The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 10 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  Despite a massive publicity campaign in America, the huge boxoffice take for Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin’s misguided $120 million reworking of Godzilla was still considered a disappointment. Daily Variety reported that the film had trouble in Japan as well. Even though it broke records there when 500,000 people turned out to see it on the opening day, ticket sales dropped considerably during the second week.

  In Stephen Sommers’s underratedDeep Rising, the likeable Treat Williams found himself unwittingly involved in a raid on a cruise ship and discovered that most of the crew and passengers had been killed by giant flesh-eating worms from the ocean depths. Ron Underwood’s remake of the 1949 RKO movie Mighty Joe Young also used some impressive special effects to bring the eponymous fifteen-foot ape to life.

  The X Files movie followed on directly from the fifth season of the TV series, as FBI agents Mulder and Scully (David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson) finally uncovered what was really behind all the conspiracies and cover-ups. It also included a flying saucer climax that was straight out of The Thing from Another World (1951).

  Alex Proyas’ wonderfully noir-ishDark City involved Rufus Sewell as a man framed as a serial killer who discovered that he and everyone else were living in outer space, where a dying race of alien “Strangers” (who looked like Clive Barker creations) possessed the bodies of the dead and could stop time.

  A big opening weekend for the fast, flashy and violent vampire action movie Blade, based on the Marvel Comics character, quickly led to rumours of a sequel to again star Wesley Snipes as the moody half-undead, half-human killing machine. The arty Wisdom of Crocodiles starred Jude Law as a psychic vampire who fed off the positive emotions that existed in his victims’ blood streams, while John Carpenter’s Vampires, based on John Steakley’s 1990 novel, was one of the director’s worst movies, thanks to a dumb script (Don Jakoby), laughable performances (especially James Woods), unconvincing special effects and the obvious low budget. Even so, it was still way ahead of Razor Blade Smile, a woefully cheap-looking vampire thriller that simply didn’t have the talent or budget to match the high concepts of 26-year-old writer/director Jake West. It also marked a sad end to the career of actor David Warbeck.

  As Death, Brad Pitt took a holiday in the interminable Meet Joe Black. Based on the novel by Richard Matheson, Robin Williams had a colourful look at the after-life inWhat Dreams May Come, and Michael Keaton came back from the dead to revisit his children as a silly-looking snowman in Frost.

  Al Pacino’s Satanic John Milton hired hotshot lawyer Keanu Reeves for his Manhattan law firm in The Devil’s Advocate, based on the novel by Andrew Neiderman. Denzel Washington played a detective attempting to catch a body-hopping demonic killer in Fallen, and Universal successfully revived its killer-doll franchise with Bride of Chucky, in which the possessed plaything was reanimated by voodoo and teamed up with his sexy psychopath girlfriend played by Jennifer Tilly.

  An adaptation of Christopher Bram’s superior gay novel Father of Frankenstein, Bill Condon’s Gods and Monsters was an over-long and occasionally plodding look at the final months of retired film director James Whale, expertly played by Ian McKellan. McKellan also appeared as a former Nazi being blackmailed by a 16-year-old student in Bryan Singer’s Apt Pupil, based on the story by Stephen King.

  Based on the novel by executive producer Dean Koontz, Phantoms starred Peter O’Toole and Ben Affleck investigating a small town where a blob monster had caused everyone to disappear.

  Produced by star Oprah Winfrey,Beloved was a Civil War ghost story that flopped at the boxoffice. Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman played witchy sisters looking for love inPractical Magic, and the long-delayed Spanish film Killer Tongue involved a woman infected by an alien rock.

  Natasha Henstridge returned as a sexy alien shape-changer still looking to get laid in the laughable Species II. Star Trek: Insurrection, the third film to feature The Next Generation crew, suffered from a weak storyline but did include an evil race of facelifting aliens, and Kurt Russell battled a cyborg warrior on another planet in the futuristic flop Soldier.

  Joe Dante’s subversive dark comedy Small Soldiers was set in a small town which became a battleground for voice-activated toys fitted with munitions chips.

  Vincenzo Natali’s student filmCube resembled an overlong Twilight Zone episode, as a group of strangers found themselves trapped in a endless maze of interlocking cubes, some of which contained lethal traps. In Sphere, based on the novel by Michael Crichton, Sharon Stone, Dustin Hoffman and Samuel L. Jackson discovered an alien artifact underwater which gave them the power to unconsciously manifest their dark sides.

  Lost in Space starring William Hurt, Gary Oldman, Matt LeBlanc and Mimi Rogers was loosely based on the 1960s TV show about the space family Robinson. Supposedly inspired by the same period, Jeremiah Chechik’s The Avengers was an incompetent travesty of the cult sci-spy show, with Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman lacking any screen chemistry as John Steed and Mrs. Peel, and Sean Connery hamming it up as the villain. It reportedly lost $40 million and became the third biggest boxoffice disaster of all time after Inchon and Heaven’s Gate.

  It was hard to believe that yet another version of The Phantom of the Opera, starring a maskless Julian Sands, was the movie Italian cinemagoers said they wanted to see from co-writer/ director Dario Argento.

  The anniversary re-release of William Friedkin’s 1973 classic The Exorcist in Britain meant extra business for the clergy, who were inundated with requests for spiritual guidance from moviegoers overwhelmed by the experience. BBC Radio 4 also broadcast a half-hour programme entitled Lucifer Rising - 25 Years of “The Exorcist”, in which journalist Mark Kermode interviewed writer William Peter Blatty and director William Friedkin.

  Although it didn’t have much to do with the author, Bram Stoker’s Shadowbuilder was quite an impressive direct-to-video horror thriller involving a black magic demon that used the dark to kill off its victims. Don Coscarelli reworked his 1979 film again asPhantasm IV, once more featuring Angus Scrimm as the Tall Man, and Christopher Walken returned as the psychopathic angel Gabriel in Prophecy 2. Ahmet Zappa, David Carradine and Fred Williamson all turned up in Ethan Wiley’sChildren of the Corn V: Fields of Terror.

  Curse of the Puppetmaster and Subspecies 4 were the latest entries in executive producer Charles Band’s direct-to-video series, while Frankenstein Reborn! and Werewolf Reborn! were the first two titles in Band’s Filmonsters! series aimed at teenagers.

  Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island was an enjoyable direct-to-video cartoon feature in which the cowardly dog and his pals met up with some scary E.C. Comics-style zombies, however Addams Family Reunion was a disappointing video entry in the live-action series, with Tim Curry and Daryl Hannah taking over the roles of Gomez and Morticia.

  With his daughter Sara Jane and co-stars Adrienne Corri and Christopher Lee among those present on November 23rd, an English Heritage Blue Plaque was unveiled at the birthplace of horror film star Boris Karloff, who was born William Henry Pratt in Peckham, south London, in 1887.

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  Steve Barron’s Merlin was a magical TV mini-series that looked at the myths and legends of Arthurian Britain from the perspective of the eponymous sorcerer (Sam Neill) and other supernatural characters. Peter Benchley’s Creature was another fun mini-series, in which scientist Craig T. Nelson and his family encountered a mutated monster land shark, created during the Vietnam war and accidently released by treasure hunters.

  A series of underwater earthquakes released a family of mutated salamanders that had grown to gigantic proportions in Gargantua, a cable TV monster movie made without any sophistication by Bradford May. Wes Craven “presented” Don’t Look Down, a Halloween TV movie in which Megan Ward played a reporter afraid of heights.

  Stephen Tompkinson was the wimpy hero who uncovered a plot by a mysterious pharmaceutical company to develop a drug that caused those who took it to share their thoughts in the three-part series Oktober, based on the no
vel by writer/director Stephen Gallagher.

  When a million year-old giant artifact was discovered in hyperspace, writer/executive producer J. Michael Straczynski reworked familiar themes from both H.P. Lovecraft and Nigel Kneale into Babylon 5: Thirdspace, the second in a series of TV movies based on the SF show, and David Hasselhoff certainly looked the part as special agentNick Fury in the TV movie based on the Marvel Comics character. When dubbed scientist Udo Kier predicted that sun spots would result in the Earth experiencing a new ice age, various west coast characters whined and panicked as it got cold in the count-the-cliches disaster movie Ice.

  Veteran Debbie Reynolds played a witchy grandmother who had to stop an evil warlock from returning the powers of darkness to the colourful world of ghosts and monsters in the Disney TV movieHalloweentown.

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  The best genre show to debut during the 1998 TV season was the Fox Network’s grimBrimstone, in which Peter Horton played dead police officer Ezekiel Stone who made a deal with the Devil (John Glover) to return to Earth and recover 113 escaped souls from Hell. Unfortunately, it was soon cancelled.

  Meanwhile, the Wes Craven/Shaun Cassidy series Hollyweird, which was also being prepared for a fall debut on Fox, was never aired after the network decided to make some major changes in the show, including bringing in an all-new cast. It was supposed to be about three midwest teenagers who brought their local-access cable TV show about unsolved murders and bizarre nightlife to Hollywood.

  At least Buffy the Vampire Slayer continued to build upon its solid fan base with strong characterizations and surprisingly dark stories, as the high school vampire-hunter (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and her friends discovered that Willow’s new boyfriend Oz was the werewolf terrorizing Sunnydale; a jealous science student used a potion to turn himself into the kind of man he thought his girlfriend wanted him to be; a Nigerian demon mask belonging to Buffy’s mother brought the recently dead back as homicidal zombies; an experimental DNA process had the side-effect of turning school swim-team members into monstrous gill-men, and Buffy’s undead boyfriend Angel (David Boreanaz) escaped after spending centuries in Hell, only to be confronted by his many victims.

  Buffy cast members also selected their all-time favourite music videos on the 1998 MTV Halloween special, Videos That Don’t Suck, which also included a behind-the-scenes look at the series, and Fox Consumer Products announced its own Buffy clothing line aimed at teenage girls.

  Chris Carter’s phenomenally popular The X Files came up with a couple of scary episodes amongst the usual aliens and conspiracy plots. In “Folie a Deux” a man holding his colleagues as hostages tried to convince Mulder (David Duchovny) that his boss was really a mind-clouding insectoid monster that had been turning its victims into blank-eyed zombies, while in “Bad Blood” Mulder was accused of staking a pizza delivery boy because he believed he was a vampire. As the surprise ending revealed, the whole trailer park community was made up of the glowing-eyed undead. Unfortunately, the killer doll episode “Chinga”, co-scripted by Stephen King and creator Carter, turned out to be a big disappointment.

  Lance Henriksen’s Frank Black had little more than a cameo in the best Millennium episode, “Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me”, in which four demons in human guise got together in a donut shop to discuss how things were going with their soul collecting. The rest of the second season plodded on, despite some major plot changes.

  Poltergeist The Legacy, the series about the members of a San Francisco-based secret society who protect others from the supernatural, returned with a two-part story in which anthropologist Alex Moreau (Robbi Chong) was bitten by an old friend while visiting New Orleans and soon found herself transforming into a vampire.

  Psi Factor: Chronicles of the Paranormal was hosted by an unconvincing Dan Aykroyd and supposedly inspired by the actual case files of The Office of Scientific Investigation and Research. Adding Matt Frewer and Michael Moriarty to the second season, O.S.I.R. investigators looked into the case of a family who had survived for more than a century without aging by drinking fresh blood, and travelled to swamp country to investigate the case of two murdered brothers who were brought back from the dead by their family as putrefying zombies.

  Ultraviolet was a moody six-part British serial in which a police detective (Jack Davenport) found himself recruited by a covert organisation dedicated to eradicating modern-day vampires in a secret war being fought on the streets of contemporary London.

  Malcolm McDowell brought a nice dark edge to his role as Mr. Rourke in the ill-fated revival of Fantasy Island, and Jeremy Piven was either the eponymous Roman god or a madman in the light-hearted Cupid.

  In Charmed, Shannen Doherty, Holly Marie Combs and Alyssa Milano starred as the three Halliwell sisters, who discovered they were witches. Using a magic recipe book found in the attic of their San Francisco home, the trio solved crimes of a supernatural nature. Mark Dacascos played a musician brought back from the dead seeking revenge in The Crow: Stairway to Heaven, which was based on the books and movies created by James O’Barr.

  The usually tedious Star Trek: Deep Space Nine managed at least one memorable episode (“Far Beyond the Stars”) that looked at racism in the 1950s against the background of the SF pulp magazines.

  Debra Messing portrayed bioanthropologist Dr Sloan Parker, who uncovered the existence of a new species dedicated to the annihilation of mankind in the underrated Prey. Robert Lee-shock was the new lead in Earth Final Conflict, playing bodyguard Liam Kincaid, a man more than human who was caught in the struggle between the alien Taelons and the human Resistance.

  Sliders also revised its cast as Jerry O’Connell, Cleavant Derricks, Kari Wuhrer and the talentless Charlie O’Connell continued to travel (“slide”) between parallel Earths on the Sci-Fi Channel and discovered an apparently haunted hotel and a digitised world where their real bodies wandered around as zombie-like “Empties”. 7 Days was a time-travel series about an ex-CIA agent (Jonathan LaPaglia) who had to save the Earth on a weekly schedule.

  Following a 1996 pilot movie,The Vanishing Man finally made it to British TV screens for an inane six-part series starring the irritating Neil Morrissey as undercover agent Nick Cameron, who turned invisible whenever he came into contact with water. Even worse was the BBC Scotland and Sci-Fi Channel-produced Invasion: Earth, which was shown in six fifty-minute episodes (each costing a reported $1.2 million). Written by Jed Mercurio, this tale of aliens from another dimension invading a remote Scottish village was one of the most ludicrously inept science fiction shows ever broadcast in the UK.

  Having apparently lost the title they wanted (see above), Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks SKG produced theanime-style cartoon Invasion America in three hour-long segments. Despite a cast of well-known voices (including Leonard Nimoy), old ideas and poor animation didn’t help. DreamWorks and Spielberg had more success withToonsylvania, featuring the gruesome comedy cartoon adventures of Igor (Wayne Knight), Dr Frankenstein (David Warner) and his dumb Monster Phil, along with the zombie family of Night of the Living Fred.

  The Simpsons Halloween Special IX was also fun as Homer’s new hairpiece was possessed by the revenge-seeking spirit of an executed criminal, Bart and Lisa were sucked into an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon on TV, and Maggie turned out to be the offspring of alien commander Kang. Even better was The Angry Beavers episode “The Day the World Got Really Screwed Up!”, an hilarious Halloween special narrated by Peter Graves in which beavers Daggett and Norbert ended up at the home of “B” movie actor Oxnard Montalvo where they battled monsters controlled by an evil vampiric alien intelligence from another dimension. Guest voices included Adrienne Barbeau, William Schallert and Jonathan Haze.

  Van-pires was a syndicated live action and computer-animated series in which a group of teens attempted to stop parasites from sapping the Earth of all its natural gases. The Fox Saturday morning cartoon Godzilla: The Series was a vast improvement over the flashy movie it was based on, and Saban’s cartoon Monster Farm was
set on a rural farm full of monsters, including vampiric rooster Cluckula, Jekyll and Hyde sheep Dr. Woolly, monster pig Frankenswine, living-dead bull Zombeef and Egyptian mummy Cowapatra.

  A quartet of transforming mummies with superhuman powers (“With the strength of Ra!”) and their sacred cat protected a twelve year-old San Francisco skateboarder, who was the reincarnation of an Egyptian prince in the cartoon Mummies Alive! The inevitable action toys followed.

  Goggle Watch: The Horror of the House of Goggle Part 13 was a daily half-hour children’s series featuring the Goggle Family who decided to turn their guest house into a themed hotel, “Goggle House of Horror”. Even more infantile was the BBC’s Julia Jekyll and Harriet Hyde, in which a schoolgirl (Olivia Hallinan) periodically transformed into a hairy giant monster.

  A juvenile spin-off from the Kevin Sorbo show Hercules the Legendary Journeys, Young Hercules involved the teenage son (Ryan Gosling) of Zeus and his friends battling the fanged followers of the evil god Bacchus over several half-hour episodes.