The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia by Peter Dendle was an A-Z guide of the walking dead, while White Zombie: Anatomy of a Horror Film was Gary D. Rhodes’s in-depth illustrated study of the 1932 poverty-row film starring Bela Lugosi, with a foreword by the late George E. Turner.
The Gorehound’s Guide to Splatter Films of the 1960s and 1970sby Scott Aaron Stine was an A-Z guide of gore films.
John Kenneth Muir’s Terror Television: American Series, 1970-1999 was another hefty reference work, while the same author’s An Analytical Guide to Television’s ‘One Step Beyond’, 1959-1961 looked at the now-obscure ‘reality’ anthology show.
In I Was a Monster Movie Maker: Conversations with 22 SF and Horror Film-makers, the talented Tom Weaver talked with such nearly-forgotten actors as Faith Domergue, Ray Walston and Maureen O’Sullivan.
Also from McFarland, Harris M. Lentz III’s monumental Science Fiction, Horror & Fantasy Film and Television Credits: Second Edition combined four earlier books and updated and revised more than 2,000 pages into one of the most important and impressive reference volumes of the year.
From Midnight Marquee cameMemories of Hammer Films, editors Gary J. Svehla and Susan Svehla’s collection of interview transcripts from the annual FANEX convention in Baltimore, Maryland. Amongst those profiled were Christopher Lee, Barbara Shelley, Ingrid Pitt and Jimmy Sangster. In Monsters Mutants and Heavenly Creatures, Tom Weaver interviewed the people behind the drive-in classics.
From the same publisher, The Spawn of Skull Island was Michael H. Price and Douglas Turner’s revised and expanded edition of the 1975 volume The Making of King Kong by the late George E. Turner and Orville Goldner. Forgotten Horrors 2: Beyond the Horror Ban was Price and Turner’s follow-up to their previous volume about poverty-row horrors.
Published by The John Hopkins University Press as an oversized softcover, Chris Fujiwara’s Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall was a welcome reissue of the 1998 illustrated study of the director of Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie and Night of the Demon, with a foreword by Martin Scorsese.
In Italian Cannibal and Zombie Movies, Jay Slater looked at the gory sub-genre from the 1970s through to the early 1990s, and The Horror Movie Survival Guide by Matteo Molinari and Jim Kamm was a pointless A-Z list of movie monsters and their various attributes.
From Maryland’s Sense of Wonder Press, Famous Forry Fotos: Over 70 Years of AckerMemories was a softcover collection of black and white stills from the archives of legendary fan and editor Forrest J. Ackerman, who turned eighty-five in November and celebrated with a party at The Friar’s Club in Beverly Hills, California. To commemorate the event, guests received It’s Alive @ 85, a special publication limited to 250 copies with an introduction by Ray Bradbury.
Among the attendees at Ackerman’s birthday celebrations was director John Landis, who guest-edited The Best American Movie Writing 2001, which included essays by Jack Kerouac, Tom Weaver, Lawrence Kasdan, John Irving, Stanley Kubrick and others.
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AlthoughGladiator walked off with Best Picture at the 2001 Academy Awards, the martial-arts fantasy Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon picked up Best Foreign Language Film, Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography and Best Original Score Oscars, while The Grinch won Best Make-up for Rick Baker.
Arthur C. Clarke presented the Oscar for Best Screenplay Based on Material Already Published or Produced via a pre-recorded clip from his home in Sri Lanka. He did not know in advance that Traffic was the winner.
Meanwhile, the terrorist attacks of September 11th had an immediate effect on Hollywood, with studios shelving, postponing or abandoning any films that might have appeared insensitive. These included Tim Allen’s new Disney comedy Big Trouble and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Collateral Damage.
Somewhat more bizarrely, even just the inclusion of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers resulted in scenes being changed and promotional campaigns being pulled. The trailer for Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man film was withdrawn from theatres and the Internet because it contained a scene (produced exclusively for the trailer) in which a helicopter was trapped in a giant spider’s web strung between the two buildings. Meanwhile, the producers of Columbia Pictures’ sequel Men in Black 2 announced that the ending of the movie would be re-shot because the World Trade Center was used as a backdrop. Any other scenes featuring the structures would also be changed.
Warner Bros, even postponed by one week its planned 500 sneak previews of the Stephen King adaptation,Hearts in Atlantis starring Anthony Hopkins. It didn’t help, and after an opening of $9.8 million the film took less than $21 million at the US box office.
Costing £90 million to make and £30 million for Warner Bros, to market, Christopher Columbus’s Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone (retitled Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone in America) was released the first weekend in November and smashed box-office records on both sides of the Atlantic. In the US, where it was released on a quarter of all the screens in the country, it easily beat the previous record set by The Lost World -Jurassic Park ($71 million) and the Potter movie became the first film to make $100 million in its first four days. In the UK it beat the previous weekend record set by Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace (£14.7 million), and the film went on to take more than $300 million worldwide.
At almost three hours, Peter Jackson’s version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (filmed for $270 million back-to-back with the two sequels, to be released a year apart) was truly an epic. Although it had a lower box-office opening than Harry Potter, the film went on to gross more than $290 million in the US. Ian McKellen was perfectly cast as Gandalf, and there was some nice villainy from Christopher Lee.
Directed by The Hughes Brothers (Albert and Allen), From Hell was based on the grim graphic novel by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell and grossed an impressive $70 million in the US: Johnny Depp gave a powerful performance as the opium-smoking psychic Inspector Abberline, investigating the Jack the Ripper killings in 1888 London.
Ridley Scott’s Hannibal was the much-anticipated sequel to The Silence of the Lambs (1991), based on the novel by Thomas Harris (which had a different ending). Anthony Hopkins reprised his role as cannibal killer Dr Hannibal Lecter, Gary Oldman hammed it up as one of his mutilated victims, and Julianne Moore ably stepped into the role of FBI agent Clarice Starling.
Thir13en Ghosts, Steve Beck’s loose remake of the disappointing 1960 William Castle film, involved a strange house that was actually an occult machine powered by the trapped souls of twelve ghosts designed to open a gateway to Hell. Co-scripted by Adam Simon, Ernest Dickerson’sBones brought rapper Snoop Dogg back from the dead as the eponymous 1970s ghetto pimp for a very brief Halloween run at the box office.
Although boasting a rave quote from Clive Barker and having Francis Ford Coppola amongst its executive producers, much of the criticism surrounding Jeepers Creepers centred on its controversial director, convicted paedophile Victor Salva. It opened in the US at No. 1 with $15.8 million, and went on to gross $33.6 million.
In Soul Survivors, a woman slipping in and out of a coma attempted to recall the events that led to her predicament. Writer/director Stephen Carpenter’s teen horror film suffered from being cut by its distributor from an ‘R’ rating to a ‘PG-13’ in America.
When it came to the summer blockbusters, Stephen Sommers’s The Mummy Returns was a fun action sequel to his 1999 original which enjoyed a record-breaking opening weekend before finally taking a worldwide total of more than $400 million.
Despite cameos from original stars Charlton Heston and Linda Harrison, Tim Burton’s disappointing and impersonal $100 million ‘re-imagining’ of Planet of the Apes took $69.5 million, during its first week in late July at the US box office. Only the first Jurassic Park had enjoyed a better opening weekend at the time. However, audiences quickly dropped off and the film ended up grossing just under $170 million. Meanwhile, extras from the film announced that they were suing the produce
rs, claiming they were exposed to a cancer-causing substance during a dust storm scene.
Executive producer Steven Spielberg handed Jurassic Park III over to director Joe Johnston, and the result was a short but impressive ‘B’ movie. Filming reportedly began without a finished script, and it showed, despite the film earning $168 million.
Based on the successful interactive game, Lara Croft-Tomb Raider starred Angelina Jolie as the eponymous upper-crust adventurer attempting to prevent the Illuminati from tracking down the secret of an ancient device that could alter space and time.
Although Marlon Brando pulled out, reportedly suffering from pneumonia, after agreeing to appear in a cameo for $2 million, the dire Scary Movie 2 still went on to take nearly $70 million in the US.
Ice Cube, Natasha Henstridge and Pam Grier found themselves battling centuries-old spooks in John Carpenter’s incompetent Ghosts of Mars, which opened and closed with a miserable $3.8 million. Woody Allen’s 1940s spoof The Curse of the Jade Scorpion did even worse, grossing just $2.5 million.
Denise Richards and David Boreanaz were among the suspects as a cupid-masked killer cut up the teen cast in the derivative slasher Valentine, and three teens travelling across the desert found themselves battling the undead in J.S. Cardone’s low-budget vampire thriller The Forsaken.
David Caruso was part of a crew sent into an abandoned mental hospital to clear asbestos who were soon affected by the building’s brooding atmosphere in Brad Anderson’s Session 9. Daniel Minahan’s low-budget Series 7: The Contenders involved a lethal TV game show where the last surviving contestant was the winner.
A good Jet Li battled an evil Jet Li from a different dimension in The One, Jake Gyllenhaal played a schizophrenic teenager who listened to a man-sized rabbit with a twisted face in Donnie Darko, and Steve Railsback portrayed the Wisconsin cannibal killer who inspired Psycho and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in Chuck Parello’s Ed Gein.
Jeremy Irons and Bruce Payne hammed it up as villains in the juvenile sword-and-sorcery adventureDungeons & Dragons, which also starred Thora Birch. The young American actress also turned up in The Hole, a low-budget British chiller about a group of boarding-school teens trapped in an old war bunker.
In Rob Green’s The Bunker, a group of German soldiers took refuge in an underground storage tunnel and wished they hadn’t. Urban Ghost Story starred Jason Connery as a journalist involved with a Glasgow family bothered by moving furniture and other spooky occurrences after the daughter’s near-death experience.
Chris Rock discovered he was dead before his time in Down to Earth, an unnecessary remake of Heaven Can Wait, while Martin Lawrence travelled back in time to visit Camelot in the equally pointless Black Knight.
Despite the acrimonious divorce of star Nicole Kidman and co-producer Tom Cruise, The Others, from young Spanish writer/director/composer Alejandro Amenabar, was a classic haunted house story set in 1945 that grossed an impressive $90.6 million. Meanwhile, Guillermo de Toro’s ghost story The Devil’s Backbone was set in a boy’s orphanage during the last days of the Spanish Civil War.
Sophie Marceau played the eponymous ghost in Belphegor: Phantom of the Louvre, based on the popular 1965 French TV mini-series. Julie Christie and Juliette Greco had cameos. Christophe Gans’s Brotherhood of the Wolf saw an 18th-century gardener and his Iroquois Indian blood brother sent to Gevaudan to track down a legendary beast. A box-office hit in its native France, it was apparently that country’s highest-grossing genre film ever.
Veteran Kinji Fukasaku’sBattle Royale was a combination of gruesome game show and Lord of the Flies, while Alex de la Iglesias’s gory homage to Hitchcock, La Comunidad, was banned worldwide by George Lucas because one of the characters dressed like Darth Vader. Lucas also sued the producers of the porno movie Star Balk, claiming consumers could be confused into thinking that Lucasfilm sponsored the hardcore Star Wars spoof.
Billy Crystal, John Goodman and Steve Buscemi were among those who voiced the nightmare inhabitants of Monstropolis in the Disney and Pixar computer-animated Monsters Inc., which opened in November and took more than $244.8 million. However, it was overshadowed by rival DreamWorks’ revisionist fairy tale Shrek, featuring the vocal talents of Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Cameron Diaz and John Lithgow. The computer-created cartoon grossed $255.5 million, consequently blowing Disney’s traditionally animated adventure Atlantis - The Lost Empire out of the water!
Inspired by the video game,Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within went one step further and created its realistic human characters and alien invaders totally through CGI animation.
In May, director William Friedkin and screenwriter William Peter Blatty sued Warner Bros, and others for unspecified damages in the federal court, claiming they were denied residuals from both the 1973 and 2000 versions of The Exorcist. They also maintained that the latter version violated federal copyright law by identifying the studio as the movie’s author and by failing to register the film as a derivative of the original.
Despite having already been shown on UK satellite television, in August the British Board of Film Classification finally passed Tobe Hooper’s long-banned 1986 sequel The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 uncut with an ‘18’ certificate.
In America, films such asHarry Potter and Lord of the Rings helped boost cinema attendances to their highest levels since the 1950s. Ticket sales rose to 1.5 billion in 2001, a 5 per cent increase on the previous year and the highest since 1958. Despite the September 11th attacks, US box-office takings were a record $5.9 billion. The same upward trend was also to be seen in Britain, where the number of admissions rose by four million to 141 million, the highest figure since 1972.
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Unjustly banished to video, Ellory Elkayem’s They Nest was an enjoyable chiller set on a remote island invaded by mutated African cockroaches that nested inside the bodies of their victims. A likeable cast (including Thomas Calabro, Dean Stockwell and John Savage), fine special effects and a knowing script raised this often gory chiller into a whole different class.
Despite featuring music from Kid Rock, Rob Zombie and others, the third film in The Crow series,Salvation, starring Kirsten Dunst and Eric Mabius, went straight to video and DVD in most markets.
Tom Arnold and Tiffani-Amber Thiessen investigated a series of murders at the Bulemia Fall High School in the slasher spoof Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th.
Venomous starring Treat Williams and some genetically engineered snakes was just what you would expect from director Fred Olen Ray and co-producer Jim Wynorski working under pseudonyms.
Brian Yuzna’s Spanish-madeFaust: Love of the Damned featured Andrew Divoff and Jeffrey Combs and was based on yet another comic book series.
Donald F. Glut’s low-budget softcore comedy The Erotic Rites of Countess Dracula was simply embarrassing. The unlikely-named Brick Randall played a singer bitten by Count Dracula (a sick-looking William Smith), who lived in Hollywood with her faithful servant Renfield (Del Howison). From the same producers, Glut’s half-hour short The Vampire Hunters Club resembled a home movie. John Agar, William Smith, Bob Burns, Dave Donham and Forrest J. Ackerman played members of the eponymous group, still searching for a young girl kidnapped in 1958 by Dracula (Daniel Roebuck). This included special guest appearances by Belinda Balaski, Conrad Brooks, Del Howison, Irwin Keyes, Carla Laemmle, Brinke Stevens, Mink Stole, Carel Struycken, Mary Woronov and others.
Erotic Witch Project 2: Book of Seduction was another of Seduction Cinema’s softcore lesbian romps from the production team of producer Michael Beckerman and director John Bacchus, who were also responsible for The Erotic Ghost. Terry M. West’s The Sexy Sixth Sense was more of the same, also from Seduction.
From Video Outlaw, Cremains was a shot-on-video anthology movie from writer/director Steve Sessions that featured Lilith Stabs and Debbie Rochon. In David A. Goldberg’s Demon Lust, Brinke Stevens was a sexy demon confronted by Tom Savini’s hit man for the mob, while Jeff Burton’s The Night Divides t
he Day was about a psychopathic killer stalking a group of students camping in the woods.
Blood: The Last Vampire was an anime about a sword-wielding girl battling shapeshifters on an American military base during the Vietnam war.
All Day Entertainment’s The Horror of Hammer and Tales of Frankenstein contained numerous trailers of varying quality, while the latter also included the 1958 Hammer TV pilot Tales of Frankenstein as a bonus.
Some of the scariest bogeymen to appear on film, including Jason, Freddy, Michael Myers, Chucky, Leatherface and Pinhead, were profiled in Bogeymen: The Killer Compilation, a three-hour documentary featuring an audio commentary by Robert Englund.
Jay Holben’s Paranoid was an eight-minute short adapted from the 100-line poem ‘Paranoid: A Chant’ by Stephen King.
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Hallmark Entertainment’s The Infinite Worlds of H.G. Wells was an enjoyable three-part mini-series, based upon the author’s short stories. Tom Ward portrayed Wells, interviewed by a secret government agency about the mysterious adventures he and his future wife (Katy Carmichael) were involved with.
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