HollowMan Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Beginning with the summer of Surf Ninjas and concluding with last year's Underdog, Vulture has compiled a list arguing that August movies generally blow. Sifting through the titles from the past fifteen years, it's hard to ignore their point. If Bushwhacked, Spawn and The Thirteenth Warrior don't convince you, how about Hollow Man? The Adventures of Pluto Nash? Anacondas?

August usually means a lot to America. It's big for vacationers. The sun comes out and everyone gets one last hurrah before the summer recedes for the year. So why would studios dump their worst movies at this time? Maybe it's just a coincidence, but either way, it's hard to say whether or not this August will break the trend. Swing Vote seems to confirm Vulture's dire prediction, but Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Pineapple Express and Tropic Thunder will surely find some appreciative audiences. And we all know The Dark Knight will continue to make bank. However, before you start thinking that a turnaround is on the way, consider the third Mummy movie -- and, once again, Vulture might have something here: Variety has called it "cheeseball stuff." Could that be the codeword for "typical August movie"? It would seem so.

He has somewhat redeemed himself with Black Book, but Paul Verhoeven still has to live with the fact that he made Hollow Man. The 2000 sci-fi thriller was a spot on his resume, which, yes, also includes Showgirls. Unlike Showgirls, however, there is no guilty pleasure, no appreciable campiness with Hollow Man. It's just bad. Verhoeven knows this, and he's been very public about how miserable it was to work with Sony on the movie. We have to look at his failure with Hollow Man as a good thing, though. At least it made him return to Holland to make Black Book.

Hollow Man wasn't a complete disaster for the studio. It made some money, it earned an Oscar nomination for special effects and it was successful enough for Sony to produce a direct-to-video sequel. If the movie had failed in all regards, Sony might not have been interested in releasing a Director's Cut of the movie on DVD, arriving in stores October 16, according to dvdactive.com. According to the specs, the new cut features an extra 8 minutes not seen in the original version. It is likely that this is the only difference, though. I'm sure Verhoeven didn't spend a lot of time re-editing the movie or reworking it in any other way. After all, it seems most of his unhappiness with the project was in its filming, not its editing. Hopefully the 8 minutes of footage doesn't simply consist of the three deleted scenes included on the Hollow Man Special Edition DVD. It still has yet to be revealed whether or not this new version will have any other bonus features, such as a new commentary or some other explanatory guide to the cut.

Hollow Man stars Kevin Bacon as a guy who becomes a modern-day Invisible Man. It has some neat ideas, including the usual themes of man abusing his abilities and going mad with power, as well as the idea that an invisible man would go crazy from sleeplessness because of invisible eyelids. It was too bad the movie ended up coming off as a creepy, disturbing thriller about a guy who spies on girls in the bathroom and who eventually becomes a deranged killer. It is also too bad that the director's cut will likely not change this about it.