Skip to content

Hellraiser: Revelations

Dear Dimension films,

For the last few years you’ve been trying to get a Hellraiser remake made. You won over the doubtful fanbase with a couple of annoucements – ie. who would be directing, the fact that Clive Barker himself was on board and loved the script that the writing directing team Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Muary (who directed some flick called inside that everyone got a total boner for) had produced. But they walked out because of your ‘vision’ for the movie. Then Clive Barker washed his hands of the whole thing and you hired the writers of the most recent Saw sequels to write a new script. Then everyone stopped caring…

Forunately you can’t get your shit together, and have been far too busy running the Halloween franchise into the ground to similarly lay waste to the Hellraiser franchise. The sad thing is that, in the eyes of the majority, the Hellraiser franchise is already dead and consigned to DTV hell. Which is a shame, but we’ll get into that later.

These days you are having huge financial troubles, which threaten to destroy your company. You left Disney, you made a lot of bad decisions, gave a lot of shitty movies the greenlight. Everything is pretty bad for you at the moment.

You plan on solving these difficulties by making sequels to pretty much every major film property you own. We know Scream 4 is coming out… risky? Probably not. People came in droves to see the original trilogy, and to be honest it’s probably the only horror series with an ounce of public integrity left. Anyway, we’ll see…

This week you announced that you will be making Hellraiser: Revelations (a ninth movie in the original series) and thus put the kibosh on the remake. For now. You also announced yet another Children Of The Corn sequel, but I couldn’t care less about that. There hasn’t been a good Children Of The Corn film since… um, yeah.

The Hellraiser franchise went wrong pretty quickly. The first two films were great, like A Nightmare On Elm Street they were more than simple gore-drenched horror movies. There was something far more clever and much more disturbing at work in those movies. Then you got involved, Dimension Films. And you played a big part in creating what we all know and “love” as  Hellraiser III: Hell On Earth.

That film went the slasher route… and it was actually a pretty good slasher movie. Entertaining, some good kill-gags in there, bBut the problem was that the series should have been so much more than that. It had the potential to go on being great – but this is the route you chose. No doubt you saw Dollar Signs when you decided to go down that path – unfortunately it didn’t give the people what they expected and it remains the least of the original three movies. Then you made Bloodlines, which was considered to be an excellent entry in the franchise. No really… test screenings went well. People apparentely loved it. Then you Studio Heads got involved, had another director reshoot a crap load of the film and in the end not one director wanted to stick his name on the bloody thing. Complete disaster, due to Studio Interference.

So you almost killed the series but you let it carry on as a Direct To Video franchise. The results were mixed – thankfully the low budget meant you had to go in a different direction, and I kinda like Inferno. Hellseeker is a lazy retread of the exact same thing with a returning face from Hellraiser 1 & 2 being the sole saving grace. Deader went in another new direction, one that I welcomed and thoroughly enjoyed. Hellworld was terrible – I have no clue what you were trying to do there, but it failed. Really, it was utterly bizzare and… why?

So today, news broke that Doug Bradley (Pinhead himself) will not be returning for this film. He’s seen the script, and he won’t be returning. The film is virtually no-budget, with shooting to commence in two weeks and be finished by the end of September. Rushed is not the word. He doesn’t feel that this film will do justice to the franchise. Given that this franchise includes both Bloodlines and Hellworld… that script must be pretty bad. So, as is now customary… here’s my list of do’s and don’t's for Hellraiser: Revelations.

1. Don’t fucking make it.

  • It’ll suck.

Regards,

Douglas J.

Posted 23 August 2010 † Douglas J § Movies § Rants ‡ Comments (0) °

Godzilla USA; Part 2: A Letter To Legendary Pictures

Dear Legendary Pictures,

So you’ve bought the rights to make a new American Godzilla film? You and Warner Bros. are really going for this? Okay – but you really have a chance to do things properly here. In fact, there’s only one suggestion I NEED to make.

1. Watch the 1998 movie over and over and over.

  • Really, there’s a lot to learn from this movie. Look at every decision they made. Every single decision. Then do the opposite.

So that’s all that needs to be said… except I’m going to say more stuff anyway. Are you ready?

2. Listen to the fans. But not too much.

  • Godzilla fans will pay to see your movie – but they’ll pay to see it a ton of times if you make a movie that pleases them. But of course you need to make a movie that will please more people – it needs to make money after all. Now, the big thing you will hear from the fans…

Godzilla must be a man in a suit. No CGI, that’s stupid.

Now in all honesty, I like my monsters to be men in suits. But to the general public the ‘lumbering men in suits’ are a joke – and they are the people you really need to appeal to. Maybe you could do some ‘men in suits’ stuff for certain close-ups and scenes that require interaction with… things… but seriously, there is nothing wrong with a CGI Godzilla. As long as it is actually Godzilla and not a giant Iguana.

Watch the opening scene from Toho’s own “Always 2″ which features an all CGI Godzilla, and you will see how awesome it can be. The trick is to be respectful to Godzilla, don’t change what he is.

3. Have another Monster for Godzilla to fight.

  • There is nothing cooler than two giant monsters kicking the shit out of each other. The budget you’ll be working with, as well as the monster-making techniques will let you take it to new levels – it can be utterly savage and monsterous… go for it, please. Big ass monsters kicking each other’s ass = movie tickets sold.

4. Human characters. Make them interesting.

  • Let’s face it, the characters in the 1998 film sucked – they were all basically one-note jokes. Oh, they can’t pronouce Ferris Beuler’s name, TEH LOL!!! If you are going to have characters and drama and stuff in amongst all the monster action, make it decent. Just because people aren’t there to see that isn’t an excuse to do it badly.

5. Toho – keep them involved.

  • Godzilla 1998 was just as much Toho’s fault as anyone elses – they O.K’d every change and the script itself. Apparentely they did raise some objections (lots), but Sony gave them some money and they shut up. Don’t give them any more money Legendary Pictures, listen to what they say instead.

Yeah, I would write more stuff – but it’s probably going to suck anyway… I realise that all these letters are pointless, but when it comes to Godzilla… I just think he belongs in Japan.

Posted 30 June 2010 † Douglas J § Kaiju ‡ Comments (2) °

Godzilla USA; Part 1.

This is a two part blog – the second part will be in the standard “letter to some Hollywood studio or another”, and we’re looking at Godzilla and his foray into major Hollywood-produced motion pictures.

You know the American Godzilla flick (aka GINO) – almost Universally despised and populated by a bad CGI giant iguana, the cast of The Simpsons and Ferris Bueller? Yeah, it wasn’t always going to be like that.

See, in 1994 two guys wrote a script. Their names escape me – and it was pretty cool. In this script Godzilla was actually going to be Godzilla – the movie would follow on from the Heisei series.

See, in Godzilla Vs. Destoroyah the big G bought it. Yup, Godzilla was no more – but as he croacked all his radiation was absorbed by his adopted son “Godzilla Jr” who then matured into a full blown Godzilla monster. It was a sequel to the original Japanese movies – cool beans.

But then Roland Emmerich got involved. He doesn’t like Godzilla films, he thinks they are lame. So he changed everything and turned the whole thing into the disaster that graced our screens in 1998.

The movie has since (kind of) been accepted into Toho canon with the monster renamed Zilla. A couple of the films in the Millennium Series reference the “abomination” and the real Big-G even hands Zilla his ass in Final Wars (the best moment in the movie).

I’m not going to go into any more detail because we all know this film sucks, and we know why it sucks – but consider this post a mini-prelude to my “letter” to Legendary Pictures, the company behind the next attempt at bringing Godzilla to the USA.

Posted 30 June 2010 † Douglas J § Kaiju ‡ Comments (0) °