Release Date: November 17, 1979

Synopsis (from IMDb) – “A novelist and a young horror fan attempt to save a small New England town which has been invaded by vampires.”

Click here to buy Salem’s Lot from Amazon

Welcome to the fourth part of my ongoing series A King’s Ransom, a series of articles that will look at the full Stephen King library, including re-reading all his books and watching all the movies based on his writing. Click here to catch up on A King’s Ransom.

Click here to read my review of the novel Salem’s Lot

Salem’s Lot Movie Review

Directed by Tobe Hooper
Written by Paul Monash

Cast: David Soul, James Mason, Lance Kerwin, Bonnie Bedelia, Lew Ayres, Julie Cobb, Elisha Cook Jr., George Dzundza, Ed Flanders, Geoffrey Lewis, Kenneth McMillan, Fred Willard, Marie Windsor

In 1974, Tobe Hooper set the horror world on fire with his movie Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It looked like Hooper would add his name to the growing list of horror greats like George Romero and John Carpenter. However, he followed it up with the lackluster Eaten Alive and in 1979 was making a made-for-TV miniseries based on a novel by a young, fresh horror author.

That novel was Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot and his movie – a three-hour television event – remains beloved by many of King’s fans almost 40 years since it first aired on CBS.

Revisiting the movie, 38 years after its release, shows that the final product was a mixed bag. The film itself has scary moments, and the pacing is quite good for a television miniseries. However, there are also many things that really hold this effort down from being an all-time classic.

When adapting this for television, writer Paul Monash took the sprawling novel of a New England town overrun by vampires and condensed the characters into a small handful of characters. One problem with the book was that there were so many characters that it was often easy to confuse them. That is because King wasn’t making a novel about vampires and a hero to fight them but was making a story about a town with problems already poisoning it, one that never saw its own death coming.

By limiting the characters and making this movie all about a hero to fight the vampires, Hooper directed a film that (much like The Shining), changed the focus of the movie from the town to a small character-driven horror story.

The hero, in this case, is author Ben Mears. Just like in the book, Mears came back to the town he lived in as a child and wanted to use the old Marsten House as a muse for his new novel. The backstory is the same in the movie and book – Mears went into the Marsten House as a child on a dare and saw a vision of Hubie Marsten hanging by his neck – Hubie being a man who died there many years before.

Also, just like in the novel, two men beat Ben to the town and buy the house for themselves – antique dealers named Richard Straker and Kurt Barlow. While a few people had seen Straker, Barlow had yet to arrive in town.

Where the movie changes things up is with the townspeople, many of whom the film combines into different characters. One example is the story of Bonnie Sawyer, a housewife who is cheating on her husband with an electrician named Reggie. In the movie, Bonnie is cheating on her husband with realtor Larry Crockett.

Other characters, such as town gossip Audrey Hersey, teenage mother Sandy, and the school bus driver Charlie Rhodes were omitted from the movie altogether (the latter of which was a huge loss as his demise in the novel was a scene that could have been hugely frightening in the movie).

That worked well to streamline the movie, but it also made this more about Ben and shortchanged characters that played an essential role in the movie. One misstep was to eliminate the young doctor Jimmy Cody and combine his character with Susan’s dad. Another disappointment was to make Father Callihan almost an afterthought in the movie. It was also disappointing to see Jason Burke, such an important character from the book, dismissed so quickly in the movie. Finally, Mark himself was almost thrown in at the end, although his skills and importance were hinted at early in the movie.

The movie also chose to ignore the entire mystery of the vampires and where they were hiding, and just went with the easy way out at the end.

There were problems with the lighting of the movie, as well as the obvious commercial breaks and the really rough editing where a monster attack was freeze-framed in a very cheesy manner. However, those were a sign of the times and can be overlooked. What can’t be ignored is the acting.

David Soul (best known for his Starsky & Hutch) days was decent as Ben Mears. James Mason as Straker, Bonnie Bedelia as Susan and Lew Ires as Jason Burke were also highlights. However, there were many instances of horrible acting that really pulled me out of the movie.

Geoffrey Lewis, who had 16 years of television acting experience before he took on the role as Mike, was hugely disappointed in the movie. Elisha Cook Jr., an actor with roles in legendary films like Rosemary’s Baby, The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, and Shane, was terrible as Weasel, a character with importance in the book that was a joke in the movie.

Barney McFadden played Ned Tibbets, and his death scene included a freeze-frame that left his ridiculous final facial expression as something that I can’t unsee and made his death a complete laugh when it should have been horrific.

These moments lie almost more at the feet of Tobe Hooper than at the feet of the specific actors. Hooper directed them in these scenes and knew he was going to use close-ups and freeze-frames and still made them as ridiculous as possible. They were laughable but not in a good way that eased tension in a horror movie.

It also has to be pointed out that some of the moments, like when the Petrie house began to shake like an earthquake before Barlow showed up made no sense for a vampire movie. It was like Hooper had never seen a vampire movie before making this.

Susan’s fate also bothered me in the movie. Remember, in the book, Ben opened the casket expecting to find Barlow, but Susan was there already turned. He had to kill her and then figured out that Barlow was hidden somewhere else. In the movie, there was no mystery and Barlow was there.

Instead of returning years later to burn down the house, Ben did it then and there. However, since Barlow and his vampires had yet to awaken that night, it meant Susan was not yet turned – which meant that Ben killed her when he burned down the house. The movie doesn’t really touch on that but it is the only explanation.  Add that to the fact that the movie never did explain what happened to Father Callihan and there were too many unanswered questions for a three-hour movie.

That is a lot of complaints about the Salem’s Lot miniseries, and they are all legitimate complaints. However, somehow, despite the bad acting, questionable special effects and the story lacking what made the novel great, Salem’s Lot ends up as an entertaining and engrossing horror movie.

As much as Tobe Hooper does wrong, he does just as much right when it comes to creating a horror flick that sucks in the viewer and keeps them engrossed, despite the three-hour running time. A product of its time, fans should cut Salem’s Lot a break on the bad production values and look past the bad acting because, beneath it all, this is a horror movie worth watching.

Next week, I will look at the 1977 Stephen King novel The Shining.

The post A King’s Ransom: Salem’s Lot Film Review (1979) appeared first on Renegade Cinema.

Release Date: November 16, 1976

Synopsis (from IMDb) – “Carrie White, a shy, friendless teenage girl who is sheltered by her domineering, religious mother, unleashes her telekinetic powers after being humiliated by her classmates at her senior prom.”

Click here to buy Carrie from Amazon

Welcome to part two of A King’s Ransom. This series of articles is a look at the full Stephen King library, including re-reading all his books from the start in chronological order, as well as watching the movies that came from his incredible career – both those adapted from his novels and short stories and those original films that King had a hand in creating.

I am starting back from the beginning, but I will only deal with short stories when they arrive in collected editions. Also, for King’s movies, I am just dealing with films adapted from his novels and short stories (or his original creations) and not any sequels – so don’t expect me to watch and talk about Children of the Corn 42.

With that said, here is a look at the first ever Stephen King adaptation, also based on his first published novel, Carrie.

Click here to read my review of the novel Carrie

Carrie Movie Review (1976)

Directed by Brian De Palma
Written by Lawrence D. Cohen

Cast: Sissy Spacek, Piper Laurie, Amy Irving, William Katt, John Travolta, Nancy Allen, Betty Buckley

Stephen King wrote a few novels and a ton of short stories before he sold his first published novel, Carrie. As a matter of fact, he threw the opening to Carrie in the trash until his wife Tabitha pulled it out and demanded that he write this book. It is a good thing too. Carrie launched King’s novel writing career and also gave him his first movie credit, just two short years after publishing the book.

King’s story ended up in the hands of filmmaker Brian De Palma. While kids today may not realize how great De Palma was in his prime, a look at his filmography should convince you of his brilliance. Before Carrie, he directed the chilling thriller Sisters, and he followed up Carrie with a career that included hits like Dressed to Kill, Scarface, The Untouchables, Carlito’s Way and Mission: Impossible.

When it came to Carrie, it was easy to see that De Palma worshipped at the altar of Alfred Hitchcock – something that he made clear through homage in almost all his movies. Items that De Palma uses in Carrie that Hitchcock made famous includes the split-screen montage, the contrasting scene where two things happen at the same time, and the point of view editing where we see what that characters witness as they see it. These are great techniques to put us in the POV of characters like Carrie and Sue while raising the tension.

That is very important because so much of the novel Carrie takes place in the minds of characters like Carrie and Sue and that is something many filmmakers struggle with while adapting Stephen King movies.

De Palma’s Carrie shares many similarities with the novel, and it is clear that Brian De Palma and screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen (who also wrote the 2013 version of Carrie) worked hard to make this movie as faithful as possible.

The film opens with a slightly disturbing scene, at least by today’s moral standards. After a volleyball game in high school PE class, the girls are all in the shower cleaning up. De Palma takes the camera slowly through the locker room, getting plenty of shots of nude girls running around with Paul Donaggio’s slightly melancholy opening title theme playing over the slow tracking shot.

The idea of the camera lecherously peeping into the girl’s locker room is disturbing enough, but then it all breaks down when Carrie starts her period and completely loses it. While the book paints the picture that Carrie believed she was dying, it is left up to the viewer to understand why she is freaking out at this moment.

Miss Collins (Miss Desjardin from the novel) slightly explains this to the principal in a scene that comes directly from the book, but it only slightly paints the picture of what is going on in Carrie’s mind. That is the one downfall of this film. De Palma uses a minimalistic approach in directing this movie when it comes to the story and tries to make up for it with his camera and editing tricks.

As a result, many of the moments in the book that shocks the reader and brings them to Carrie’s side are left unsaid in the movie. De Palma only hints at Carrie’s mother’s history of abuse and changes her father’s backstory completely. Sue plays a much smaller role in the film than she does in the book. The entire relationship between Chris and Billy barely exists. There is so much information that could make Carrie a much more sympathetic character that is missing from the movie.

The movie seems to want to show us things happening but not stick around long enough to understand why the characters do what they do. Examples are when Chris and Billy are planning the prom attack. Billy is slightly abusive and confused when dealing with Chris. They go to kill the pigs. They set up the blood. They drop the blood on Carrie. While on the run, Chris tries to run Carrie over and they die.

If that sounds like bullet points, that is how De Palma precisely edited it. That is what happened in Billy’s story. He remains nothing more than a minor side character, even though he shares responsibility for the entire massacre at the prom with Chris.

Sue is similar. She asks Tommy to take Carrie to the prom and refuses to back down when Miss Collins pushes her about it. Then, in a significant change from the novel, she goes to the dance and sees the incident before it happens only to get thrown out and spared from the death.

Once again, it sounds like bullet points, but that is how De Palma filmed it happening. The one bad thing about Sue’s story is that the movie eliminates her link with Carrie as one of the innocents that night – and someone who helped Carrie in her last moment on Earth. De Palma passed on that for the jump scare at the end.

With that said, that doesn’t mean the movie doesn’t work.

The entire setup with Carrie and her mother was well done. While the movie ignored much of her mom’s abuse, Piper Laurie did enough with her character to show how scary and demented Margaret White was. The film showed a lot of religious symbolism although De Palma chose not to point out the fundamentalism of her beliefs. Instead, he used imagery and set design to try to emphasize this fact.

When Carrie tells her mother that she is going to the prom, and her mom can’t stop her, it is the turning point in the movie – as it is in the book. That tells me that, while much was left out, what De Palma did worked well.

De Palma filmed the actual prom disaster perfectly, and the split screen and lighting choices made it work great considering the lack of gore outside of a couple of the kills. The complete devastation of the prom was not quite as massive visually in the movie, but the POV shots and split screen work made what was shown work quite well.

Another change that De Palma made was the death of Margaret White. In the book, Carrie just stopped her mom’s heart. However, in the movie, De Palma rightly understood that there needed to be a more dynamic climax, so he had Margaret stab her daughter only to have Carrie crucify her mother. The shot of Margaret pinned to the wall dead, with knives piercing her in the same spots as the small crucifix in the closet, was shocking and disturbing.

The acting was hit-and-miss. Sissy Spacek was terrific as Carrie and brought her shame, uneasiness and eventual guilt to life brilliantly. At the prom, it was easy to feel her joy, and that was all due to nothing more than the facial expressions and acting of Spacek.

Piper Laurie, as mentioned earlier, was brilliant as Margaret White. The script gave her little in the way of story, but she made up for it in her manic performance, one that created one of the most disturbing parental figures in movie history. On the other side, Betty Buckley was great as Miss Collins, delivering as the one positive authority figure in the movie.

William Katt (The Greatest American Hero) was decent as Tommy, although he was only expected to smile big most of the time. For younger actors, John Travolta, Nancy Allen and Amy Irving did the best they could with what the script gave them – Allen the best of the trio.

Carrie ended up as a very loyal and disturbing horror film. The film was, much like the book, a story of human monsters (Margaret White and Chris Hargensen) pushing an innocent girl to the limit and then watching as the world burns. In the book, Carrie was an innocent girl who becomes a monster. In the movie, Carrie kills many people but, at the end of the day, doesn’t lose her innocence.

Carrie White was a victim pushed to fight back and did it in the most brutal way possible.

Next week, I will look at the 1975 Stephen King novel Salem’s Lot.

The post A King’s Ransom: Carrie Film Review (1976) appeared first on Renegade Cinema.

Darren Aronofsky’s movies are hyper-kinetic morality tales set in trippy, deeply psychologically dreamscapes.  As someone who has not yet seen Noah, the movie, I’ve read the novelization, penned by Mark Morris and based of Aronofsky and co-writer Ari Handel’s script. And I have to say, revisiting the Biblical (and Quranic, and Judaic) story has allowed me to appreciate its bonkers simplicity, surprising amount of suspense, and complex moral undertones. If the movie achieves anywhere near this level of depth and makes one’s noggin start thinkin’, then we are in good company.

The novel begins with a young Noah sitting with his father, Lamech, hearing tales of the Creator in what appears to be a depraved and dangerous landscape. We are introduced right away to the magic; a sacred snakeskin morphs when exposed to fire, and vice versa. A group of hideous and savage vagabonds show up and bash Lamech’s head in in front of his helpless young son. Morris describes this scene in explicit detail—from the dying, glassed over eyes of his father to Noah’s brief hope that his father will “merely be injured”. This type of exposition elevates the story from brutish gratuity to a genuine portrayal of human experience.

In fact, the entire novel feels as if we are witnessing the true story of Noah and the Ark, to the extent that one can imagine the original “book” being penned off real-life characters. Noah, now grown, is a real man in a real time with definite characteristics that make him relatable. He’s a dutiful husband and father, bad-ass yet reluctant protector (early on, he gruesomely kills three poachers who break a dog’s legs to eat it) and a thoughtful, wise survivalist. He never lets obstacles brings him down. His faith and resolution allow him to come off calm and composed, the type of servant God would need and desire to fulfill His mission of destroying mankind and rebuilding it again from scratch.

About His mission. Morris, and by extension Aronofsky and Handel, do a terrific job at creating this apocalyptic, barren, and frankly terrifying world. Who didn’t wonder at a young age what was so awful about people that made God want to wash us out? As an innocent child, I always imagined drunken gambling and killing and cheesy brothels. Here, we have genocide, petty thievery, cannibalism, sex slavery, and the sort of eco-devastation that causes giant pools of toxic sludge to subsume and corrode innocent deer. In Chapter 4, Noah and his family come across a series of impaled skeletons, countless of them, on their way to meet with Noah’s grandfather. They also come across a dying, eviscerated girl and her dead family.  Noah’s wife, Naameh stitches up and cares for the girl, and she is raised for the next ten years alongside Noah’s two sons. In fact, time goes by rather slowly from the time Noah is told by God through several dream sequences that he must build the Ark, or specifically that “He is going to destroy the world”, and the time the actual flood happens. Luckily for everyone on earth, God gives Noah ample time to build his Ark and summon all the critters, even providing a lush forest from which he can hew wood. The chapter when the animals finally show up is a high point.

There are many wholly original sequences to Noah. Biblical giants are represented by giant stone post-Angels called the Watchers, who help Noah build the Ark and also protect him from danger. The sequences in which Morris describes these heavenly beings descending onto earth and being turned into ugly stone behemoths is nothing short of fantastical.

By the time the flood actually happens, we are quite familiar with the decimated and hopeless ancient world the book has created.  The antagonists become so inhuman in their actions and descriptions—teeth bared, eyes crazed—that the audience is meant to sympathize with Noah’s plight. This justification of killing all of humanity seems forced, and the book (and perhaps movie by extension) wants us to understand and sympathize with Noah’s determination in following the instructions of an omniscient being. This is problematic, to say the least. It reminded me of Michael Shannon in Take Shelter, or other characters who might come off psychotically deranged in their self-righteousness in any other circumstance.

But the novel Noah is worth picking up because it makes you consider all these things, and it’s fun to be thrust into a different time period, one that is not commonly represented. Reading the book forces you think how important spiritual and moral quandaries shape our society and who we are, especially quandaries that are, by nature, dogmatic and divisive.  The unique and creative take on the Biblical tale is precisely what makes the movie and novel an intriguing joyride through time and myth.

The post Noah the Novelization Book Review appeared first on Renegade Cinema.

That novel showed us the entire train in a trip from the rear to the front and was a very interesting look at how this society exists after the rest of the world was destroyed.

In Snowpiercer 2: The Explorers, the second graphic novel which as both the second and third parts of this story, we learn that there are more survivors aboard a second train called the Icebreaker. This train is very similar to the Snowpiercer train, which is a problem since that means the story is very similar to the first book and there is a lot of repetition.

The back of the train is the poor, there is a section that is a prison, which consists of flat boxes (similar to Morgue boxes), then there is the middle class in the middle and the ruling class in the front. Just like with the first novel, we follow one man as he makes his way from the front of the train to the back and then back again. However, there are enough differences to make this worth a read.

The man is Puig, an Explorer who lost his parents to a mad man’s grenade 15 years before this story starts. Explorers are people who actually leave the train to investigate the world outside as they attempt to discover a way to survive outside of the train. However, these Explorers are also disposable, and Puig’s early memories included the first time the train had a “brake test” and stopped long enough for the Explorers to get off for the first time. That was the day his parent’s died.

Now, an adult, he is an Explorer and when he sets out on one of the brake missions, he finds a corpse and realizes this person was from that fateful first experience and was left out to die. When he returns, he is tried for turning off his video monitor while exploring and is sentenced to a suicide mission. When the ruler’s daughter televises the suicide mission on the train’s televisions, Puig is allowed to return and given a hero’s welcome, the hand of the daughter in marriage and a spot with the ruling council.

What Snowpiercer 2: The Explorers does, that veers from the first novel, is show our hero becoming one of the ruling class and starting to hide things from the people on the train as well. This includes the fear factor that there is always a chance that the Icebreaker may one day crash head on with the Snowpiercer, and the people need the rulers to make sure that never happens.

We also meet more religious nuts, theses believing they are really on a spaceship in outer space instead of on a train, and some neat entertainment options for the survivors, including virtual reality trips to help them get by. There is also enough political intrigue to fill a Shakespeare play. The major motif of this story is a search for survivors more than a never ending round trip journey to death.

By the end, there is enough here to remain an interesting read, but at the end of the day there is the huge problem that Snowpiercer 2: The Explorers is not as good as Snowpiercer: The Escape. That hurts because as a standalone novel, this is an interesting read, but it ties so much into the first novel that you need to read both and this one just feels like a slight letdown after such an impressive debut.

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Before I get much into this review, I will preface by saying that if you are a fan of the WWE or professional wrestling in general, WWE 50 is a must-buy and might be the best book I have ever seen when it comes to the history of the WWE. I also want to say that you need to buy the physical book and not the Kindle edition, because this is a beautiful book and is worth the $7 difference in price. With that out of the way, let’s look and see what you get with this purchase.

Last year, the WWE released their Blu-ray titled The History of WWE: 50 Years of Sports Entertainment and WWE 50 is the perfect complement to that Blu-ray documentary. While the two products tell similar stories, there is so much more in this book that was not a part of that great documentary.

When you open the book, you see that every poster from every WWE pay-per-view is on the inside front and back covers of the book. It isn’t anything but packaging, but it is pretty cool. However, once you start reading the book, you find this is something special that tells the complete history of the WWE, the good and the bad.

WWE 50 starts out with Capitol Wrestling with Vincent J. McMahon and his work in building his wrestling promotion. The entire ordeal where Vince left the NWA with Buddy Rogers and then discovered Bruno Sammartino is given a lot more space here than the documentary ever gave it. While the documentary skimmed over the pre-Hulk Hogan era, this book not only goes into detail what happened in that era, but also has some amazing photographs.

Plus, like I said, this even gives the dirt as well, such as Superstar Billy Graham still saying the WWWF dropped the ball when they shortened his title rein to give the belt to a “boring” Bob Backlund. I also learned that Gorilla Monsoon was completely against Vince Sr. selling the company to Vince Jr. because he was one of the owners along with Sr. and wanted the company to remain in old school hands.

If there is one thing that bothers me about the story in this book, it is how it discounts promoters like Bill Watts and Fritz Von Erich as being short sighted, and then later when Triple H calls other promotions today “small and shabby” and places that teach bad habits when it comes to in-ring work. However, as a book about the WWE, it is clear they have an agenda and that is to show that they were right in the long run. They did give credit to WCW, but only slightly.

Speaking of WCW, there is an awesome graphic during the section about the Monday Night Wars where it shows the ratings for every week that they went head-to-head, from the start to the finish. There is also a fantastic map in the book where it showed who ran which territory in the country before the WWF started its take over.

Plus, did I mention the photos? This is why you need the physical book. From old school wrestling posters to in ring photographs to behind-the-scenes photos (such as a very young Stephanie McMahon sitting on Andre the Giant’s lap), this book has everything a WWE fan could want. This is a reason to buy the book all by itself.

However, Sullivan wrote a very entertaining and interesting story. While it was clear this was from the WWE’s point-of-view, that is ok because the winners write the history. However, there are a lot of behind-the-scenes stories that are told from all points of view. We hear Pat Patterson talking about how he hated Shawn Michaels but loved to watch him wrestle. We have Steve Austin regretting ever shaking Mr. McMahon’s hand and turning bad, saying he would do it all the same (cheating to beat The Rock) but wouldn’t have turned good. We even get a lot of comments from Vince Russo as well as Paul Heyman’s thoughts on McMahon ruining ECW when he brought it back.

Things slow down at the end when the book talks about marketing, books and movies, and the Performance Center, but it is a complete history and those areas are needed. For those who love the curiosities, the book also talks about the XFL and World Bodybuilding ventures that were not as successful for Vince McMahon.

Let me be 100% honest. I loved WWE 50 and every WWE fan should own it. If I could give it more than a 10, I would.

The post WWE 50: Celebrating 50 Years of Sports Entertainment Book Review appeared first on Renegade Cinema.

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There’s no denying the legendary status of the Alien franchise but it’s also been no secret that the brand has been going through some dark times.  After a couple of much maligned sequels, two underwhelming cross-over films, and the massively disappointing Prometheus, it has become increasingly difficult to hope that the series would be able to regain it’s credibility.  While Alien: Out of the Shadows isn’t enough to offset the franchise’s past failures, it’s an encouraging step in the right direction.

The book begins thirty-seven years after the events of the first Alien film on a mining ship called Marion.  While mining the planet LV-178 for material called trimonite (which was really tempting to call unobtanium), the workers  discover a swarm of the mysterious Xenomorphs.  The resulting chaos causes a shuttle to collide with Marion leaving all but eight crew members dead.  As the surviving crew members, led by Chief Engineer Chris “Hoop” Hooper, are frantically searching for a way to escape the dying ship, they pick up a shuttle containing Ellen Ripley.  Once they revive Ripley, Hoop devises a plan for the crew to escape in her shuttle. Hoop quickly realizes, however, the only way the escape is feasible is to gather supplies on LV-178, in the middle of the Xenomorph nest.  Making matter worse is that android Ash managed to hitch a ride on Ripley’s shuttle and continues to be hellbent on completing his mission for his bosses at Weyland-Yutani to bring back the alien life form.

Since Alien: Out of the Shadows serves as a midquel between Alien and Aliens, there is an certain lack of suspense to be expected but Lebbon still manages to give the book a surprisingly tense setting.  For example, in the opening chapter, the Marion crew members are forced to watch a shuttle video feed in horror as the aliens slaughter everyone on board.  There’s no audio and the silence winds up making the carnage all the more devastating.

Afterwards, the majority of the novel gives off a very claustrophobic environment which I felt was one of the best elements of the first two Alien films as well as a perpetual feeling of dread.  As a matter of fact, it feels like they try to borrow many of the better elements (at one point a guy even says game over”) of the first two films.  Normally, I would call it a ripoff but here it feels more like a respectful homage from an author who recognized what made the series work to begin with.

As far as Ripley goes, rather than try to add to the character’s legacy, the book decides to go to delve into her life before her time on the ill-fated Nostromo.  Some of the more dedicated fans of the series might remember that she had a daughter that is seldom mentioned and never seen.  To me, this fact always felt like a bit of an elephant in the room and it was refreshing to finally see it addressed. When Ripley finds out how long she has been in stasis, she is immediately wracked with guilt over her inability to be there for her now fully grown daughter. As the novel progresses, she’s being haunted by hallucinations of what her life might have been like if she had never left Earth before being brought back to reality.

The one element though that gives me mixed feelings is the portrayal of Ash. Since using his android body was no longer an option for fairly obvious reasons, his presence has now been transferred into the computer of Ripley’s shuttle.  While this certainly makes him more threatening, the fact of the matter this has been before (and better) with characters like HAL-9000, Ultron and Brainiac.  There’s nothing particularly wrong with this version of Ash and there even certain times where his presence feels downright unsettling but at this point it’s kind of been done to death.

Alien: Out of the Shadows is the first installment of a new Alien trilogy and though it’s too soon to tell how the rest of the series will go, it’s off to a promising start.  While certainly not a perfect story, it manages to recreate the some of the better elements of the franchise and remind me of what made the franchise so appealing in the first place.

The post Alien: Out of the Shadows Review appeared first on Renegade Cinema.

Head over to YouTube and you will see that The Guild web series received anywhere from 400,000 t0 over 1 million views PER EPISODE. Yeah, it was not only one of the first big successful Internet web series, but was also the inspiration for Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-Long Blog, which everyone has heard of.

And, honestly, everyone needs to know about The Guild as well.

The web series was created by Felicia Day in 2007. Before this, Day had a role on the TV series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer (as Vi). She also had small roles on a ton of other popular television shows but wanted to do something special, something that was hers. She joined up with Kim Evey, who served as the co-producer, and set out to create The Guild.

The Guild is set up around a group of people who play online MMO games (such as Worlds of Warcraft). Much of the early shows contrasts the fact that they live in their game world and think they know each other but then shows how strange it is when they first meet and then how they are different – or very similar – to the characters they portray in the game.

Honestly, that is just scratching the surface and you need to watch it to get the full effect of what The Guild is really about.

This book is set up in a manner where Day, as well as her co-stars and crew members, tell the story in an almost narrative. If you read the Saturday Night Live biography Live From New York, it is set up in a similar style, but basically it comes down to seeing a person’s name and then they talk about something. Then you get another person’s name and they give their thoughts about it.

That makes this book not only an easy read, but a very entertaining one. Of course, Day gets the most time to talk here because she was the creator, star and writer of all the episodes, but she does not dominate the conversation.

Everyone gets a chance to share in the joy of telling the story of The Guild, including special guest star Wil Wheaton, who starred in season three as the leader of an antagonistic guild. The fact that Wheaton was in the show as a major character should tell you how successful the show became.

Yes, Felicia Day was a “name” before The Guild, but she started this as a startup and used what money she could scrounge up to make it. Then, she found an audience which caused Microsoft to offer them a deal to finance the show. They then ended up with names like Neil Gaiman, Nathan Fillion, Stan Lee, Kevin Sorbo and many more to offer to cameo in the series.

What this book tells is a true success story, of how Felicia Day found something she thought could work, took the chance on putting it out there for people to see, and ended up with a winning show on her hands. This is – honestly – something anyone who dreams of creating web content should read. It is very uplifting.

The book is also FULL of photos from The Guild, many behind the scenes shots. There is also interviews with people like Jed Whedon (Joss’ brother who show runs Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD) who helped with the music videos, as well as a look at their convention experiences and how they pulled off the convention season.

The Guild: The Official Companion is a great read for anyone who loves the show and is a book that will make anyone who hasn’t seen it want to check it out. This book is highly recommended.

Check out the three music videos by The Guild, produced by Jed Wheadon.

http://youtu.be/jFhgupR565Q

The post The Guild: The Official Companion Review appeared first on Renegade Cinema.

Artwork by

For those who don’t know, Scott C is a cartoonist who has created a series of pieces of artwork that sees two characters from a pop culture favorite movie facing off once again.

An example is often as simple as Walter Matheu facing off with the Bad News Bears players, as obscure as the little boy facing a Red Balloon or as quirky as the three main characters from Office Space facing off with the printer. What makes these so impressive is that, while many of the drawings are minimalistic, you can always recognize the actor’s face that the photos represent.

When looking at the Reservoir Dogs drawing, with Tim Roth lying in a pool of blood, you immediately recognize Chris Penn. My wife and I went through the book together when it first arrived in the mail, and it became a fun contest to see who could figure out the movie first. She was especially excited when she beat me to the Space Balls photo.

The only drawback to this book is that only real film geeks can fully appreciate the book. There is no cheat sheet anywhere in its pages, so if you can’t figure one out, you are SOL.

The intro is by Edgar Wright, who says he has prints hanging in his office of the Scott C art for his movies, Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. That is about the highest praise an artist can get.

Is it worth the buy? I think it is completely worth it for anyone who loves movies or is a huge pop culture fan. This might not be so big for non-film geeks, but for those of us who live film, this is a gold mine of smiles.

Check out Scott C’s website for samples of what you will find in Great Showdowns: The Return.

The post Great Showdowns: The Return Book Review appeared first on Renegade Cinema.

When a novelization of a film comes, there are two purposes for the book. The first is to give fans of the movie something extra, some depth to the movie that adds to the story and the experience. The second purpose is to give people who have not seen the movie a reason to want to see the movie – a great story that can stand on its own, movie or not. This Pacific Rim book does both of those things.

When reading D-Rock’s review of the Pacific Rim movie, the first thing he offers up is that the story is not a fresh one and is derivative. Arguably, the last thing you will say when you finish reading the Pacific Rim book is that the story is derivative. This story is so much more than just robots fighting monsters.

This is a story that reinvents what the monsters we have seen in movies since World War II might represent.

The story starts off in the past, where Raleigh and his brother Yancy are fighting a giant Kaiju in their Jaegar robotic fighting machine. They beat the Kaiju, but at the expense of Yancy, who dies in the fight. One thing to pull away from this scene is that the Kaiju might not be mindless monsters, because this one knew exactly how and where to attack in order to find the pilots. It is a little plot point, but that is what makes this story strong – you can follow these clues to figure out the big twist of the story about the same time the characters figure it out.

Raleigh has quit the Rangers since his brother died and is just helping build walls. Meanwhile, the governments of the world have decided to quit putting money into the Jaegar program, choosing instead to just build walls and hide from the Kaiju. When we move back to the present day, there are only four Jaegar machines left and the head of the program – now surviving on its own without the government’s help – seeks out Raleigh for his skills to set out on one last mission to try to win the war.

If they fail this time, the world will die. Before the Jaegars were ever created, the world tried every manner of fighting they could think of, with nuking the monsters the last resort. This method killed more people than even the monsters would have and soon the monsters were able to even withstand a nuclear attack. The four final Jaegars are the world’s last stand, and the world won’t even support them.

That made this story about the few people remaining with faith in the program – all alone – trying to save the world of people who had already given up.

Here is the most interesting part of this book. The giant robots vs. monsters battles that everyone talks about are only a small part of the book. There is the giant battle at the beginning and then there is not another battle with Kaiju until you are almost 2/3 of the way finished with the novel. That is a smart decision because reading about the fights is not exciting if they stretch on and one. The Pacific Rim book really shows what these monsters are, where they came from, and why they keep getting bigger and stronger, something people might have missed if they just watched the movie once and only paid attention to the big robot vs monster fights.

This Pacific Rim book develops some great characters – Raleigh and his ability to move on after the death of his brother; Stacker Pentecost, the man who leads the program, and his determination to save the world that has since passed his program by; Mori, a girl who Stacker saved as a child and owes everything to him while also wanting to prove she can be a Ranger as well; and Newt and Gottlieb, the two scientists who figure out what the Kaiju really are, and who both cripple the final mission and then save everyone with their brains.

This book presents so many other great characters as well, with Herc and his son Chuck, and the black market dealer Hannibal Chau among the best.

Let’s talk about the writing. One of the keys to keeping someone reading, and not putting the book down, is to create compelling cliffhangers at the end of each chapter and Alex Irvine mastered that technique here. It was almost impossible to put the book down for the night when a chapter ended, because he kept the action moving and the story so strong.

With the interesting characters, the genius twist and turns of the story, the well placed cliffhanger chapter ends, and great pacing, the Pacific Rim book was just about perfect. It added enough to make people want to see the movie and included a ton of extra info (including classified documents in between every chapter about characters, missions, Kaijus and Jaegars) that adds to the already great movie.

It doesn’t get much better than this.

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