The Eternal
Biehn will star in the story of a 500-year vampire who wants to die and sets out to find a worthy adversary in combat.
Fangland
“Fangland” is based on the 2007 novel by former “60 Minutes” producer John Marks. It’s centered on a New York-based producer who travels to Romania for an interview with a notorious European arms dealer, who turns out to be a modern-day Dracula.
Evangeline Harker, a young producer for the TV news show The Hour, reluctantly accepts an assignment into the wilds of Romania to explore doing a segment on a legendary criminal figure, Ion Torgu. Evangeline soon finds herself at the very outskirts of civilization, and after hearing a missionary’s account of a supernatural plague that affected a whole community in Africa, she’s accosted by Torgu himself, doing an excellent impersonation of the vampire count. Her subsequent imprisonment in a deserted hotel also parallels Stoker’s tale, but Marks manages to make the familiar fresh, so that even devotees of the original will find themselves rapidly turning pages and being drawn into Evangeline’s fate and the stories of her friends and colleagues at The Hour.
[BD Review] The Collapsed
Reviewed by Mike Ferraro
It is the end of the world, yet again, and a family must escape their city life and break for the country. Clearly this is a storyline that will never stop in the world of cinema, so shall we not just embrace it as an audience? Unfortunately for us, this film does indeed tackle many themes and scenarios as many other stories have. Only it doesn’t accomplish the missions of being fresh or compelling as much as the filmmakers would have hoped.
The Collapsed follows the Weaver family as they try their best to survive an apocalypse of unknown origin. They do their best to avoid other survivors, who have since turned into thieves, rapists, and cannibals. After a run-in at an abandoned gas station, the four of them head to the forest for shelter, and it is about here when all is not as it seems.
Writer and director Justin McConnell seems to interesting on finally getting to the inevitable twist at the end, that he leaves out some key cathartic moments. As the family starts dwindling down in numbers, the surviving group is given not a moment to really care about their lost love ones.
It really takes you out of the picture when you become frustrated at the lack of emotion from anyone. When you come back from a journey, expected two of your family members to be waiting for you safe and sound, but you show up and their dead, you half expect to feel something. These characters just whisk it off like another day in the office. Could they simply be used to all this death? Probably, but it has to hit you when it is so close to home.
Could the acting work by the principle cast be to blame here? Some of these performances aren’t very convincing, and perhaps this is why there seems to be no emotional response to such a horrific event. But you never really get a sense that this was part of the screenplay in the first place.
Despite many of the film’s shortcomings, Anchor Bay spared no expense towards extra features. The DVD includes two commentary tracks (director and producer, and actor), a music video for Rob Kleiner’s Devil in Disguise, and some weblinks to unlock even more content (like a soundtrack download and a making-of feature).
It would be nice to have given such attention to a film worth sitting through again.
Roll Into The Gas Station In This Exclusive Clip From ‘The Collapsed’
Anchor Bay’s Justin McConnell directed The Collapsed hits DVD on June 5th and we have an exclusive clip from the film to help kick things off! It’s a definitive reminder not to take too long at the gas station if the apocalypse has already happened.
In The film, “in wake of an unknown event that has catapulted civilization into a fatal downward spiral, the Weaver family — father Scott (John Fantasia), young adult son Aaron (Steve Vieira), mother Emily (Lise Moule) and teenage daughter Rebecca (Anna Ross) — desperately tries to survive. Fleeing the city, their only hope of sanctuary is a rural hometown from their past, Dover’s Bend. With the constant threat of violent death forcing them to stay as far away from civilization as possible, they take to the forest. However, they soon discover that the danger posed by other survivors may be the least of their worries. Someone — or something — seems to have followed them into the wilderness…”
Head inside for the clip! READ MORE
18 Comments
[BD Caption Contest] Win An Autographed ‘No One Lives’ Prize Pack!