Replying to my own post.
Having watched the 2018 sequel / reboot of the 1978 original Halloween and having been left underwhelmed I made a point of looking out for the original. UK TV didn’t let me down.
I say confidently my opinion is the 1978 film when viewed as a 1978 film is more imaginative, more creative, more original and more influential than the 2018 film will ever be. No question about it.
Plus the 1978 film only cost about $325,000 (about $1,367,342 in today’s money) for the 91 minute run time which included splashing out $25,000 to get Donald Pleasence involved.
The 2018 cost about $10,000,000 (which ought to have a bit added for inflation) for the 106 minute run time. Call it 8 times more expensive.
However a more intriguing question is which film would be preferred by a modern audience? The 1978 version is famously very light on actual gore but has buckets of suspense. The 2018 version (which did good box office) soon starts delivering the gore… But is that enough?
I suspect I already have the answer: The 2018 film did good box office, they made a direct sequel to that (on release now) and another sequel is on the way.
TCMF-2L
That was hysterical! Thanks for sharing.
I remembered it as being pretty good. I liked the flashback to the cavemen finding the alien “black oil” thousands of years earlier. At the time, I didn’t appreciate the movie implying that the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was part of a U.S. government plot, though. NOT cool, man.
The Simpsons Movie is the only one I can think of - and Homer breaks the fourth wall in the first few minutes of it, calling us suckers for paying for something we can watch on TV for free!
I watched two Dan Stevens horror movies this weekend.
The Guest in which he stars as a returning US soldier from the Middle East who turns up at the family home of a fallen colleague. He promised to take care of the family and this becomes his new ‘mission’.
The Rental in which a romantic getaway he and his girlfriend along with his brother and his girlfriend rent out an idyllic seaside house for the weekend. Everything seems good and an enjoyable time away in a remote location where they are all away from the stress of normal day to day life. Except things start to feel a little odd about this perfect getaway house.
Both are very good movies with entertaining premises and good changes of tempo to add to the atmosphere and suspense.
For what it is worth Dan Stevens is who I would cast as the new James Bond. Very good portfolio of a variety of roles, starred in big productions, but isn’t a big household name himself. I think he’s in the same position where Timothy Dalton was when he was chosen to be Bond.
This seems to be popular in anime right now - For example, Demon Slayer had a film released this year (“Mugen Train”) that filled in the between-seasons gap, and there are others.
There was a theatrical Batman movie between the first and second seasons of the TV series in the '60s.
Thanks, of course there is that one.
Batman is also obviously pretty famous as an example.
My favourite UK Cop Show of the 1970s, The Sweeney, only ran to four seasons. As is typical of UK shows there are less episodes. However between the third and fourth seasons they pushed out not one but two separate movies.
TCMF-2L
Dark Shadows did this House of Dark Shadows (1970) was being made at the same time the were still doing the TV series, with series creator and director Dan Curtis directing the feature film. A second film, Night of Dark Shadows (1971) was made after the film had gone off the air, and didn’t feature Jonathan Frid as Barnabas Collins.
They had discussed simply editing some of the TV footage together to make the film, but rejected that and filmed a wholly new film. However, other TV series did go the route of re-issuing TV episodes, albeit with added footage. The Spy with my Face (1965), for instance, was a film made by adding some new footage to an episode of the TV series The Man from U.N.C.L.E., which was still running. Similarly, there was a feature film version of Battlestar Galactica (1978) released after the TV show premiered, but with new footage and, i thin, a different ending.
There was a McHale’s Navy movie released while the TV series (1962-1966) was still on the air – McHale’s Navy Joins the Air Force (1965). The same cast appeared.
There was a Munster movie, Monster Go Home, released only a couple of months after they stopped original broadcasts of the TV show. The same cast was involved, except that they had a different Marilyn (Debbie Watson, replacing Beverly Owen and Pat Priest who had played the part on TV)
During the 1970s quite a few British sitcoms did a movie version. Often after the TV series was finished (Porridge for example) however Man About The House and Are You Being Served? both had films released while the TV show was still being produced.
Steptoe and Son (retooled in the USA as Sandford and Son) had two films released while the TV show was still going.
TCMF-2L
Friday the 13th Part 2
I had never seen this series and decided to give them a shot. I did see the first one about two years ago and it was so pathetic(dull!), I did not continue at the time. I decided to give it another show and Part 2 was…well, still mostly lame. Just setup, kill, wait around for awhile. No imagination or creativity.
I’m going to continue, but it seems the first two are really lame. A lot more nothing happening than actual action.
Between Friday the 13th, Halloween, and Nightmare on Elm Street, which holds up the best do you think? I am considering the Nightmare movies after I watch the Friday the 13th ones.
The only Friday the 13th movie I’ve ever seen was Part VII: The New Blood, because a high school friend of mine was in it. He played the comic relief character and was the best thing about the film… until he got decapitated.
I’ll let you know what I think of him once I get there.
^ Number three is in 3-D, so expect many hokey “Count Floyd”-type jump scares.
“Buck Rogers” did a theatrical premiere before the series began, didn’t it?
I’ve noticed. Yo-Yo-ing, the pitchfork handle sticking straight out, various obvious 3D effects. It’s quite cute. Movie seems not too much better yet, though.
That’s the one I first saw – in a theater, so I got the full 3D effect. The 3D was pretty decent, especially the title. The movie, of course, was abysmal.
But after seeing the first one, I had to se the first two. I caught them on a double bill at a local college. The first one was actually pretty decent, but after that the series suffered from the “we used this ridiculous idea in an earlier film and we’re going to stick with it”, which I call “Katra Disease”
I heard the 3D was impressive in this movie. Is it better than what they do now? The last 3D movie I saw in the theater was Avatar, which was immersive, but not that great an experience. I mean, who cares?
I can’t remember the early 1980’s well enough to know if I saw any real 3D(red and blue glasses) movies.
That’s a complicated question, because different people respond differently to different 3D systems, and what works for me might not work for you. all I can say is that the opening titles appeared to be coming out of the screen, and in my experience 3D that appears to be in front of the screen 9rather than behind it, as if you’re looking through a window) often failed, not resolving itself into a single protruding 3D object, but looking like two independent objects. The titles for Friday the Thirteenth 3D looked as if they were literally in my lap. By contrast, the paddleball in the 1954 flick House of Wax never coalesced into a single in-your-face image, but looked like two independent ghostly images.
I don’t know why this should be. The technology in both cases was almost certainly the same – they used polarized glasses, with the polarization axes at 45 degrees in one eye and 135 degrees in the other eye. (Anaglyphic 3D – the red-and-green glasses – was a cheaper measure for small-town cinemas that couldn’t afford the double projector or prismatic hookups needed for polarized 3D, along with the special polarization-preserving screen. With anaglyphic, all you need is a single projector and an ordinary movie screen, plus those glasses. But it’s only really good for black and white movies – color movies look weird in anaglyphic.)
Nowadays most theaters use either RealD 3D, which uses circularly polarized light instead of linearly polarized light or, increasingly, liquid crystal glasses that block out vision in first one eye and then the other. A few theaters (like the Omnimax ones) apparently can’t use RealD because of the large angles or something, so they still used the linear 45/135 glasses, but they’re switching to liquid crystal glasses, mostly.