THE HUNGER GAMES (now on Blu-Ray and DVD from Alliance Films) - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Yes, this is now out on Blu-Ray and guess what? It still stinks!

The Hunger Games
(2012) dir. Gary Ross
*1/2
Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Willow Shields, Elizabeth Banks, Stanley Tucci, Wes Bentley, Woody Harrelson, Donald Sutherland

Review By
Greg Klymkiw

"What the fuck!" bellowed an angry sweet-faced teen as she and her girlfriends stood outside of the theatre playing The Hunger Games. "That was such a piece of shit. I didn't wanna see some bullshit PG-13 version. I wanted to see way more killing." Other than her proclivity for sadistic violence and the litany of sailor-worthy epithets barfing out of her gullet, you'd think, just looking at her, that she was a simple girl next door in Bible Belt Country. In most respects, she was, no doubt a genteel young miss. And importantly, she was right about two things. The movie was indeed a "piece of shit" and the violence - given the subject matter, proved to be all sizzle and no steak.

That this extra-long episode of Hannah Montana with killing is now out on Blu-Ray, I did so choose, like Our Lord, to sacrifice myself for the sins incurred by those who love the movie. I nailed my feet to the floor and watched it again.

I am now happy to report that The Hunger Games is no worse than it was on the big screen.

Based on the first of a trilogy of bestsellers by Suzanne Collins (I skimmed the first novel, but never bothered with the others), this might well have made for a decent picture if it had veered towards Norman Jewison's Rollerball and mated with Kinji Fukasaku's aforementioned Battle Royale - the cool dystopian future vision of the former and the utterly insane ultra violence of the latter.

Alas, even with the dreadful Hunger Games script (co-written by its original author Collins), a watchable movie would have required something resembling a director which, helmer Gary Ross clearly is not.

There is not, of course, a soul on the planet who is unaware what The Hunger Games is about. This teen-friendly miasma of fetid science fiction cliches is set after an apocalypse wherein the world has been rebuilt as The Capitol, a right-wing city state with a bunch of satellite districts representing the working class. Two kids from every district are selected by lottery to engage in too-the-death combat games which are broadcast live to all.

Clumsily, we are forced to follow the idiotically named couple Katniss (Lawrence) and Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) from the mining district as they wend their way through the proceedings, presumably fall in love and leave an open door for the sequel since they have displeased the government and Katniss has betrayed Gale (Hemsworth), her love interest from before the games began. Great! We'll enjoy a Twilight-like love triangle for two more miserable movies.

Gary Ross really can't direct.

He's written a few decent screenplays in his time - notably Big, Dave and The Tales of Despereaux - but his directorial output to date includes the lame attempt at quirky mainstream psuedo-post-modernism Pleasantville and the horrendous biopic of the famous racehorse Seabiscuit (which made me long for the 1949 Shirley Temple and Barry Fitzgerald weepie The Story of Seabiscuit).

With The Hunger Games, Ross reaches his filmmaking nadir. He's yet another director who has absolutely no idea how to direct suspense and action. Full of annoying shaky-cam and endless, cheap-jack quick cuts, he's all bluster. He has no idea of spatial geography, the camera placements are, dramatically, a mess and there is nary a genuinely thrilling moment in the entire movie.

For screen violence to really work - for it to have the power to alternately tantalize and sicken, a director needs to have a combination of craft and style. Ross has neither. Sam Peckinpah, for example, often shot his violence with a myriad of shots and numerous quick cuts, but the shots were exquisitely lit and/or composed and every single cut was like a dramatic beat - moving the film forward in terms of pace, but also conveying vital visual story information. The Hunger Games is edited in today's typical Attention Deficit Disorder style with a cornucopia of ugly shots.

Adding to the film's ineptitude is a lumbering 142-minute running time which inspired me to yearn, in vain, for the 80-90 minute length of Roger Corman New World pictures that were oft-blessed with crisp, stylish, humour-infused direction.

Neither Ross nor author Collins have anything resembling a sense of humour, but luckily, a couple of great supporting actors livened things up just in the nick of time. Stanley Tucci as the host of the broadcast and Woody Harrelson as a hunger game mentor, both serve up more than a few laughs (plus really bad haircuts) whilst Donald Sutherland in a small role as the Capitol's head-honcho is deliciously chilling and as such, comes closest to capturing what the movie might have been if the rest of it had actually been directed.

Our two leads have both acquitted themselves superbly in other movies - Lawrence in Winter's Bone and Hutcherson in Journey to the Centre of the Earth and its sequel Journey 2 The Mysterious Island. While they're both attractive here, our ability to feel anything at all for either character has more to do with their commanding screen presence as opposed to any of the lame dialogue forced into their memory banks and out of their mouths and the garbled action gymnastics they're put through by the woefully incompetent camera jockey Ross.

Nothing one says or does will stop the Hunger Games juggernaut. It's going to make a few thousand times as much as the GNP of all the Third World nations put together. This, sadly, has a lot to do with the genuinely brilliant marketing coupled with the increasingly susceptibility of younger audiences to outright crap.

Like the moronic Twilight films (save for the first half of the decently directed first instalment), Hunger Games is another example of how young audiences, so desperate to follow the Pied Piper of the current cultural dystopia plaguing our world, will happily, greedily, moronically and voraciously scarf down whatever buckets of excrement are placed before them.

They don't even need a spoon to scoop the fecal matter into their mouths. They bury their faces deep into the waste matter. Like pigs at a trough - bulking up for slaughter

"Hunger Games" is now on Blu-Ray and DVD via Alliance Films.

If you really feel you must own this abomination, feel free to order from the Amazon links below and support the maintenance of this site.



There's really no reason to present a Hunger Games clip here, so instead I'm presenting clips from much better movies with a similar theme.

Norman Jewison's Rollerball trailer:



Kinji Fukasaku's Battle Royale trailer:

Ridley Scott's PROMETHEUS - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Well, this dull, bloated, meandering hack job sure as hell isn't ALIEN. It is, however, co-written by the TV hack who gave us the woeful screenplay for COWBOYS and ALIENS.

Prometheus (2012) *1/2
dir. Ridley Scott
Starring: Noomi Rapace,
Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron, Idris Elba, Guy Pearce

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Ridley Scott's film of Alien from the screenplay by Dan O'Bannon was (and still is) a great movie. When I first saw it in 1979, the experience was so perfect, so complete, that I never imagined there would be a need for a sequel (or prequel) of any kind. When the sequels started coming, I was less than impressed. I detested James Cameron's overlong, noisy Rambo-lina-styled Aliens, David Fincher's miasma of half-baked pretention Alien 3 and only Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Alien: Resurrection had decent entertainment value. The less said about the AVP instalments the better.

I loved Alien so much I probably saw it at least ten times in its first year of release and a few more times in subsequent years. Scott's direction was so dazzlingly proficient, H.R. Giger's legendary design elements so astounding and O'Bannon's script so tight that it held up on repeated viewings - allowing one to admire different elements of both craft and subtext once the pure visceral nightmare of the first screening was out of one's system.

And, it was one hell of a great monster movie - so much so that I kept my eyes peeled for any subsequent film Scott and O'Bannon were attached to.

Having penned the hilarious and creepy Dark Star, the John Carpenter-directed satire of 2001: A Space Odyssey, O'Bannon was already familiar to me. After Alien, though, he always delivered the goods - even when the directors were hacks (as was the case with John Badham's competent rendering of Blue Thunder) or if the directors completely buggered up the writing (in particular, Tobe Hooper's mish-mash of Lifeforce and his lamely directed remake of Invaders From Mars) or when the directors were talentless non-entities (like Gary Sherman, whose dull by-the-numbers helmsmanship of Dead and Buried strangely enhanced the writing and made you wish a real director had delivered up O'Bannon's scenario).

When O'Bannon was paired with a great director, though, like Paul Verhoeven - watch out! Total Recall is so perfect and hasn't dated one bit and makes one automatically assume that the upcoming new version will have to be an utter waste of time.

The only opportunity O'Bannon had to direct his own original screenplay was the phenomenal Return of the Living Dead - a horror film so blisteringly insane, scary and funny that I still can't figure out why O'Bannon's output eventually petered out (though he did a decent directorial job on a Lovecraft adaptation written by another screenwriter called The Resurrected).

O'Bannon is one thing - the real thing!

Ridley Scott, however, is another matter. He's directed 20 pictures. He will always be in my good graces for Alien - his work there is unimpeachable. If truth be told, however, I haven't much liked most of his other pictures.

Blade Runner is clearly not without merit, but whatever version one sees, it's pretty much a gorgeous looking mess (and I still think the studio cut is the best). Thelma and Louise is entertaining, but full of fake female empowerment and has little value beyond one helping. Hannibal has the distinction of being a first-rate piece of A-movie trash and Black Hawk Down is still one kick-ass war picture. The rest of Scott's output is completely negligible - and yes, this includes his testosterone-infused Oscar-winning snore-fest Gladiator.

In spite of this, I was genuinely thrilled when I heard about Prometheus. I went so out of my way to NOT know anything about it that all I could tell you about the movie before seeing it was that Scott was directing, it had something to do with Alien and had a cool poster I couldn't avoid. About an hour before seeing the movie, I sadly made the inadvertent discovery that Michael Fassbender was in the movie and playing an android. Knowing this kind of annoyed me after all my hard work of not watching any trailers or reading anything in advance about it, but what finally annoyed me even more was the movie itself.

Anyone who thinks Prometheus should be viewed as a stand-alone piece and NOT a prequel to Alien (as some have suggested) is an idiot. It's a prequel all right. A scientific expedition is launched based upon similarities in ancient art works from different eras. A crew of scientists go to another planet and discover that it was once populated by alien beings who were responsible for creating life on Earth until they were wiped out by the nasty monster aliens from the first movie. Everyone gets wiped out save for Noomi Rapace and Michael Fassbender.

And there you pretty much have it.

The movie might have been worth watching, but the screenplay is so dull that there's little going for Prometheus other than leading lady Noomi Rapace (from the original German Dragon Girl trilogy), Fassbender's amusing android who models himself after Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, Scott's first-rate visuals and terrific special effects. That said, the effects here are typical of the digital age and nothing has the majesty or power of those rendered in Alien. I even hated the Prometheus spaceship. I'm more of water-dripping Nostromo rust-bucket-spaceship-kind-of-guy from instalment number one.

What drove me crazy in Prometheus is how most of it was all sizzle and no steak. There is only one - count 'em - ONE brilliantly horrific, suspenseful set piece that's ALMOST as good as anything in the first Alien.

And it IS a great scene, on a par with John Hurt's chest explosion. The Prometheus near-equivalent involves Rapace giving herself a Caesarean to pluck out the alien growing in her womb before it bursts out and kills her. It was the only time in the whole movie I genuinely perked up. Scott handled this harrowing sequence with tremendous aplomb. Though the chest explosion in Alien was a tough act to follow, the movie did so in spades and was so ridiculously scary you spent much of the movie squeezing your bum cheeks to keep the fecal matter from spewing out. The rest of Prometheus, however, feels plodding, predictable and is possibly even worse than Gladiator. Though I will concede it beats the AVP pictures.

The movie is rife with BIG IDEAS, but most of them are introduced, then dropped in favour of forward thrust and pyrotechnics. Even more offensive is the predictable conclusion that offers up a sequel or two. I saw it coming from very early on and prayed the story WOULDN'T go where it did.

It does.

So much for shocker endings.

However, I do suspect a gibbon might have trouble predicting the outcome.

That the screenplay is woefully inadequate is no surprise. It's written by Joe Spaights whose only claim to fame is a silly direct to video thriller a la Deliverance and Damon Lindelof, a TV hack whose only feature credit as a screenwriter is (need I say more?) Cowboys & Aliens.

The tagline for the original Alien was the brilliant: "In space, no one can hear you scream." With Prometheus, everyone in the theatre will hear discriminating audience-members scream for the movie to finally end so they can get home, slap on their Alien Blu-Ray and cleanse their palates of this decidedly unpalatable, over-hyped and shockingly well-reviewed hack job.

"Prometheus" is currently in world wide release via 20th Century Fox.

THE HUNGER GAMES - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Based on the first of three dreadful bestselling books by Suzanne Collins, this might have made for a decent picture if it had come closer to Jewison's "Rollerball" or Fukasaku's "Battle Royale", but then this would have required something resembling a director, as opposed to the incompetent Gary Ross

The Hunger Games
(2012) dir. Gary Ross
Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Willow Shields, Elizabeth Banks, Stanley Tucci, Wes Bentley, Woody Harrelson, Donald Sutherland

*1/2

By Greg Klymkiw

"What the fuck!" bellowed an angry sweet-faced teen as she and her girlfriends stood outside of the theatre playing Hunger Games. "That was such a piece of shit. I didn't wanna see some bullshit PG-13 version. I wanted to see way more killing."


Other than her penchant for more intense degrees of sadistic violence as well as the litany of sailor-worthy epithets that continued to fly out of her mouth, you'd think, just looking at her, that she was a simple girl next door in Bible Belt Country.

This genteel young lady was, of course right about two things. The movie is indeed a "piece of shit" and the violence - given the subject matter, is all sizzle and no steak. It's kind of like a really long episode of Hannah Montana with killing or, if you will Battle Royale crossed with The Lizzie McGuire Movie.

Based on the first of a trilogy of bestsellers by Suzanne Collins (I skimmed the horrendous first novel and didn't bother with the others), The Hunger Games might have made for a decent picture if it came closer to Norman Jewison's Rollerball crossed with Kinji Fukasaku's aforementioned Battle Royale - the cool dystopian future vision of the former and the utterly insane ultra violence of the latter.

To make a dream picture like this, even with the dreadful Hunger Games script (co-written by Collins) would, however, have required something resembling a director which, helmer Gary Ross clearly isn't.

By now, there isn't a soul on the planet who doesn't know what The Hunger Games is about. This teen-friendly miasma of fetid science fiction cliches is set after an apocalypse wherein the world has been rebuilt as The Capitol, a right-wing city state with a bunch of satellite districts representing the working class.

Two kids from every district are selected by lottery to engage in a too-the-death combat game which is broadcast to all the citizens. We follow the idiotically named couple Katniss (Lawrence) and Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) from the mining district as they wend their way through the proceedings, presumably fall in love and leave an open door for the sequel since they have displeased the government and Katniss has betrayed her love interest from before the games, Gale (Hemsworth).

Great! We get a Twilight-like love triangle to follow for two more miserable movies.

Gary Ross really can't direct. He's written a few decent screenplays in his time - notably Big, Dave and The Tales of Despereaux - but his directorial output to date includes the lame attempt at quirky mainstream psuedo-post-modernism Pleasantville and the horrendous biopic of the famous racehorse Seabiscuit (which made me long for the 1949 Shirley Temple and Barry Fitzgerald weepie The Story of Seabiscuit).

With The Hunger Games, Ross reaches his filmmaking nadir. He's yet another director who has absolutely no idea how to direct suspense and action. Full of annoying shaky-cam and endless, cheap-jack quick cuts, he's all bluster and not much else. He has no idea of geography, his camera placements are all a big mess and there is nary a thrilling moment in the entire movie.

For screen violence to really work - for it to have the power to alternately tantalize and sicken, a director needs to have a combination of craft and style. Ross has neither. Sam Peckinpah, for example, often shot his violence with a myriad of shots and numerous quick cuts, but the shots were exquisitely lit and/or composed and every single cut was like a dramatic beat - moving the film forward in terms of pace, but also conveying vital visual story information. The Hunger Games is edited in today's typical Attention Deficit Disorder style with a cornucopia of ugly shots. None of this has the power it could have had.

Add to the film's ineptitude a plodding 142-minute running time and I kept yearning for the Roger Corman 70s-style New World 80-90 minute running times and the often crisp, humour-infused direction so many of them were blessed with.

Neither Ross nor author Collins have anything resembling a sense of humour, so it's up to a couple of great supporting actors to occasionally liven things up.

Stanley Tucci as the host of the broadcast and Woody Harrelson as a hunger game mentor both offer more than a few laughs and really bad haircuts whilst Donald Sutherland in a small role as the Capitol's head-honcho is deliciously chilling and as such, comes close to capturing what the movie might have been if the rest of it had actually been directed by someone.

Our two leads have both acquitted themselves superbly in other movies - Lawrence in Winter's Bone and Hutcherson in Journey to the Centre of the Earth and its sequel Journey 2 The Mysterious Island. While they're both attractive here, our ability to feel anything at all for either character has more to do with their commanding screen presence as opposed to any of the lame dialogue forced into their memory banks and out of their mouths and the garbled action gymnastics they're put through by the woefully incompetent camera jockey Ross.

Nothing one says or does will stop the Hunger Games juggernaut. It's going to make a few thousand times as much as the GNP of all the Third World nations put together. This, sadly, has a lot to do with the genuinely brilliant marketing coupled with the increasingly susceptibility of younger audiences to outright crap.

As such, like the moronic Twilight films (save for the first half of the decently directed first instalment) Hunger Games is another example of how young audiences, so desperate to follow the Pied Piper of the current cultural dystopia plaguing our world, will happily, greedily, moronically and voraciously scarf down whatever bucket of excrement is placed before them.

They don't even need a spoon to scoop the fecal matter into their mouths. They bury their faces deep into the waste matter.

"Hunger Games" is in mega-wide release all over the world and is distributed in Canada by Alliance Films.

There's really no reason to present a Hunger Games clip here, so instead I'm presenting clips from much better movies with a similar theme. Kiddies, watch these instead. Don't give in to "The Man"!

Norman Jewison's Rollerball trailer:



Kinji Fukasaku's Battle Royale trailer:

JOHN CARTER - Review by Greg Klymkiw - The movie's poor performance at the boxoffice has the horrible whiff of a lazy company that had no idea what to do with this unique genre picture. While it's still playing on a few decent big screens, anyone who loves sprawling sci-fi fantasy adventures, owes it to themselves to see it now.

Buy the original Edgar Rice Burroughs novels here:

John Carter (2012) dir. Andrew Stanton
Starring: Taylor Kitsch, Lynn Collins, Willem Dafoe, Samantha Morton, Thomas Hayden Church, Ciarán Hinds, Dominic West, Mark Strong

***1/2

By Greg Klymkiw

When I do the math that counts, I add up the following John Carter attributes:

A handsome, stalwart hunk hero.

A major league babe.

Noble allies for the hunkster and babe to right wrongs.

Great villains.

An overall mise-en-scene that captures the SPIRIT of the late, great, original author Edgar Rice Burroughs ("Tarzan of the Apes") whose book ("Princess of Mars") the film is based upon.

Eye-popping special effects (that work just as well in 2-D as they do in 3-D, the latter process being one I normally can't stand).

Cool aliens.

Cool sets.

Cool spaceships.

Monsters.

Yes, monsters.

Cool monsters, at that.

An astounding slaves-in-an-arena-fighting-aforementioned-monsters scene.

A rip-snorting battle sequence.

Have I mentioned the babe, yet?

The sum total of the above is that director Andrew (Finding Nemo, WALL-E) Stanton's big screen version of Burroughs's first John Carter novel is a total blast.

The movie details the adventures of our title hero (Taylor Kitsch), a two-fisted soldier from the Civil War who, while on the run and hiding from a military posse trying to force him back into service, is zapped to Mars through a mysterious worm-hole device buried deep within a southwestern American cave. Once on the Red Planet, his Earthly physiology allows him to defy Martian gravity, thus giving him the power to leap incredible distances.

In addition to his brawn and bravery, this gravitational endowment (amongst hunky actor Taylor Kitsch's other obvious endowments - especially one in particular) is extremely helpful when he happens upon a "good" city state being oppressed by a "bad" city state. As luck would have it, the good guys have mega-babe Princess Dejah (the fetching, drop-dead gorgeous Lynn Collins), who kicks mighty butt (as well as being endowed with one) AND is a super-brilliant inventor. She comes up with a device to battle the nasties who want to forge an unholy alliance by forcing her to marry the slimy Sab Than (Dominic West), an evil puppet ruler who provides the front for the real power, Matai Shang (Mark Strong).

And then there are the lizard-like Tharks (think Jar-Jar Binks from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace but with four arms and no patois) who try to keep a low profile, but are convinced by John Carter and Princess Deja to join them in their fight against the bad guys. Tars Tarkas (Willem Defoe doing great voice work) and Sola (Samantha Morton) are the prime movers and shakers amongst the Tharks who help our hero and heroine.

The "character" I think I loved best happens to be the cutest alien dog I've ever seen in all my days of going to the movies. Granted, it's the only alien dog I've ever seen in the movies, but why quibble? Woola is the Martian dog, ever-drooling with a perpetual tongue hanging out of its wide, happy mouth and resembling a roly-poly big-eyed pus bag. He's super-fast and super-loyal to John Carter.

Old Yeller, Rin Tin Tin and Lassie be damned - Woola's got your collective asses in his jaws.

When I was a kid, I devoured Edgar Rice Burroughs with a passion. He was no great genre "thinker" like Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury or Arthur C. Clarke, but his pulpy, punchy style, his serviceable and often cheesy dialogue (even when I was a kid in the 60s it made me guffaw good-naturedly more than once) and most of all, his incredible imagination - creating exciting worlds on the planet Earth and beyond - made him every kid's go-to guy for sci-fi-fantasy-adventure. Stanton's obvious deference to Burroughs renders John Carter the ultimate screen adaptation of the famed Tarzan-creator's work.

The movie is deliciously old-fashioned, even intentionally retro - but NEVER with tongue-in-cheek. Stanton plays everything straight which lets the natural humour of the material shine and most of all, allows the derring-do thrill and delight ever-so tantalizingly.

The action, humour and major battle scene at the end are as good as any I've seen in years. Curiously enough, there isn't a single story element from the original Burroughs that hasn't already been pilfered by George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and pretty much any and every sci-fi silver screen outing since the books came out.

If truth be told, the elements Lucas lifted from Burroughs for his Star Wars films were enough to grip a couple of movie-going generations, but what Stanton delivers is the real thing and for me, is a lot more enjoyable. Lucas's Attack of the Clones, is probably my favourite Star Wars picture since it managed to capture everything the others merely purport to. I realize I might be in a minority here, but the majority haven't seen as many movies as I have. And John Carter, though reminiscent at times of SW:AOTC, beats that one and all the other Lucas efforts hands down.

By now, everyone has discussed - ad-nauseum - what a big box office flop Stanton's film is. I think this has less to do with the picture or the $250 million price tag - it has everything to do with Disney's utterly pathetic marketing. They blew it big time. Changing the shooting title "John Carter of Mars" to simply John Carter was the first idiotic move. For those fanboys who love Burroughs - fine, but to reel in new generations of moviegoers it would have made far more sense to include the "of Mars" appendage. The ads and posters Disney created are utterly lame also. Add a stupid generic title to ho-hum graphics and there's already a big strike against the picture in the marketplace.

John Carter's hugest per-capita theatrical grosses in the world were in Russia. They maintained the dumb title, but it sure looks cool in cyrillic letters and it sounds even cooler in Russian. Most of all, though, the graphics on the Russian ads and posters were deliciously retro, but so in the spirit of Burroughs that I'd argue a whole new generation might have been attracted to this ultra-cool approach if it had been employed round the world.

Worst of all, where were the literary tie-ins? All Disney could come up with was a novelization (!!!) of Burroughs's original book and the current screenplay.

Morons!

Where were the tie-ins with the actual Burroughs Carter books? They should have been out at least a year ago - building a whole new interest in his work with younger generations. Looking at other recent successful film franchises based on books, Burroughs more than deserved a shot at capturing the imaginations of young readers. Besides, his writing equals that of Leo Tolstoy when compared to the pathetic noodlings of J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter), Stephanie Meyer (Twilight) and Suzanne Collins (The Hunger Games).

John Carter is a movie that does have its fair share of longueurs, but I suspect this is due to some obvious truncations in the final picture editing. Part of me thinks the pace might have actually improved overall if the picture had been longer. The movie is already long, so I don't see the logic in keeping things on the cutting floor that might have improved the overall flow of the picture.

Disney screwed up. In fact, the company's recent proclamation of instituting a $200 million write-down based on the movie's poor performance at the boxoffice has the horrible whiff of a lazy company that had no idea what to do with this unique genre picture and decided - possibly in advance - to seek a tax loss.

While John Carter is still playing on a few decent big screens, anyone who loves sprawling sci-fi fantasy adventures, owes it to themselves to see it now.

That said, it's going to look great on Blu-Ray.

"John Carter" is currently in worldwide theatrical release and has been miserably marketed and distributed by Disney.

For a great perspective on Disney's pathetic marketing, the following is a fantastic open letter to Richard Ross, Chairman of the Disney Company. Read it HERE!

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THE LAST MAN ON EARTH - Richard Matheson is one of the finest writers of the 20th Century. Amongst numerous novels and short stories, he wrote screenplays and teleplays for some if the coolest genre movies including the Corman Poe adaptations, numerous TWILIGHT ZONE episodes and Spielberg's DUEL. Here is the most faithful adaptation of his classic post-apocalyptic thriller "I am Legend"

The Last Man On Earth (1964) dir. Sidney Salkow and Ubaldo Ragona
Starring: Vincent Price

***

By Greg Klymkiw

Let’s get this out of the way – Richard Matheson is one of the great American writers of the 20th century and his impact upon popular culture, literature and the art of writing is, perhaps, as insurmountable and important as the impact of someone like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald or Raymond Carver. The difference between Matheson and the aforementioned scribes is that he gets very little in the way of egghead (academic) respect (save, no doubt, for the likes of screenwriter extraordinaire George Toles and uber-menschian-pop-culture-guru Will Straw) – probably because his genres of choice were horror, sci-fi and fantasy and much of his writing was at the (supposedly lowly) level of screenplays and teleplays. There are, however, few great living and working filmmakers who do not owe a lot to the ground broken by Matheson. His genres of choice are pulp and it is pulp that often does not get the reverence it truly deserves.

That said, Matheson not only wrote some of the best movies and television (the monumental The Incredible Shrinking Man, classic episodes of the original Rod Serling Twilight Zone series, and a number of the Roger Corman big-screen Poe adaptations – among many others), but his astounding novel “I Am Legend”, first published in 1954, still has the power to chill and provoke. Matheson’s terse prose style captures the voice of his central protagonist so expertly that the horrifying, lonely journey taken by Robert Neville, the last man on an Earth populated by vampires, is simple, yet complex in its exploration of life in an apocalypse – an apocalypse that can be seen as both the end and a new beginning for mankind.

It’s a great book, and has spawned three film versions. The most recent is the execrable Will Smith action vehicle that takes the novel’s title and premise and does little besides providing a handful of visceral shocks. 1971 brought us Boris Sagal’s supremely entertaining and seriously, almost-hilariously dated Chuck Heston vehicle. And then there is The Last Man On Earth – an oddball 1964 film adaptation produced by schlockmeister Robert Lippert and made in Italy with a cast of dubbed-in-English Italians and a very odd, but also very compelling Vincent Price in the title role.

While the picture veers, on a number of fronts, from Matheson’s novel, it manages – more than the other versions – to come the closest to the spirit of this strange, terrifying tale of one man battling post-apocalyptic vampires. Moodily shot in black and white, we watch as Robert Morgan (inexplicably renamed as such in the movie, and played by Price) spends his days bombing around the city in a station wagon, killing vampires and burning their corpses while alternately taking care of mundane errands like shopping (in eerily-empty shops).

As dusk approaches, our hero locks himself in his secured suburban dwelling to calmly sip wine and listen to jazz LPs while roaming hordes of vampires call tauntingly to him from outside, threatening to kill him before he kills more vampires. Luckily, his home is secured with all the anti-vampire accoutrements including clusters of fresh garlic hanging on every possible entrance – the smell of which repels the vampires. (I must admit this particular bit of lore always confused me when it came to Eastern European vampires – you’d think all those bloodsucking Bohunks would be attracted to the aroma of garlic. But, I digress.)

Matheson himself wrote much of the screenplay adaptation for The Last Man On Earth and I suspect this is why the picture feels very close to the tone of the source material. In spite of this, Matheson was not satisfied that his script was rewritten by a number of other writers at the behest of Lippert and his pasta-slurping co-producers and he removed his name and had it replaced with the nom-de-plume of Logan Swanson. Oddly enough, looking back over all the film adaptations of his novel, this is still the best of the lot.

In spite of this, the picture is not perfect. The Italian locations look great, but are weirdly masked in the dialogue to be American instead of European. This is especially disconcerting since the locations contribute so much to the eerie quality of the movie. The standard dubbing into English of actors who are clearly not speaking English was de rigeur in the 60s, but seems a bit wonky in a contemporary context. The flashbacks employed feel shoehorned in rather than wended expertly and seamlessly into the narrative (Sagal’s The Omega Man did this rather well – in spite of the kitsch factor of most everything else in the picture).

These are minor quibbles, however. The Last Man On Earth captures Matheson’s dark, nasty tone and for much of the picture’s running time, it is a truly creepy and scary sci-fi horror thriller. Especially worth regarding is how this version captures the whole notion of how vampires (creatures of legend) become the new mundane humanity and how the mere mortal becomes the legend. It is this very thematic layer that takes Matheson’s “pulp” into the realm of worthy literature and thankfully, this particular picture is respectful of the theme.

The Last Man On Earth is as fine an adaptation of Matheson’s novel that we’re likely to see for some time. Sadly, the Will Smith version will put the kibosh on any future attempts to remake the film. In the meantime, see this version and be sure to read Matheson’s original “I Am Legend” and then you, like I, can dream of a remake in a generation or two that tackles this classic and universal work with EVERYTHING it deserves.

“The Last Man On Earth” is available on many DVD labels as a public domain title, but the best ones are the Legend Films release (that includes an odd, but rather pointlessly colorized version in addition the B/W original) and MGM’s terrific version that is double-billed with “Panic in Year Zero” and appears to be re-mastered from truly pristine elements.