I’m enjoying exploring DK Canada’s Monsters in the Movies book, and the current chapter on Myths, Legends and Fairy Tales is bringing me all manner of film to partake in. Today, it brings me Robert Zemeckis’ take on the epic poem Beowulf. Always a technically inovative director, Zemeckis decided to make the film with computer…
Tag: mythology
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006) – Gore Verbinski
DK Canada’s Monsters in the Movies takes to the sea as I explore the chapters on Myths, Legends and Fairy Tales, and find myself confronting Davy Jones as I settled in for the first sequel to the surprise franchise, Pirates of the Caribbean. When Disney had a surprise hit on their hand with Pirates, based…
Paranormal Activity (2007) – Oren Peli
The Blair Witch Project may have made found footage horror movies mainstream, but it was Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity that brought it into our bedrooms. And this haunted house/possession story is the next stop in the ghost chapter of DK Canada’s Monsters in the Movies. There’s a lot of divisiveness about this movie, people either…
Spirited Away (2001) – Hayao Miyazaki
The next big title in DK Canada’s incredibly entertaining and informative The Movie Book, is going to allow for a bit of a dive into Miyazaki’s films, which is going to be truly enjoyable as they are always so fully realized and beautifully animated. It’s time to settle in for the Academy Award winning film…
The Ghoul (1933) – T. Hayes Hunter
Horror legend Boris Karloff takes on the zombie genre in the next film in DK Canada’s Monsters in the Movies, although with the introduction of Egyptology into the story, one could make an argument that it could fall into the mummy genre as well. Karloff is Professor Morlant an aging, and dying Egyptologist. He’s been…
War of the Worlds (1988) – The Walls of Jericho, and Thy Kingdom Come
The war of the worlds truly gets underway this week as the aliens attempt to cement their position on the planet, and come up with a way to survive the radiation poisoning plaguing them (by constructing creepy looking suits). The Walls of Jericho was written by Forrest Van Buren (an alias, most likely for Greg…
Silver Bullet (1985) – Daniel Attias
The next werewolf title to come along in DK Canada’s Monsters in the Movies is an adaptation of Stephen King’s Cycle of the Werewolf starring Corey Haim, Megan Follows and Gary Busey. This one hasn’t stood up well to my nostalgia, but on reflection, if you have someone (a younger viewer) that you want to…
Indiana Jones and the Hollow Earth (1997) – Max McCoy
1934 This week’s book shelf sees me continuing to seek out adventure with one of my favorite heroes, Indiana Jones, in the third novel by Max McCoy. Having previously enjoyed McCoy’s two previous forays into action with the globe-trotting archaeologist, I was quite looking forward to some Nazi punching and delving into hollow Earth theories…
Star Trek: Voyager (1996) – The Q and The Grey, and Macrocosm
Captain’s log: stardate 50384.2 Kenneth Biller pens the teleplay for this episode from a story by Shawn Piller. It first aired on 27 November, 1996, and saw Q (John de Lancie) and the Q Continuum return to plague Captain Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) and the rest of the crew of the Voyager. Following the events that…
The Monster Squad (1987) – Fred Dekker
The next werewolf title that DK Canada’s very enjoyable Monsters in the Movies recommends doesn’t only feature a Wolfman (Carl Thibault), but also includes Dracula (Duncan Regehr), the Mummy (Micheal Reid MacKay), Frankenstein’s Monster (Tom Noonan) and the Creature From the Black Lagoon known as Gillman (Tom Woodruff, jr.) in this version. This cult favorite…
Indiana Jones and the Dinosaur Eggs (1996) – Max McCoy
1933 Indiana Jones, the globe-trotting archaeologist, sets out on his tenth novel adventure, and the second one by Max McCoy, and much like its predecessor, the author continues to show that he knows how to tell a fairly solid Indy story, marry it with history, mythology, and legend and tie it in to what has…
Ginger Snaps (2000) – John Fawcett
Werewolf movies get the Canadian treatment with the cult classic, Ginger Snaps. The next werewolf title featured in the immensely enjoyable Monsters in the Movies by John Landis, and available now from DK Canada provides a unique spin on the mythology of the lycanthrope when tying in the cycle of the werewolf with that of…
