Another Video Game Movie: This Time, it's Clock Tower
Filed under: Horror, Deals, Newsstand, Games and Game Movies
The Mayhem Project, a small, genre-oriented production company that was founded last year, has hired a director for its first film. Back in October, Mayhem announced that its first two projects would be horror films: Sanctuary (an original story) and Clock Tower, which is based on a video game. Already in line to write the latter was Jake Wade Wall, the scribe who, among other things, penned the paint-by-numbers (and court-bound) remake of When a Stranger Calls, but the studio just recently hired a director. According to reports in the trades this week, Chilean horror prodigy Jorge Olguín has been signed to helm the film which, since he was discovered and is currently having a feature produced by the great Guillermo del Toro, is exciting news indeed for fans of the Clock Tower franchise.The movie, which "involves a young woman who receives a disturbing phone call from her estranged mother warning her not to come home," is apparently based on the best-selling third installment in the Clock Tower series, and is expected to go into production sometime this fall. Gamers can help me out here, but my understanding is that this game is much less about killing bad guys and much more about hiding and escaping from them than most scary games these days, so maybe it'll be something different, for once.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
6-26-2006 @ 11:30PM
cat said...
Clock Tower 1 & 3 are some of my favorite video games of all time.It's going to be hard to capsure all of the intensity and spookiness of these games.I also love the Silent Hill games to death,even though the movie could have been sooo much better!
Let's hope this one's ok....
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6-27-2006 @ 1:26AM
Vishal said...
From what I remember of the game (never played more than three minutes of it, and that too on a Super Nintendo version), you are right about it favouring running and hiding more that other firearm-heavy horror games like the Resident Evil series.
Basically you play any number of regular horror movie fodder types (teenage girls, young trendily-dressed women/men, etc) navigating and solving the mysteries of a creepy mansion while trying to escape from this hideous person brandishing a humongous pair of scissors. His name is Scissorman (Oh yes).
While the idea of not blowing the villain up with a bazooka at every turn and instead relying on your wits and puzzle-solving ability may still be a novel thing in a video game (despite being as old as, well, Monkey Island at least), how this will translate into a movie that is any different from the hundreds of films featuring extended "run and hide from X villain" sequences remains to be seen.
Of course, I am unfamiliar with the third game, and Wikipedia informs me that it features a bottle of holy water that transforms into a bow (where do you find arrows for it? Transforming candles?) -- so much for non-violent puzzle solving.
Also, Clock Tower 3 features Scissorwoman. Can Scissordog and Scissorhamster be far behind?
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