At the Orange British Academy Film Awards on 13 February, director Tim Burton presented eighty-eight- year-old Sir Christopher Lee with the Academy Fellowship — the highest accolade given out by BAFTA for contribution to film. Previous recipients included Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg, Charlie Chaplin, Elizabeth Taylor and Sean Connery.
The 83rd Annual Academy Awards were announced in Hollywood on 27 February. Natalie Portman won the Best Actress award for her portrayal of a crazed ballet dancer in Black Swan, and Toy Story 3 picked up the awards for Best Animated Feature Film and Original Song (“We Belong Together”). Inception scooped up a quartet of technical awards for Cinematography, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing and Visual Effects. The Art Direction and Costume Design awards went to Alice in Wonderland, and The Wolfman was the winner of Best Makeup. Co-directed by Australian genre artist Shaun Tan, The Lost Thing won for Best Short Film, Animated.
The highlight of the evening was when ninety-four-year-old Hollywood legend Kirk Douglas presented the award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.
On 12 November, Honorary Academy Awards for lifetime achievement were presented to actor James Earl Jones (the voice of “Darth Vader” in the Star Wars movies) and veteran make-up artist Dick Smith (The Exorcist).
Before Warner Bros. began pulling all eight Potter DVDs from retail shelves at the end of December in preparation for future upgrades, the Blu-ray release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 included an in-depth conversation between J. K. Rowling and Daniel Radcliffe, along with an interactive option. The Potter franchise has already generated around $51 billion for the studio’s Home Entertainment division — on top of the $7 billion earned during the films’ theatrical release.
Following complaints in the press by Dutch director Tom Six, in October, the British Board of Film Classification lifted its ban on The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence), giving the controversial body-horror movie an “18” certificate on DVD after two-and-a-half minutes were cut from the original running time.
Scott Spiegel’s Hostel: Part III found its natural home after being released directly to DVD, as did Victor Garcia’s Mexican-set Hellraiser: Revelation, the ninth film in the franchise and the first not to feature Doug Bradley as “Pinhead”.
Danny Trejo, Ving Rhames and the busy Sean Bean starred in Death Race 2, a DVD prequel to the 2008 remake.
A couple were trapped in their island home by a washed-up soldier in Carl Tibbetts’ debut Retreat which, despite starring Thandie Newton, Cillian Murphy and Jamie Bell, also went straight to DVD.
Released on DVD as an “After Dark Original”, The Task was about a reality TV show recorded on a haunted prison ship.
Skin Eating Jungle Vampires from Chemical Burn Entertainment had all the quality of a bad home video. The same was true of The Stone: No Soul Unturned and the terrifically titled (but ultimately disappointing) Fast Zombies with Guns, from the same distributor.
Survivors of a terrorist bomb attack had to also escape the walking dead in Zombie Undead.
The Blu-ray of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) featured more than fifty minutes of “newly discovered” scenes never included in the finished film.
The Complete 50th Anniversary Collection of the 1960s TV series The Avengers was issued by Optimum as a limited edition thirty-nine disc set that featured every episode digitally restored and more than thirty hours of bonus material.
The Complete Sherlock Holmes Collection was a five-disc Blu-ray set containing all fourteen of Basil Rathbone’s Holmes films, dating from 1939–46.
Guillermo del Toro, John Landis and Roger Corman were among those who were commenting on the horrors of the past on the DVD compilation Trailers from Hell! Volume 2.
1980s stars Kristy Swanson, D. B. Sweeney and Robert Davi turned up in the entertaining Syfy channel movie Swamp Shark, John Schneider was slumming in Super Shark, and Robert Picardo had a cameo in Mega Shark vs Crocosaurus.
Syfy also revived the careers of 1980s pop rivals Deborah (Debbie) Gibson and Tiffany, who teamed up for Mary Lambert’s Mega Python vs. Gatoroid, which also featured former Monkee Micky Dolenz as himself.
Brian Krause and C. Thomas Howell battled arachnids from Afghanistan in Jim Wynorski’s dire Camel Spiders; Robert Patrick was involved in a civil war on Mars in the videogame-based Red Faction: Origins, and Lance Henriksen made a brief appearance in Scream of the Banshee.
A giant monster nearly destroyed the entire planet in Behemoth, a mutated root system threatened to tear apart the Earth in The Terror Beneath (aka Seeds of Destruction), and a proofreader and an archaeologist teamed up to prevent the end of the world in Doomsday Prophecy.
A volcano under Yellowstone Park exploded in a Super Eruption, while Stacy Keach’s mad meteorologist used a weather weapon to destroy his enemies in Storm War.
Danny Glover’s obsessed Captain Ahab wanted revenge on a Great White. er, Dragon, in the Syfy “original” movie Age of the Dragons, a medieval reworking of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.
H. G. Wells was no doubt spinning in his grave as mutated monsters travelled back in time in Morlocks, and Ray Harryhausen would have been equally disappointed by the bargain- basement Sinbad and the Minotaur.
Meanwhile, an unrecognisable Richard Grieco played the evil Loki in Almighty Thor, another cheap knock-off from The Asylum, who would also have you believe that its low budget alien invasion movie Battle of Los Angeles was in no way similar to the bigger budget Battle: Los Angeles.
Alien bacteria animated an eighteen-foot golem in Iron Invader (aka Metal Shifters), and alien technology created a terrorist weapon in Cold Fusion.
The Syfy’s channel’s two-part Neverland was yet another version of the Peter Pan story, with Rhys Ifans as the future Captain Hook, Anna Friel as his pirate lover, and Keira Knightley as the voice of a CGI Tinkerbell.
A modern-day Dorothy Gale (Paulie Rojas) discovered that the best-selling books she had written were based on her suppressed childhood memories in Syfy’s two-part The Witches of Oz. The supporting cast included Billy Boyd, Lance Henriksen, Jeffrey Combs, Mia Sara, Sean Astin and Christopher Lloyd.
Pierce Brosnan’s best-selling novelist investigated the death of his wife (Annabeth Gish) in Mick Garris’ two- part, four-hour supernatural mini-series of Stephen King’s Bag of Bones on A&E, which also featured genre veteran William Schallert.
Based on a comic book, the unfortunately titled Steve Niles’ Remains was yet another reworking of Night of the Living Dead and was the first original movie produced by the Chiller cable TV channel.
Housewife Halloween movies included Lifetime’s Possessing Piper Rose starring Rebecca Romijin, and Hallmark’s The Good Witch’s Family starring Catherine Bell. Martin Mull’s titular phantom attempted to scare away a family who moved into his house in Oliver’s Ghost for the same network.
Eddie Izzard portrayed a mysterious stranger who turned up on Christmas Eve in the BBC-TV movie
