The Birds 1963

Posted on October 19, 2007 by kukon

The Birds 1963Cast:
Rod Taylor – Mitch Brenner
Jessica Tandy – Lydia Brenner
Suzanne Pleshette – Annie Hayworth
Tippi Hedren – Melanie Daniels (as ‘Tippi’ Hedren)
Veronica Cartwright – Cathy Brenner
Ethel Griffies – Mrs. Bundy, elderly ornithologist

The Birds (1963) is a modern Hitchcock thriller/masterpiece, his first film with Universal Studios. It is the apocalyptic story of a northern California coastal town filled with an onslaught of seemingly unexplained, arbitrary and chaotic attacks of ordinary birds – not birds of prey. Ungrammatical advertising campaigns emphasized: “The Birds Is Coming.” This Technicolor feature came after Psycho (1960) – another film loaded with ‘bird’ references.

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Night of the Living Dead 1968

Posted on October 19, 2007 by kukon

Night of the Living Dead 1968Cast:
Duane Jones – Ben
Judith O’Dea – Barbra
Karl Hardman – Harry Cooper
Marilyn Eastman – Helen Cooper/Bug-eating zombie
Keith Wayne – Tom
Judith Ridley – Judy
Kyra Schon – Karen Cooper/Upstairs body

Before “Night of the Living Dead”, zombie movies were mostly movies that relied on its atmosphere and not necessarily its horror or gore and were mostly set at exotic, far off, locations. Zombies weren’t flesh eating monsters, they’re were slaves that were controlled by a master, as showed in classic zombie movies such as “White Zombie” and “I Walked with a Zombie”. George A. Romero completely threw this existing genre elements overboard and almost completely reinvented the genre. Sometimes I miss the old zombie flicks but George A. Romero introduced us to a totally new and great world of horror movies, that influenced many later movies. Copied a lot, never surpassed.

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Dawn of the Dead 1978

Posted on October 19, 2007 by kukon

Dawn of the Dead 1978Cast:
David Emge – Stephen
Ken Foree – Peter
Scott H. Reiniger – Roger
Gaylen Ross – Francine
David Crawford – Dr. Foster
David Early – Mr. Berman

Dawn of the Dead is concrete proof that extreme gore and violence doesn’t always equal a dumb movie and that the two can make very nice bedfellows indeed.

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Halloween 1978

Posted on October 19, 2007 by kukon

Halloween 1978Cast:
Donald Pleasence – Dr. Sam Loomis
Jamie Lee Curtis – Laurie Strode
Nancy Kyes – Annie Brackett (as Nancy Loomis)
P.J. Soles – Lynda van der Klok
Charles Cyphers – Sheriff Leigh Brackett
Kyle Richards – Lindsey Wallace

‘Halloween’ was made in twenty days on a budget of just three hundred thousand dollars, and went on to gross over $50 million in the US alone back in its premiere theatrical run in 1978 (that’s about $150 million to today’s terms). The film not only started the careers of many of the cast and crew, but led the revolution of horror films through the 1980′s and was a clear influence on the serge of teen horror flicks in the late 1990′s.

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The Others 2001

Posted on October 19, 2007 by kukon

The Others 2001Cast:
Nicole Kidman – Grace Stewart
Fionnula Flanagan – Mrs. Bertha Mills
Christopher Eccleston – Charles Stewart
Alakina Mann  – Anne Stewart
James Bentley  – Nicholas Stewart
Eric Sykes – Mr. Edmund Tuttle

The Others comes from Chilean-born, Spanish-based director Alejandro Amenabar, who previously obtained attention in the West with the striking Virtual Reality film Open Your Eyes (1997). (Alejandro Amenabar and Tom Cruise probably met during the making of Vanilla Sky (2001), the English-language remake of Open Your Eyes that Cruise appeared several months later in the same year).

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