Here’s how little I understood BEOWULF when I had to read it in English class in junior high and again in high school: I thought the title referred to the monster, and that the monster was a wolf. Laugh all you want, but Anglo-Saxon epic poems of the 8th century aren’t the easiest things to decipher.

Luckily, Robert Zemeckis’ BEOWULF is different, and I don’t just mean because it’s animated. It’s his “no-bullshit” version of the epic poem, as he promises on the making-of documentary featured on the DVD’s extra features: “This has nothing to do with the BEOWULF you were forced to read in junior high school. It’s all about eating, drinking, killing and fornicating.”

Actually, as scripted by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary, the movie doesn’t stray all that far from the story of its source. It’s just that it ditches much of the boring elements and amps up the saucy ones, leaving an action-oriented, sometimes ribald and unapologetically over-the-top experience. Should Beowulf really be shown punching his way out of sea monster by going through the eye? Sure, why the hell not?

Getting a CGI slimdown in the process, THE DEPARTED heavy Ray Winstone assumes the lead role of Beowulf, a hero – here, made flawed, in direct opposition to the poem – who arrives at the castle of King Hrothgar (Anthony Hopkins) to slay the monster Grendel (Crispin Glover), a giant deformed beast from a nearby village who doesn’t like all the noise their merriment makes.

Beowulf agrees, Grendel attacks and – while stark naked and opting to use no sword – our hero kills the creature. That doesn’t sit well with his serpentine mother, who takes the form of Angelina Jolie, whose breastastic reveal sent the tongues of Internet bloggers a-wagging when the scene was leaked just prior to its theatrical release. She offers Beowulf a truce: He can say he killed her if he promises to leave her be. Because she looks like a nude Jolie, he agrees.

Women are known to change their minds, however, which results in Beowulf having to engage in the fight of his life with a huge, fire-breathing dragon. Like much of the movie, this sequence is a thrill to watch. Even when the narrative lags – and at nearly two hours, it does here and there – the visuals are something to behold. While I’ve never been a fan of motion-capture animation, BEOWULF represents a huge leap for the medium; it’s difficult to imagine Zemeckis being able to make it live-action.

While I haven’t compared, I don’t have to see the theatrical cut to know that the unrated director’s cut is the one to watch. Laden as it is with violence, gore and nudity, it makes the ages-old story more exciting and accessible (Seamus Heaney or no Seamus Heaney) than it ever has been, or could ever hope to be.

For a more trash-oriented but still vastly entertaining take, don’t overlook 1999’s BEOWULF, from ALIEN NATION director Graham Baker. It plays fast and loose with the source material, as you’d expect a straight-to-video Christopher Lambert vehicle would.

Here, the inhabitants of a big, spooky castle are under constant threat of being made a meal by a ghost demon named Grendle. Their saving grace comes in the form of visiting mysterious stranger Beowulf, played by Lambert, the HIGHLANDER refugee and graduate of the Angry Whisper School of Acting.

Beowulf has a gift of sensing danger, so he knows when the monster is near. The beast is mostly a CGI creature given a wavy effect that looks like someone dragged a big magnet across your TV screen. The fight scenes – set to a techno score by Juno Reactor – alternately ape those found in MORTAL KOMBAT, THE MATRIX and EVIL DEAD II, and Beowulf himself busts out some GYMKATA moves. Assisting Beowulf is a foxy brunette (played by Rhona Mitra of HOLLOW MAN) who has a name, but I didn’t catch it because her boobs hang out the entire film.

How faithful is it to the poem? Again, it was a chore to read, but I’m pretty sure if the castle dudes were being visited in their dreams by a horny Playboy Playmate, I would’ve remembered, and maybe even aced the test. –Rod Lott

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Sometimes, there’s a lot to be said for keeping it simple. As undemanding as Steven Gould’s 1992 novel JUMPER is, it’s certainly memorable. Picking it up five years after first reading it, details came flooding back with ease.

While watching director Doug Liman’s big-budget adaptation starring STAR WARS prequel vet Hayden Christensen, I was forgetting plot points minutes after they were introduced – its can’t-miss conceit complicated by a need to muddle something so straightforward.

Both tell the story of a young man – Davy in the book, David in the movie – who suddenly and inexplicably acquires the gift of teleportation. As Gould conceived it, Davy’s power allowed him to escape an abusive father and a would-be rapist trucker before getting the bright idea to “borrow” considerable cash sums from bank vaults.

From there, Davy eludes police and NSA questioning while also thwarting terrorist acts for the feds and romancing a headstrong college student named Millie (but only after he’s devirginized by another girl, perhaps prompting some of the controversy this young-adult novel has courted in its history). He performs a lot of jumping between New York and Oklahoma.

But the movie diverges considerably after the phrase “bank vaults.” Oh, there’s Millie, alright; she’s now a childhood crush grown up to be a clueless barmaid played by THE O.C.’s Rachel Bilson. Most of the book is condensed into 15 or 20 minutes, then Liman and company exercise free reign, with more visually appealing but less interesting results.

David is chased not by the cops, but by the Paladins, a shadowy organization for whom Roland (Samuel L. Jackson) – sporting white hair that makes him look like a Fisher-Price toy, not to mention a knife he uses to kill David’s kind – works. Yes, that’s right: David is not the only “jumper,” as he learns when he meets the cocky Brit named Griffin (Jamie Bell of BILLY ELLIOT).

Neither Roland nor Griffin appears as characters in Gould’s book, but they take center stage in the film. (Gould has, however, smartly taken advantage of the loads of exposure the movie will afford his work by writing an original tie-in called JUMPER: GRIFFIN’S STORY, which serves as that character’s origin, continuity be damned.)

The joy of Gould’s source material stems from its childlike view of an amazing power. With Davy greeting his newfound skills with equal guilt and glee, it’s not unreasonable to view it as a thinly veiled tale of hitting puberty and discovering the magic of erections.

Liman, a gifted filmmaker (SWINGERS, GO, THE BOURNE IDENTITY) reduces Davy’s story to a mere special effect. Although mildly diverting, there’s nothing all that innocent – or human – about it. –Rod Lott

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Although I check out the British music magazines every time I go to the bookstore, it’s probably been two years since I bought one. In the past, its cover-affixed free CDs were like catnip to me, but as they became less adventurous, so did my willingness to fork over $10.

But now here’s one worth having: OK_COMPUTER, “free” with the February issue of MOJO magazine. With a tip of the hat to Radiohead (which adorns the mag’s cover), the disc is a 15-track collection of futurist electronic music, spanning from the 1960s to today. It begins with a double-dose of New Wave – with less-obvious cuts from The Human League and Gary Numan – but really finds its footing with Fujiya & Miyagi’s buoyant “Ankle Injuries.” While I’ve never heard of this act before, this 2006 cut is a wholly infectious feel-good anthem.

I also haven’t heard of The Peppers, but their 1973 “Pepper Box” sounds like it could have been made for today’s soulful dancefloors. The ’60s-era The Sounds of Tomorrow is represented with “Space Child,” which will appease the Joe Meek fans. Boards of Canada remixes an act named Clouddead, while the always-reliable Tangerine Dream is on hand with “Rubycon (Part One),” from 1975.

Only a couple of tracks are duds, and its wide range of discoveries (with just a hint of kitsch) reminded me of a couple of my all-time favorite compilations: SYNTH ME UP: 14 CLASSIC ELECTRONIC HITS and WIRED MAGAZINE PRESENTS: MUSIC FUTURISTS. Drive down to your local Borders now to avoid paying eBay-inflated prices later.

LG YC SLC PCH 29Z
SARG SLC RF PROV
NY S&P CRTNS 5Z
PLS FDG BRWNE
JD PEP GRVY MIZ
PTNT RSTD GARLIC PAR
MINI MPL CINN PIT
OORCH APL RSP
OM LT BF FRNK
OORCH CLCM OJ12
SOBE LIFE PSSN

… and one that’s not …

GREAT GUACAMOLE

Yet another retelling of Robert Louis Stevenson’s split-personality novella comes to the screen – this time with rockin’ tunes – in THE DR. JEKYLL & MR. HYDE ROCK ‘N ROLL MUSICAL. The title says it all.

It begins in classic movie-musical style, panning in to Stevenson’s quaint countryside home, as he awakes from a horrible dream and sees visions of the characters who populate his nightmares: our cast. For a $55,000 budget, this opening is admirable. Flash-forward to the present day – or 2003, when this film first was released – and Dr. Jekyll (writer/producer/composer/makeup artist Alan Bernhoft) is mixing up something special. He drinks it, and you know what happens next: He becomes Mr. Hyde, who kind of looks like a cross between Meat Loaf and a hobo, and embarks on a killing spree.

Oh, and the characters sing. A lot. It’s in the grand rock-opera style of THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW or TOMMY, with that exact 1970s vibe. The songs are competent, but not memorable. Often, the tunes make way for the filmmakers to throw in cheesy, ’80s Chroma key effects, where you’re left wondering whether you should laugh at it or with. As it went on, I still was uncertain how much of the goofiness was intentional, so I chose to laugh at it.

I’m afraid it has more ambition than to which it could live up, and the gimmick wears thin by the second song. But this film is a full 90 minutes, so prepare for many more of them, with Bernhoft giving it his all throughout. My attention quickly wavered, but did perk up later at a scene in a bar, where Hyde had his paws all over some whore in a black leather bra, singing about how he loves little girls. But my sudden reinterest had nothing to do with the bar or the song, I can assure you. –Rod Lott

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As awesome as the four FILM CREW discs are, I got the biggest “original MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000” contact high yet from CINEMATIC TITANIC. After all, it’s a project featuring MST’s first trio of stars – creator Joel Hodgson, Trace Beaulieu and J. Elvis Weinstein – as well as two later players in Mary Jo Pehl and Frank Conniff. Silhouettes, wisecracks and totally shitty movies – MST is pretty much back, kids, just minus the robots and network interference, and with the added bonus of a rhyming name.

The first CINEMATIC TITANIC project is skewering THE OOZING SKULL, aka BRAIN OF BLOOD, a 1972 mad-scientist cheapie directed by Z-movie legend Al Adamson. The roast starts with little fanfare and zero introduction; as it begins to unspool, our five principals take their spots on a stair-stepped balcony silhouette on both sides of the screen. Some are seated; others stand; all poke holes in this turd with razor-sharp wit.

There’s no “getting used” to it, nor “settling in.” So “on” is their rapport, it’s as if these guys never stopped working together in the first place. Rather than stop the movie as MST episodes did for transitionary host segments, Hodgson and company merely pause it to make some extended comment that requires more attention, such as bosomy starlet Regina Carroll’s horrendous makeup job.

I barely remember plot points from the mind-numbing SKULL, but that’s because there were so few. In a nutshell, an old coot of a scientist needs to transplant a brain ASAP – like, now – so he’s forced to pick the nearest body: his facially challenged mongoloid retard henchman. The (comparatively) smart brain doesn’t cotton to his new host body, so he takes advantage of his newfound brute strength and goes bonkers on everybody. And there’s a midget sidekick, who bears the brunt of many, many jokes … all merited, in my view.

There are no extras on the disc, but who needs ‘em? The feature alone is all you need for your humor RDA. Welcome back, guys; please don’t leave again. –Rod Lott

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What’s in the water o’er at The Horror Channel? Their original programming continues to impress me greatly – first with SHADOW FALLS and now even more so with HEARTLAND HORRORS: SEASON ONE, another online series rounded up in its entirety for DVD.

Ten short films await you on HEARTLAND HORRORS, none of them related other than the behind-the-camera talent – primarily Patrick Rea and SHADOW FALLS’ Kendal Sinn. Once again, this proves you don’t have to have a big budget to do horror right – just the heart for the material (well, competence goes a long way, too).

It begins with THE THING ABOUT BANNON’S LOOKOUT, which may be the most predictable of the bunch. But from there, things get more original and better, starting with COPY, in which a Xerox warns a woman not to hire the guy she’s just interviewed for – and promised – a job. It’s original and clever. So is THE LAST LAUGH, with a clown torturing a mime to try and coax a sound out of him. The ending is creepily dark, and kudos to whomever plays the mime; he turns in a hilarious silent performance.

WOMAN’S INTUITION has a young lady visiting the doctor because she feels something is wrong. As revealed in the shocking ending, boy, is it ever! A FEW MILES BACK feels like an adaptation of an old urban legend. It’s decent, but goes on a big too long at just over 10 minutes, beating you over the head with the obvious. (OUT TO PASTURE and BITTER SWEETS also carry the ring of a strong folklore influence, but succeed more with less time.)

SMOKED is kind of a one-joke bit, but done well, subverting expectations, and SHED OUT OF LUCK (great title, that) has a guy being held captive in a barn by … well, you just have to see it. When he’s offered a bowl of dinner, I just about lost it. And if you like zombies (these days, who doesn’t?), CAFÉ AT THE CROSSROADS will be you cup of undead tea.

Don’t click around and watch just a couple; hit “play all” and treat yourself to what amounts to a surprisingly satisfying indie-minded CREEPSHOW. The production values are superb for this sort of thing, and these guys clearly know what they’re doing. I just hope they get to do more of it.

But, wait! There’s more! Four additional shorts appear in the extras. Being all comedy-oriented and less polished, they wouldn’t fit in all that well with the main episodes, but as bonuses, they’re welcome. THE CLICKER is concerned with a remote control with a mind of its own, while THE PIRATE P.S.A. decries the oppression of the salty seafarers. MULTI-TASK is a six-minute mockumentary about an DIY filmmaker so fed up with his crew that he clones himself, so he can serve as director, writer, actor, etc. – all at the same time. Lastly, MIME AWAY is a commercial parody that is exactly like what it sounds.

At under $10, this is really quite a steal. Indie horror is alive and doing very, very well. –Rod Lott

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As if the name didn’t suggest such, Shadow Falls is a creepy small town. Located somewhere in the Midwest, it apparently died in the mid-’80s after something terrible happened at its local hospital. Now it appears to be all but deserted, but an evil still populates within its borders. Billed as the first horror TV series made for the Internet, the first eight episodes have made it to DVD as SHADOW FALLS: VOLUME 1.

With many strikes against it from the outset (ultra-low budget, shot on video, no-name cast and crew), I was as skeptical as anyone to check out this Horror Channel show, but it’s surprisingly pretty good. For one thing, it contains a great air of mystery. For another, most episodes are under 10 minutes in length, so they have little chance to bore. Each stands alone, but as becomes evident about midway through, there are threads woven and clues embedded in each that eventually will come to an all-makes-sense end (in episode 32, according to writer/director Kendal Sinn in the extra-feature interviews).

The first episode, “Jabberwocky,” seems utterly random: A little girl all alone in a classroom – except for her teacher – recites Lewis Carroll’s poem of the same name, and is rewarded with a disembodied human hand on which to snack. The end. On the surface, there appears to be no story, but stylistically, the seeds of the series have been planted.

Next is “Dead to Me,” in which a man is interrogated by someone unseen about a disastrous trip to the town; its final shot chills. “The Man from Lod” has a carful of teenagers stranded on its outskirts at night (car trouble will be a recurring theme of the series), and is the one episode I wouldn’t want to watch in the dark while home alone. Although initially humorous (”Where have I heard that before? Oh, yeah, FRIDAY THE FUCKING 13TH!”), it has a genuine scare and tension to burn.

“Daddy” brings a man to Shadow Falls, in search of his daughter who’s been missing for 20 years. “Crazy Joe’s Haunted Videotape” is the most overtly comedic, setting up a CLERKS-type scenario between two slacker store workers, but the enigmatic VHS they screen sets up a lot of mythology that gives you the most backstory thus far, and is creepy. In “My Pixie Valentine,” a girl is brought back to the town’s fields by the arrival of a letter from a past lover. But you just know she isn’t going to find roses awaiting her.

“Nurse Lemming’s Responsibility” concerns a dresser at a garage sale with a key hidden within its drawers, taking its discoverer to Shadow Falls’ graveyard, and “The Funny Scream of Nurse Karen” is an exchange between a seemingly insane doctor and his tied-up prey. Played out partly as grainy security-cam footage, this episode hints at more horrific things to come, but it’s also the season-ender.

The acting ranges from decent to amateurish, but Sinn smartly lets the silence permeate much of the running time. The shorter the episodes are, the better they seem to be, and that also goes for the ones with the least amount of dialogue. It’s the mood these create that makes SHADOW FALLS mildly addictive. Although I had better things to do, I couldn’t stop myself from watching “just one more.”

Season two was supposed to start running last fall; hopefully it’ll start soon, because I’m anxious to see what further secrets the town holds. –Rod Lott

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The damned thing is that MASTERS OF HORROR: THE DAMNED THING has the nerve to call itself an adaptation of Ambrose Bierce’s classic short story. In that 1894 tale, a group of men in a cabin hear a chilling account of the death of a man by an unseen force in the forest that ripped him to shreds. In this one-hour episode … well, at least someone gets ripped to shreds. Similarities, you end there.

This THING opens 24 years ago, when – shortly after black goo drips from the ceiling – a dad goes nuts, shoots his wife dead and almost kills his son, too, but he gets eviscerated and does whirly-loops as his guts spill out on the ground.

Surviving Kid grows up to be a small-town sheriff with a permanent limp, played by Sean Patrick Flanery (THE YOUNG INDIANA JONES CHRONICLES), and his obsession with events of the past have driven off his button-cute wife (Marisa Coughlan of TEACHING MRS. TINGLE) and their only child. At least he has a right to be, because with the anniversary of That Night coming up, the people around town are starting to act crazy.

How crazy? Oh, like kill-yourself-with-repeated-blows-of-a-hammer crazy.

With a script by Richard Christian Matheson, THING errs in many ways, including trying to find a credible explanation for the monster. Bierce’s was ingenious, revealing only that it exists in a plane of color human eyes cannot see, but this show leaves nothing to the imagination, giving us a Sandman-style petroleum-based beast.

Director Tobe Hooper – responsible for two certifiable scare classics (POLTERGEIST and THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, of course) and other flicks on the other end of the quality spectrum – is not at the top his game here, although production values are strong. His camera forever swirls about, scenes go on too long and – worst of all – it isn’t the least bit frightening. He gets off a couple of good gross-outs – the aforementioned toolbox murder and an encounter with a car-crash victim – but that’s about it.

Bierce’s story would be challenging for anyone to adapt without going into it knowing it’s all in the suggestion. But the MASTERS OF HORROR team has made so many alterations, the title no longer fits. Even if it weren’t based on a pre-existing piece of literature, the THING has little life to it. –Rod Lott

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Normally, presskits I receive for new movies are just a boring little book of boring production notes with a CD of stills that’s not good for much of anything. Exception: the box just that just arrived for WALK HARD. I shudder to think of the cost-per-piece of this one. Photos of what’s in the “Cox Box” await you after the jump.

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The best thing about DORM OF THE DEAD is its title, but don’t expect the movie to fulfill that promise. In fact, don’t expect the movie to seem much like a movie. It’s a hair shy of unwatchable.

Dealing with a zombie outbreak on the campus of Arkham University, very little of it takes place in a dorm. Very little of it actually involves zombies. It’s more like an excuse for several extended, scored-with-bad-techno sex scenes that recall the lurid but boring Cinemax After Dark features, only shot on video. The box plays up the fact that Andrea Ownbey – aka “Miss Howard Stern” – is one of the stars, but this means nothing to me. Besides, none of the girls really look attractive, and that includes B-movie staple Tiffany Shepis.

There are two things the Donald Farmer-directed DORM does well: 1) Making special effects look homemade, and 2) overdoing it on sequences involving people walking. When your credits feature an actor who calls himself “Dukey Flyswatter,” you know you’re not to take it seriously, but I’d rather not take it at all. –Rod Lott

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The longtime Hitch staple died today at the age of 73 while awaiting a lung transplant. He was 15 years off, and we’ve disabled the clock. Rest in peace, Bobby.

This just in: Singer Robert Goulet is currently hospitalized and awaiting a new lung. Not to irritate his wife further, but if he doesn’t pull through (we’re rooting for you, Bobby!), the 73-year-old crooner’s prediction of expiration will be off by a good 15 years.

Forty-three stories up, someone’s terrorizing a very dorky-acting Lauren Hutton in SOMEONE’S WATCHING ME!, a 1978 made-for-TV movie most notable for being written and directed by one John Carpenter, and shot merely weeks before he started filming a little indie thing called HALLOWEEN.

Fleeing to L.A. after a bad relationship, Hutton rents the apartment high atop the Arkham Tower, which directly faces another high-rise tower. It’s from there that an unknown man watches her every movie via telescope, leaves her presents, bugs her place, menaces her with phone calls, threatens her with notes and basically terrifies her to the point where there’s a huge gap between her teeth.

For help, she turns to lesbian workmate Adrienne Barbeau and professorial love interest David Birney, as well as the police, who can’t do anything about it until “he” does something. And believe it, that hellish moment eventually arrives.

With a dash of REAR WINDOW, the movie conjures up a fair amount of supsense on a low, low budget. But Carpenter finds effectiveness in efficiency, and even gets off a shot early in the film that’s one of the more frightening things in his oeuvre. As a Carpenter fan, I’ve wanted to see this “lost” film for years, and I wasn’t disappointed.

It’s now available on DVD, either separately or as part of Warner’s six-disc TWISTED TERROR COLLECTION, a boxed set of seemingly randomly chosen horror flicks like Oliver Stone’s THE HAND, EYES OF A STRANGER, Amicus’ FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE, Wes Craven’s DEADLY FRIEND and, um, DR. GIGGLES. –Rod Lott

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No-budget writer/director David Heavener’s DAWN OF THE LIVING DEAD is the kind of movie MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 would have had a heyday with. And from all evidence, I’m fairly sure it was intentional. This is – in more than ways one – a messy film, as if the zombie genre raped the Indian burial ground genre, and this was the bastard child.

Here, a woman (Amanda Bauman) still reeling from the death of her daughter moves to a California home near little more than the Mexico border with her husband (Joe Estevez, quickly morphing into Gary Busey’s dopplegänger), who also happens to be her sponsor for her post-tragedy addictions. She starts experiencing strange visions at all hours of the night that feel very real, but her hubby tells her these are side effects of all her crazy meds.

Yet she actually has good reason to be freaking out. Her humble abode once was a safe house for illegals, and a whole family was slaughtered there. And now they’re coming back alive to pay the new owners a visit! And, hey, they’ve even brought a zombie baby!

Heavener himself shows up midway as the guy in charge of keeping the local windmills running, because, he explains, “When you have no energy, you have no life.” He wisely scripts himself some nudity-laden slow-motion sex with the missus, and appears to playing his role for yuks, whereas everyone else (Bauman especially) seem to be fully invested in motivation and all that nonsense. You don’t motivation for a movie in which some white-trash woman starts stripping for no good reason for two Mexicans her husband has captured (”We left Mexico for this?” the subtitles read. “Look at those melons. Ripe.”), complete with cheesy ’80s-style music video effects.

The gore effects are actually pretty good for this sort of thing (look for blood as thick as Welch’s grape jelly to ooze out that aforementioned zombie tot’s empty eye socket), even if all other production values are sacrificed. Yet this thing is full of entertainment – not for general audiences, but the Friday-night-beers-with-the-guys crowd who can appreciate bad films for their sheer, utter B-ness. –Rod Lott

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Although the story may be as stripped-down as the Spartans themselves, 300 is one of those phenomenon films worth seeing just for imagery alone. Of course, it has Frank Miller and Lynn Varley’s graphic novel to thank for that.

Proving his DAWN OF THE DEAD remake was no fluke, sophomore director Zack Synder lensed this rooted-in-fact actioner, based upon the ancient Battle of Thermopylae, in which 300 determined Spartans held their own against exponential armies of Persians.

Gerard Butler – to me, he’ll always be DRACULA 2000 – stars as King Leonidas, the Spartans’ leader. He looks just like the character from the book, and indeed, this is a recurring trend. The film makes a better point of Leonidas’ internal struggle between doing what is right for his people vs. doing what is right for himself.

Much of this hinges on the film’s one true departure from the book: the addition of his wife, Queen Gorgo, played by a radiantly beautiful Lena Headey. While the Spartans square off against legions of spear-wielding soldiers and the occasional monster, the queen is shown defending her husband’s honor back home, by any means necessary.

The first half of 300 is all buildup – and admittedly, boring at patches – as it paves the way for the true reason moviegoers turned over $210 million for tickets: the battle scenes. And, oh, those battle scenes! They’re as visually exciting as anything you’re apt to see all year. Actually, even the slow stuff upfront is stunning, with every scene a marvel of production design and a work of art. One could grab a random frame from the film, have a print made, and hang it above the fireplace, and visitors would be envious.

In these sequences, one can see how panels from Miller’s work were lifted directly onto Synder’s viewfinder. The latter does an excellent job of using the former’s work as a template, but then building bridges between the individual scenes to fill in the action and make it come truly alive. Has there ever been a case where a film followed its source material so closely?

The DVD’s bonus features make just how clear, with side-by-side comparisons of certain key scenes. More interesting is a conversation with Miller himself, in which he reveals his main – and unlikely – influences in writing 300: hard-boiled crime writers like Jim Thompson and Mickey Spillane, particularly for their to-the-point approach in dialogue.

At the end of this feature, Miller turns to Snyder and asks how in the heck the director is going to make his next project work: an adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ WATCHMEN. One thing’s for sure: It won’t look dull. –Rod Lott

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It’s nice to see a Stephen King adaptation at an actual movie theater again, where they belong, instead of the watered-down, overlong miniseries that play several nights on network TV and basic cable. It’s also nice to see it contain actual scares, which helps when your source material does the same.

1408 comes from King’s most recent short-story collection, 1992’s EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL: 14 DARK TALES. As King notes in his introduction, it was never meant to be an actual story, but an example of how writing progresses from draft to draft. For whatever reason, he finished it, and it’s one of EVENTUAL’s many highlights. It’s easy to see why it’s been handpicked for big-screen treatment, and here’s hoping its success helps usher in another wave of quality King films.

John Cusack stars as Mike Enslin, a writer of several midlist books on haunted places. He’s working on one for hotels, rating each on a scare scale of one to 10 skulls. In his research, he’s found that supposed ghost-infested bed-and-breakfasts are just a way to drum up business. That will all change with his stay in room 1408 at New York’s Dolphin Hotel – a room that is kept unoccupied for a reason: 56 occupants have died in it, none lasting for more than an hour.

Or, as Dolphin manager Samuel L. Jackson puts it, the room is “fucking evil.”

Once inside, Mike’s stay starts off innocently enough: unexplained mints on the pillow, blared Karen Carpenter from the clock radio. But soon, actual bodily harm comes to him, and the clock starts providing a handy 60-minute countdown toward his apparent doom. With a barrage of spirits and phenomena and other things that go bump in the dark, it’s like THE SHINING compressed into one compact suite.

King’s original story of the same name is structured roughly into thirds – before, during and after Mike’s stay – whereas most all of the film is concerned with the during. Granting the tale an ominous touch, King relates the goings-on in the room not as they happen, but only afterward, via whatever details Mike left on his voice recorder.

What he doesn’t say makes our imagination run wild. But movies being visual, 1408 shows all, and some of it is very creepy. For more or less being confined to one space, the filmmakers do a great job of concocting more and more things to make Mike’s night a living hell. Although it includes all of the shocks of the story, it has to expand upon it in order to hit feature-length, and adds a subplot about Mike’s ex-wife and dead daughter to help fulfill that.

Hope you like Cusack, because the entire movie is on his shoulders. If he weren’t such a great actor, we’d want to check out of 1408 early. But he makes the skeptic Mike likable, believeable and sympathetic. As much as the moviegoer in us likes to see him go through the ringer, we feel bad for him all the same. In fact, parts of the film are real downers, but that just means it works.

The movie’s not perfect, mostly because of maybe two too many false endings. But it’s a smart and stylish chiller/thriller – everything that director Mikael Håfström’s previous film DERAILED was not. –Rod Lott

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Slasher films are targets of scorn from critics and other high-minded pillars of the community, yet a nonstop source of fun for movie buffs. Adam Rockoff’s 2002 study GOING TO PIECES: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE SLASHER FILM, 1978-1986 stands as the definitive guide to this sub-genre – extremely well-written and well-researched, with neither a dry spot nor scholarly leaning within its pages.

Now the same can be said for the documentary based on the book, GOING TO PIECES: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE SLASHER FILM, originally broadcast last Halloween on the Starz cable channel and now out on DVD.

In the book, Rockoff is quick to defend his beloved slashers, making a good point about how tame they are violence-wise when compared to the body count of actioners like COMMANDO and RAMBO III. Better yet, he’s honest; as willing as he is to call HALLOWEEN a classic (and it is), he’s just as willing to call a stinker a stinker (and there are more than a few). By interviewing some of the prinicples behind the seminal slashers – and even the fringe ones – Rockoff gives us a detailed and eye-opening all-access pass into some juicy, behind-the-scenes stories. And who knew there were any such tales to be told regarding TERROR TRAIN, HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME or MY BLOODY VALENTINE?

The documentary seems practically lifted from the pages, with the added benefit of bloody footage from the films being discussed. (It’s one thing to read about SLEEPAWAY CAMP’s disturbing twist ending, but another thing altogether to see the damned thing.) In addition to the heavy-hitters, the B- and C-titles like those above are given equal time, making them appear even more watchable than they actually are in full. Though the filmmakers – that includes Rockoff, who scripted – deserve credit for seeking so many on-camera participants out; I only wish they wouldn’t have employed the annoyingly pretentious device of having them walk while talking.

From the slashers’ early days of PSYCHO to its post-modern parody days of SCREAM and SCARY MOVIE (and, in the doc, the current revival with the likes of SAW and HOSTEL), Rockoff has all the gory bases covered. If Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger are your idea of a good time, his book was written just for you. Ditto the doc. –Rod Lott

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When I was 13, a friend gave me Stephen King’s CYCLE OF THE WEREWOLF for my birthday. Though I was overjoyed, my mom wasn’t too thrilled with Bernie Wrightson’s illustrations of disembodied pig heads and werewolf sex. Yet a year later, she had no problem dropping me off at Northpark Cinema 4 to see the book’s R-rated adaptation, SILVER BULLET, recently re-released as part of a sweet, affordable DVD box set containing new special editions of PET SEMATARY, THE DEAD ZONE and, um, GRAVEYARD SHIFT.

Not exactly a novel, CYCLE depicts a tense year in the town of Tarker’s Mills as its residents are terrorized by the unexplained arrival of a lycanthrope, with each short chapter representing a month. For the most part, the chapters aren’t even related, and with their sheer brevity, they come off like tone poems rather than pieces of an overall linear tale.

That’s not a criticism of CYCLE, and King transplanted a majority of those 12 stories into his own screenplay for SILVER BULLET. There’s the attack on the lonely fat woman, there’s the mauling of the cop in his car, there’s the kid flying the kite for the very last time. But a series of thinly related sketches wouldn’t work as a film, so King chose to center his narrative on Marty, the disabled kid who escapes death by shooting the werewolf’s eye with a bottle rocket.

Corey Haim stars as Marty, a casting decision that immediately dates the film. But it’s Haim before his testicles descended, so it’s all good. While every other townsperson falls victim to the werewolf despite having two legs, it’s the disabled kid stuck in the wheelchair who outlasts them all. He gets help from his homely sister (Megan Follows) and their crazy drunk uncle, “played” by Gary Busey.

Busey is incredible in this flick, and by “incredible,” I mean semi-retarded. And this was a few years before his head-injury-causing motorcycle accident. There’s this amazing reaction shot at the end where the werewolf bursts through the wall, and Busey’s looking right into the camera and goes through half a dozen amazing facial contortions in the span of half a second. Hilarious.

TWIN PEAKS‘ Everett McGill plays the town reverend, who tries to plead with his congregation not to kill the beast. (Semi-related side note: King’s decision to greatly compress time for the film was smart, because I never believed the rev could go unnoticed for three months as he does in the book.) LOST’s Terry O’Quinn has a small role as the sheriff, and RESERVOIR DOGS‘ Lawrence Tierney is, appropriately, a bartender.

As a whole, the film is fairly cheesy, but what does one expect from a mid-’80s effort from producer Dino DeLaurentiis? I’d argue that it’s comfortably cheesy, because it’s enjoyable for all of its 95 minutes, and has its share of good scenes of horror. In these days of CGI overkill, it’s actually quite nice to see a werewolf that’s just a guy in a suit.

Today’s audiences likely would laugh at Carlo Rambaldi’s work on the monster –  as well as the entire film –  but I have to admit a soft spot for this one. I think I even liked it more today than the several times I saw it two decades ago. CYCLE is kind of an interesting one-off experiment – the calendar as novella –  but SILVER BULLET brings its ideas to life. –Rod Lott

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You read about it in the most recent issue of Hitch, and now Hitch contributor Chris Sharpe’s feature-film debut, SEX MACHINE, is hitting DVD on May 1, from Anthem (the same people who had the foresight to release FRANKENHOOKER). You can order it now. Do it not because we’re quoted on the back, nor because we wrote the jacket copy – do it because it’s actually an enjoyable, fun, well-made movie!

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