Beary Creepy Paddington

If you were around your usual social media haunts yesterday, chances are you would've come across a bunch of memes skewering the forthcoming live-action version of children's book favourite Paddington by inserting the character into famous horror movie scenes (click here for a collection of them). Now the first trailer's out, and though Paddington comes off slightly less creepy than the memes have made him out to be, the film does have a weirdly disgusting WTF moment where the CGI bear (voiced by Colin Firth) sticks toothbrushes into his ears and pulls out globs of earwax and proceeds to sniff and lick said earwax.

Anyway the trailer seems to have Garfield/Yogi Bear vibe, which isn't really a good thing in my books. But I didn't grow up reading Paddington so hey what do I know... Gather your kids close around the monitor and watch Paddington destroy a bathroom:

Horror, Wes Anderson-ized

This superb SNL horror send-up of Wes Anderson popped up around Halloween but I haven't been able to find a non-geo-blocked clip until a friend alerted me to this site a couple of days ago. It's done amazingly well, aping Anderson's character types, colour schemes and symmetrical compositions to bring us a version of a slasher movie if had been made by Anderson himself. Click here for an in-depth breakdown of how it was all achieved.

Don't Worry, It's Just a Cat

Cats: the source of all false terror. I'm sure there are way more examples but not a bad start, Vulture:

Preview of Horror Titles Coming in October!

Halloween's coming up in a month's time so here's a heads-up on the spooky treats you can find in October:

Byzantium (trailer)
The Night Visitor (trailer)
Sharknado (trailer)
Girls Against Boys (trailer)
No One Lives (trailer)
Frankenstein's Army (trailer)
Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (trailer)
Frankenstein Created Women (trailer)
Friday the 13th - The Series
Aftershock (trailer)
World War Z (trailer)
The Purge (trailer)
Curse of Chucky (trailer)
The Crocodile (trailer)
Rancid (trailer)
A Haunted House (trailer)

Also: Blu-rays for Carrie, Last House on the Left, Slither.

Trailer: The Conjuring

Horror trailers don't come any creepier than this one for James Wan's The Conjuring, a supernatural chiller based on real-life ghostbusters Ed and Lorraine Warren. It starts off chirpily enough with The Zombies' "Time of the Season" playing in the background, but then slowly builds into one terrific little scare that makes me hopeful this will one of the better horror pics to be released this year. Wan (Saw) also has the sequel to Insidious on the way, and if you haven't already seen that film, I recommend you get the DVD out, sit down with a bucket of popcorn late at night and be prepared to soil your pants...

Trailer: Stoker

Oldboy director Park Chan-wook's English language debut Stoker couldn't look more beautiful and enticing in this trailer. The film is a bit of an oddball collaboration in that the script, said to be inspired by the Hitchcock classic Shadow of a Doubt, comes from the pen of Wentworth Miller, writing under the pseudonym Ted Foulke. Now "nuanced screenwriter" doesn't come to mind when thinking of Miller, or more so his acting (Prison Break, the voice of EDI in Stealth) - but perhaps he's a much better scribe than thespian (the script made 2010's Black List of unproduced screenplays). Anywho this Gothic-looking chiller, starring Nicole Kidman, Matthew Goode and Mia Wasikowska, could be an early highlight in 2013.

NZFF Highlight: Room 237

A brief word of praise for Room 237, Rodney Ascher's doco exploring some incredible, out-there meanings and theories hidden in Stanley Kubrick's enigmatic 1980 adaptation of Stephen King's The Shining. Some of it definitely gets you thinking (continuity errors or is Kubrick playing tricks on us?), some of it will make you spit-take in great WTF fashion, but one thing they all have in common is the utter obsessiveness of it all. This is the perfect companion piece to The Shining (alas no double feature pairing at the fest), and if you love the movie, Kubrick or unpacking puzzles and symbols etc, head on down to the Rialto Cinemas in Newmarket at 8:30 tonight for the final screening of the doco. Last night's session sold out, so get in there quick!

ABCs of Death Winner Announced: T is For Toilet

Check out the winning entry for the ABCs of Death competition, a terrifically gory piece of claymation from UK-based Lee Hardcastle. His short will be joining works by the likes of Ti West (House of the Devil), Jason Eisener (Hobo with a Shotgun) and Nacho Vigalondo (Timecrimes) in this hotly anticipated horror anthology film produced by Ant Timpson and Tim League.

Death Delivers: A Quick Spoiler-Free Word on Final Destination 5

Caught a screening of Final Destination 5 last night, and to put it simply, it delivered. After the cruddy, lazy fourth one, this entry felt very much like a reinvigoration of the franchise, an attempt to put things right and round off the series in a way that would satisfy both fans and newcomers. Much credit must be given to director Steven Quale*, whose staging of the film's gruesome, Grand Guignol set-pieces - the series' raison d'etre - is spectacularly well-executed, especially the jaw-dropping opener, which is just as good if not better than FD2's. I tend to switch off if too much CGI is used in horror splatter and there's still a bit of that here, but the CGI is also subtly, almost invisibly applied in this opening sequence without losing the scale of the devastation. Of course, the 3D bits are gimmicky as usual, though strangely I didn't mind it as much as FD4, perhaps 'cos everything about this movie is just better overall. It's the funnest horror film I've seen in a theatre in a while - and I wouldn't even count myself a FD fan. Opens this Thursday, go see it!

(*Quale hasn't done much by way of feature directing, but he's served as second unit director for James Cameron on Titanic and Avatar, so it's not inconceivable that he's picked up some of Cameron's chops for staging spatially coherent spectacle. Keen to see what he does next.)

Roadshow's screening invite

Trailer: Insidious

It's been a while since we've had a genuinely scary horror movie - let's not count faux-doco-type sutff like Paranormal Activity - so here's hoping Saw director James Wan's return to horror will get under the skin in the way that several early rave reviews have already hinted at. Here's one from South by Southwest, and another from Toronto Film Fest.



The trailer suggests Paranormal Activity/Poltergeist/haunted house-style spookiness, maybe with a twist (oh wait, "it's not the house"!), and it looks like Wan's paying much attention to slow-burning, creepy camerawork and atmosphere, though the "flash-cuttiness" towards the end is a bit disconcerting (maybe just part of the trailer?). Bring on the chills...

Unrelated but: Josh Lucas and Patrick Wilson - I always get them mixed up.

Guy Wants Sundance Horror Movie to Be Burned

I've always wondered if indie filmmaker Lucky McKee will make another film as great as his debut May (criminally MIA on DVD around these parts) again: I haven't seen the Jack Ketchum adaptation Red which he was fired from, but his other two horror efforts, The Woods and the Masters of Horror entry Sick Girl, while not without their moments, didn't quite live up to their potential.

Here's hoping that film will be The Woman, which just premiered at Sundance and has already caused a stir, prompting walkouts and this dude to call for the film to be "burned and confiscated". The following video is possibly the best publicity the film could ever receive:

Random Stuff #14

Viral Exorcism

Wicked viral marketing for the horror flick The Last Exorcism, using Chatroulette to spook unsuspecting peeps. Simple but effective, and FUNNY.

Friday the 13th: Special Screening!

If you're in Auckland tonight and at a loss for something to do...

(from the facebook event)

Old School Horror on the Big Screen for Friday 13th

Venue : Academy Cinema

Tickets : Oldschool Price - $9.99

Available from Box office in Academy Cinema, under the Auckland City Public Library in Lorne Street, on the 13th from 1pm.

When the Incredibly Strange team were young we used to look forward to every Friday 13th on the calendar year because that meant a horror film would be on the big screen.

However somewhere along the way distributors simply couldn't be fucked in providing some thrills for the kids on this very special day. So here at Incredibly Strange HQ we find that lack of showmanship pretty damn dire and to prove a point, we're going to screen some old school 35mm horror for the movie fiends in Auckland.

From the prolific and diverse mind of Umberto Lenzi (one of Italy's greatest genre directors), comes the deranged zombie flick NIGHTMARE CITY aka CITY OF THE WALKING DEAD. A zombie pic that delivers the meaty goods in a kooky pic that breaks all the rules of the walking dead. For starters these zombies are fucking fast and they're no dummies either, they're happy to either chow down or use a machine gun on your arse.

The film has none of the mean-spiritedness of his MAKE THEM DIE SLOWLY but contains the utter lunacy and high gore factor of Lenzi's EATEN ALIVE and IRON MASTER. It has an inept lead who producers forced onto Lenzi, not exactly what you'd expect from the 'heroic male' lead.

******BONUS BONUS*********

Roadshow Distributors are releasing an upcoming film that all incredibly strange fans will want to check out. They're supporting old school horror by giving us 100 dbl passes to give out to fans.

So the first 100 people to buy a ticket on the night will receive a free double pass (worth $36) to Alexandre Aja's kickass PIRANHA 3D!

Amityville Horror House for Sale!

The house that was the inspiration for the 1979 horror film The Amityville Horror is on the market... for US$1.15 million! Looking at the photos it looks like it's been done up quite nicely, but would you still live in it if you knew its history?? More pics here.

Scorsese's Top 11 Scariest Horror Films

This is a bit late, but better late than never... last week Martin Scorsese shared with The Daily Beast his Top 11 favourite horror flicks. Cool to see less-recognised titles like Dead of Night and The Entity in there with the usual suspects. Also dig his line about Psycho - "the shower... the swamp... the relationship between the mother and son" - it's a film that's so often imitated and lampooned people tend to take for granted its under-the-skin creepiness. This here is a man with taste.

Most of them are available to rent from fatso:

1. The Haunting

2. Isle of the Dead

3. The Uninvited (where's the DVD dammit!)

4. The Entity

5. Dead of Night

6. The Changeling

7. The Shining

8. The Exorcist

9. Night of the Demon

10. The Innocents

11. Psycho

Zombieland

It's Halloween tomorrow, so to get you in the mood, here's a post solely focused on nothing but zombies, zombies and zombies...

First item of interest: [REC] 2. If you haven't already heard, there's a marketing challenge out there to create as much buzz as possible for the New Zealand theatrical release of this sequel to the Spanish horror hit. There have been some cool ideas floating around already - visit the website to see them - and one of the niftiest is probably the zombie insurance auction ("Revenant Emergency Coverage 2") that's up on trademe at the moment (Bid now to avoid losing out...).

This Balloon Boy mash-up is cool too:


[REC] 2 opens on November 13, and is having its premiere this weekend at the very sold-out Vendetta Films 24 Hour Movie Marathon (which a few of us here at fatso are crazy enough to attend).

For those going out trick or treatin' (probably no one in that age group will be reading this) or dress-up Halloween parties and need some tips, check out this amazing zombie invasion in Monroeville, Pennsylvania where around 2000 people, fully caked in pasty, skin-peeling make-up, took to the mall where Dawn of the Dead was shot. Read more here.

Meanwhile, in Iowa, a man was called a zombie and punched twice (!?).

Damn, No Signal

Have cellphones ruined the movies? I think it's taken a little bit of magic out of the problem-solving aspect of film narratives. Everything seems a bit easier and lazier today with cellphones, though sometimes it's a necessity: just watch 24 and try to imagine it being made without them. In the realm of horror movies, it's become a tired device for generating tension and this great clip below shows you it's now as common a cliche as the car-that-won't-start or fumbling-key-drop. Lull in the narrative? No problem. Just strand your characters out of coverage area! Or give them a nearly empty battery! Perfect. They're screwed.