Apes was a surprise box-office hit, opening at #1 in America.
Paul W. S. Anderson directed a silly 3-D steampunk version of The Three Musketeers starring his wife, Milla Jovovich, who criticised Summit Entertainment on Twitter for failing to market the movie properly.
Mary Elizabeth Winstead was part of a Norwegian team that discovered something under the Antarctic ice in The Thing, a belated and pointless prequel/remake of John Carpenter’s 1982 movie (which itself was a remake).
Meanwhile, Carpenter himself directed The Ward, in which Amber Heard’s teenage pyromaniac ended up in a spooky 1960s insane asylum.
Husband and wife stars Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz refused to promote the final cut of Jim Sheridan’s Dream House, which gave away all its surprises in the trailer and quickly sank without trace on both sides of the Atlantic.
In America, Hammer’s psychological thriller The Resident went directly to DVD, despite starring Hilary Swank, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Christopher Lee. At least it received a negligible cinema release in the UK, as did the pagan thriller Wake Wood, another Hammer production that had been sitting on the shelf for a few years.
Co-scripted by Stephen Volk and director Nick Murphy, The Awakening was an atmospheric low-budget period ghost film set in a haunted boarding school.
Given its slightly more than $1 million budget, James Wan’s Insidious turned out to be one of the most profitable films of the year, taking more than $53 million at the US box-office. Produced by the team behind the terrible Paranormal Activity franchise and written and directed by the creators of the Saw series, it was an intentionally old-fashioned ghost story about parents fighting for the soul of their son.
Two sisters discovered footage of themselves from 1988 that proved they had always been a magnet for the supernatural in Paranormal Activity 3. Made for just $5 million, the prequel opened in the US at #1 with a gross of $52.6 million — the biggest horror film and best October opening ever.
Shark Night 3D served up college co-eds as chum, while a group of foxhunters became the hunted in Blooded. Apollo 18 was another “found footage” flick, this time set on the Moon.
A brother and sister wandered around a forest investigating the paranormal in the Spanish-made Atrocious, while the Norwegian Troll Hunter was like The Blair Witch Project with giant furry trolls.
Guillermo Del Toro produced Julia’s Eyes, Guillem Morales’ Spanish supernatural thriller in which Belen Rueda’s Hitchcockian heroine investigated the death of her blind twin sister. Del Toro also produced and co-scripted Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, a loose remake of a 1973 TV movie, about an old manor house haunted by little evil critters.
Pedro Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In starred Antonio Banderas as an obsessed plastic surgeon in an art house homage to Georges Franju’s Les yeux sans visage (aka Eyes Without a Face).
Gustavo Hernandez’s Spanish thriller The Silent House played out in real time and was based on a true murder mystery that happened in 1940s Uruguay.
Louise Bourgoin was the female Indiana Jones battling mad scientists, dinosaurs and reanimated Egyptian mummies in Luc Besson’s comic book-inspired The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc- Sec.
Kirsten Dunst and Alexander Skarsgard were unlucky enough to schedule their nuptials for the same day as a rogue planet was about to crash into the Earth in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, which debuted in America on video-on-demand.
Mike Cahill’s Another Earth was another indie feature, in which a woman (Brit Marling) won a trip to an identical planet orbiting her own world.
The Dead was a low budget zombie film shot in Africa, and the bargain budget zombie apocalypse continued in the British-made The World of the Dead: The Zombie Diaries.
The horror comedy Dylan Dog: Dead of Night, which starred Brandon Routh as a paranormal investigator, took under $1 million during its opening week in the US.
A pair of assassins discovered that there was more to their latest job than they expected in Ben Wheatley’s Kill List. Tucker & Dale vs. Evil was a low budget spoof on backwoods slasher films, while Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds swapped bodies in the comedy The Change- Up.
More tragedy than Greek, Theseus (future “Superman” Henry Cavill) led his Olympian chums against Mickey Rourke’s evil King Hyperion in Tarsem Singh’s overblown Immortals, released in “epic 3- D”.
Your Highness was a witless fantasy spoof that somehow managed to feature James Franco, Natalie Portman and Charles Dance in its cast.
Despite Jason Momoa’s solid Hyborian warrior, and Ron Perlman as his father, the 3-D Conan the Barbarian was a disappointing origin story of Robert E. Howard’s sword-wielding hero.
Audiences were colour-blind to the 3-D The Green Hornet, in which Seth Rogen’s mugging millionaire became a crime-fighter with the aid of Jay Chou’s far more intelligent Kato, and Ryan Reynolds made a lightweight Green Lantern in Martin Campbell’s disappointing origin story of the DC Comics superhero.
James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender played the younger incarnations of Professor X and Magneto, respectively, in Matthew Vaughn’s better-than-expected “preboot” of the Marvel Comics franchise, X- Men: First Class.
Marvel continued to build towards its multi-hero Avengers epic in 2012 with the release of Kenneth Branagh’s mighty 3-D Thor, which introduced the planet Asgard’s God of Thunder (Chris Hemsworth), exiled to Earth by his father Odin (Anthony Hopkins). Meanwhile, Chris Evans’ wartime weakling became Captain America: The First Avenger in Joe Johnston’s nicely old-fashioned 3-D adventure, which pitted the all-American hero against Nazi villain the Red Skull (Hugo Weaving).
Comedian Rainn Wilson became low-rent hero “The Crimson Bolt” in Super, which also featured Ellen Page, Liv Tyler, Kevin Bacon and Nathan Fillion.
Based on Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel about teenage cloning, Never Let Me Go starred Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley, while Alex Pettyfer’s stranded alien might just as well have been another Twilight vampire in the teen romance I Am Number Four, produced by Michael Bay.
The less said about Bill Condon’s The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 1 the better, as Bella and Edward got married, moped around and had a vampire baby.
Directed by Catherine Hardwicke, who was responsible for the first Twilight movie, Red Riding Hood put a werewolf spin on the same basic premise.
A young Parisian orphan (Asa Butterfield) befriended forgotten cinema pioneer Georges Melies (Ben Kingsley) in Hugo, Martin Scorsese’s 3-D paean to the movies, which also featured Sacha Baron Cohen, Ray Winstone, Emily Mortimer, Jude Law, Richard Griffiths and Christopher Lee.
Maybe because it was released in “4-D Aroma-scope”, but Robert Rodriguez’s Spy Kids: All the Time in the World was a box-office stinker.
Despite being directed by Steven Spielberg, the 3-D motion-capture used in The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn just made the comic strip characters look creepy.
One of the biggest box-office bombs of the year was Walt Disney’s Mars Needs Moms. Estimated to have cost around $150 million, the 3-D motion-capture comedy took just $6.9 million in the US during its opening weekend. However, Hoodwinked Too!: Hood vs. Evil actually had the worst opening ever for a 3-D movie, grossing just $4.1 million at 1,500 movie theatres.
