Psycho fails to sell at auction...

I'm genuinely shocked that a London auction house couldn't find anyone willing to bid the minimum price of $44,000.00 on Bernard Hermann's score for Psycho.(read more here)

Granted, I don't have $44,000.00 lying around for non-essentials and neither does anyone I know personally. But if I did, I think this would be e a pretty nifty thing to have.

I mean, Brian DePalma didn't want it? Come on!

Bad Brains and Yankee Ghosts...

Check out my, um, think piece about bad brain movies on AMC TV's Horror Hacker site. It's food for thought... okay, I'll stop now.

If you don't recognize the photo, it's 1958's Fiend Without a Face, which I watched on TV as a child because it starred Marshall Thompson of Daktari, a series about a veterinarian taking care of African wildlife. Shocker.

I'm willing to bet Tim Burton had a similar experience, because if you watch Beetlejuice (1988)closely, there's a Fiend-ish sculpture lurking in a corner.

Oh, and my review of The Haunting in Connecticut, the Amityville Horror of our day, is live.

New Reviews: Duplicity and Knowing

New reviews are here: Nicolas Cage gets a scary glimpse into the future in Knowing and Clive Owen and Julia Roberts find that love and Duplicity are tough acts to balance.

I remade a Zombie...

Just when I thought this rumor had gone away, it seems to have picked up new credence:

The I Walked With a Zombie remake now has a director in Adam Marcus, whose only previous horror credit is Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday. Oh, yeah — that's the sensibility the hauntingly poetic I Walked with a Zombie — a dreamy reworking of Charlotte Bronte's feverishly perverse Jane Eyre — needs.

I'm comforting myself with the thought that it can't be any worse than Ritual, with Jennifer Grey. Made in 2001, it apparently opened in a handful of European markets before going to DVD in the US as Tales from the Crypt Presents: Ritual.

Kid flick kicks ass!

This is how the preliminary weekend box office numbers are looking:

1.) Race to Witch Mountain: $25 million
2.) Watchmen: $18 million
3.) The Last House on the Left: 14.7 million
4.) Taken: $6.7 million
5.) Tyler Perry's Madea Goes to Jail: $5.1 million

Conventional wisdom has it that a decent kid's movie is always a winner, but this doesn't bode well for the hugely expensive Watchmen or the Last House on the Left remake.

Could it be the power of the actor formerly known as The Rock? I must confess that I'm a Dwayne Johnson fan. He's not a great actor and probably never will be. But he's got real star power; when he's on screen, everyone and everything else fades into the background.

And I have to say (though I'm very much in the minority), that I think Richard Kelly's Southland Tales is a pretty interesting movie and that Johnson is a significant part of the reason.

And remember, people jumped on Kelly's Donnie Darko with both feet when it opened, and now it's a bona fide cult classic. Just saying.