It’s the scariest time of the year.
VELOCIRAPTOR RAPTURE — The famed playing God with dinosaurs trilogy finally gets the hi-def treatment, and it’s certainly one series that will look great on your big screen HD TV. While the first is still the best, and the series suffers from the law of diminishing returns, I still enjoy the second Jurassic Park, partially because there are no kids. I’m sorry, but screaming children who turn on flashlights when a T-Rex is hunting them annoy me. Still, the Spielbergian sense of wonder permeates this series, and it’s great if you have a carnage fetish. Chomp!
DISC ROT YOU’LL LIKE — Lucio Fulci’s Zombie (aka Zombi 2 overseas, where it was marketed as the sequel to the original Dawn Of The Dead) gets the HD treatment too, and this cult flick is one of the best zombie flicks ever. The story is not that complicated: A scientist’s daughter and a reporter journey to a tropical island and discover it is gradually being overrun by the undead. What is fun are the decaying bodies sporting live maggots, the underwater zombie/shark wrestling scene (yes, it’s real) and some truly nasty eviscerations. Gore galore for those who crave it, along with some great cinematic moments as well.
ASSKICKING ARCHAEOLOGISTS — The British TV series Bonekickers crosses Indiana Jones with CSI, and while that sounds ludicrous, it’s rather fun. After all, real-life archaeology is a slow, painstaking process that is not exactly stirring to watch, but dress it up with geek chic and some glamour, and you’ve got something entertaining. Naturally, the scientists that make up the show’s team not only delve into historical mysteries but have to contend with people who feel threatened by or want to take advantage of their discoveries. Hey, if it makes their trade more exciting, maybe more young people will want to dive into it rather than wanting to be reality TV stars. And that’s a good thing.
SINISTER SCARECROW — Directed by Frank De Fellita (author of The Entity), the cult TV classic Dark Night Of The Scarecrow stayed in my mind long after I saw it as a child. I finally bought it on DVD recently, right before they announced the 30th anniversary Blu-ray version with new bonus features. My luck. Anyway, this revenge story focuses on four Southern rednecks who hunt down and kill a mentally handicapped man whom they wrongly believe killed a little girl. They slay him while he hides in a scarecrow in a field then hide their crime, so you know that straw man is going to resurface to torment them. There are some nice creepy moments for an early ‘80s TV movie, and the ending scene is brilliant. Cool casting choices: Lane Smith,
Q&A: IVANA MILICEVIC ROARS IN THE HOWLING REBORN
It’s been 16 years since we had a new Howling movie, and the eighth installment, The Howling Reborn presents a modern cross between a lycanthropic thriller and a high school morality tale as a young student (Terra Nova‘s Landon Liboiron) discovers that he has a werewolf destiny linked to his long-lost mother (Casino Royale‘s Ivana Milicevic). It’s an interesting variation with two strong female characters in a usually male-dominated genre. Milicevic spoke with “Queued Up” about embracing her sinister side.
There’s a sexiness to this movie, but you don’t have any nudity.
That’s also for a PG rating, which is fine by me. In my experience with the things I found that are sexy, you’re able to be sexier when you don’t have to add nudity. It’s like a balance of things. Nudity is just so sexy by itself, even if it isn’t sexy. It reminds me of an HBO series I did called Mind Of The Married Man. Because it was HBO when I was able to say anything—my mouth could be so dirty, and I could be dirtier when I was in his dreams. If I was naked on top of it, it just would’ve been too much.
In this movie your character has an interesting seduction scene which turns sinister very quickly, and there is a later moment that walks a line because it suggests Oedipal ideas.
I kind of wanted to do it that way. It kind of puts it on the creepy side. There are a lot of issues in relationships where the boy does need to pick his girlfriend over his mother or his wife over his mother at some point. I’m not saying it’s sexual. It’s just life. I liked the idea of being creepy like that, but I hope it’s not too much.
What was it like working on a low-budget horror movie like this?
You know what, it is really difficult to get a movie made. Here we are with a bunch of actors, kids mainly, and you don’t have a lot of time to do it in. That shooting schedule was three and a half weeks. You do the best that you can to try to give it nuances. If we had three or four months to do that movie, it would be even better because the actors involved were really good, and you have all these constraints like time and things that happen, like when Landon got an eye infection because of the contacts one day. It’s normal stuff that happens, and on a regular movie you would have time to heal. In some scenes we could only shoot from one side, and that makes it harder for a performer to find your way, but everybody is trying their best to do something good. No one sets out to do something mediocre ever. When we were done shooting this movie, I was like, “Now I’m ready to shoot this movie!” We all felt like that.
Is there any type of role that you’d like to do but haven’t done yet?
I would just like to make people laugh every day, or feel something. As I’m growing older and maturing in general, I just want to play more and more myself. I would just like to play a woman, just a mother or a family member. If you were casting Mary Magdalene and Holy Mary, which one would you cast me as? I’d probably get cast as Mary Magdalene, when all I want to play is Holy Mary.
I would cast you against type because a lot of times you get interesting material from people when they don’t do what’s expected of them.
Exactly. Because I’ve got to think at this point in my career, if you see me coming, you probably already think I’m going to be bad. You probably already think I did it. So you should cast me as the red herring.
