The Thing versus The Thing: a critical comparison.

There are some films that a person with a good or overactive ability to visualise, like myself, can watch during the wee hours of night, and feel unsettled by for hours after the fact. Granted, I was still a bit young at this point (VHS was still the only viable home video medium at this time). But the John Carpenter version of The Thing is a film I will have to go senile in order to forget at all.

How to make a good Blu-ray Disc

Introduction

A common saying amongst the individuals who review and evaluate any form of home video is that when all other factors are equal, the picture with the most active dots in it wins. Blu-ray Disc is the king of the home video castle in that sense. No prior medium has ever offered more than twenty percent of its active dot count.

Last night I said “the hell with it”, and went to see Prometheus again…

I often do things that do not make sense in light of my present circumstances. And going to see Prometheus for a second time, from a financial perspective, is one of them. But see it again I did, and I thought that I would share my reflections with you. Because the film has been out for several weeks now, and everyone I know whom I wanted to preserve surprises for has seen it, I will be divulging things that can be considered critical to the plot. Consider yourself warned.

Dawn Of The Dead versus Dawn Of The Dead: How missing the point can really hurt your story

In the year 1978, George A. Romero released a film unto the world that has set many standards in terms of how horror films and films with social commentary should be made. That film was called Dawn Of The Dead, and is estimated to have grossed around fifty-five million dollars on the worldwide market, against an estimated budget of six hundred and fifty thousand.

Remakes and such

It is almost like when one of the children in a school class gets sick. In a matter of days, if not hours, every child in the class is sick. And when a film enjoys some vestige of success, sequels, remakes, or spin-offs follow like stench follows shit. People who do not understand the nature of the film and media businesses will moan endlessly about the reasons for this, but when you get down to it, it really is astonishingly simple. Hollywood does not remake films because they want to improve or even repeat the good points of a film, be it an old classic or a foreign hit. No, the real reason the film studios in Hollywood remake any film is because they want to remake the money that the film they are remaking made. The cut-throat nature of the entertainment industry means that a studio literally lives from hit to hit, not the quality of the hits, nor the magnitude of them. I have already made reference to the subject of how profits are not made in the cinema, but rather on home video or television licensing. This is a major part of the reason why the unregulated market that is the American film market does not produce any innovative, interesting, or unusual material. If you do want a film that meets any of these criteria, you generally have to go to foreign markets.