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Posts Tagged ‘David Kajganich’

The Invasion (second review)

Tuesday, October 29th, 2024

THE INVASION (2007) is the fourth (and final, the way civilization is going) official movie adaptation of Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers. I actually reviewed it for The Ain’t It Cool News when it came out, which is one way I can prove it exists. It’s documented! Anyway I after I watched the other three I figured I oughta complete the set.

This one stars A-listers Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig and is the Hollywood debut of acclaimed German director Oliver Hirschbiegel (DAS EXPERIMENT, DOWNFALL), as well as the first movie written by David Kajganich, who later wrote A BIGGER SPLASH, SUSPIRIA and BONES AND ALL for Luca Guadagnino. But it was kind of a fiasco, losing money and getting poor reviews, universally considered the weakest of the four versions. I’m sure we would’ve noticed it was kinda sloppy even if it hadn’t been widely reported that producer Joel Silver thought it wasn’t working and spent $10 million on reshoots written by the Wachowskis and directed by their guy James McTeigue (V FOR VENDETTA, NINJA ASSASSIN). It was delayed over a year and moved from a confident June release to a resigned August one.

And, would you believe it? It doesn’t really work. But it has its moments.
(read the rest of this shit…)

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Posted in Reviews, Horror, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 23 Comments »

Suspiria (2018)

Monday, November 5th, 2018

SUSPIRI… uh…

Luca Guadagnino’s SUSPIRIA (2018) is technically a remake of Dario Argento’s SUSPIRIA (1977), because it’s about an American named Susie Bannion going to a dance academy in Germany in 1977 where other students are turning up dead and weird shit is happening because it’s run by a coven of witches led by Mother Suspiriorum, The Mother of Sighs. But don’t expect to see any of the things you think of when you think of SUSPIRIA, like the colorful lighting, the maggots dropping from the ceiling or that room full of razor wire. Guadagnino (CALL ME BY YOUR NAME) doesn’t use the same look or any specific scenes or story points, he just plays with the basic idea. Now there’s more intra-coven political stuff going on, as well as news coverage of Baader-Meinhof bombings and the hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 181 by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and a subplot about an old therapist looking for a patient who disappeared after telling him the school was run by witches, and also his wife (played by o.g. Susie Bannion Jessica Harper) disappeared during the war and he keeps thinking about her, and…

I mean it’s 52 minutes longer than the original so there’s alot more stuff going on. It bills itself as “Six Acts and an Epilogue in a Divided Berlin” (spoiler: actually should be Six Acts, an Epilogue, and a Brief, Uneventful Tag Near the End of the Credits). I appreciated the act breaks. (read the rest of this shit…)

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Posted in Horror, Reviews | 75 Comments »

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