Lost Carcosa

Those of you who read my posts regularly, will probably have guessed that I love Guillermo Del Toro’s work.   He’s awesome.  Seriously.  So when I saw this bit of news about Del Toro making a Frankenstein movie, you know I immediately had to jump to linking it here, as it made me happy like a little school boy.

“I’m not doing ‘Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein.’ I’m doing an adventure story that involves the creature. I cannot say much, but it’s not the central creation story, I’m not worried about that. The fact is I’ve been dreaming of doing a ‘Frankenstein’ movie since I was a child. The one thing I can promise is, compared to Kenneth Branagh, I will not appear shirtless in the movie!” 

Read more at Movies.ie

It looks like Guillermo Del Toro has signed on to write a trilogy of vampire novels with crime authoe Chuck Hogan.  Also of interesting note is hish signing a four picture deal.  To quote BBC UK:

There are plans to remake Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Frankenstein and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five.

BBC UK

Stuart Gordon and Jeffrey Combs make a great pair in the movie industry.  At least I seem to think so.  They do a great job creating entertaining movies together, but it looks like Combs has turned down playing a part in Gordon’s adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Thing at the Doorstep”.

Stuart was like, ‘Yeah, I know, being in bed with beautiful women all day, it sounds tough, and I went, ‘You know, Stuart, actually, it is. I’m married, and I don’t wanna do that.’ It’s not part of my world. It was just too much, it was like, ‘And then they’re writhing, and then they’re humping some more, and then they build to a climax, and then they climax, and sweat…” I wish him all the best with that one, but not every project’s right for me.  

~Combs

You can read Comb’s thoughts over at Arrow in the Head News.

I just watched a French movie called “In My Skin” and wow… I’m not sure just what I can say about this one.  “In My Skin” is a disturbing movie, both in imagry and psychologically.  It is a story of trying to connect to one’s self, and maintaining a semblance of control.  When someone loses control over the world around them, that person may go to extreme measures to regain a feeling of control over something.

IMDB says:

A woman grows increasingly fascinated with her body after suffering a disfiguring accident.

The Playground says a bit more:

After drunkenly gashing her leg open at a party, Esther becomes obsessed with her body and it’s perceived imperfections. She begins to poke, prod, cut, gouge and mutilate her body on a journey to self discovery.

Its hard to say much more than that without really giving too much away.  Even with all the cringing I did, I thoroughly enjoyed this film.  It says a lot without really saying a whole lot.  The acting is good, and imagry is great, and the raw feeling is powerful. Basically, what needs to be said is add it to your NetFlix queue now.  Unless you can’t stomach blood and self inflicted wounds done really slowly and deliberately.  Then you might want to pass.

IMDB: Dans Ma Peau

NetFlix: In My Skin

I just watched Frontier, a French horror movie by Xavier Gens, and i can emphatically say “Wow! That was a brutal film!”

The movie is about a group of young people who form up a rather incohesive team of thieves to try and take advantage of the wide spread looting and rioting after the elections finish in France.  Having stollen an acceptable amount of cash, the group heads out to the “Frontier” to escape the law, only to end up in the clutches of an insane neo-Nazi family running a people eating butcher shop.

The movie was filled with some very gruesome and bloddy scenes, but was shot in an manner that was at times, quite often actually, rather artistic.  It was simultaneously intriguing, visually appealing, grotesquely gory, and realistically brutal.  We’ve all seen the movies where the fights look good, almost too good, leaving the viewer feeling like he’s just seen a good clean piece of choreography. But leave it to a non-American movie maker to put in scenes of a large man giving a hard right to a small woman’s jaw, followed by a flinchingly realistic kick to the head.  Ouch!

Head on over to The Playground to read their review and see a few more images and details.

The Telegraph has a look at the original Indy.  Otto Rahn, and archaeologist who ran afoul of the Nazis and obsessed with finding the Holy Grail, is likely to be the inspiration for Indiana Jones.

Head over to The Telegraph for an interesting mini-bio of Otto Rahn.

More Jeffrey Combs stuff!  HorrorYearBook has news that Jeffrey Combs is returning in “Abominable 2″.

Fatally-Yours has a good review and a trailer up for Jaume Balagueró’s movie “REC” as well as the trailer for the Hollywood remake “Quarantine”.  From the trailers, I have to say, that I’m actually pulled more by Balagueró’s lower cost original than Hollywood’s version.  REC is the story of a a young reporter attached to a team of Fire Fighters to chronicle their day to day lives.  Things go bad when the building they go into is suddenly quarantined by the government to contain whatever is making the people go extremely violent inside.  The coolest sounding bit?  No musical cues to give away the scary parts!
Check out the trailers and read a bit more at Fatally-Yours.