Bob Jimenez at El Latino Weekly has reviewed Stephen’s upcoming horror movie Beneath The Darkness. Keep reading if you want to know how the movie is. Ask most people and they’ll tell you that dying in a plane crash is the most frightening death they can imagine. Director Martin Guigui laughs, looks us all in the eye and says, “Want to bet?” Guigui is a director (My Ex-girlfriend’s Wedding) who usually makes us laugh. But in “Beneath the Darkness,” he explores the psychotic world of a small town mortician who enjoys burying people alive. In Bruce Wilkinson’s screen play, the victim is thrown in a coffin screaming for mercy. There is none. Well, almost none. “Want company,” the mortician asks with a grin? He throws a flashlight into the coffin and slams it shut!
Guigui has apparently been studying terror movies that work. “What ever happened to Baby Jane?” “Kill Bill 2″ and certainly, “Psycho!” There’s a touch of all three thrown in with a little “Nancy Drew.” But there’s freshness in the way Guigui pieces together a story that keeps us guessing and sensing that we’re going to see something even worse. Guigui is also market conscious. The movie is a perfect summer-recession distraction aimed principally at an audience sure to come back to be scared again and again; teenagers. The hero of the movie is one of their own; rebellious, distracted and a loner, yet brave enough to confront and expose the evil in his town.
It just happens to be Eli, the mortician, a psychopath monster. Veteran actor Dennis Quaid plays the douchebag, asshole, nut-ball with perfection. According to executive producer as Doc Holliday in “Tombstone” In any event, Quaid is so menacing, (watch his eyes and twitching mouth) that he only has to raise his hand and you expect to see an axe in it. In fact, Quaid is so wacky that one isn’t sure whether Guigui is satirizing horror movies or just letting Quaid have fun.
Travis (Tony Oller) is our teenage geek hero. He is tormented by the memory of helplessly standing by and watching his younger sister die. That gives him a sort of “I don’t give a shit attitude,” especially about school and the track team. But he becomes curious about seeing two eerie silhouettes dancing in Eli’s upper floor bedroom. He should have minded his own business.
Abby (Aimee Teegarden) is Travis’s perky but nosey girl friend who goads Travis into taking a closer look. The plot would work well enough without her sexy teasing, but Travis has to find his groove somehow and lets Abby talk him into breaking into Eli’s house–at night. Not a very good idea. Soon both find themselves at the mercy of Eli who plans to bury both of them. Bravo to Geoff Zanelli for his nail biting musical score. It faithfully accompanies every emotion of fear and terror the audience feels or is it the music and not the scene?
I must warn you. The opening scene of “Beneath the Darkness” is so terrifying and so disturbing that you’ll want to get up and walk out. I mean, who need this? But you’ll be glad you stayed, to let director Martin Guigui take you to the edge time and time again. And you never know? You might meet a new friend, the guy or gal you’ve been grabbing next to you. In Beneath the Darkness, Ely Vaughn (Quaid) is a pillar of the community in tiny Smithville, Texas. The town’s mortician, Ely has been revered since his days as the high school’s star quarterback. But since the tragic death of his wife two years earlier, Ely has withdrawn from his neighbors, while local teens spread stories of supernatural goings on at Ely’s mansion–which is also the funeral home. When high school friends Travis (Oller), Abby (Teegarden), Brian (Lunsford) and Danny (Werkheiser) decide to check out the rumors, they are shocked to see the supposedly grieving widower dancing with a mysterious woman behind the curtains of his bedroom window. Their curiosity aroused, the four teens wait for Ely to leave the house before breaking in to investigate. But instead of finding clues to the woman’s identity, they stumble on a grotesque, long-hidden secret. The sadistic mortician next door will now stop at nothing to literally bury his past.
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Why It’s Hard to Write Romantic Comedy
Romantic comedy is on of the hottest themes in movies and I can easily name twenty romantic comedy movies that really burned the charts and are considered some of the most sellable movies of the century. Proof? I still have to see an action star who has not ventured into being a major cast in a good romantic comedy theme which means that there is really a huge market who gets crazy when that genre is now showing. And since hundreds of romantic comedies have been made dealing with hundreds of romantic comedy angles from the dead husband not really leaving the earth yet and hovering over his still alive wife to a girl who falls into a deep sleep every now and then who meets guy and the story revolves there, coming up with a new and untapped romantic comedy approach would be a very hard task. One reason why writing a good romantic comedy is quite a challenge is because you have to come up with so many reasons and twists that keeps them apart until the story nears its end.
if you are on the drawing board and you have thought of a runaway winner as a general plot on a romantic comedy script, here are some ways to keep them apart as long as you want them to be. You can start by putting the lovers apart and placing them in different countries, so far that it would take them days before they see each other the moment they decide to and create twists along the way. Or, you can make characters that are ages apart and that would mean a truckload of differences, a scenario where arguments are aplenty. And that leads us to another hot reason to keep the characters apart and that would be miscommunication focusing on how each of the main characters misconstrued each other.
Opposing values such as lovers who belong to warring political families or business opponents or a girl who fights for the environment and a guy who works for a huge oil firm – these thick walls would really spur a good number of twists which you can extend for a good thirty minutes or more. Nevertheless, since we have thought of these angles, it is not a far-fetched idea that others have also come across the same stories and that would mean that we have to go deeper and more absurd, if I may put it that way. You can use the more prevalent issues in life like for instance people who met and fell in love via social networking or relatives of a person who have been hospitalized, sharing the same room, and that is where they met. There is still a rich cornucopia of topics that have not been used and you just have to delve deeper. Work on people’s character and create situations for it.
Keep in mind that most people love romantic comedies mostly because they tingle the innermost feelings but they will love it more if they are able to relate to the stories.
The Cardboard Box, The Unsung Hero of Fiction and Film
We all take cardboard boxes for granted. And why wouldn’t we? These unremarkable cuboid containers, often coloured pale beige have no intention of standing out from the crowd. Yet in spite of their seemingly characterless existence, cardboard boxes do crop up more often than one would expect in fiction, film and television. Most obviously, the humble cardboard box, or more accurately, a sizeable team of boxes were often cast as a crash mat on to which a character, usually a baddie falls. Many children’s TV programmes and films, most notably those produced by the UK’s Children’s Film Foundation gave these cardboard boxes centre stage as they actively thwarted the dastardly activities of many a bad guy. However outside of children’s film and television, these boxes were often out of shot, making us believe a character had in fact fallen to their death.
Another popular role for many boxes was to be mercilessly driven through in episodes of the A-Team, Starsky & Hutch and other action shows of the 1970′s and 1980′s. This was particularly humiliating as this casting trend happened at a time when their role in the stunt world was being superseded by the air-bag which replaced the box based crash mat. It’s a sad fact that cardboard boxes weren’t, and still aren’t permitted to become members of Equity. Their roles often went uncredited and even unpaid in many cases. For many, their acting career was short as they seldom finished filming unscathed. And with so many up and coming boxes ready to fill their shoes, the future is bleak for the majority of ‘used’ boxes.
Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, writer and creator of super sleuth Sherlock Holmes quickly realised the potential of the box and penned The Adventure of the Box, the second short story in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, published in 1892. Despite of having a major place in the stories title, the box featured little after the opening chapters of the story, as even the nation’s favourite super sleuth focused more on the contents of the box rather than the box itself. There is only one television adaptation of this story, being the final episode of ITV The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes series which ran from 1985 to 1994. The box which sensitively portrayed the fictional box narrowly missed a BAFTA nomination in favour of Jeremy Brett’s portrayal of Holmes himself.
Probably the most famous cardboard box featured on Jasper Carrot’s ‘Carrot’s Lib’ comedy show aired in the early 1980′s. Dave, The Cardboard Box featured in numerous sketches which depicted the day to day living of a plain brown box. This documentary, narrated by Rik Mayall (presumably David Attenborough had other engagements) showed the reality of life of an everyday box both at work and play. The show charted Dave’s unsuccessful foray into stand up comedy, his failed relationships and his eventual demise into alcoholism. Dave spent much of the 1980′s and 1990′s as a recluse and very little is known of his whereabouts today.
These days, the vast majority of boxes find employment in the packaging industry; a far cry from the dizzy heights of television and film stardom. It seems a shame that these unsung heroes seldom gain the recognition they truly deserve.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes Movie Download
Cast: James Franco, Freida Pinto, Tom Felton, Brian Cox, John Lithgow Andy Serkis
Director: Rupert Wyatt
Modern day San Francisco and Will Rodman (Franco) is a troubled scientist, working on a cure for Alzheimers disease and using chimps as well as illegally using his father (Lithgow) to see if the ALZ 112 cure works.
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When one of the chimps which is showing signs of growing intelligence thanks to the trials in the lab breaks out and is killed, Rodman discovers she’s protecting a baby – whom Rodman promptly takes home and raises as his own test subject.
Three years later and Caesar the test subject is also showing signs of inherited intelligence and has learned sign language – however, when Caesar attacks a neighbour protecting Rodman’s dad, he’s locked up in a primate sanctuary.
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But it’s not long before Caesar’s plotting a break out from the chimpanarium his human captors have imprisoned him in…
A reboot of the Apes franchise was in no way on my radar after the somewhat messy Tim Burton/ Mark Wahlberg attempt back in 2001 – but quite frankly, this reboot is perhaps one of the best of the series – and one of the best reboots of a flagging franchise I’ve ever witnessed.
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That’s mainly, it has to be said, due to the work done by WETA in creating the chimps and Andy Serkis’ motion capture suit work as the lead Caesar. We’ve now reached an age where digital technology can do pretty much anything and can do it astoundingly well.
While the early digital realisation of the baby chimps is something akin to a Mogwai/Ape cross and a little creaky, when Caesar ages and comes into his own, it’s really an astonishingly good cinematic moment (even if early shots of him careering around a home are unnecessary and feel shoehorned in as if to show off what the tech can do) as the ape rises up and begins to emote. There’s so much feeling conveyed in Caesar’s eyes that you can’t help but connect with the primate and his kin and for that, those involved in this film really do need huge kudos as it’s never easy to get an audience to empathise with digitally created creatures.
Most of the humans are really confined to second fiddle in this to be honest and some pretty unsurprising stereotypes are rolled out as well; the boss of the genetic research company rolls out such clichés as “I run a business – not a petting zoo” and “You make history – and I make money”. Coupled with Tom Felton’s cruel cage master, that side of the story is somewhat predictable, clunky and a little jarring. Plus when you throw in a couple of plot holes – convenient lapses of security aid some of the narrative but will irritate some, there’s clearly some further evolution of the script needed.
That said, director Rupert Wyatt (who did the superb The Escapist) is in need of praise for helming this origin story, which tips a hat to the mythology as well (if you’re an Apes fan, there’s some pretty sly and cool nods to the franchise in the past – look out for them, you won’t be disappointed) but also for helming a terrifically well paced and reined in blockbuster. The final set piece is also to be commended as it breaks some of the conventions of Hollywood blockbusters and dials down the action which actually adds to the tension and suspense of the film.
All in all, Rise of the Planet of the Apes is one of the best blockbusters of the season; it’s a thrilling, emotion filled and intelligent ride which reinvigorates the franchise and has got me salivating for a potential sequel.
Published August 2nd, 2011
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