Cult Classic Trailer: Q: The Winged Serpent

There can never be enough love in this world for an underrated filmmaker like Larry Cohen, so excuse me while I briefly plug this release of his 1982 monster flick Q the Winged Serpent. Modern viewers may recognise his name on the screenwriting credits of films like Phone Booth and Cellular, but a few decades earlier, when Cohen was in his prime, he was cranking out one terrific B-movie after another: everything from gritty blaxploitationers (Black Caesar, Hell Up in Harlem) to horror gems (It's Alive, God Told Me To) to offbeat thrillers (Perfect Strangers, Special Effects).

The low budgets of his films didn't always meet his ambitions, but this rarely mattered when he could pull off genre pics with the sort of scrappy charm, economy and personality that's sorely missing from contemporary filmmaking. A fan favourite, Q, with its herky-jerky Harryhausen-style creature effects, is a perfect example of Cohen's work. Hats off again to Vendetta Films for putting it out on DVD and Blu-ray! Check out the trailer below  (taken from an old Roadshow VHS tape):

Trailer: The LEGO Movie

Okay I'm so DONE. The LEGO Movie trailer is here. The Hollywood machine that's obsessed with turning every established toy/board game into a movie will delight us next year with this feature-length version of the popular brand, which believe or not was first manufactured way back in 1949 (thanks Wikipedia). However before we prematurely declare "RIP Hollywood", the dudes tasked with directing this project offer a little hope that it'll be a wee bit more than a blatant toy commercial: Phil Lord and Chris Miller, who did Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and 21 Jump Street, two movies which definitely did not suck and were surprisingly good and funny.
For those who need to jump on the LEGO bandwagon now, we do have a selection of DVDs that might answer the niggling question of how you can actually transform interlocking plastic bricks into something narratively watchable.

Ray Harryhausen: "If you make fantasy too real, it loses the quality of a dream."

AMEN! I was watching Life of Pi last night thinking, "Okay, that's a pretty impressive and realistic-looking computer-generated tiger and all... but...". This weird kind of feeling - attributed to a phenomenon called "uncanny valley" - has yet, for me anyway, to be overcome by CGI, no matter how good it looks. There's so such problem with Harryhausen's pioneering stop-motion animation creations. The hand-crafted charm, the jittery quality, the fact that an actual three-dimensional object was photographed, the onus being on the viewer to do some work filling in the gaps - these elements make, say the skeleton army in Jason and the Argonauts, feel a whole lot more real than some of the slick, overblown CGI effects we've seen and been accustomed to in recent years.

Anywho Ray Harryhausen's passing is a great loss to the film world. Without this guy there would be no Star Wars, no Jurassic Park, no The Thing, no Nightmare Before Christmas etc!  A lot of Hollywood's greatest and most memorable creatures, aliens and monsters simply would not exist.

Here's a pretty good comp of Harryhausen's work:
If you 'd like to catch up on some of the films he's worked on, this is a list of what we've got in our library:

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms
It Came from Beneath the Sea
Earth vs the Flying Saucers
20 Million Miles to Earth
The 7th Voyage of Sinbad
Mysterious Island
Jason and the Argonauts
First Men in the Moon
One Millions Years B.C.
The Valley of Gwangi
The Golden Voyage of Sinbad
Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger
Clash of the Titans

Short Film: Iron Man vs. Bruce Lee

The talented guy behind that cute Dragon Baby short last year returns with a similarly fun action short pitting Bruce Lee against Iron Man. Why not? This will be the most entertaining 1 minute you'll have today.

Trailer: Frankenweenie

In 1984, Tim Burton made a live-action short film called Frankenweenie for Disney but was fired because they thought it was too creepy and weird. Fast forward 27 years and many box office hits later - including that billion dollar money-machine Alice in Wonderland - Burton's returned to the short again for Disney, but has done a stop-motion animated feature length remake. The first trailer's hit the web, and it looks pretty darn cute in a macabre, Burton-esque way. Apparently it'll be the first stop-motion movie to be shown in IMAX 3D.