According to Variety, Chris Columbus’ 1492 Entertainment has picked up the film rights to Ben Templesmith’s werewolves-in-a-mental-institute graphic novel “Welcome to Hoxford“. Columbus will produce the adaptation along with 1492 partners Michael Barnathan and Mark Radcliffe.
I’m trying to imagine what a film version of Hoxford’s visual would look like, and I’m failing. Perhaps they could get David Fincher to direct and Darius Khondji to handle the photography– they created a similarly grungy, visceral world in Se7en.
In the past, special effects legend Rick Baker has expressed a cetain reluctance about the use of computer-generated creature effects in film. Apparently this hasn’t stopped Rick from messing around with ZBrush, and he’s been sharing his progress and experiments over at the ZBrushCentral forum. Starting two weeks ago, he started posting concept art for The Wolfman. Judging from some of his back posts, these are probably proofs-of-concept instead of anything official, but it’s really exciting to see the different stages of the creative process getting posted to a forum by the artist. Amazing stuff!
According to The Hollywood Reporter, production of the werewolf / vampire / zombie film Dead of Night starts today in New Orleans. The makeup effects are being handled by Greg Cannom and DRAC Studios, and if those names ring a bell, it’s probably because they just took home the makeup Oscar for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and they’re doing work on the forthcoming graphic novel blockbuster Watchmen.
Dead of Night is an adaptation of Tiziano Sclavi’s Dylan Dog, an Italian horror comic from 1986. According to Wikipedia,
Dylan Dog is a penniless nightmare investigator who defies the whole preceding horror tradition with a vein of surrealism and an anti-bourgeois rhetoric… Dylan lives with Groucho at 7 Craven Road in a cluttered apartment with a doorbell that screams. His hobbies include playing the clarinet and constructing model ship; he has many phobias, including claustrophobia, bats and heights. Dylan is also particularly susceptible to motion sickness, which is one of the reasons why he rarely travels.
Seems like a lot of dark humour is involved… let’s hope this one survives the transition to the big screen!
Say what you will about Michael Jackson… Thriller was an amazing video when it first came out in 1983, and it’s still pretty awesome today. Jimi Cuell feels the same way, and last October, he and his dedicated crew of dancers / zombies / 80’s fashion victims / filmmakers collaborated to create an homage that is both hilarious and impressive.
Tony Slotslider’s Book of Terror is an eight-minute short film that Cuell & friends wrote, shot and edited, all within 48 hours. Madness, you say? Nay, friends, it’s the Bloodshots 48-Hour Horror Filmmaking Contest. Cuell’s group was required to create a film in the werewolf genere, and they had a few other guidlines as well– they had to include an occult book as a prop, and use the line “this picture looks familiar” as part of the dialog. “We came up with the idea in something like 10 minutes,” Cuell told The Vancouver Courier. “And then we went straight home and started working on the song and that took three hours or so. We wrote the lyrics accordingly and went and grabbed a werewolf mask and just went from there.” See the results for yourself!
ArcLight writes in to let us all know that the Sci Fi original movie War Wolves will premiere as part of Sci Fi’s werewolf movie marathon on March 8th. Check out a synopsis and trailer below.
Jack Ford leads a special forces unit back to the United States to hunt down Jake Gabriel, a soldier who has been infected with the werewolf virus that turns man into wolf. Little does Jack know that three of the female soldiers serving in his unit have also been infected and have already transformed into she-wolves. The she-wolves forces of evil and Ford’s special op forces of good, are pitted against each other in the race to save mankind from turning into wolves.
War Wolves will be airing at 9PM local time, towards the end of a full day’s worth of werewolf movie programming on Sci Fi. Other titles in the day’s schedule include Dog Soliders, Cursed and another Sci Fi original, Never Cry Werewolf. Check out the Werewolf Events Calendar for a full lineup of titles and times.
What do you do when you’re an 11-year-old boy and the werewolf who lives with you is taking private phone calls from your Valentine crush? If you’re Dave of Spook House Dave!, you spin it into soap opera, complete with soft-focus shots and dramatic musical cues.
Spook House Dave! is a new online puppet series about Dave, an 11-year-old who lives in a haunted castle with a vampire, a witch, a werewolf, a mummy, a Frankenstein’s monster and an assortment of other ghouls and ghosts. Like Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends, it’s geared towards kids, but any grown-up with a sense of humour will get a kick out of it. The dialogue is funny and genuine, the character design is creative and endearing, and everything on screen, from the puppets to the scenery, has a lovingly-handcrafted feel. The official web site, spookhousedave.com, currently features a special Valentine’s Day episode (shown above). The full site should be launching in the next month or two, and in the meantime you can visit DM Kids to watch the first two episodes. There’s also a Spook House Dave! Youtube channel, which has got some original content in the form of character confessionals. No confessional from Umberto the werewolf yet, but maybe he’s next.
Spook House Dave! is produced by Dragonfruit Studios and a team of puppeteers and improvisers in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s great to see artists and performers working together and using the web to distribute their work like this– here’s hoping Spook House Dave! takes off. I know I’ll be watching (and rooting for Umberto)!
According to statistics posted by TorrentFreak, Underworld: Rise of the Lycans is this week’s number one most downloaded film on the BitTorrent protocol. The stats posted don’t include total download numbers, but TorrentFreak confirms that the total number of downloads is “well over a million”. I’m not sure what says about the quality of the film. Given that another one of this week’s rising stars is Beverly Hills Chihuahua, probably nothing good.
What did you all think of Rise of the Lycans? I’m afraid I was still hibernating when it came out.
Figures.com has posted some new photos of the 7- and 12-inch Mezco Wolf Man figures, including wicked-looking “bloody” variants of each. Mezco’s detail pages for thesefigures don’t include any info on the bloody versions, so I’m not sure when or how they’ll be made available, but rest assured, when I know, you’ll know. Of further note is Mezco’s ship dates for these: the 7-inch version now ships “mid to late October 2009″, probably to coincide with the film’s release date, but the 12-inch version apparently still ships in late April. I’m not sure if that’s an oversight or a deliberate decision, but in any case you can still pre-order both versions. Thanks for the tip, ArcLight.
Monty Python-style gore, a storyline borrowed from Jurassic Park and a werewolf costume that’s not obscured by cheesy, shadowy night shots? This looks like a lot of schlocky, low-budget, tongue-in-cheek fun. Check out direwolfmovie.org for photos and more info.
Crave Online has a two-page interview with Rick Baker, whose special effects genius brought us pretty much everyfantasticsilver–screenwerewolf of the past 30 years. A lot of the interview is similar to ones conducted by MTV and ShockTilYouDrop back in August– Baker talks about how The Wolfman star Benicio del Toro already sort of looks like a werewolf, his rocky relationship with CG effects and his reasons for continuing to develop “old school” makeup and prosthetic techniques despite CG’s capabilites (hint: he says “I like making the sh*t.”).
What’s interesting are Baker’s comments on the challenges of making a dramatic transformation sequence out of a werewolf that’s relatively low-key compared to the ones in AWIL and The Howling.
I kind of said, “To be honest with you, I don’t know how we do this transformation. I don’t know how we make an American Werewolf in London kind of a thing out of this slight change.” His nose is only this much longer. His teeth grow and some things… he’s not a four-legged thing. His feet do get a little more doglike and the hands grow claws and stuff. There’s things we can do but also how do you do it and try to make it original. After Werewolf and the Howling movies, how many times can we see these stretchy faces and claws busting through and all that stuff.
Rick, I think I speak for werewolf fans everywhere when I say that the stretchy faces and claws busting through are exactly what we want… but if anyone can some up with something better, it’s you.
