After much vote counting and recounting, we can finally announce that the winners of our Third Annual Costume Contest are Shrek and Fiona in the Adult category, and the Tim Burton Group in the Kids category. Runners-up in the Adult category were the Gargoyle and Alien and Ripley; runners-up in the Kids category were Snoopy and the Toy Soldiers. Thanks very much to all our entrants and finalists for making this a great contest. We had some impressive entries this year, and we can't wait to see what you come up with for next year! Here are pics of the winners and the runners-up (if you want to see all the entrants again, the complete gallery is after the jump):
ADULT WINNER: SHREK AND FIONA
ADULT RUNNER-UP: GARGOYLE
ADULT RUNNER-UP: ALIEN AND RIPLEY
KIDS WINNER: TIM BURTON GROUP:
KIDS RUNNER-UP: SNOOPY
KIDS RUNNER-UP: TOY SOLDIERS
A quick aside: Erik and I would like to request that, even if you don't agree with the results, you please refrain from attacking the winners in the comments. The folks who submitted the Shrek and Fiona entry followed the rules as we set them up; I personally emailed the adult finalists letting them know they'd been selected, so that everyone could have a chance to let their friends and family come and vote for them. We've done it this way the past two years and it's not been an issue; this year there were some hard feelings and ugly comments tossed around in what was intended to just be a fun contest, and so we're going to revisit how we run the contest for next year. We'd like your feedback as to how YOU think the contest should be run, so we can take that into account next year. Please take a moment to respond to the poll questions and let us know your thoughts, and thank you so much for participating and for reading Cinematical.
You'll find the poll questions, and a gallery of all the contest entrants, after the jump. Thanks, and Happy Thanksgiving from all of us at Cinematical!
Okay, Cinematical readers, our crack staff has the field narrowed down to 15 finalists in the Adult Category of our Halloween Costume Contest, and now it's time for you to get to work and vote for your favorite Adult and Kid entries. You can only vote ONE time for each category, no duplicate votes will be counted.
Yes, you can vote for yourself, and you finalists are free to go and round up everyone in your little black books, your email and cell phone contact lists, and your MySpace friend lists to come and vote for you. As a reminder, here's what the winning entries will get:
Here are the Adult and Kid Finalists you are voting on. Please leave your vote in the comments, using the costume name as your vote. Please note that we have TWO separate Transformers in the finals, so if you are voting for one of them, make sure to specify "Transformer #1" or "Transformers #3." Please enter just one pick in each of the two categories in your comment, and thanks for participating. Voting will be open until 11:59PM EST on Saturday, November 17. We'll announce our winner on Monday, November 19. Thanks very much to everyone who entered for making this a really tough competition!
We got such a great response from our readers to our Halloween Costume Contest that we've decided to give those of you who missed the deadline to enter your awesome movie-themed costumes a last-chance deadline -- midnight PST on Wednesday, November 7 -- to get your entries in. You can find all the rules and details here on the official contest announcement page (please don't forget to send the release form with your entry!) You'll be competing for a spooktacular prize package in either the adult or kid category:
In the meantime, we know you wanna see how the competition is shaping up. We're seeing lots of creativity with the costume creations; the big movie sources this year are Transformers, 300, and Batman (well, the Joker anyhow) with several entries each! Slasher and Horror genres are, not surprisingly, well-represented as well.
Below you'll find four galleries full of costume entries to peruse, one for the kids and three for the adults. PLEASE DO NOT VOTE YET! This represents all of the complete entries we have received. If you know you entered and you do not see your entry here, please email me at kim (at) cinematical (dot) com to let me know so we can get you in there. Our staff will whittle these entries down to a slate of finalists for you to vote on. Of course, feel free to give a shout out in the comments to let us know which entrants you like and to give all of them a big round of virtual applause and group hugging.
Gallery: Halloween Contest 2007 -- Kid Finalists
Gallery: Halloween Contest 2007 -- Adult Entries, Batch One
Gallery: Halloween Contest 2007 -- Adult Entries, Batch Two
Gallery: Halloween Contest 2007 -- Adult Entries, Batch Three
If you're entering the contest in our last-minute chance to enter, you'll want to read all these important rules (after the jump) before you do so ... seriously, read them. And don't forget to send your release form with your entry!
Hey there movie fans, we know you had lots of cool and creative costumes for your Halloween parties (or just for slouching around your neighborhood trick-or-treating, pretending to be a surly teenager so you could score a bag of free candy). Just a reminder that you have until tomorrow at midnight to get your entries in to our fabulous Halloween Costume Contest. I have to tell you, though ... we are seeing some amazingly impressive entries. Some of you folks really went all out this year. The competition is going to be tough.
The prize packages for the Adult and Child Winners are pretty amazing, check it out:
Maybe a filmmaker wants to tip their hat to the slashers and psychos who thrilled and chilled them in their youth; perhaps they want to make a post-modern comment on the nature of watching violent entertainment; maybe they just want to scare us good and proper with a moment of sheer blood-curdling terror. Whatever the reason, there are some pretty good horror movies about watching horror movies; here are seven (admittedly skewed towards the modern and the domestic) for your perusal.
Kevin Williamson's sly, self-referential script exploded every slasher-flick cliché ... and picked some darkly glimmering moments out of the rubble. Starring Neve Campbell as Sidney Prescott, a girl beset by a masked killer, Scream paved the way for a host of imitators, but the original is a surprisingly fresh and remarkably well-structured mystery -- plus, Williamson and director Wes Craven's commentary on the DVD is like a master-class on the history and methodology of slasher film. When the blood-stained climax sees our heroine suggesting our killers have "seen too many movies," the reply comes back fast: "Now Sid, don't you blame the movies. Movies don't create psychos; movies make psychos more creative!" It's a great line -- and you also wonder if it's true. Scream's killer famously asked "Do you like scary movies?" Scream itself asked why you like scary movies, and left you to puzzle over your answer. (Bonus question: How many times did Scream show up on a Cinematical Seven throughout the month of October?)
Five contestants sign up for a reality-TV-style contest; they spend six months locked together in an isolated home. If you stick it out for the duration, everyone wins a cool million dollars; if one person leaves, though, everyone loses. Much of My Little Eye is shot with distorted web-cams and a you-are-there queasiness -- we're the audience for the "show," and we get to witness as things start to go very, very wrong. Eventually, the truth comes out -- and we feel ourselves becoming a very different kind of viewer, watching something very different than the 'contest' in the film's set-up, seeing the film's events through very different eyes. My Little Eye may not be perfect, but it has one grim, chilling moment that's among the scariest, creepiest scenes I've ever seen in a horror movie.
I come to John Carpenter's 1978 classic Halloween from an odd perspective. I'm a horror buff, and I've been getting the crap scared out of me at the cinema and on video for several decades now. Whether it be current stuff like the Saw films, classics like the Universal Monsters, or mondo obscuro delights like Paul Naschy werewolf flicks from Spain or Messiah of Evil (which I did a Retro Cinema review on a few weeks ago), I've seen it all. Well, not quite all. Despite my status as a hardcore horror junkie I only recently watched Halloween for the first time in its entirety. I've seen bits and pieces here and there over the years, but this was my first time taking in the whole thing from start to finish (and if you just said "that's what she said," then shame on me for handing you such an obvious straight line).
Having been raised on a steady diet of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazines, the idea of a guy going around killing people with a big knife wasn't my idea of a scary movie. I preferred a supernatural angle to my horror, thank you very much, and Halloween just didn't appeal to me upon its initial release. Over the years my prejudice against non-supernatural horror has faded, but having seen many of the films that Halloween inspired -- whether they be sequels, homages or knock offs -- I've developed a deep dislike for slasher films, so I never saw any reason to check out the one that started it all.
Happy Halloween from Cinematical! As a special treat, we've put together this gallery of some of the great movie monsters, from Lon Chaney Sr. as the Phantom in the 1925 silent film The Phantom of the Opera, to Lon Chaney Jr. as The Wolfman. We have an array of Dracula's, from Nosferatu (1922 and 1979 versions) to Dracula (Bela Lugosi, Christoper Lee, Frank Langella, and Gary Oldman -- who do you like best?). We have a slew of evil children and evil adults in the mix as well. Tell us who your favorite movie monsters are, and who we missed including in our gallery.
Later on tonight, we here at Cinematical will shovel out our last two Halloween-related features for you to read. When that happens, we'll officially be done with our 31 straight days of original scary movie content (with one notable exception: our very awesome Halloween Costume Contest, which will continue on through early November), and for that I am grateful. You really do not know how hard it is to round up a group of writers, come up with tons of ideas and ask them to meet specific deadlines for 31 straight days. In order to succeed, one needs the greatest team of movie writers ever assembled. Thankfully, we have that here on Cinematical. And while I intend to thank them privately for all their hard work, I'd also like to thank them publicly for entertaining our millions of readers all month long with some of the finest Halloween content I've ever seen. Feel free to check out our entire collection of tricks and treats over here, and in the meantime I'll point you toward a few of my personal favorites:
From Patrick Walsh: Non-Horror Movies that Scared the Crap Out of Me As a Kid: "You kids today don't know how lucky you have it with your wussy Shreks and your lamewad Pikachus! Children of the 1980s are still in therapy over what Hollywood deemed "family films" back then. The following non-horror mind-screws should prove my point. "
From Monika Bartyzel: The Horror of Fairy Tales: "What is creepier than kids, parents, evilness, sorceresses, wolves, and cannibalism? Before the stories were ripped from their horror roots, they were just right for scary, gory films."
From Scott Weinberg: Best Horror Movies You Haven't Seen Yet, Parts 1, 2 and 3: "If you're a regular reader (Hi Mom!) then these titles will no doubt look a little familiar -- but the flicks haven't been released yet, so that makes 'em eligible for inclusion."
From Eric D. Snider: An Obsessive-Compulsive's Guide to the Friday the 13th Movies: "A few years ago, I decided a good way to spend my time would be to watch all 10 Friday the 13th movies and keep track of the statistics: how many kills, how many heroines taking showers, how many people falling down while trying to run away, etc. I was fond of the Scream series' deconstruction of the slasher genre, and it occurred to me that the Friday the 13th films -- most of which I had not seen at that point -- were probably the source of some of the oldest, ripest clichés."
The image of Lugosi's Dracula is heavily copyrighted; Nosferatu is, by contrast, an open source vampire; you could tell that from his cameo a few years back on Sponge Bob Square Pants. The silent classic was originally a bootleg version of Bram Stoker's novel. When Werner Herzog went to work on a remake of F. W. Murnau's 1922 vampire film, he could call his creature Count Dracula, thanks to public domain laws. Herzog preserved much of the original's style out of admiration for Murnau and "the most important film ever made in Germany" (maybe so...any other suggestions?).
But Herzog's skeptical, neo-documentary approach--seen this summer in Rescue Dawn--wouldn't permit him to use Murnau's mistier plotting. He took pains to see how Nosferatu works. Why has no one burned the evil castle down in daylight? Simple: it doesn't really exist except in ruins, "except in the minds of men" who are tricked by the darkness of night. How does the vampire beat Harker home? There's a line about how the sea voyage is faster than heading back from Transylvania overland. (Unlike the book, this is set about the time Murnau set his version, 1838; there are no railroads yet in Central Europe.)
This was supposed to be a list of horror movies appropriate for dates. Unfortunately, I kept coming up with reasons why each movie wasn't a good idea. While my rationale wasn't entirely realistic, it got me thinking about movies that open certain cans of worms. Pregnancy. Momma's boys. Infidelity. These seven flicks have got lots of relationship deal-breakers in them, and can lead to some date-damaging conversation, rather than sexy innuendo and rose petals to the bedroom. They might uncover questionable morals, or even some private kink that you just can't get into. And some will get just a little spoilery, but most of them are classics, so you probably know the gist already.
Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) is just a simple, nervous printer who thinks his girlfriend, Mary (Charlotte Stewart), has broken up with him -- that is, until he is invited to dinner with her and her family. He finds out that she has had an amazingly brief pregnancy, and has given birth to some sort of strange alien baby. Being the noble boyfriend, he marries her, and is quickly left with this weird, wailing tot when she abandons them. Henry starts to become unhinged, and that just doesn't bode well for baby.
While this may be a short film, Eraserhead is packed full of taboo dating topics. Pregnancy. Marriage. Accepting abnormal babies. Ditching the family when sleep-deprived. Infanticide. One minute, you're watching an eerie David Lynch movie, and the next, you're having discussions about what you'd do with alien babies, whether you'd be noble and marry the mother of your out-of-wedlock kid. Or heck, whether love would keep you with her even if it looks like she got horizontal with some other strange sort of being.
It must have been something to be a filmmaker in the 1920s, trying to imagine ways to scare people; you had a huge blank slate in front of you. Hardly any of it -- ghosts, vampires, werewolves, mummies, zombies, cat people, maniacs, monsters, homicidal killers -- had been done yet. Moreover, the negative connotations of horror had yet to take hold. Whereas most modern horror films are ashamedly snuck past reviewers, Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) was released to rave reviews. The great critic Carl Sandburg, writing in the Chicago Daily News, called it "the most important and the most original photoplay that has come to this city of Chicago the last year." We can only imagine what Sandburg would have said about F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922); he may have seen it, but he didn't review it. For my money it is the superior of the two films, made by a far greater cinema artist.
Like Wiene, Fritz Lang, Joe May and many German directors of his era, Murnau (1888-1931) worked in German Expressionism, finding ways to manipulate the images in the frame to a point beyond reality for maximum emotional effect. But Murnau was unique in that he used these images to express his personal fears and desires; he also intermingled realistic, nature shots with his bizarre, artificial Expressionist shots. He completed just over 20 films in his short career, and almost half of them are said to be lost. He was gay and constantly struggled with all the conflicting pros and cons of his emotions in his films. He moved to Hollywood in 1927 and made his masterpiece Sunrise there. Just a few years later, after completing his final film, Tabu, he died in a car accident.
I don't care how many times they push it back, or how much potential for hackneyed disaster there is in a film about a killer crocodile -- I'm looking forward to Rogue, mostly because there was a lot that impressed me about Greg Mclean's debut film, 2005's Wolf Creek. For one thing, it was bold enough to defy several horror cliches, such as foreshadowing dread in the early scenes -- the first thirty minutes of Wolf Creek could be part of an Aussie road drip dramedy, with three aimless kids taking their rickety car way too far into unsafe areas of the Outback. It's also a film that's completely unrelenting in the psychic trauma it wants to inflict on the audience. By the time the slaughtering starts, we know these characters -- we care about them. Frankly, Mclean seems like he'd be completely bored with making a standard slasher/monster film with paper-thin characters. Therefore, I'm going to be first in line for his killer croc movie, and wait for my enthusiasm to blow up in my face.
I have no idea if this will get to theaters by late 2008, but I know that Platinum Dunes does have the gears grinding, so it's a possibility. In fact, a little birdie recently told me something hilarious -- Corey Feldman went in and pitched himself as the star of this thing. For those who don't remember, Feldman played Vorhees foe Tommy Jarvis in two installments of the original series, and he apparently had designs on making the Friday remake his newest comeback vehicle. There's really nothing you can do with Jason at this point other than remake him, but how? Word is that PD wants the remake to feature both Jason and his trademark mask -- two elements that didn't congeal until Part III of the original series, so I'm imagining a smelting together of the first three films, set in modern day and with a lot of in-jokes. I guess it will be a film about a little boy who drowns in a lake and immediately morphs into an overgrown, lumbering killer with a machete. Sounds intriguing.
I first saw Ed Wood at a midnight screening on opening weekend. Even 13 years ago, I was not much of a midnight-movie person, but I thought the late-night audience would be a lot more fun and responsive to a Tim Burton film than, say, the matinee crowd. It turned out not to matter much. Ed Wood isn't a movie that needs a packed house; although the black-and-white images look fabulous on a big theater screen, the movie is equally enjoyable at home, curled up on the sofa with the one you love and some popcorn or beer, and trying to mimic the Bela Lugosi love-spell hand movements along with the title character, as in the photo above.
Ed Wood is a sweet, touching movie about a guy who likes to make low-budget movies and wear women's clothing -- often at the same time. The movie was released in 1994, back in the day when Johnny Depp had a much smaller cult following of women who swooned over him ... and Ed Wood probably didn't do much to increase that cult unless you liked the look of a guy in angora and lipstick. Tim Burton directed -- his second time working on a feature with Depp. Currently, it is my favorite of all the Burton-Depp films. The script was written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who also worked together on the biopics The People vs. Larry Flint and Man on the Moon.
Like the final chapter of any worthwhile trilogy, this entry is filled with something old, something new and something that hints at ... maybe a Part 4? (Catch me in March!) If you're a regular reader (Hi Mom!) then these titles will no doubt look a little familiar -- but the flicks haven't been released yet, so that makes 'em eligible for inclusion. (Well, that and the fact that I think they're good enough to track down.) And just so you're all caught up, here's a link for Part 1 and another for Part 2.
The Orphanage -- Produced by genre lord Guillermo Del Toro -- and the flick has the guy's wonderful fingerprints all over it. First-timer Juan Bayona delivers a quietly creepy and surprisingly engaging little ghost story, but don't let that fool you into thinking it's for the lightweights. This is a deliciously effective movie about a woman who returns to renovate an old orphanage with her devoted husband and adopted son ... but quickly comes to regret it. (Full review here.) Arrival: Picturehouse has it scheduled for a December 28 limited release.
Borderland -- By the time I saw Zev Berman's Borderland at the SXSW Film Festival, I'd grown a little weary of what I call "tourist horror," but this scrappy indie offers just enough color and energy to warrant a look. It's about a trio of young guys who travel to a Mexican border town and run afoul of, yep you guessed it, murderous devil worshippers. Hey, how often do you get to see Sean Astin playing a psychopath? (Full review here.) Arrival: November 9, as part of After Dark's Horrorfest event; Lionsgate DVD after that.
If you're coming late to the party for The Evil Dead, you may wonder what all the fuss is about. You may pop the movie into your DVD player, watch the first awkwardly-shot sequence, in which five friends drive to an isolated cabin in the woods, and giggle at how amateurish it looks. You may watch the next few scenes, in which the friends settle into the cabin, stumble upon an old tape recording, listen to a man on tape solemnly describing his discovery of an ancient Book of the Dead and how his wife turned into a demon and bodily dismemberment became necessary, and start to question why anyone would think this piece of crap was any kind of a horror classic.
But maybe you were amused by Bruce Campbell mugging as Ash, or noticed the myriad fresh camera angles presenting the action, or the extreme close-ups on eyes, or liked the low-budget aesthetic, and decided to give it a chance. And then one of the five friends wanders out into the woods, against all common sense, and the woods attack her -- yes, that's right, the woods attack her -- and she barely escapes back into the cabin, and then one by one the friends start turning into demons, and bodily dismemberment becomes a viable solution. And then you might say to yourself, "Ah, that's why."
Sam Raimi (writer/director), Robert Tapert (producer) and Bruce Campbell (actor/co-executive producer) had been making 8mm movies in Michigan before tackling their first feature, a micro-budget horror movie that they envisioned as a "quintessential drive-in movie," and The Evil Dead works best as a communal experience, where audiences tend to laugh at the amateurish seams, scream at the blood and gore, and then start laughing at the blood and gore simply because it's so over the top that laughter is the only appropriate response. But Raimi, especially, was disappointed that people laughed, because he intended to make a straightforward horror flick.
Okay, Cinematical readers, our crack staff has the field narrowed down to 15 finalists in the Adult Category of our Halloween Costume Contest, and now it's time for you to get to work and vote for your favorite Adult and Kid entries. You can only vote ONE time for each category, no duplicate votes will be counted. 
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