Footsteps in the Fog (1955), in which the Edwardian thriller template is driven pleasantly haywire by a heroine who turns out to be just as crazy and amoral as the villain…
Mimic (1997), in which the usual giant, killer, B-movie bugs evolve a cunning form of camouflage…
Naked Fear (2007), in which people are still ripping off The Most Dangerous Game after all these years…
Scanners (1980), in which David Cronenberg comes even closer than I’d remembered to just flat-out remaking The Power…
and…
12 to the Moon (1960), in which– and you’ll never see this coming– twelve people go to the moon.
#1 by The Beerman on October 25, 2009 - 10:33 pm
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I was also pleasantly surprised by parts of “Naked Fear” — especially when the mounting tension of the hunt is magnified as all the witnesses that could collaborate the victim’s story wind up dead — but the ultimate ending, to me, came off as rather silly and derails a lot of the primal punch from those same sequences. *shrugs*
#2 by El Santo on October 26, 2009 - 6:58 am
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The epilogue does turn the movie into something of a shaggy dog story. I get the reasoning behind it (ending on a note of “strong womanhood” to make absolutely certain even the biggest idiots in the audience don’t come away thinking they were supposed to be in Colin Mandel’s corner), but Vasquez undoubtedly went overboard there.
#3 by ReadMcG on October 26, 2009 - 3:23 pm
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Okay, I give up. I had a comment here, but I am completely unable to make it. No matter how much I try to break up my long sentences and paragraphs, and even if I include no links or URLs, my comment gets flagged as spam. I could try breaking it up into multiple comments like in the last thread, but I don’t want to monopolize the thread with a long string of comments again. Can you please consider a different method of spam protection? This one seems seriously broken.
#4 by Read MacGuirtose on October 26, 2009 - 3:56 pm
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Ah, what the hey; I probably shouldn’t do this, but I’ll go ahead and try breaking my comment up into separate posts again and see if I can get it through that way… though I’d still really like to know what it is that keeps getting my posts blocked in the first place; this one wasn’t really even all that long:
While I’m reluctant to broach this subject here after the previous thread ended up temporarily derailed by such a pronunciation discussion, I’m baffled by calling so much attention to the pronunciation of “lunar” as “loo-nar” in your review of 12 to the Moon. “Loo-nar” is the way I’ve always pronounced it.
[CONTINUED]
#5 by Read MacGuirtose on October 26, 2009 - 3:56 pm
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…While I admit that I have regularly mispronounced certain relatively obscure words in the past, those were words I’d seen in writing but never actually heard spoken before. (I was startled to discover some years ago that “damask” was actually accented on the first syllable.) This one, though, is common enough that I’m fairly certain I would have noticed if everyone else was pronouncing it differently, especially since I did my graduate work at the USC Space Sciences Department…
[CONTINUED]
#6 by Read MacGuirtose on October 26, 2009 - 3:57 pm
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…Dictionary.com agrees with the “loo-nar” pronunciation, as does Merriam-Webster. The OED says that it can be pronounced either “loo-nar” or “lyoo-nar”, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard the latter pronunciation, and it sounds weird to me. So, I’m seriously wondering here… if “loo-nar” sounds odd enough to you to be worthy of repeated mention… how in the world do you pronounce the word?
[CONTINUED]
#7 by Read MacGuirtose on October 26, 2009 - 3:57 pm
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…(Or am I misinterpreting your phonetic spelling and are you calling attention not to the character’s pronunciation of the first syllable, but to his placing equal stress on both syllables, or something?)
#8 by Read MacGuirtose on October 26, 2009 - 3:59 pm
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Well, okay, I eventually got it through, but it took breaking it into four posts to do it. And… I still don’t know why. I’ve seen longer posts than that go through. Certainly longer posts than the last two combined, and yet it still wouldn’t let that through unless I split it into two posts. I am baffled as to what it is about my writing that SpamFree seems to object to so much.
Okay, sorry; I probably shouldn’t have posted that string of comments; it’s not like what I had to say was so important that it had to go through at any cost. I’m just really frustrated by the difficulty of getting a comment through SpamFree…
#9 by Joshua on October 26, 2009 - 4:01 pm
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A little bit like Cretan Linear A, maybe, but last I heard, that still hasn’t been deciphered
Good grief, is there anything El Santo doesn’t know?! You must be the best-educated online B-movie reviewer ever.
(That was a compliment, of course).
#10 by El Santo on October 26, 2009 - 4:42 pm
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Read: What I meant is that Captain Anderson pronounces it as if it were two one-syllable words of equal stress, rather than as one two-syllable word with accent on the first syllable. It’s like the difference between Ro-Man and Roman– make sense now?
#11 by El Santo on October 26, 2009 - 4:50 pm
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And Joshua: Let’s just say I have a really eccentric combination of hobbies.
#12 by Read MacGuirtose on October 26, 2009 - 4:50 pm
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OK; yeah… that’s what I meant by my last post about misinterpreting your phonetic spelling. I thought it was possible that might be what you meant, but I wasn’t sure.
#13 by The Rev. D.D. on October 27, 2009 - 8:01 am
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You know, I still haven’t seen Mimic, despite it being a giant bug movie by Guillermo del Toro.
Truly a “WTF!?” moment.