Full Moon Features: The Reawakening of the Underworld series

2012-05-05

Well, it was bound to happen sometime. Four movies into the Underworld series, I finally broke down and saw one of the things in theaters. It was back in February when I was joined by three other gentlemen for a 5:10 showing of the 3-D version of Underworld: Awakening (for some reason the 2-D version wasn’t showing at all in my town), and it’s pretty safe to say we all got precisely the movie we were expecting. I don’t know…
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Full Moon Features: Witnessing the Rise of the Lycans

2012-04-05

Every three years — almost like clockwork, it seems — we get another installment in the Underworld series. (Which I guess means we’re in for Underworld: Here Comes Another One come January 2015.) Keeping to that schedule, the first month of 2009 brought us a prequel, Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, which temporarily set aside the present-day storyline in order to delve into the past to explore where the whole Vampire/Lycan war began. Directed by Patrick Tatopoulos, who designed the…
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Live-Tweeted Quasi-Review of “Anathema”, the Lesbian Werewolf Horror Darling of Kickstarter

2012-03-22

In July 2011 I posted about one of the first Kickstarter projects I ever contributed to: Anathema. The goal was to fund the illustration, colouring and printing of issue #1 of a werewolf comic that writer Rachel Deering called “a return to classic horror in comics”. Now, seven months after that post, and five months after the project surpassed its Kickstarter goal, the first issue of Anathema is circulating among Kickstarter contributors. I got my claws on a PDF and sat…
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Web Series “Wolfpack of Reseda”: Drink some True Blood while driving your Kia to your job at Initech

2012-03-17

According to the end of the first episode of  Wolfpack of Reseda, when you’re infected with lycanthropy you immediately receive enormous feathery sideburns and a brand new Kia Soul. The bemused equanimity with which protagonist Ben March accepts these seemingly arbitrary gifts sealed the deal: as soon as I’m done writing this post, I’m moving on to episode two. Reseda is an eight-episode web series produced by Fox Digital Entertainment (and sponsored rather conspicuously by Kia). New episodes debut weekly on Myspace. They’re…
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Full Moon Features: The Underworld series, Part One

2012-03-07

He’s a life-saving surgeon, she’s a death-dealing vampire — can the two of them get along? That’s the big question posed by 2003′s Underworld. (Actually, that’s not strictly true. The real question the filmmakers probably posed was “Hey, wouldn’t it be really cool if we made a movie where vampires and werewolves fought each other with guns while there was a Romeo and Juliet thing going on?”) I gave Underworld a wide berth when it was first released nearly a…
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Full Moon Features: Joe Johnston’s The Wolfman, two years later

2012-02-07

It’s tantalizing to think about The Wolfman that might have been. Mark Romanek’s music videos are so distinctive that it’s pretty much a guarantee that his treatment of the material would have been, too. Just take a gander at “Closer” or “The Perfect Drug” by Nine Inch Nails, or Johnny Cash’s “Hurt” or even Michael & Janet Jackson’s “Scream” and you’ll see what I mean. The man knows his way around striking — and frequently disturbing — imagery. Once slated…
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Full Moon Features: The “Rebirth” of The Howling series

2012-01-08

After Howling: New Moon Rising limped into video stores in 1995, the long-running series was finally put out of its — and our — misery. Seven films in, any connection with Gary Brandner’s original novels had long since been severed and it couldn’t be denied that the bad films in the franchise easily outstripped the good ones. Short of sending its werewolves into space (an idea that I’ve seen in comic form, but never on the silver screen), everything that…
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Book Review: “Werewolves – An Illustrated Journal of Transformation” by Paul Jessup

2011-12-28

Werewolves – An Illustrated Journal of Transformation is the tale of Alice, a young woman who gets attacked by a pack of wolf-like creatures and then documents her changes (and those of her brother Mark, who was attacked too) over three weeks with journal entries and evocative illustrations. Writer Paul Jessup and artist Allyson Haller have created a teenaged femme werewolf tale that stands shoulder to shaggy shoulder with Ginger Snaps. It seems like there a lot of ways a journal-style project like this could go wrong: clumsy…
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Full Moon Features: 70 Years of The Wolf Man

2011-12-09

On December 12, 1941, a horror legend was born, and it couldn’t have come at a better time for Universal Studios, which had ruled the roost in the first half of the ’30s with such iconic monster movies as Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy and The Invisible Man. It wasn’t until the success of 1935′s Bride of Frankenstein, though, that the studio caught the sequel bug, resulting in the production of Dracula’s Daughter, Son of Frankenstein, The Mummy’s Hand and The…
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Full Moon Features: The Howling series, Part Two

2011-11-09

When last we left the Howling series, director Phillipe Mora had just made a complete hash of the first sequel, 1985′s Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf, yet somehow felt qualified to take a crack at another one. How he was able to convince novelist Gary Brandner that he was the man for the job I have no idea, but once he had secured the sequel rights Mora set about writing a script that had no connection whatsoever to…
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