Notícias

Filmmaker / musician Chris Alexander is the former editor-in-chief of Fangoria magazine, the co-founder/editor of Delirium magazine, and he wrote the book Corman/Poe. Now, he’s teaming with Headpress Publishing to send his new book Art! Trash! Terror!: Adventures in Strange Cinema out into the world. The book has a release date of March 15th (you can pre-order copies on Amazon at This Link), but the launch event is set to take place at Dark Delicacies in Burbank, California and the Cinelounge Sunset theatre in Hollywood, California this weekend!

Art! Trash! Terror! has a page count of 460. The official description says it’s a treasure trove of in-depth essays and edifying interviews that celebrate some of the most eccentric and unforgettable movies in cult cinema history. From recognized classics to misunderstood masterpieces to unfairly maligned curios, the author takes an alternately serious and playful but always personal look...

It’s the summer of “Blaxploitation, Baby!,” the latest festival hosted by Film Forum.

The indie theater announced the upcoming festival which will take place August 16 through August 22. The program celebrates the early ‘70s genre of Black cinema, and features films wth iconic movie stars Pam Grier, Richard Roundtree, Ron O’Neal, Tamara Dobson, Jim Brown, Vonetta McGee, Fred Williamson, Isaac Hayes, and more.

“Blaxploitation, Baby!” is dedicated to author and pioneering film historian Donald Bogle, who collaborated on Film Forum’s first Blaxploitation festival in 1995. Bogle credited Melvin Van Peebles’ filmography for helping to establish the genre. “Blaxploitation, Baby!” additionally ranges from works from directors such as Ossie Davis, Gordon Parks, and Gordon Parks Jr.

As well as the screenings, the festival will include the sales of critic and historian Odie Henderson’s “Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras: A History of Blaxploitation” and Donald Bogle’s acclaimed TCM book “Hollywood Black” at concessions.

Let’s face it, streaming services have lost a lot of their appeal. Between their ever shifting libraries, their kneecapping of theaters, and their tendency to overwhelm viewers with substandard garbage, it’s hard to be excited about our streaming present. Heck, most services now play the same couple of ads over and over, even for paying customers!

With every annoying insurance ad and every movie suddenly shoved from a service you bought to a different service you don’t have, Tubi looks better and better. Tubi is one of many free streaming services available online. Like most other services, free or otherwise, Tubi interrupts the programming with occasional ads.

But Tubi also has an outstanding library, one that rivals Max, with its oft-threatened TCM and Ghibli channels. Still, Tubi can be overwhelming to some users, who can’t always see the gems alongside stinkers such as Big Stan (starring Rob Schneider!

Originally announced in 2021, a new take on 1972’s Blacula is on the way from MGM, Bron and Hidden Empire Film Group, with Deon Taylor (The Intruder) on board to direct.

In a new piece on Variety today, reporting on a 50th anniversary screening of the original classic taking place at the Fine Arts Theater in Beverly Hills on October 24, the site notes that the upcoming Blacula reboot movie is “slated for release next Halloween.”

Variety details, “The new film is a modern reimagining of the 1972 movie, directed by William Crain and starring William Marshall as Blacula.

“The reboot picks up where the original saga left off, after the 1973 sequel Scream Blacula Scream, and will be set in a metropolitan city post-coronavirus pandemic.”

Here’s the full logline for next year’s movie: “Blacula is an ancient African prince who is cursed by Dracula after he fails to agree to end the slave trade.

With a title like Blacula, it’s been pretty easy for many horror fans to write the film off as something like a feature-length joke. In pinnacle 1970s style, the film posters are campy, highly saturated, and littered with gimmicky taglines like “deadlier than Dracula!” For those who may not be privy to the significance of Blaxploitation cinema, William Crain’s 1972 film has often been reduced to more of a punchline rather than a film with extremely important historical and political significance. The Blaxploitation film movement was a largely independent and low-budget endeavor by Black filmmakers that took large amounts of inspiration from the ideologies of the Black Power movement. Meaning, these films were not afraid to be politically charged and extremely pointed with their anti-establishment messaging. They were largely concerned with reinserting Black perspectives and narratives into the cinematic canon that were generally ignored by Hollywood. Iconic films like...

Though their “’80s Horror” lineup would constitute enough of a Halloween push, the Criterion Channel enter October all guns blazing. The month’s lineup also includes a 19-movie vampire series running from 1931’s Dracula (English and Spanish both) to 2014’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, the collection in-between including Herzog’s Nosferatu, Near Dark, and Let the Right One In. Last year’s “Universal Horror” collection returns, a 17-title Ishirō Honda retrospective has been set, and a few genre titles stand alone: Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte, The House of the Devil, and Island of Lost Souls.

Streaming premieres include restorations of Tsai Ming-liang’s Vive L’amour and Ed Lachman’s Lou Reed / John Cale concert film Songs for Drella; October’s Criterion editions are Samuel Fuller’s Forty Guns, Bill Duke’s Deep Cover, Haxan, and My Own Private Idaho. Meanwhile, Ari Aster has curated an “Adventures...

Hello, dear readers! Today, we here at Daily Dead are kicking off our 2022 Indie Horror Month celebration, and we have a ton of killer content coming your way throughout the entire month of April that will highlight some amazing indie genre goodness created by an assortment of maverick makers from both the past and present. And for our first official piece for Ihm 2022, I thought it made sense to take a look at one of the most pivotal decades in independent horror cinema: the 1970s.

While we’ve had plenty of brilliant indie horror released here in America throughout every decade (it’s worth noting that the roots of independent horror can even be traced back 100 years to the release of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu), there were certainly several key figures who were busy making horror movies on their own terms prior to the ’70s that helped pave the way...

Invoking an oft-overlooked canon, actor turned director Bill Posley fabricates a highly entertaining homage to the Black horror of decades past with “Bitch Ass,” a slasher picture set in 1999 aiming to become the heir of cult classics the likes of “Blacula” or “Bones.” Posley’s genuine fondness for his predecessors in the genre is first visible in the perfect casting of Tony Todd, who played the title part in the original 1992 “Candyman,” as a TV horror host — think the famed Elvira, the Cryptkeeper from “Tales from the Crypt,” or Mr. Simms from “Tales from the Hood” — to introduce his

Reveling in an appropriately malevolent laugh, Todd describes Bitch Ass as “the first Black serial killer to don a mask” and then immerses us into his world through an old television set and a VHS tape. Right off the bat, Posley announces his murderous protagonist’s fascination with games of all...

“Blacula” is leaving the coffin.

MGM, Bron and Hidden Empire Film Group’s Deon and Roxanne Avent Taylor are teaming up for a reboot of the blaxploitation horror classic.

The new film is a modern reimagining of the 1972 movie, directed by William Crain and starring William Marshall as Blacula. The reboot picks up where the original saga left off, after the 1973 sequel “Scream Blacula Scream,” and will be set in a metropolitan city post-coronavirus pandemic.

A description of “Blacula” teases how the movie will update the classic story, as it follows the vampire as he “thirsts for vengeance”:

Blacula is an ancient African prince who is cursed by Dracula after he fails to agree to end the slave trade. Blacula is entombed and awakens 200 years later ready to avenge the death of his ancestors and of those responsible for robbing his people of their work, culture and heritage as they appropriated it for profit.

“Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror” begins with a modest proposal: “Black history is black horror.” It’s a succinct and provocative notion, the idea that there’s a symbiotic relationship between the horror genre and the African-American experience. However, executive producer Tananarive Due said that to her eyes, the two are inextricably linked.

“We were brought here in bondage, and white supremacy continues to mischaracterize and marginalize us,” said Due, a scholar, and novelist who specializes in the supernatural genre. “As the parent of a teenage son who’s already six feet tall, I’m fearful about his future encounters with police and the ways in which black children just like him are assumed on sight to be thugs and less than fully human.”

Due describes that fear and uncertainty as an example of an unrelenting horror that explains why creatives of African descent like herself, gravitate toward...

The vital documentary Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror, directed by Xavier Burgin and based on Robin R. Means Coleman’s book of the same name, invites us to know the perspective of African-Americans towards horror films. With a chronological structure, ranging from the oldest horror titles with black characters (such as Son of Ingagi from 1940) to the first footage of Jordan Peele’s upcoming film Us, Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror brings together an excellent group of interviewees. Directors, actresses and actors and specialists (including Coleman herself) provide a unique film dissection, certainly focused on the representation in horror cinema of the black minority in a...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

As genre fans, we are truly lucky to be living in a day and age where we can enjoy a variety of incredible film projects that celebrate nearly every aspect that we love about horror. Sometimes, these documentaries are focused on a specific film or a franchise, sometimes they hone in on one director or actor in particular. But with Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror, director Xavier Burgin has crafted an 83-minute journey spanning over an entire century of filmmaking that not only celebrates the milestones, but also holds Hollywood and society as a whole responsible for how black culture has been represented in cinema, as well as lauding the achievements of black creatives who have helped pave the way for future generations throughout their careers.

Based on Dr. Robin R. Means Coleman’s book of the same name, Horror Noire is an essential and entertaining documentary that...

Jordan Peele’s latest career incarnation could have been fodder for “Key & Peele,” the hit Comedy Central sketch show in which he and Keegan-Michael Key skewered modern racial issues. But Peele wrote had written a horror movie about race, and it needed a director. That created a challenge: After William Crain (“Blacula”), Bill Gunn (“Ganja & Hesse”), and Ernest Dickerson (“Bones,” “The Walking Dead”), how many black horror directors can you name? (The savviest genre fans out there might also remember James Bond III, very much a real person, who directed “Def By Temptation” 27 years ago.)

Needless to say, it was slim pickings. “I first pitched this as a movie no one would make,” Peele said. “About halfway through writing the script, I realized I was the only person who could direct it.”

However, Peele’s feature directing debut, “Get Out,” also brings him into the rarified class of horror directors...

Blaxploitation films burst onto the scene in 1971 with the huge success of Gordon Park’s Shaft. By 1972, audiences were clamoring for more, and filmmakers and studios were keen to jump on the bandwagon. While most of the majors were focusing on the Shaft formula of hot chicks and cool Dicks, American International Pictures saw a void that no one had filled yet: the black horror film. And so, with as little money as they usually invested, they sent forth into the world Blacula (1972), and wouldn’t you know it? Audiences loved it.

Just don’t call it Blaxploitation—because it isn’t. Blacula, surprisingly, showcases little of the developing tropes already established by Shaft. There is no "jive" talk, no gratuitous nudity or overwhelming violence. And I say "surprisingly", because it would have been so easy (not to mention profitable) to follow the formula set in motion by Shaft, Superfly,...

What new horrors await us on DVD this month? Well, lots of bloodsuckers, for starters...

As the old Simpsons quote goes, there are only three real monsters, kid: Dracula, Blacula and Son of Kong. Sadly, giant gorilla junior doesn’t make an appearance this month though we’ve at least got the first two categories covered.

Leading the way with aplomb, our friend Blacula finally graces this young blog with not one but two classics released on Blu-ray and DVD as a complete collection. In case you’re not familiar with this wonderful splicing of seventies Blaxploitation and gothic horror (shame on you if so), the tale of undead African prince Mamuwalde and his ongoing struggle with both his own bloodlust and pesky locals trying to stake him through the heart is both surprisingly well-made and massively enjoyable. Oh, and its success also led to the subsequent release of Blackenstein,...

Urban action and fatal attraction give rise to a groove from beyond the grave in this funkadelic, fangadelic blaxploitation double-bill from Eureka Entertainment, which sees the eternally cool William Marshall put a fresh spin on the age-old legend of the vampire, condemned to wander the earth with an insatiable lust for blood as Blacula.

Produced at the height of the blaxploitation era, the Blacula movies are the perfect blend of genre and social film making, the types of which hadn’t been seen before… or since!

Blacula (1972)

Stars: William Marshall, Vonetta McGee, Denise Nicholas, Thalmus Rasulala, Gordon Pinsent, Charles Macaulay, Emily Yancy, Ted Harris, Rick Metzler | Written by Joan Torres, Raymond Koenig | Directed by William Crain

In 1780, African Prince Mamuwalde (Marshall) pays a visit to Count Dracula in Transylvania, seeking his support in ending the slave trade. Instead, the evil count curses his noble guest and transforms him into a vampire!

Recent hot cinema topics such as the portrayal of the Mandarin character in Shane Black’s Iron Man 3 and speculations about what classic Star Trek villain Benedict Cumberbatch’s character in J.J Abrams’ Star Trek: Into Darkness was modeled after leading up to the film’s release, among others, underline the importance of great villains in genre cinema.

Creating a great cinematic villain is a difficult goal that makes for an incredibly rewarding and memorable viewer experience when it is achieved.

We’ll now take a look at the greatest film villains. Other writing on this subject tends to be a bit unfocused, as “greatest villain” articles tend to mix live-action human villains with animated characters and even animals. Many of these articles also lack a cohesive quality as they attempt to cover too much ground at once by spanning all of film history.

This article focuses on the 1970’s,...

This article is dedicated to Andrew Copp: filmmaker, film writer, artist and close friend who passed away on January 19, 2013. You are loved and missed, brother.

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Looking at the Best Actor Academy Award nominations for the film year 2012, the one miss that clearly cries out for more attention is Liam Neeson’s powerful performance in Joe Carnahan’s excellent survival film The Grey, easily one of the best roles of Neeson’s career.

In Neeson’s case, his lack of a nomination was a case of neglect similar to the Albert Brooks snub in the Best Supporting Actor category for the film year 2011 for Drive(Nicolas Winding Refn, USA).

Along with negligence, other factors commonly prevent outstanding lead acting performances from getting the kind of critical attention they deserve. Sometimes it’s that the performance is in a film not considered “Oscar material” or even worthy of any substantial critical attention.

As Halloween approaches, let’s take a moment to reflect on two of Blaxploitation cinema’s seminal horror films and the legendary actor William Marshall.

Blacula

Written by Joan Torres & Raymond Koenig

Directed by William Crain

USA 1972

“You shall pay, black prince. I shall place a curse of suffering on you that will doom you to a living hell. I curse you with my name. You shall be… Blacula! ”

And thus Dracula has cursed African prince Mamuwalde into a life of eternal suffering. Mamuwalde awakens in 1972 finding a different world than when he last saw Count Dracula. He encounters interracial gay couples, glitzy night clubs, and sassy cab drivers. This new world does not bother him as he has but two objectives, bloodsucking and finding his lost love.

Blacula starts as pure exploitation cinema: a Dracula story for a black audience, a pun in the title, Afros, bell-bottoms, and loads of jive talk.

How many versions of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde have been released on film? It’s an astounding number at 123 film versions. It may not be quite as many as Dracula or Frankenstein, but it’s in the running if not right on their cape tails. Each age of in horror history attempts to lay its own claim to this tale of chemistry meets the modern scientific man meets the Monster. Who of us can forget Frederic March with his near pompadour hairstyle slightly hunched over with eyebrows all-a-caterpillar? How about Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde; that was Hammer getting cheeky with all of us who had decided that simply redoing Universal horror stories wasn’t good enough in 1971. So what happened between 1886 when Stevenson first unleashed his epic literary tale and the 1970’s when Dr. Jekyll became Dr. Black and...

A look at what's new on DVD today:

"127 Hours" (2010)

Directed by Danny Boyle

Released by Fox Home Entertainment

With a fast-forward button at the ready on home devices, it's high time more people see James Franco's Spirit Award-winning performance as real-life adventurer Aron Ralston, who gets his arm trapped under a boulder in Utah's Bluejohn Canyon and struggles to survive and free himself in Danny Boyle's life-affirming followup to "Slumdog Millionaire." (Matt Singer's interview with James Franco and Danny Boyle is here.)

"420 High Desert Way" (2011)

Directed by Tom Breedlove

Released by Maverick Entertainment Group

Dealing with a different drug than the one suggested by the title, this procedural drama follows a young undercover cop who must refine his extreme sports skills as he infiltrates a drug cartel and must bust them before they learn his true identity.

"Bambi" (1942)

Directed by James Algar and Samuel Armstrong

Released by Walt Disney Home Entertainment...

Hey, it’s Halloween weekend! Not to be a party pooper, but, frankly, I really could care less… So, don’t look for any pictures of me in a Blacula costume or some shit like that, because it’s not happening!

I hear Sergio is going to some party in Chi-town dressed as Armond White!

Anywho… all kidding aside… the horror film genre is one in which you don’t find much action where black directors and actors are concerned. I know Ice Cube said recently that, in this business, for black talent, comedy is the path of least resistance, which, while it might sound like bullshit to the ear, actually is easily proven when you consider the kinds of “black films” Hollywood often finances.

Sure, there’ve been a few “black horror films” in years past, but few that I can truly call seminal pieces of work. There’s Bill Gunn’s landmark film,...

It’s time for another update on horror-film screenings for the Halloween 2009 season and beyond; you can track back through our previous items starting here. The most exciting news is the addition of a very special show to the Scary Movies 3 series currently unspooling at New York City’s Lincoln Center: Trick ’R Treat with Michael Dougherty (pictured) in attendance!

The All Hallow’s anthology feature unspools at the Walter Reade Theater (165 West 65th Street, upper level) this Wednesday, October 21 at 8:30 p.m., followed by a Q&A with Dougherty. Trust us: You want to see this one on the big screen. Full details on Scary Movies 3 can be found here. In addition, adventurous genre fans will want to check out Juraj Herz’s The Cremator when it shows as part of Lincoln Center’s The Ironic Curtain: Czech Cinema series on Tuesday, Oct. 27 at 9 p.m. This black...