MalcolmMcdowell Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Upon recently re-viewing Rob Zombie's 2007 take on the classic Halloween, I felt a little bit less harsh about it. Don't get me wrong: it's still mighty tedious and nowhere near scary, but at least I got the impression this time around that the rocker-turned-auteur was trying to fashion more of a character study around boogeyman Michael Myers -- who he was, why he was -- and while diluting the mystique of our killer effectively diluted the suspense, the film still delivered on the basest level of having someone get visibly, viscerally dispatched every so often. If all you had to ask of that film was a body count, Halloween slowly but surely delivered.

But while people do die in Zombie's Halloween II, that's just not enough to make up for all that pesky in-between.

These days, vampires are almost as prevalent as the mirrors they never cast a reflection in. True Blood, Twilight, Lestat, Underworld, The Vampire Diaries, Cirque du Freak, Priest, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter... They're everywhere. However, while we might be inclined to knock any new film that tries to jump onto the pile, we can't really fault any horror indies. Vamps have always thrived in that realm; it's their home turf.

So you might remember that last year, I wrote about a little Canadian horror comedy called Suck and its interesting cast list -- Jessica Pare, Malcolm McDowell, Dave Foley, Iggy Pop, Moby, Alice Cooper, Carol Pope, and Henry Rollins. The film has since wrapped, is heading to TIFF next month (hat tip to MTV), and you can check out a trailer for the bloodletting after the jump. The brainchild of Rob Stefaniuk (of Phil the Alien fame), Suck focuses on a struggling band who finally finds success when the leader's (Stefaniuk) ex gf and bandmate Jennifer (Pare) becomes a vampire rife with "sexually charged charisma that drives the audiences wild."

McDowell co-stars as Eddie Van Helsing -- a one-eyed vamp hunter who's afraid of the dark, while Foley plays their manager, Pop plays a music producer, Cooper plays a bartender, and Rollins plays "Rock'n Roger" -- a radio dude with terrible hair. That alone has me sold. Heck, McDowell with a flashlight to "keep the dark away" is gold just on its own. But just to sweeten the pot some more, the film's full of songs like David Bowie's "Here Come's the Night" and The Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil." Ready to Suck?

It wasn't until fairly recently that voice acting in video games was done by either no-name actors trying to pay the bills or B- and C-list actors who were, well, also trying to pay the bills. The Command and Conquer games began employing a mixed bag of actors in its 1999 iteration, Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun, when they managed to snag Luke Skywalker's big daddy James Earl Jones, but otherwise continued casting random character actors like Udo Kier and Barry Corbin in future games like Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2.

Grand Theft Auto III changed the game, literally, with its roster of recognizable names and voices like Joe Pantoliano, Michael Madsen, Michael Rapaport, Debi Mazar, and Kyle MacLachlan all playing parts in the free-for-all crime cape that make Rockstar Games just that. With GTA III's massive sales and buzz (particularly from angry parents), the scene was set for Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, which boasted an over-the-top cast particularly appealing to its target audience: Dennis Hopper, Danny Trejo, Gary Busey, Lee Majors, Debbie Harry, Ray Liotta, Tom Sizemore, and Jenna Jameson, just to name a few.

When word about Easy A, otherwise known as The Scarlet Letter hits high school, it didn't sound like the most desirable or charming comedy -- a young woman pretends she's promiscuous to get ahead. (yay) But now ... Well, now there's a killer cast merged with a plot summary that could easily make this a must-see film.

Variety reports that the comedy will, more specifically, follow a high school girl (Emma Stone) who, "after being ostracized by a false rumor she's loose, uses the rumor mill to her advantage, pitting puritanical students and teachers against their liberal counterparts." And who will some of these people be? Oh, just Lisa Kudrow, Alyson Michalka, Thomas Haden Church, Patricia Clarkson, Stanley Tucci, Penn Badgley, Cam Gigandet, Malcolm McDowell, and Daniel Bird. How's that for a supporting cast? The fact that this is a teen comedy and not some star-ridden ensemble drama makes the roster all the more impressive.

Production kicks off on June 9, and hopefully that means we'll get to see how it all turns out sooner rather than later. But for now -- who are the puritans, and who are the lascivious liberals? Any guesses?

I'm a horror fan, but I'm not one of those demented geeks who sits in his cluttered basement wishing he could remake Frankenstein in order to explain the monster's tortured family life before he was resurrected by the good doctor. Thus I was more than a little perplexed when self-professed hardcore horror fan Rob Zombie so eagerly jumped into the director's chair to make his own version of John Carpenter's classic Halloween. What made him think he could improve on perfection?

I agree completely with Cinematical's Scott Weinberg, who recently Tweeted: "Corpses and Rejects are to horror what Epic and Date are to comedy." Of course, he was talking about Zombie's initial forays into the horror field, House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil's Rejects. If you haven't seen them, don't worry: they're simple, fanboy pastiches of earlier, better films that influenced Zombie. Rejects was a modest improvement over Corpses, but, by all accounts, his Halloween in 2007 was a total misfire that pleased no one but the studio bean counters.

I confess, I haven't seen it yet -- my most trusted horror guru (read his review) advised me to save my money -- and the new trailer for H2: Halloween 2 does not inspire much hope for the sequel to the remake. The trailer promises that "the secret" will be revealed. Like Halloween II, the original sequel directed by Rick Rosenthal, this one features a lot of hospital footage. You can watch it over at Yahoo! (or below) and glory, if you choose, in the prospect of more Sheri Moon Zombie. Tyler Mane returns as Michael Myers, along with Scout Taylor-Compton, Malcolm McDowell, and Danielle Harris. H2: Halloween 2 Electric Boogaloo hits theaters on August 28.

The story behind the making of Delgo is heartwarming and inspiring. Fathom Studios, based in Atlanta, Georgia, has been creating commercial computer animation for more than ten years. When they decided to produce their own feature-length narrative film, they did it completely independent of the Hollywood studio system. They labored long and hard with a much smaller budget and a much smaller staff than the animation behemoths. They bravely posted "digital dailes" throughout production, a kind of progressive, online series of "making of" snippets. They recruited a slew of actors with name recognition -- Freddie Prinze Jr., Jennifer Love Hewitt, Val Kilmer, Malcolm McDowell, Louis Gossett Jr., Michael Clarke Duncan, Burt Reynolds, Chris Kattan, and the late Anne Bancroft in her last performance -- to voice the characters.

If only the film as a whole was as dramatic and lively as the behind-the-scenes story. Under the direction of Marc F. Adler and Jason Maurer, the 3-D animation is quite lovely to behold, but the characters are one-dimensional and the script, credited to six writers, spends too much time on convoluted plot mechanics. Delgo falls into an uncomfortable place where the technical achievement can be admired without the emotions ever being engaged, provoking nothing more than a tepid response ("meh") when the end credits begin to roll.

Set in a lush fantasy world of flying creatures, colorful reptiles, and the odd monster, beast, and giant insect, Delgo pits two races against one another. The proud, dominant, invading race lords it over the humble, subjugated, native race. Sound familiar?

What happens when you put Malcolm McDowell, Jessica Pare, Dave Foley, Moby, Iggy Pop, Alice Cooper, Carol Pope, and Henry Rollins on the bloodsucking hunt? A movie that definitely doesn't Suck.

The Hollywood Reporter posts that all of the above have signed on to a new Canadian horror-comedy called, both appropriately and inappropriately -- Suck. From writer/director Rob Stefaniuk (Phil the Alien), the film will follow "rock 'n' roll wannabes in search of fame and vampires." I never realized that the two went together. I mean, after a slew of episodes of True Blood, I'd might believe it if the hunters found vamps during Sex Addicts Anonymous... But then again, if anyone would know how to find the world's vamps, I imagine it would be Alice Cooper. Mixing him with the wonderful Henry, plus Mr. McDowell and Foley sounds downright excellent.

Production begins later this month in Toronto, and I hereby offer myself as set-visiter, bringer of Rollins' black coffee, bloodletter.

No, no, there's not going to be a remake of A Clockwork Orange starring Mick Jagger. At least I don't think so. This is just a fun bit of what-could-have-been. We like to play around with alternate-universe casting here once in a while, and this one's a doozy. Someone found a letter from producer Si Litvinoff to legendary director John Schlesinger, urging him to consider directing an adaptation of Anthony Burgess's novel. And part of the pitch was that Mick Jagger wanted the role of the psychopathic Alex, and that the Beatles "love[d] the project" and wanted to provide the musical score. Fortunately (?) Schlesinger wasn't interested and the project eventually wound up falling to good old Stanley Kubrick.

The Clockwork Orange we got was -- like all of Kubrick's work -- too singular a film to even try to imagine how someone else's version would have been different. But I admit I'm amused (and intrigued) by the notion of Jagger taking on the Malcolm McDowell role. Hell, after watching the manic two-hour stage show he put on in Shine a Light at age 63, I'm kind of convinced that he's actually omnipotent. As for the Beatles? That's just creepy. I'll stick with Kubrick's classical selections.

[hat tip: Movie City News]

With a little over a month to go before the release of Rob Zombie's Halloween, the director has released a whole slew of character posters on his MySpace page. They're not nearly as high-quality as the Golden Compass character sheets we brought you recently -- they all have the same background, so its mostly a cut and paste type of job, but they're not bad. There are posters for pretty much every major character here, from Scout-Taylor Compton as (a presumably smaller-chested) Laurie Strode to Malcolm McDowell as Dr. Loomis. There are two for Michael Myers, one of Tyler Mane as the adult, masked Michael and one of Daeg Faerch as the young Myers, with some kind of party hat pushed up onto his head and a creepy look on his face. There are even some posters for Danny Trejo, William Forsythe and Udo Kier -- I didn't even know the first two were in the movie until seeing these posters.

Also in his MySpace update, Zombie lets fans know that the official website for the film has been updated, with some new images in the cast bio sections. I took a look, and they do look like pics I haven't seen floating around yet, so hop on over if you're a Zombie-head. As of now, Halloween has its ticket punched for August 31, when the competition will be Balls of Fury, the Jennifer Lopez festival film Bordertown and Kevin Bacon's Death Sentence, which is being directed by another horror mainstay, James Wan. Looks like Wan isn't afraid to go head-to-head on this one -- we'll see who wins.

The last casting announcement we got from the sci-fi thriller Doomsday, was an exclusive from the director Neil Marshall (The Descent), to our own Chris Ullrich. Now Empire Online has reported that Malcolm McDowell is the latest addition to the cast. The story takes place 30 years after a plague has wiped out a good chunk of the population; inspiring a quarantine that mainly entails walling off the infected. Of course, the virus doesn't stay contained for very long and an elite team is put together to stop the disease from spreading. Written and directed by Marshall, the film also stars Bob Hoskins, Rhona Mitra, and Alexander Siddig. McDowell has signed on to play Kane, a global expert on the virus who advises the team on how to fight the spread of the disease.

It seems slightly out of character to have McDowell in a good-guy role in a film. Despite his varied career, nobody can play the steely-eyed villain like McDowell. Well, maybe Paul Bettany, but I guess that example might not really count. McDowell is currently doing his bad-guy best as Linderman on the NBC series Heroes right now, but there is no solid word on whether his work on the show is firmly in the guest star camp, or whether he has signed on for the long haul. Production on Doomsday began back in February, and between his turn as Dr. Loomis in Rob Zombie's Halloween remake later this year and his possible TV commitments, it looks like we will be seeing plenty of McDowell soon.