"Blood Simple" - original 'fake trailer' emerges, influenced by "The Evil Dead"...

The Coen Brother's first film - "Blood Simple" - took a some initial inspiration from Sam Raimi and "The Evil Dead", so it seems, from a recently unearthed 'fake trailer' that was used to sell the film to investors....

Click "READ MORE" below to continue, and to see the trailer...

Double Bill Mini Musings: Woods & Dogs...

The Cabin in the Woods:
What's it about?
Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon's love/hate letter to the horror genre was originally made in 2009, but due to MGM's financial troubles at the time, it was shelved until 2012 for release. Five good-looking college kids head off to the woods for a fun weekend, but where do a bunch of shady button-pushers in an underground bunker fit in?
Who would I recognise in it?
Chris Hemsworth, Richard Jenkins, Bradley Whitford, and ... well, that would be telling.
Great/Good/Alright/Shite?
It's hard to talk about this movie without spoiling it - but the trailer gives most of the game away as it is (although not the entire game, one should note). In a cabin rather reminiscent of that in Sam Raimi's seminal 1981 horror milestone The Evil Dead, there are all sorts of nasty surprises just waiting to be discovered.

Click "READ MORE" below to see if this flick's any cop, and whether the Straw Dogs remake has any teeth...

Well worth a read (claymation article)...

I came across this article on www.fastcocreate.com - it's a piece about claymation animator Lee Hardcastle (one of my "Stuff I Dig" links down there on the right of this blog), and it's well worth reading.

Hardcastle is the demented genius behind the likes of Pingu's The Thing, Claycat's The Raid, and Chainsaw Babe 3D. If you're not familiar with his fantastically graphic claymations (he's currently animating a version of Evil Dead II, which I'm eagerly awaiting), then head over to his website or YouTube and get watching!

He's also made a bunch of excellent 60 second shorts based on real movies - below are my favourite two of these:

Flavours of the Month: March 2012...

LOOKS:

The Walking Dead Season 2 - the second half of season two has been a storming success with Glenn Mazzara as the new showrunner. The scale of the look of the show has expanded, the pacing has been perfected, the drama has been ramped up even more, and boy-oh-boy did we zed-heads get some amazing zombie action too. I absolutely cannot wait for season three!

Deadwood - spotted it on sale, so figured I'd give it a spin and now I love this show. The first season is superb, as is the second (even if the dialogue became overly complicated and verbose ... as if the writers ran every word through a thesaurus), and while the third season lacks some of the propulsion and intrigue of the first two seasons (until the final three episodes when it gets nail-bitingly tense), you're so invested in the town and its residents, you don't mind that the final season has been a slower-paced affair with several vague subplots that never really developed. An excellent show all-round and I dearly hope we can finally get the much-talked-about, but never realised (thus far), TV movies that were intended to wrap up the storylines properly.

The Evil Dead - I've got it twice on VHS (cut & uncut), once on DVD (the 'Book of the Dead' edition), and now I've got it on Blu-Ray. It's a bit of an annoyance that we in Region B didn't get the original aspect ratio and a few other additional extras (as found on the now out of print limited edition that Region A got), but it's a spiffing way to catch up on some missed extra features from releases past, and get a remarkably good-looking spruce-up of the print.