Hiya hiya hiya boys and girls and welcome the Week of the Lycanthrope.... Eh, sounds too corny. Think we will just go with Werewolf Week. This week I am just tackling unknown titles to see whether or not the shapeshifters are getting the same cinematic love as the various vampire incarnations. We will just scrub our minds of the Twillight Saga and move on.
Yeah I peed on your Twillight DVDS... what of it?
This has been a lycanthrope grab bag at the suggestions of some of my readers and I thought it was high time we get back to the roots of this blog was based from. For those that are coming in late I used to write for a review company and got stuck with the horror section because... I'm a guy and can tolerate blood caking the walls, entrails spewed about and it shouldn't phase me.
Suffice to say I no longer work for said company and have been reviewing what I want each week.
Yet there is a longing every so often I need to get back to the mainstream of horror and see what worked and what was complete and total dreck. With that in mind, let's see if there are any decent werewolf films currently out there. Otherwise we will just have to fall back on An American Werewolf in London and the Howling... again.
Welcome back folk to another slathering heap of Larson 80’s
TV Week. Now we have covered two very
successful creations providing entertainment and probably more topless man
chest than I ever needed to see. Now I
thought we would take a gander at one of the bombs of the 80s that held promise
but not enough interest. Bear in mind
this is also these are the audiences that needed Friday the 13th
sequels left and right so this could be part of the problem. A professor of criminology (thank
you Jay for looking that up) who prowls the night in search of
criminals and show them the error of their wicked ways all the while being a
vigilante? This is Manimal.
Thought we were gonna watch the game, not Spring clean!
Dr. Jonathan Chase…wealthy,
young, handsome. A man with the
brightest of spoilers. A man with the
darkest of pasts.
Dr Chase (Simon MacCorkindale of Hammer House of
Horror, Macbeth, The Sword and the Sorcerer, Falcon Crest, Counterstrike, Poltergeist:
The Legacy, Casualty and Night Wolf) apparently glob trotted from
Cambridge England, to Africa to the far reaches of Tibet…stuff happened?? Okay the skinny is thus, Chase found through
an accidental transmogrification he could shape shift into multiple
animals. Why wouldn’t he want to use
that new found ability to FIGHT CRIME??!!!
Of course he would. That is
perfectly logical from all the angles I have examined it at.
Frosted Flakes won't save you, criminal scum.
Other than the audience only two other people knew his
secret. One being a lovely lady cop
Detective Brook McKenzie (Melody Anderson of Flash Gordon, Dead &
Buried, St. Elsewhere, Policewoman Centerfold, Phillip Marlowe, Private Eye and
Firewalker) and his buddy Ty Earl (Michael D. Roberts of Heartbreaker, The Ice
Pirates, Earthlings, Double Trouble, Manhunter, Rain Man and Sleepstalker)
in the atypical buddy cop/crime fighter story arcs of the day, this series
lasted all of 8 episodes due to poor Neilsen ratings. The
audience did not get to delve into Chase’s back story at all and were in fact
robbed at a potentially clever series.
I had a few comments about the show now. The creature transformations were brought to
us by Stan Winston’s Creature Shop and while they were amazing manifestations
from man to panther. Most of us had
issues with his clothes somehow never tearing or morphing with his flesh into
these various creatures. I guess Simon
MacCorkindale in his tighty whiteys might have been a problem but personally as
well built as the guy was you would thought it would improve the ratings
overall. For crying out loud, Magnum
didn’t have a shirt on half of the time and I heard no complaints from straight
women and gay men so who can guess.
Due to the costs of Stan Winston’s SFX team, co-coordinators
and various animal wranglers the executives felt the cost was too great for the
low ratings and ultimately pulled the plug on a superhero vigilante that could
have really gone places. Located in New
York you already got the vibe of the Avengers, Fantastic Four or Spiderman but
even great locale, special effects and decent writing cannot always survive the
first year as this was rated one of the worst of the 50 TV shows of all time in
2002 by TV Guide. Somehow nonsense like
Jackass and The Jersey Shore got more love.
