When 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002) appeared, it did not simply revive the zombie film. It replaced it with something leaner, faster, and more psychologically pointed. The infected were not undead bodies driven by hunger but living humans stripped down to a single overwhelming impulse. That conceptual precision gave the film its force. The famous opening, Jim (Cillian Murphy) waking alone in a hospital and wandering through an emptied London, has often been compared to the later beginning of the tv series The Walking Dead, but the resemblance is mostly structural. In Boyle and Garland’s film the hospital is
Tag: movies (Page 2 of 5)
There is a particular kind of American fantasy that rolls into town on squeaky wheels: a carnival, a circus, a sideshow. It promises wonder, then quietly reorders your soul. Charles G. Finney’s The Circus of Dr. Lao (1935) drops a surreal menagerie into a dusty Arizona town. Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) delivers a traveling nightmare to a small town in Illinois, baiting people with the one thing they want most. The enduring appeal of these fantasies becomes even more apparent when examining their film adaptations, which reveal as much about Hollywood as about the books themselves.
Between 1965 and 1967, British cinema produced an unlikely espionage trilogy centered on an unglamorous, bespectacled intelligence officer named Harry Palmer. Adapted from Len Deighton’s novels and starring a then-young Michael Caine, these films (The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin, and Billion Dollar Brain) were conceived as a realistic alternative to the wildly successful James Bond franchise. Yet within just three years, the series evolved from sharp anti-Bond realism to stylistic excess, reflecting both the creative volatility of 1960s British cinema and the limits of translating Deighton’s dry, ironic prose into spectacle. Len Deighton’s 1962 novel The Ipcress File was
Few sea stories have captured the public imagination like the Mutiny on the Bounty. In April 1789, a group of sailors on HMS Bounty, led by the young master’s mate Fletcher Christian, seized the ship from the irascible Lieutenant William Bligh and cast him and his loyalists adrift. The mutineers would scatter across the Pacific, hiding on Tahiti or disappearing into the isolation of Pitcairn Island, while Bligh undertook one of the most astonishing open-boat voyages in maritime history. Because the surviving accounts sharply contradict one another, the tale was destined to become a battleground of interpretation: a perfect canvas
Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate is one of the defining Cold War thrillers of American literature. Published in 1959, it captures a world of paranoia, espionage, and ideological extremism at the height of the Red Scare. The novel follows Sergeant Raymond Shaw, a decorated Korean War veteran who, unbeknownst to himself, has been brainwashed by Communist agents into becoming an unwitting assassin. The real tragedy (and brilliance) of Condon’s construction is that Shaw’s mother, Eleanor Iselin, is the true villain: an ambitious, ruthless woman who manipulates both her son and her husband, Senator John Iselin, a demagogic McCarthy caricature, to
- Count Graf Orlok (Nosferatu, 1922)
- Frankenstein’s creature (Frankenstein, 1931)
- Gillman (Creature from the Black Lagoon, 1954)
- Alien (Alien, 1979)
- The Thing (The Thing, 1982)
- Brundlefly (The Fly, 1986)
- Pinhead (Hellraiser, 1987)
- Pale Man (Pan’s Labyrinth, 2007)
In chronological order.
When Tron premiered in 1982, it was unlike anything audiences had ever seen. Made by Walt Disney Productions and directed by Steven Lisberger, the film combined live-action footage with computer-generated imagery in ways that were not just new but revolutionary. Yet for all its visual daring, Tron remains a strange hybrid: a movie that wedded an almost childishly simple story to some of the most sophisticated visual technology of its time. At its core, Tron tells a fairly naive story. Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), a brilliant but wronged programmer, is digitized and transported inside a computer, where he must battle
- King Kong (King Kong, 1933)
- Godzilla (Godzilla, 1954)
- Ymir (20 Million Miles to Earth, 1957)
- Gwoemul (The Host, 2006)
- Mantis creatures (The Mist, 2007)
In chronological order.
- King Kong (Merian C. Cooper, 1933)
- Planet of the Apes (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1968)
- Gorillas in the Mist (Michael Apted, 1988)
- Congo (Frank Marshall, 1995)
In chronological order.
Only one movie per franchise.
Airport (1970) was so successful that it paved the way for three sequels. Unfortunately, none of them was on par with the original movie. Airport 1975, directed by Jack Smight, was easily the worst one. Released four years later, it clearly reveals how quickly the franchise shifted from melodramatic ensemble drama to pure spectacle. The premise is simple to the point of absurdity: a midair collision between a small plane and a jumbo jet leaves the cockpit crew dead or incapacitated, forcing a flight attendant (Karen Black) to pilot the aircraft until rescue arrives. That’s it, a single setup stretched