DarkCorners Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Under the direction of exec Joe Drake, Lionsgate Films has pretty much walked away from the type of movies that made its name -- as exemplified by their dumping of the Clive Barker adapatation Midnight Meat Train, and sending an audience friendly movie like Dance of the Dead (that most of us at Cinematical just happen to love) straight to DVD. Now Peter Block, the company's former head of acquisitions and co-productions and a veteran producer whose three dozen credits include the aforementioned Midnight Meat Train, has launched a new company to try and fill the gap, according to Variety.

The company, named A Bigger Boat in honor of what Roy Scheider said in Jaws, will begin by making two to three modestly-budgeted (between $10 million and $25 million) genre films per year. Block is currently in the "formative stages" of building the company's initial slate of productions, but Variety says it will "likely" include an unidentified thriller directed by John Carpenter and Dark Corners, a thriller based on a script by E.L. Katz. Katz was one of the writers and producers of last year's Pop Skull.

A Bigger Boat has a co-financing and distribution deal with Overture Films covering North America and another with Alliance Films for the UK, Spain, Italy, and Scandanavia. Block has also made deals with partners, including GreeneStreet Films, for production and other business affairs. All we need now are the movies -- how about some straight ahead, adult-oriented horror, Mr. Block?

"The plot and the structure of it and what the meaning is and what the events are representational of. I found that to be confusing. -- Thora Birch, in a recent interview about her latest film, Dark Corners. Oh, good. So it's not just me. Something of a cross between A Nightmare on Elm Street and Drew Barrymore's Doppelganger, Dark Corners, which is being released on DVD today, asks us to follow two parallel story threads, each of which stars a Birch character. In one of the stories, we get a character that I'll call Heaven Thora, who has honey-blonde hair and a handsome husband and leaves an upscale suburban home every day to go to a comfortably boring office job, where no one presumably bothers her with questions about what she's been up to since Ghost World. In the other story, we have Hell Thora, a big-haired, sluttily-dressed mortician's assistant who is inhabiting a nightmare world with a bunch of possessed demon-people who paw at windows and swipe at you with sharp instruments if you get too close.

Each Thora exists as a recurring dream for the other Thora, and this is a big problem for Heaven Thora, because she's currently battling through a high-class problem: she is subjecting herself to IVF treatments in order to conceive a child, and a recurring nightmare in which she's a member of Vixen is not in keeping with the doctor's orders to relax. To nip this problem in the bud, Heaven Thora visits a psychotherapist, played by British actor Toby Stephens. In an awkwardly written scene, he sits her down in front of a spinning crystal, putting her to sleep so that he can hypnotically suggest that she rid herself of the "dream me." Planting this suggestion causes Hell Thora to be set upon by the demon people, who stab her to death. The hypno-therapist then happily announces that Heaven Thora is now rid of her doppelganger, to which she quips: "I thought you guys always dragged this kind of thing out, to make extra money." I'm re-hashing all of this because it's more or less the last scene I can explain.