The first volume in the “Deep Focus” series of film criticism books from Counterpoints/Soft Skull Press was They Live, a look at the 1988 John Carpenter film by Jonathan Lethem.
Triumph of the Walking Dead: Robert Kirkman’s Zombie Epic on Page and Screen was an unauthorised guide to the comic book and TV series, edited with an Introduction by James Lowder. The book included fifteen essays by Lisa Morton, Kim Paffenroth and Jay Bonansinga, amongst others, along with a Foreword by Joe R. Lansdale.
Supernatural: Bobby Singer’s Guide to Hunting was a tie-in to the TV series by David Reed.
The Gothic Imagination: Conversations on Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction in the Media featured interviews between John C. Tibbetts and such writers as Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Gahan Wilson, Robert Bloch, Ramsey Campbell, Brian Aldiss and others.
Attendance figures at the US box-office hit a sixteen-year-low in 2011, with a drop of approximately 3.6 per cent on revenues from the previous year. The reason for this could be that films are available on an increasing number of platforms, which no longer means that you have to go to your neighbourhood movie theatre to see them.
History also has a tendency to repeat itself, so it was no surprise that the 3-D “revolution” in films and TV looked ready to stall in 2011 — just like it had done previously in the 1930s, 1950s and 1980s. At the cinema, audiences proved reluctant to pay extra just for the (often shoddy) 3-D experience, while 3-D television sets were still prohibitively expensive for most people, not helped by a lack of product to show on them.
Still, that didn’t stop Warner Bros. from releasing the eighth movie in the Harry Potter series in 3-D, the first to be shown in the process. Despite the final film in the franchise being something of a disappointment after the solid storytelling of the previous entries, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 smashed all records before it, clocking up the highest-grossing opening weekend ever ($168.55 million) in July, beating The Dark Knight, Spider-Man 3, The Twilight Saga: New Moon and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. The film went on to pass the $200 million point in just five days, and achieved a world-wide take of $900 million ten days after that.
In the UK, the film broke box-office records by taking ?23 million over its opening weekend, beating the previous entry’s ?18.32 million, and the eight Harry Potter movies are now officially the highest-grossing film franchise ever.
“Inspired” by Tim Powers’ superior novel, Rob Marshall’s 3-D Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, the entertaining fourth instalment in the Disney franchise, involved zombified sailors and murderous mermaids as Johnny Depp’s increasingly silly pirate Jack Sparrow joined Ian McShane’s sorcerous Blackbeard and his duplicitous daughter (Penelope Cruz) in a race to find the fabled Fountain of Youth.
Matt Damon’s New York politician was warned by Terence Stamp’s mysterious man in black that his life was destined along a different path in The Adjustment Bureau, based on a story by Philip K. Dick.
Dick could just as well have been the inspiration for Neil Burger’s Limitless, in which Robert De Niro’s ruthless businessman wanted the secret of the “smart pill” that allowed Bradley Cooper’s struggling novelist to access the unused areas of his brain.
Jake Gyllenhaal found himself living two separate lives in Duncan Jones’ Source Code, which bore more than a passing resemblance to Deja Vu (2006), while Justin Timberlake was living on borrowed time in the near-futuristic In Time. The latter movie was briefly the subject of a lawsuit by Harlan Ellison, who claimed that the film infringed upon his story “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman”.
Gwyneth Paltrow was the first victim of a viral epidemic in Stephen Soderbergh’s Contagion, an all-star version of the kind of disaster films regularly churned out by the Syfy channel. Made for a fraction of that film’s budget, Perfect Sense featured Eva Green and Ewan McGregor’s characters falling in love as a world-wide epidemic robbed people of their sensory perceptions.
2011 was certainly the year for alien invasions at the cinema. Based on a comic book, Jon Favreau’s $163 million Cowboys & Aliens was executive produced by Steven Spielberg but it failed to deliver the thrills, despite teaming Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford against alien invaders in the Wild West.
J. J. Abrams’ $50 million homage to producer Spielberg, Super 8, was a summer movie about a group of school friends who witnessed a spectacular train crash and became involved with an escaped extraterrestrial who just wanted to go home.
Aaron Eckhart’s military veteran led a platoon of soldiers and some jittery camerawork against an alien invasion in the noisy Battle: Los Angeles, while a group of young people were trapped in a Moscow invaded by aliens through the power supply in The Darkest Hour.
British sci-fi nerds Simon Pegg and Nick Frost picked up the eponymous alien escapee (voiced by a potty- mouthed Seth Rogen) in Greg Mottola’s likeable comedy Paul, which also featured Jason Bateman, Jane Lynch, Blythe Danner and Sigourney Weaver.
Nick Frost also turned up as a laid-back drug dealer in Joe Cornish’s inventive Attack the Block, which mixed its laughs with scares as toothy alien balls of fur met their match at the hands of a gang of urban teenagers on a South London estate.
Shia LaBeouf’s hapless hero Sam Witwicky teamed up with Victoria’s Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley to battle the evil Decepticons in Michael Bay’s 3-D second sequel,Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Patrick Dempsey, Frances McDormand, John Turturro, John Malkovich, Buzz Aldrin and Leonard Nimoy (as the voice of “Sentinel Prime”) were lost amongst the special effects mayhem.
Hugh Jackman’s washed-up fighter trained a boxing robot in Shawn Levy’s Real Steel, based on the story by Richard Matheson, and five scantily-clad women used their fantasies to escape from a mental institution in Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch.
In Dominic Sena’s ludicrously entertaining Season of the Witch, a pair of disillusioned fourteenth century Crusaders (Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman) were forced by Christopher Lee’s plague-ridden Cardinal to escort a suspected witch (Claire Foy) to a remote monastery. After being attacked by wolves and zombie monks, they discovered an even greater evil awaited them at their destination.
Cage also starred as a vengeful escapee from Hell on the trail of an evil satanic cult leader in Patrick Lussier’s 3-D Drive Angry, which, despite the non-stop action, flopped at the box-office.
Based on another graphic novel series, Paul Bettany’s futuristic vampire-hunter had to rescue his kidnapped niece in the 3-D Priest, while Anthony Hopkins’ ageing exorcist teamed up with a young priest (Colin O’Donoghue) to banish a demon possessing a pregnant Italian teenager in The Rite.
Director Guy Ritchie and actors Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law were reunited for Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, a sequel to the 2009 film, as the Great Detective tried to prevent a devious Professor Moriarty (Jared Harris) from starting the First World War.
After eleven years, Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and David Arquette returned for Wes Craven’s Scr4am, which updated its scares for a new generation who couldn’t care less. Despite featuring TV heroines Anna Paquin, Kristen Bell and Hayden Panettiere, it became the lowest grossing entry yet in the spoof slasher series.
Tony Todd returned to the series as a creepy coroner in Final Destination 5, in which the survivors of a bridge collapse met their graphic demises in gore-drenched 3-D.
Colin Farrell was the vampire that moved-in next door in the surprisingly good 3-D remake of the 1985 comedy-horror film Fright Night, which also featured David Tennant in the original Roddy McDowall role.
Rebecca De Mornay’s mad matriarch dominated her sadistic sons in Mother’s Day, a remake of the 1980 slasher film of the same name, while Leighton Meester’s crazed stalker put a kitten in a clothes dryer just to make her point in The Roommate, a risible PG-13 rip-off of Single White Female (1992).
A belated prequel to Tim Burton’s 2001 remake, Rupert Wyatt’s Rise of the Planet of the
