agony Tagged Articles at Cinematical
Fair Warning, DVD Shoppers: 'Howard the Duck' Special Edition Exists
Filed under: Action », Comedy », Sci-Fi & Fantasy », Home Entertainment », Comic/Superhero/Geek »
In the pantheon of mega-derided '80s films, few films can touch the inescapable reek of Howard the Duck. I know plenty of folks who dig Ishtar, Cobra, and Leonard Part 6 -- but remarkably few movie geeks have stood up and spoken out for Willard Huyck's Howard the Duck, which just recently arrived as a Special Edition DVD from Universal.
I'll spare you the plot machinations -- because frankly a movie this stupid deserves to be seen BY YOU at least once -- but I've always been amazed at the disparity between the source material and the cinematic adaptation. I've also been sickened by the girl on duck seduction scene, assaulted by the horrific Thomas Dolby music, and beaten into drooling submission by the flick's endlessly wretched puns.
But as a piece of mid-'80s big-budget mega-floppage? I find Howard the Duck more fascinating -- and more worthy of mockery -- than Hudson Hawk, Over the Top, and Toys put together. So imagine my ironic jubilation when I saw a new Howard the Duck DVD sitting on the video shelves, as if it were actually a real-live movie that people would want to own...
So Urban Legends are the New Superheroes?
Filed under: Horror », Independent », Deals », Universal », Newsstand », Cinematical Indie »
Apparently someone has told all of Hollywood that the apocalypse is coming, and we can all be saved only be making MORE MOVIES ABOUT URBAN LEGENDS. And, because they have our best interest at heart, our friends in the movie industry have leaped to humanity's defense: On Monday, Universal bought a super-secret spec script about an urban legend on a college campus, and today comes the news that Intrepid Pictures (which, by the way, has a first-look deal with Universal) just picked up ... exactly the same thing. Yippee, we're saved!Universal's pic is called Agony; Intrepid's is Mercy. And that's pretty much the only difference. Seriously. Though Universal is being coy for some reason about the details of Agony's plot, it's set on a college campus, and deals with an urban legend that -- shocker! -- turns out to be true. Mercy, meanwhile, is about "a college student who sets out to debunk the urban legend of the Mercy Killer ... only to discover that he is all too real and has chosen her as his next victim."
So basically, if you snuck in under cover of darkness and switched the scripts, no one would notice. Ain't Hollywood great?
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