Zombies, ‘Iron Man 2,’ Geoff Johns and ‘Twilight’ in Everyday Hero headlines
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My all-time favorite zombie movie? That would have to be ‘I Walked with a Zombie,’ the darkly stylish and disturbing 1943 film directed Jacques Tourneur and produced by horrrormeister Val Lewton. The photo below, which I found in the Los Angeles Times archives, shows star Frances Dee in a typically shadowy scene...
It turns out that ‘Zombie’ is being involuntarily brought back from the cinema dead (how appropriate is that?). That’s the top story today in the Everyday Hero roundup of handpicked headlines from the fanboy universe...
Andy Fickman (director of the upcoming Disney film ‘Return to Witch Mountain’) is a key figure in a plan to remake four creepy films from the RKO Pictures vault -- “I Walked With a Zombie,” “The Body Snatcher,” “Bedlam’ and “Five Came Back.” Michael Fleming reports that Fickman, a former Universal Studios tour guide, has long been intrigued by Lewton. “After Frankenstein and the Wolfman came Lewton and RKO, and what they lacked in budgets they made up for with atmosphere, imagination and great directors making horror with psychological flair. It was on the heels of WWII, when Nazi Germany showed that the scariest enemy might be the person who looked like your next door neighbor.” [Variety]
The Stark realities of Hollywood: Terrence Howard says that he learned about his ouster from ‘Iron man 2’ by reading about it in the trades and he rebuked the Marvel Studios party line that the casting decision was made due to a salary dispute. He told interviewer Scott Simon: ‘I read something in the trades that implicated it was about money or something, but apparently the contracts that we write and sign aren’t worth the paper that they’re printed on sometimes.’ So what’s the real story? [NPR]
The ‘Twilight’ zone: More pictures from the set of ‘Twilight’ have popped up and our favorite is this one, which suggests that Bella apparently does some of her clothes shopping at the Army & Navy surplus shop.
Set phasers on petulant: George Takei doesn’t like William Shatner. William Shatner doesn’t like George Takei. In a new interview, the man who used to play Captain Kirk says he pities the man who used to play Sulu. ‘The poor man. There’s such a sickness there. It’s so painfully obvious that there’s a psychosis there. I don’t know what his original thing about me was. I have no idea.’
Light reading: Rob Reiner will direct an action-adventure called ‘Book of Shadows’ for Castle Rock. The premise: ‘The story follows a young man who must embark on the perilous journey of first love and face many trials of maturity while on the dangerous quest to close a mythical tome called ‘Book of Shadows’ in order to restore balance to the world.’ [The Hollywood Reporter]
Geoff Johns talks about ‘New Krypton,’ the three-month story that will cross over throughout the Superman comics titles and follow the Man of Steel’s emotional trauma as a city of 100,000 Kryptonians arrive on Earth even as the hero deals with the death of his adoptive father, Jonathan Kent. Johns tells Vanetta Rogers: ‘Superman’s trapped, Clark Kent’s trapped between his Kryptonian roots and his human roots. He’s really a man of both worlds. He grew up believing he was human and then discovered he had been sent to our world. So just as he’s gotten this amazing, unbelievable touchstone to a planet that was long dead, a world he never thought he’d see again, and even his family -- I mean, literally his family, with his uncle and aunt and his cousin -- just as he receives the greatest gift that he could ever dream of, he loses one of the most important people in his life, Jonathan Kent.’ [Newsarama]
Credits: Iron Man image courtesy of Marvel Studios and Paramount Pictures. The photo of William Shatner as Captain Kirk is from the Los Angeles Times archives. Superman image courtesy of DC Comics.