Christopher Lee: Horror films today are ‘obscene’

Christopher Lee

By Grace Wong for CNN

London, England (CNN) — Although his name is synonymous with horror, Christopher Lee says he doesn’t have much desire to see pictures that fall under that genre these days.

The 87-year-old, who helped Britain’s legendary Hammer studios breathe new life into the horror genre in the 1950s, says he rarely watches horror films.

“I find it quite nauseating what they do,” Lee told CNN. “The blood is all over the screen like an avalanche — the mutilation — dreadful things, and I just don’t enjoy that.”

The veteran actor, who played Count Dracula and Frankenstein in a series of Hammer movies from the 1950s until the 1970s, says it’s “obscene” how much is displayed in horror films today.

“What you don’t see is far more frightening than what you do see,” said Lee, who considers Roman Polanski’s 1968 supernatural thriller “Rosemary’s Baby” the scariest film he’s ever seen.

That may explain his attraction to upcoming psychological chiller “The Resident,” his first Hammer film in more than 30 years.

Starring Hilary Swank and Jeffrey Dean Morgan, the movie is about a young doctor whose landlord develops a creepy obsession with her.

Lee was a perfect fit for the film, which takes on a nightmarish quality in a nod to the noir style of Alfred Hitchcock, director Antti Jokinen says.

“He has that presence that a movie like this needs because a single look can be the scary atmosphere that you need,” Jokinen told CNN.

“The Resident,” due out in the spring, is the first theatrical feature under the banner of the re-launched Hammer Films. It is being revived by new investors who bought the company two years ago.

Lee says his reunion with Hammer is ironic in a way. He didn’t leave the studio on the best of terms — “I’m not going to go into it, but take it from me, they ruined it,” he says of his last Hammer film, bizarre 1976 cult classic “To the Devil a Daughter.”

Some remarkable films did come out of that era: He describes black-and-white “Scream of Fear” (1961) as “brilliant,” and fondly recalls working with the close-knit Hammer team, which was like a family.

“Occasionally they’d change the cameraman or something but otherwise the whole crew was the same all the time, and I knew all of them extremely well,” he said.

But the white-haired actor doesn’t wax nostalgic. “Not every Hammer film was perfect,” he said.

In 1966′s “Prince of Darkness,” he ended up playing the character of Dracula silent because the lines “were not good and I couldn’t do anything with them.”

Lee played a central role in the rise of Hammer, starring in 1958′s “Dracula,” which helped both him and the studio gain international recognition.

The film was instrumental in launching a golden era for the production house, whose films, with their gothic qualities and use of vibrant colors, helped reinvigorate the horror genre.

But the movies began to seem outdated as movies like “The Exorcist” and “The Omen” came on the scene, and Hammer produced its last film in 1976.

Lee — or to be precise, Sir Christopher Lee, after Queen Elizabeth II knighted him in June — has come a long way since his first Dracula film, a six-week job that he says paid £750.

Although he’s often associated with Hammer films, Lee is quick to point out that he hasn’t really taken many horror roles.

Aside from the Dracula movies, “The Curse of Frankenstein” (1957) and “The Mummy” (1959), “I haven’t done lots of horror,” the prolific actor told CNN.

Of course, that hasn’t kept him from achieving cult status among horror fans.

Included in his legion of fans is “The Resident” co-star Morgan, who says he “hit the ceiling with excitement” when he found out Lee was joining the cast.

Morgan told CNN: “He’s got this kind of dignity to him that’s just great.

“I work with so many actors that don’t have respect for what we do, or respect for the history of what we do and not only does he respect it, but he is a part of the history of this craft.”

Over the decades Lee has starred in hundreds of movies. He has a predilection for playing baddies, including Bond villain Scaramanga in “The Man with the Golden Gun” (1974).

“I haven’t spent my entire career playing the guy in the bad hat, although I have to say that the bad guy is frequently much more interesting than the good guy,” Lee said.

His more recent film credits include the menacing Saruman in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy and fallen Jedi knight Count Dooku in the Star Wars prequels.

But he considers 1973′s “The Wicker Man” “the best picture I’ve ever done.” The role was written for him and remains his favorite.

“They didn’t have to look for me to play the part; they wrote the part for me,” which doesn’t happen very often, he said.

Lee has kept a busy work schedule. In addition to “The Resident,” he stars alongside Colin Farrell in the soon-to-be-released “Triage,” is involved in a film from the director of “The Wicker Man” and lends his voice to animated film “Monstermania!”

Lee, who doesn’t show any signs of slowing down, despite approaching the age of 90, is pragmatic about his extraordinary career.

“Well,” he said. “What else would I do?”

Read MORE about Christopher Lee HERE

Exclusive Interview with Mike Elizalde: Amazing Special Effects Artist

Mike Elizalde

Jackie Jekyll – GoreMaster.com

Mike Elizalde, whose credits include “X-Men: The Last Stand”, both of the “Fantastic Four” films, both of the “Hellboy” films and most recently “The Land of the Lost” film, has been in the special effects business for over 20 years.   Mr. Elizalde was nominated for a “Best Makeup” Oscar for his work on Hellboy II (2008).  He is the owner of Spectral Motion an all purpose special effects shop offering Creatures, Props, Special Makeup Effects. His shop specializes in the design and creation of astonishing cinematic creature effects, special makeup effects, animatronics and action props.  Mr. Elizalde shares his journey into the world of filmmaking and special effects with GoreMaster.

Read the Exclusive Interview HERE!

Amazon Specials!

Lon Chaney’s Grandson in House of the Wolf Man

Thanks to Bloody-Disgusting, we now have the trailer for “House of the Wolf Man,” which is a black and white film made in a 1940s style.
 

In 1944, “House of Frankenstein” was released, which was followed by “House of Dracula” in 1945. Apparently, “House of the Wolf Man” was supposed to happen soon after, but never did. So director Eben Mcgarr took it upon himself to make that third film, which stars Ron Chaney, the grandson of Lon Chaney Jr (the original Wolf Man).

“Dr. Bela Reinhardt (Chaney) has invited five people to his castle to see which of them will inherit his estate,” Mcgarr said of the plot. “He has arranged for a competition of sorts, the victor shall be determined through process of… elimination.”

He added that it is intended to “slip seamlessly in with the other two movies, and with no gore, language, or sex, it should be for all members of the family.”

 

 

Hollywood’s most wanted look familiar as films revisit old ‘Enemies’

By Maria Puente, USA TODAY

They’re back —Bonnie and Clyde, Dillinger and Baby Face, Jekyll and Hyde, Holmes and Watson. Say hello again to Robin Hood, the Wolf Man, the Lone Ranger, Frankenstein, the Invisible Man and Conan the Barbarian. Hamlet, dear boy, long time, no see! They have all been here before, and soon they’ll all be here again, dashing across big screens around the world, drawing in a new generation of moviegoers perhaps unfamiliar with earlier versions of these characters.Or so Hollywood hopes.

Exhibit A: Public Enemies, out Wednesday and starring Johnny Depp as the charming and public-relations-savvy bank robber John Dillinger in a retelling of how the early FBI got its man in 1934. (It was messy and bloody, and innocent people were caught in the crossfire.)

Real-life “public enemies” such as Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and Bonnie and Clyde were celebrities to Depression-era Americans who cheered them for stealing from despised banks. By the 1940s and through the 1970s, Hollywood made scores of movies and TV shows about Dillinger and his gang. Now, in the midst of an economic calamity and multiple bank bailouts, Universal hopes a sexy outlaw targeting bankers and outwitting brutal G-men will resonate with audiences.

“It’s hard to predict, but (banks) are not going to garner an undue amount of sympathy — let’s put it that way,” jokes Enemies director Michael Mann. He’s not concerned about past Dillinger movies; he knows most moviegoers will be more familiar with Depp than with Dillinger, but he believes they’ll be drawn to a story about a “fascinating life.”

But you have to wonder about all this effort being lavished on movies that have been made before, even if the characters and stories are being presented in fresh ways. Surely today’s filmmakers haven’t run out of new characters or creative juice. Maybe it’s the result of the crashed economy, as risk-averse studios fall back to familiar (and proven) moneymakers.

Call them insurance policies

Or maybe it’s a matter of tradition and history: As in any art form, entirely new stories are relatively rare; what came before is recycled and reimagined to make new art.

“The idea of re-using characters and remaking films goes back to the earliest days of Hollywood, but the flood today does seem rather stunning,” says UCLA film historian Jonathan Kuntz. “But with so much riding on major pictures costing hundreds of millions, they want some kind of insurance. Taking a story or character already well known makes it easier to market, to get that opening weekend box office at a reasonable level.”

It will not have escaped Hollywood’s notice, Kuntz says, that characters such as Batman and the Mummy, each dating back decades, have been enormously successful in recent revivals. No wonder, then, that Universal, long known as the studio of monster movies, would return to its archive: The Wolfman (original 1941) is due in November with Benicio Del Toro; The Invisible Man (original in 1933) is scheduled for 2011; and planning has begun for Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954).

So it’s back to the past — only with better (and more expensive) special effects. “There’s always talk in the Hollywood press about this— ‘Do we have to recycle everything all the time, why can’t we come up with new characters?,’ ” says David Gross, editor of MovieReviewIntelligence.com, which analyzes movie reviews from newspapers around the USA. “There’s not a whole lot new under the sun, so if you have to go back to the well every 20 years, there’s a new generation of moviegoers (to attract).”

Most of nearly two dozen coming movies are based on classics of English literature or Western folklore, with American comics, pulp fiction and TV series thrown in. Thus: Frankenstein; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; and the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Also: Conan the Barbarian (based on 1932 stories by Robert E. Howard, remake of the 1982 film due in 2010); John Carter of Mars (based on the Edgar Rice Burroughs stories, coming in 2012 with Taylor Kitsch);The Three Stooges (coming in 2010, with Jim Carrey, Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro); and The Lone Ranger (2012, with part-Cherokee Depp as faithful companion Tonto).

Most have been made multiple times, such as Gulliver’s Travels (2010, Jack Black), A Christmas Carol (November 2009, Jim Carrey) and Disney’s Alice in Wonderland(2010, directed by Tim Burton with Depp as the Mad Hatter), which even Disney has done before, in a 1951 animated feature.

“The other versions haven’t been very good,” says Richard Zanuck, an Alice producer, “and we’ve never seen the story through the eyes of a visionary like (Burton).”

As in literature, certain cinematic characters and themes are returned to repeatedly because they resonate across all boundaries of time, space and cultural milieu. So, every generation needs its own on-screen Hamlet — and now we’re about to get another one: After Lawrence Olivier (1948), Richard Burton (1964), Mel Gibson (1990), Kenneth Branagh (1996) and Ethan Hawke (2000), now comes young heartthrob Emile Hirsch, 24, who is set to play Hamlet next year and is the first actor in his 20s to play the prince of Denmark on-screen at roughly the same age as the character.

Director Catherine Hardwicke and screenwriter Ron Nyswanger say they will present the story as a “contemporary supernatural thriller.”

“Hamlet is the ultimate, alienated young hero, who exposes the hypocrisy of society,” Hardwicke says. “His struggle to find the truth and act on it is universal and particularly relevant to young people today, living in a world that’s in crisis mode on so many fronts.”

Call them universal themes

But does every generation need its own Robin Hood? Even if it’s Russell Crowe and he’s wearing macho armor instead of tights? Maybe so. After all, rob-from-the-rich-give-to-the-poor is an evergreen concept.

Robin Hood, of course, is much older; the character is based on late 12th-century English folklore. Errol Flynn nailed the role in 1938, then Sean Connery in 1976, Kevin Costner in 1991, and Mel Brooks in a comic version in 1993.

Now Oscar-winning Crowe will be the prince of thieves, starring in Robin Hood, due out later this year and directed by Ridley Scott. Producer Brian Grazer says the story was ripe for revisiting, again, because it’s a “universal theme.” (There’s that phrase again.)

Robin Hood “is trying to create equality in a world where there are a lot of injustices,” Grazer told USA TODAY earlier this year. “He’s a crusader for the people, trying to reclaim some of the ill-gotten gains of the wealthy.”

Filmmakers are not only bringing back characters we have seen before. In some cases, there are two sets of filmmakers making films about the same characters at more or less the same time.

Two Holmes and Watson films are in the works. Sherlock Holmes, with Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law, directed by Guy Ritchie, is out later this year; the second, still untitled with no release date, is a comedy with Sacha Baron Cohen and Will Ferrell. And two Jekyll & Hydes: Jekyll and Hyde, with Forest Whitaker and 50 Cent, out later this year, and Jekyll, with Keanu Reeves, no release date yet.

Also, two William Tells. Errol Flynn played him in a 1953 picture. Now comes William Tell: The Legend, due in 2010, with Jim Caviezel. The second film has a name, Ironbow: The Legend of William Tell, due in 2011, but as of yet no named star.

Who are the audiences for two William Tell movies? He may be a Swiss hero, but to everybody else he’s … well, he’s the opera overture adapted as the theme for The Lone Ranger. But the Tell movies may be the offbeat exception.

“This is not business as usual — this is Hollywood’s attempt to deal with risk in a troubled marketplace,” says Brett Walsh, a producer on the Whitaker/50 Cent Jekyll and Hyde, which he says will follow director Abel Ferrara’s darker, more suspenseful vision of the story.

“Going back to known brands or characters is perceived as a way of protecting your downside risk, because they have an existing value,” Walsh says.

Maybe, but it might also be true that oldies are goodies. And each new generation of moviegoers gets to discover the gems in Hollywood’s archive anew — as is happening already with The Story of Bonnie and Clyde, expected to begin shooting later this year with Hilary Duff as Bonnie.

Tonya Holly, who is writing, directing and producing the movie, says she’s not intimidated by the Oscar-winning 1967 Bonnie and Clyde with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. Not only has film technology improved in 40 years, but her target audience is filled with moviegoers who are not familiar with the real-life bank robbers and who haven’t seen the earlier film.

“But they know Hilary and Kevin (Zegers as Clyde), and their fan base is going to boost interest,” Holly says. Besides, she says, when it comes to movies, “There are a million ways to tell a story, and the story changes with each storyteller.”

Bride of Frankenstein given new life

By Steven Zeitchik

   Universal and Imagine are breathing new life into “Bride of Frankenstein.”

The companies are in talks with Neil Burger to write and direct their long-stirring remake of the 1935 monster movie. Burger, who would pen the script with writing partner Dirk Wittenborn, most prominently wrote and helmed “The Illusionist,” the Edward Norton magician mystery that earned nearly $40 million for Yari Film Group in 2006.

James Whale’s “Bride of Frankenstein,” which starred Boris Karloff as the monster and Elsa Lanchester as the titular bride, continued the story that began with 1931’s    “Frankenstein.” A monster, on the run from an angry mob, has a series of adventures, and also persuades Dr. Frankenstein to create a mate. The doctor is successful, but the bride (who is not a central character) winds up rejecting the monster at the end of the movie.

The CAA-repped Burger, who also penned and helmed Iraq-veteran pic “The Lucky Ones,” is attached to direct “Dark Fields,” a thriller about a slacker who discovers a drug that makes him sharper. That pic is also set up at Universal, but progress has been slowed since star Shia LaBeouf was forced to pull out last year with a hand injury.

   “Bride” has had a series of stops and starts. About five years ago, “American Splendor” scribes Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini were attached to write the screenplay for the Uni/Imagine update. Their concept was to set the picture in contemporary New York, with a young woman dying and then unnaturally brought back to life (Burger’s version is expected to differ significantly from that concept). Jacob Estes, a writer on Spider-Man spinoff “Venom,” also at one point had been attached to write a draft.

Brian Grazer and Sean Daniel will produce the pic;  Karen Kehela, David Bernardi and Chris Wade will oversee for Imagine.

   Universal is eager to develop reboots of its library of classic monster titles, insiders in the development community said. It is developing a new version of “Creature from the Black Lagoon,” the 1954 Jack Arnold pic about a monstrous fish that a group of travelers encounters in the Amazon, and later this year it will release the Benicio Del Toro-toplined “The Wolf Man,” an update on George Waggner’s 1941 werewolf tale.

“Frankenstein” has been remade numerous times — Mary Shelley’s book sits in the public domain — but “Bride” has had only one other go-round on the big screen: a 1985 version at Columbia starring Sting and Jennifer Beals. In 1999, Bill Condon’s “Gods and Monsters,” a biopic of Whale, showed clips from the film and re-created the bride herself.

Amazon Specials!

Tim Burton Heads To MoMA For Five-Month Exhibition

by Peter Knegt

   The Museum of Modern Art will present a major exhibition exploring the full scale of filmmaker Tim Burton’s career, both as a director and concept artist for live-action and animated films, and as an artist, illustrator, photographer, and writer. The exhibition will be on view from November 22, 2009 through April 26, 2010.

   “There is no other living filmmaker possessing Tim Burton’s level of accomplishment and reputation whose full body of work has been so well hidden from public view,” said Ron Magliozzi, MoMA’s Assistant Curator. “Seeing so much that was previously inaccessible in a museum context should serve to fuel renewed appreciation and fresh appraisal of this much-admired artist.”

   The exhibition will bring together over 700 examples of Burton’s rarely or never-before-seen drawings, paintings, storyboards, moving-image works, puppets, maquettes, costumes, and cinematic ephemera, and includes an extensive film series spanning Burton’s 27-year career. The exhibition explores how Burton “has taken inspiration from sources in pop culture and reinvented Hollywood genre filmmaking as an expression of personal vision, garnering him an international audience of fans and influencing a generation of young artists working in film, video, and graphics.”

   The exhibition is organized in collaboration with Burton himself, and by Ron Magliozzi, Assistant Curator, and Jenny He, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Film, with Rajendra Roy, The Celeste Bartos Chief Curator of Film, The Museum of Modern Art.  Included are little-known drawings, paintings, and sculptures created in the spirit of contemporary Pop Surrealism, as well as work generated during the conception and production of his films, such as original “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and “The Corpse Bride” puppets; “Edward Scissorhands,” “Batman Returns,” and “Sleepy Hollow costumes;” and even severed-head props from “Mars Attacks!” Also featured are the first public display of his student art and earliest nonprofessional films; examples of his work for the flash animation internet series “The World of Stainboy” (2000); a selection of the artist’s oversized Polaroid prints; graphic art and texts for non-film projects, like “The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories” (1997) and “Tim Burton’s Tragic Toys for Girls and Boys” (2003) collectible figure series; and art from a number of early unrealized projects. Additionally, a selection of international posters from Burton’s films will be on display in the theater lobby galleries.

   Burton’s entire cinematic oeuvre of 14 feature films will screen over the course of the five-month exhibition in the Museum’s Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters: “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure” (1985), “Beetlejuice” (1988), “Batman” (1989), “Edward Scissorhands” (1990), “Batman Returns” (1992), “The Nightmare Before Christmas” (1993), “Ed Wood” (1994), “Mars Attacks!” (1996), “Sleepy Hollow” (1999), “Planet of the Apes” (2001), “Big Fish” (2003), “Corpse Bride” (2005), “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” (2005), and “Sweeney Todd” (2007).  His early short films “Vincent” (1982) and “Frankenweenie” (1984) will also be featured.

   In conjunction with Tim Burton, MoMA will also present “The Lurid Beauty of Monsters,” a series of films that influenced, inspired, and intrigued Burton. Taking as its starting point a screening of horror movies that Burton organized in Burbank in 1977, the series includes such films as “Jason and the Argonauts” (Don Chaffey, 1963), “Frankenstein” (James Whale, 1931), “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (Robert Wiene, 1920), “The Pit and the Pendulum” (Roger Corman, 1961), “Nosferatu” (F. W. Murnau, 1922), and “Earthquake” (Mark Robson, 1974).

 

Learn Makeup effects at GoreMaster.com

Del Toro seeks to return evil to vampire fiction

CBC News

   Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro sets out to return universal evil to the vampire genre with a new book released this month called The Strain.

   Del Toro, who is best known for his Oscar-winning movie Pan’s Labyrinth, spent four years working on the novel, the first of a trilogy he is penning with crime writer Chuck Hogan, he said in interview with CBC Radio’s Q cultural affairs show.

   “The whole idea was to go back to one of the branches of vampire fiction that seems to be vacant, tragically vacant in the last few years, which is not a romantic, tragically misunderstood male lead like in a romance novel but as a creature of alternate history, biology and anatomy that is essentially a parasite or a predator hunting humans,” del Toro said.

   Del Toro has been fascinated with vampires since he was a kid and his movies, Blade and Cronos both feature vampires. The director thinks interest in vampires goes beyond the current fleeting dalliance with the Twilight series, in which the vampire is just a romantic bad boy.

  “There are few characters that belong to the cosmos of mankind,” he said, mentioning the dragon which is seen as evil or good in different cultures.”The same is true for the vampire — it’s very malleable — it’s an incredibly open metaphor for power, greed, sexual appetite, you name it,” he said. His own preferred form of the monster is a reanimated corpse with “no soul and an alien hunger to consume blood.”

   With The Strain, Del Toro wanted a modern version of the monster and incorporated some research he’d done into pandemics for the film Mimic.

“I wanted to create this medical thriller that slowly but surely emerges as a pandemic of a vampiric virus,” he said.

This form of vampirism causes its victims’ bodies to mutate into bug-like creatures, who wreak havoc in Manhattan as a team of disease specialists and others try to stop the disease. But while Del Toro is adept at creating mythical monsters through his screenplays, he recruited Hogan three years ago to help him craft the novel.

   “I found to be honest, that I was really in my element when creating creatures and creating outlandish headpieces, but I thought I was not blessed much with a knack for American reality, American dialogue, procedural stuff and I found all that more in the partnership with Chuck,” Del Toro said.

   The other two books in the series are due in 2010 and 2011.

In great demand as a director, del Toro is working on updates on Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a remake of Slaughterhouse Five and a two-part film adaptation of The Hobbit.

Del Toro admits he doesn’t have a strong taste for fantasy fiction, but says he loves The Hobbit. His own home library reflects those preferences.

“An entire room is dedicated to horror and only one bookshelf shelf is dedicated to sci-fi, half a bookshelf to fantasy, but those that are there I love passionately — absolutely adore them — and The Hobbit is one.”

He said he signed onto The Hobbit project, when he turned down a Harry Potter and the Narnia movies, because of his admiration for Peter Jackson’s work on the Lord of the Rings.

“I love the book exactly for what it is and … it’s all going to be a beautiful tale of a guy with an incredibly beautiful spirit, which all Hobbits have, who is confronted with a very vast much darker world than he knew. And he comes back to his point of origin completely changed and yet very sure of his own nature.”

 

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Girls Like Gore Too – GoreMaster.com interviews Eryn Krueger Mekash

Eryn Krueger Mekash applying butt bruise to Zoe Bell

Makeup artist Eryn Krueger Mekash took some time out of her hectic film and television schedule to graciously answer some questions for GoreMaster. Some of Eryn’s impressive list of credits include: Flags of Our Fathers (2006), Sabrina the Teenage Witch (1996-2003), Letters From Iwo Jima (2006), Alpha dog (2006), Nip/Tuck TV series, and Prom Night (2008). She shares her story and how much the”old school” makeup effects influenced her decision to become a “killer” makeup artist.

Read the interview here  Eryn Krueger Mekash Interview

I, Frankenstein

I Frankenstein

 

 

 

4/16/09  – 

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Director Patrick Tatopoulos, Underworld co-creator Kevin Grevioux and Death Ray Films are partnering up on the film I, Frankenstein.

I, Frankenstein is a soon to be released Darkstorm Comic that was written by Grevioux. The film combines classic monsters of horror like Frankenstein’s Monster, the Invisible Man, Dracula and the Hunchback of Notre Dame, in a present day “film noir” setting.

In the film Frankenstein has learned to control his inner demons and is now a private detective. As for Dracula, he is a crime leader and the the Invisible Man works as “a secret operative.”

Producing will be Robert Sanchez and Chris Patton through Death Ray. Ryan Turek is helping to develop the project.

Death Ray hopes to launch a franchise with I, Frankenstein.

 

 

…more like this at  GoreMaster.com

Frankstein Head Knocker