toro in which entrants with YouTube channels can submit a short horror story to be judged by Del Toro, with the winner getting the opportunity to sign a deal with Del Toro’s Legendary Pictures. The contest is called “You Tube Space House of …
Konami has dropped a bombshell with the sudden release of a new trailer for the Silent Hill series. Although the trailer doesn’t offer much in details pertaining to the actual game or its plot, it does offer some pretty big names that happen to be involved in the project. First up is Hideo Kojima, the venerable …
As Joseph Heller wrote in Catch-22, “Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.” The Strain is difficult to categorize. The cynical part of me thinks it was born mediocre and I’ve just been expecting too much from it. Perhaps this was always where we would end up, with Holocaust flashbacks and a sense that this isn’t what we signed up for.
After the fantastic final few minutes of last week’s episode, with its genital loss and general sense of momentum, this episode thankfully brings us further than where we left off, while also throwing in a couple of incredibly misguided leaps of faith (more on that later). I bring up this random small piece of Russian history not only to introduce the idea that The Strain likes to give us a small moment of promise and then painfully disappoint. Our core group splits up this week after a couple of separate disputes, mostly because of crises of faith.
There’s a lot of talk this week about being good, as in a decent person, and what that means. The writers lay it on thick with the scene between Jim and his wife, who has just been accepted into a cancer trial because of Jim’s deal with the devil. “Good things happen to good people, right?” she asks him. “Right?” It’s like she’s just rubbing salt in the wound of his already festering guilt.
We live in a burgeoning era of horror television. American Horror Story will begin its fourth season in the fall, and The Walking Dead will start its fifth. Penny Dreadful just finished an excellent debut season, and Netflix’s Hemlock Grove just put up its second season. True Blood, Supernatural, Bates Motel, Sleepy Hollow, Grimm. And of course, the most horrifying show currently on television, Hannibal. Horror is all over our TV screens, but if there’s one person who deserves their shot at it (presuming David Lynch isn’t interested), it’s Guillermo del Toro.
Not two weeks ago, famed auteur and Pacific Rim director Guillermo Del Toro set the internet ablaze when he announced the confirmation of a follow up to his 2013 robots vs. monsters film Pacific Rim and dated Pacific Rim 2 for April 7, 2017. The biggest surprise wasn’t the official announcement of the sequel though, …
Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s vampire trilogy The Strain has captured the imagination of horror fans since its 2009 release. Adapted as a comic by writer David Lapham (Stray Bullets) and artist Mike Huddleston, Dark Horse has just released the hardcover collection of the first 11 issues comprosing the first part of the trilogy. Working in close collaboration with Del Toro and Hogan, the comic book is not merely an illustrated novel but rather a visualization that captures the spirit and content of the book. This is an adaptation in the true sense of the word, building off the existing material and adjusting it to fit an entirely new medium.
Deadline reported Thursday that Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim is getting a 3D sequel, with Universal and Legendary Pictures shooting for an April 7, 2017 release. Del Toro is back on to direct as well. The previous film grossed just over $100 million domestically at the box office and was something of a disappointment financially Stateside, …
What’s difficult about making this list is finding a balance between a successful Kubrickian film that either predates or pays homage to Kubrick and, for lack of a better term, is a ripoff. Now that we’ve hit the apex, it’s clear that these are, regardless of influence, quality films. What sets them apart is their …
6. The Spoils of Babylon The Spoils of Babylon is an upcoming American comedy miniseries by Saturday Night Live veterans Andrew Steele and Matt Piedmont, directed by Piedmont (Casa de Mi Padre), and starring Tobey Maguire, Kristen Wiig, Tim Robbins, Jessica Alba, Val Kilmer, Haley Joel Osment, Michael Sheen, and Will Ferrell. It’s doubtful that any …
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug Written by Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Guillermo del Toro Directed by Peter Jackson New Zealand, United Kingdom, and USA, 2013 The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is, no doubt, an improvement over The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, though perhaps because it is the second of three …