The fall finale of FRINGE, left much to be desired. Instead of going out with a bang and giving us a blockbuster way to remember the show leading up to the return, we got a rather mundane episode where the ultimate bottom line was Olivia (Anna Torv) ending her relationship with Peter (Joshua Jackson).
The finale of SPARTACUS: BLOOD AND SAND was a vengeance filled slash fest, where characters you loved to hate or hated to love were dispatched by Spartacus and his gladiator army with a fervor seldom seen in even horror movies. When the dust settles pretty much everyone in the House of Batiatus is dead or dying (though we do know now that Lucy Lawless will be returning as Lucretia next season).
Most of the ARC team is dispatched to handle a herd of venomous, hybrid reptile/mammals invading McKinnon school, a mission complicated by the presence of several annoying students kept after hours in an amateur reenactment of THE BREAKFAST CLUB. There’s a stuck-up girl (Lauren Coe) with an attitude that just begs to be taken down a peg via the tender attentions of a therocephalian, and two geeky boys (Patrick Gibson, Ciaran Flynn) that might have merited some sympathy if they didn’t try to humiliate the girl by uploading her personal phone videos to the school’s CCTV system. But it’s all academic (heh) since the school is now a battleground.
That isn’t to say that Spanish horror scores from that period were any less terrifying, or funky, as Spain-based Quartet Records is proving with such releases as Waldo de los Rios’ ISLAND OF THE DAMNED and Fernando Garcia Morcillo’s HOWLING OF THE DEVIL. But perhaps none of their soundtracks has a more unique origin than Giluliano Sorgini’s THE LIVING DEAD AT THE MANCHESTER MORGUE.
Where POLTERGEIST stands as a landmark in how mostly traditional instruments and orchestrations could be used to create an unearthly tone, rock-centric music certainly wasn’t a slouch at digging into those same fear centers, perhaps with even more chilling results. It’s likely no band did it better than Goblin, an Italian group that turned the progressive vibe pioneered by the likes of Pink Floyd and Zeppelin to far darker ends, using acid builds of electronics, strumming guitars and wailing voices to become escalating webs of fear, the big solo usually accompanying some unlucky woman’s evisceration in such classic scores as DEEP RED and SUSPIRIA.
Certainly one of the loudest, and most exciting horror scores belongs inside the television set of the Freeling family, as installed by Jerry Goldsmith. Though a master of just about every movie genre, horror had provided a creatively malefic voice for Goldsmith. He’d marry Bartok-esque impressionism and old scratch violins for THE MEPHISTO WALTZ, blow on MAGIC’s unbalanced harmonicas and win his only Oscar for chanting THE OMEN’s black mass.
Let’s face it, no one is ever going to replace Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert who for decades gave the thumbs up and down on movie critiques throughout their years on PBS stations with SNEAK PREVIEWS and later, in syndication with AT THE MOVIES. They defined a genre that was aped time and again, but the imposters could never capture the camaraderie and arguments that they engaged in over the years. When Siskel passed away, Ebert somehow found a kindred spirit with critic Richard Roeper, who found is own voice and repartee with Ebert. When Ebert fell ill, AT THE […]Read On »
It’s so hard to wrap up a long-running series, be faithful to the core values of it and still satisfy fan expectations. It’s even harder when your series comes to an end quicker than you would have liked or expected.
The latter is the case of MEDIUM. It only made it through a half-season this year before CBS pulled the plug after seven years (five of those were spent on NBC, two on CBS).
This at least gave creator Glenn Gordon Caron time to craft an actual finale, rather than leaving the show on a limbo note.
Sometimes there is no accounting for what turns people on, let alone what people think will turn other people on. Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher are, together and separately, talented and attractive, and there’s nothing really offensive about their romantic comedy NO STRINGS ATTACHED. True, it defies logic and credibility in several major ways and its tone manages to be bland yet inconsistent, but it’s not mean-spirited, which gives it some points.
Was it as odd for you as it was for me watching Steven Tyler and Jennifer Lopez judge a bunch of normal (and lame) every day people on a reality show last night during the opening episode of AMERICAN IDOL? Both have had good and long careers in the music field in the case of Tyler, and movies and music in the case of J.Lo. So seeing them reduced to doing AI just didn’t seem right. And, yes, I used the word reduced. Make no mistake about it. You can sugar coat it, you can talk about how great of […]Read On »
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