Connect with us

Editorials

2011 BLACK FRIDAY CHOPPING LIST: MUSIC

Published

on

Black Friday

Wow. This year saw new releases from metal titans Megadeth, Anthrax and Mastodon. But we know that, while metal pumps deeply in the hearts of most BD readers, it’s not the only type of music that blows your skirt up. So click below for the badass selection of film scores, hip-hop and yes bone-crushing metal that makes up the 2011 Music edition of our Chopping List. We’ve switched the purchase links over to iTunes this year (for the most part) so familiarize yourself with their “gift this item” feature. If you just want old-school discs, then most of these titles are readily available at Amazon as well.

FILMS & TV | MUSIC | GAME/TOYS & MERCH. | BOOKS & COMICS

The Hunter by Mastodon

List Price: $9.99

I fell in love with Mastodon two years ago when I heard Crack The Skye. It instantly took me back to the days when metal could be textured, ambitious, musical and symphonic. It felt like a Master Of Puppets for the new millennium. This new record trades in some of the epics for shorter songs and adds some more hooks but also finds a way to remain more interesting than The Black Album. For one, The Hunter actually has a bit of a sense of humor. Highly recommended and bound to brighten the holidays of any old-school metal fan.

Order by clicking here

The Great Escape Artist by Jane’s Addiction

List Price: $9.99

This one hasn’t actually been getting a ton of critical love, which I’m a little baffled by. For one, it goes without saying that it’s miles better than Strays. And while it’s not an instant classic like Nothing’s Shocking or Ritual it has plenty of merits. Dave Sitek’s production helps the band back into those dark corners it was born in and the result is kind of like a cool codeine dream of a record. It has some of the slow mysticism of the second Porno For Pyros record combined with the textures and groove Jane’s is known for. If you know a Jane’s fan who has written this album off as a matter of course – go ahead and get it for them. They’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Order by clicking here

Terminal Twilight by White Willow

List Price: $9.99

From Jonathan Barkan’s review.

This album is a perfect mixture of creepy and beautiful, calming yet unsettling. Also a prog album, this one leans more towards the “arty” side of the genre rather than Leprous’ rock/metal. With definite nods to the Goblin and Tangerine Dream horror/sci-fi soundtracks, each track on this album is representative of some form of apocalypse, whether it be natural disaster or financial ruin. For those rainy evenings when you can lay back and let yourself get lost in the music, Terminal Twilight is one of the best accompaniments I can recommend.

Order by clicking here

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo OST by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross

List Price: More Details Dec. 2nd

There’s obviously no new Nine Inch Nails record this year but that doesn’t mean there won’t be a kick ass release from Trent Reznor. I adored the score for The Social Network and the snippets I heard of the Tattoo during a footage presentation a few months back sounded even better – driving the footage to an unrelentingly intense culmination. The track listing has yet to be announced but we can only hope that Reznor’s “Immigrant Song” collaboration with Karen O. makes the cut. More details are available on Dec 2nd which, knowing Reznor, is probably pretty soon to when the album is released digitally. I’d bet a kidney it’s out before Christmas.

Order by clicking here

Bilateral by Leprous

List Price: $7.99

From Jonathan Barkan’s review.

Looking more and more like my Album of the Year, this prog/rock/metal masterpiece doesn’t have a single song I’d classify as “filler”. It also adds in enough stylistic changes to keep things constantly interesting (just check out the awesome funk bass riff in “Mediocrity Wins”, the lullaby-esque intro to “Mb. Indifferentia”, or the eerie piano opening to “Acquired Taste”). I’ve been coming back to this album over and over again since I got it, which is becoming a rarer occurrence these days.

Order by clicking here

Th1rt3en by Megadeth

List Price: $9.99

Honestly, I’d kind of lost track of Megadeth after Countdown To Extinction but coming back and listening to Th1rt3en it feels like they haven’t missed much of a beat. A lot of the stuff I’d heard here and there over the years was light on hooks and heavy on riffage, but in this new release the two exist side by side in fairly sustainable portions. And finding religion doesn’t seem to have made Mustaine too soft at all.

Order by clicking here

Watch The Throne by Jay-Z and Kanye West

List Price: $11.99/Deluxe $14.99

This album may not reach the heights of Kanye’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy but it certainly outpaces Jay-Z’s last offering by a lap and a half. It’s a lot of fun to hear these two friends and artistic rivals challenge each other into exploring new levels. It’s an epic game of one-upmanship that makes a perfect universal gift (provided the recipient is at least in middle school).

Order by clicking here

Worship Music by Anthrax

List Price: $9.99

From Jonathan Barkan’s review.

Sometimes you just have to put on tunes that make you rock out. And what better band to do it to than Anthrax? Not only do you have an album full of kickass songs but one of them, Fight ‘Em Til You Can’t, is about surviving the zombie apocalypse! So gather up your survival gear, pop this sucker onto your iPod, and show them what you’ve got.

Order by clicking here

Angles by The Strokes

List Price: $9.99

Another under-appreciated gem from earlier in the year. While you can’t argue that it’s better than the first record – it certainly rocks harder and more melodically than almost any other mainstream release this year. “Under Cover Of Darkness” is groovy and cathartic and “Gratisfaction” downright channels Thin Lizzy. If you know a classic rock fan in need of something new, pass this along. “Taken For A Fool” is another highlight.

Order by clicking here

Drive OST by Cliff Martinez and Various Artists

List Price: $9.99

This thing! I had it on repeat in my car for literally three weeks after I saw the film! And I suspect when I get another dose of one of the year’s best movies on Blu-ray that this soundtrack will go right back into regular rotation. The first five songs are those perfect east-side LA retro synth sounding songs that somehow you still love despite their hipster pedigree. After that the disc settles into Cliff Martinez’s shimmery, ambient score. An album you can literally drive around to in any town and it automatically makes the streets you’re cruising cool as hell.

Order by clicking here

Unto The Locust by Machinehead

List Price: $9.99

Know someone who loves Metal at its darkest, most brutal and uncompromising? Know someone who loves insane tempo changes? Know someone who love the double bass drum? Then get this for them. Just do it. They remind me of Pantera in the purity of their intentions but also manage to bring some Iron Maiden-esque mystique and harmonies into the mix without coming across as silly.

Order by clicking here

The Conditions Of My Parole by Puscifer

List Price: $9.99

Know someone who’s a fan of Tool and A Perfect Circle but can’t seem to stretch the arms of their musical fandom beyond metal? This is a good first step. The presence of Maynard James Keenan will draw them in and, while there’s till plenty of heavy stuff on the record, introduce them to a wide swath of experimental sounds and ideas. A really interesting record.

Order by clicking here

John Carpenter’s The Thing OST by Ennio Morricone

List Price: $9.99

From Jonathan Barkan’s review.

C’mon people, this movie is a classic and Ennio Morricone’s music is pretty much burned into our brains at this point. Put on this album, close your eyes, and watch the movie from memory. Almost as good as watching the movie itself.

Order by clicking here

LuLu by Lou Reed and Metallica

List Price: $12.99

From Jonathan Barkan’s review.

If your morbid curiosity can’t take it any longer and you just HAVE to know what this horrific mess sounds like, please wait until Black Friday, when I’m guessing this will be in the dollar bin. That way you can at least spend as little money as possible on it. And once you realize you never want to listen to it again, you can use it as a drink coaster! Two for the price of one (dollar)!

Order by clicking here

Editorials

‘The Fog’ 19 Years Later: There’s a Reason You Don’t Remember This John Carpenter Remake

Published

on

The Fog remake
Pictured: 'The Fog' (2005)

John Carpenter’s illustrious catalog of horror and non-horror classics has already seen three remakes (Halloween, Assault on Precinct 13, and this column’s focus), with at least one more kinda-sorta confirmed on the way (Escape from New York). If you consider 2011’s The Thing enough of a remake, notch another on the bedpost. It makes sense; Carpenter turned his no-bullshit attitude into a masterful filmmaking style, and those listed titles harbor nostalgic admiration. We’re probably closer than we think to seeing Bryan Fuller’s Christine remake for Blumhouse or a contemporary They Live, while Dwayne Johnson’s Big Trouble in Little China sequel project fades away. Imagine Julia Ducournau’s Christine should Fuller exit, or what about if James Gunn booked a brief horror vacation away from the DCEU for his take on They Live?

Carpenter’s brand of down-and-dirty storytelling mixed with societal commentaries make his works perfect for generational updates, but they can’t all be winners.

Take 2005’s woefully tragic The Fog, for example.

Rupert Wainwright’s disastrously shallow remake lacks the finesse of even a crusty barnacle attached to the underbelly of Carpenter’s original. During a period of horror cinema inundated by remakes, The Fog asserts itself as one of the worst. The 2000s had a very “show, don’t tell” approach to horror filmmaking and leaned on grisly violence popularized by Saw, all exploited in their lowest forms throughout The Fog. Bless both Carpenter and the late Debra Hill for serving as producers, but Wainwright and writer Cooper Layne do their salty source shanty zero justice.


The Approach

‘The Fog’ (1980)

Carpenter’s The Fog is successful because of the auteur’s influence. Between his stronger emphasis on churchly greed, eerie musical score, and abilities as a simplistic yet impactful visionary, viewers get plenty of “bang for their buck” in 90 minutes. Wainwright doesn’t possess those qualities and relies on archaic horror templates without any investment. In an era where computer graphics were still advancing, and some producers only valued horror as gory inserts within a lax narrative, Wainwright’s direction equates to background noise. There’s nothing spectacular or signature about the filmmaker’s approach, as recyclable as the plethora of 2000s horror films plagued by the same churned-out doldrums.

Smallville heartthrob Tom Welling follows in the footsteps of fellow WB/CW stars like Supernatural’s Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki to shepherd his own horror remake, playing Tom Atkins’ role of fisherman Nick Castle. He’s a descendant of Norman Castle, one of the founding fathers of Antonio Island, which is located off the Oregon coast. It’s been over 100 years since the island’s bustling Antonio Bay community was established, and to celebrate an upcoming anniversary, a statue is commissioned that displays its founders as a dedication to their contributions. Mayor Tom Malone (Kenneth Welsh) wants everything to be perfect, but little does he know Antonio Bay is about to have an undead problem to confront when a mysterious fog rolls in thick as sauna steam.

The bones of The Fog are all there, but both needlessly overcomplicated and disparagingly unkempt. Carpenter introduces his film with an eerie ghost story told around a campfire that becomes a grave truth for Antonio Bay — Layne’s remake screenplay does backflips to try and explain the unexplainable. Nick’s charter fishing vessel unleashes the curse when second-mate Spooner (DeRay Davis) rips open a burlap bag concealing curse items with the boat’s anchor because the film doesn’t trust audience comprehension past any viewer’s eyesight. One of the biggest scourges upon 2000s horror cinema was creators believing their audiences were as dumb as algae-covered rocks, causing them to spell the obvious out in even more blatant and less captivating methods.


Does It Work?

The Fog remake carpenter

‘The Fog’ (2005)

The adjustments Wainwright oversees in 2005’s remix are a bungle of what out-of-touch producers presumed horror fans wanted to see at the time. Carpenter’s quaint coastal atmosphere is eradicated by Spooner’s Girls Gone Wild behavior or the need to belabor flashbacks that lay out every grim detail about Captain Blake (Rade Šerbedžija) and his lepers. Antonio Island’s tainted history is still prevalent as a driving force behind the weather-based haunting, but where Carpenter leaves us to imagine the atrocities founding fathers committed, Wainwright and Layne lean on time jumps that detract from overall moods for cheap betrayal thrills. The remake retains less reflection, whereas Carpenter’s original better depicts a town reckoning with its horrifying heritage — an example of hollow vengeance versus frightening introspection.

Maggie Grace co-stars in Jamie Lee Curtis’ hitchhiker role, except she’s no longer affable nomad Elizabeth Solley; she’s Kathy Williams’ (Sara Botsford) daughter, Elizabeth Williams. Her ties to Antonio Bay are supposed to represent how we can’t escape our fates, fair enough. What’s unfortunate is Layne’s need to shoehorn relationship drama because she’s (apparently) the love of Nick’s life despite his handful of hookups with KAB radio DJ Stevie Wayne (Selma Blair) while Elizabeth fled her hometown for six months — a love triangle situation that adds no special sauce and is practically forgotten. Carpenter is fantastic when letting his characters exist without bogging their arcs with fifty reasons why they’re exactly where they are in any given scene. Wainwright is no mimic, nor does his film’s desire to tangle characters together as friends, lovers, or family members add further intrigue. If anything, it adversely tanks character development because there’s no resident we intimately care about.

Which brings us to the “fog” of it all. Carpenter’s maggot-ridden swashbucklers from the deep are memorable and creepy, while Wainwright pulls his haunted visuals from a grab-bag. Sometimes, they’re atrocious see-through animations made of mist — other times, indiscriminately human entities. One victim contracts leprosy as his punishment, another fried to ash upon touch, and yet another is dragged underwater by invisible hands — there’s zero continuity to Wainwright’s justifiably antagonistic forces. They become a Mad Libs gaggle of props fitting whatever scare-of-the-hour The Fog decides is necessary at that moment, none of which ever collaborate in unison. That includes Captain Blake’s parting climax, in which he abandons his group’s attack on Antonio Bay because he claims Elizabeth as his ghost wife after it’s clear she’s the spitting image of Blake’s 1870s lover [insert seventy thousand question marks].


The Result

The Fog remake tom welling

‘The Fog’ (2005)

The Fog remake is everything I despise about thoughtless horror outputs rolled into a briny clump of seaweed and misbegotten reinventions. It’s hardly scary, unable to let audiences invest in atmospheric spookiness, and so wildly incompetent. Each scene gets progressively worse, starting with the reveal of evil personal belongings stamped with identifiable “Hallmarks” that become pieces of a puzzle that never gets finished. Carpenter makes you feel the offshore breeze rolling in with his fog, sending chills up your spine as these scurvy-soaked scoundrels start stabbing and hooking Antonio Bay residents. Wainwright doesn’t ever grasp what his iteration of Blake’s demons should look like or how they should cause havoc, so he starts throwing basic horror visuals at the screen out of desperation.

Revolution Studios’ The Fog downgrade sinks thanks to primarily messy effects, hampered by the early millennium’s digital capabilities. That’s not exclusive to awful ghost illustrations that look like someone just decreased the “Transparency” slider in Photoshop. The fog, the TITULAR FOG, doesn’t even hold up to Demon Wind standards (in which the wind is essentially fog, roll with it). Wainwright and his team brainstorm ideas that sound rad on paper — an older woman gets barbecued, a ghost outline appears in fog like Imhotep’s sandstorm face, a younger woman is attacked by seaweed — but execution almost exclusively whiffs. The remake’s drunkard generalization of Father Malone (which is such a slap in the face to Hal Holbrook’s fantastic original performance) should meet an epic death when Captain Blake levitates glass shards as a containment circle, but three pieces fly through Malone’s body, and it’s over. That’s the level of SFX disappointment that festers throughout 2005’s The Fog, all buildup with no reward.

The film’s finale feels like a prank; the rest of the conflict’s resolution is lost at sea. Carpenter’s much heavier scolds against organized religion’s dirty dealings help give his film an identity down to the glimmering golden cross, while Wainwright goes as generic as they come and abandons ship when the well runs dry. Nothing justifies the kind of conceptual excitement that comes along with worthwhile remakes, whether that’s copycat role replications (I love Selma Blair, but her Stevie doesn’t match Adrienne Barbeau’s presence) or storytelling reductions that choose numbing violence over folkloric sensations of dread. We love a horror movie that’s critical of early America’s disgusting colonization tactics, but The Fog doesn’t know how to turn those frustrations into a compelling genre production. Whatever’s kept from the original holds no candle to Carpenter’s version, and whatever’s added — like Nick and Elizabeth’s awkward shower sex scene set to softcore porno music — brings nothing of value.


The Lesson

‘The Fog’ (2005)

Just because your remake starts with a banger like Fall Out Boy’s “Sugar, We’re Going Down Swinging” doesn’t mean the film itself is a banger. There’s no world where I’d recommend Wainwright’s The Fog over Carpenter’s titanically superior original, and I say that as a leading Aughts horror remake champion. It’s another Nu-Horror approach that strips away commentary crucial to the plot’s intrigue since all Layne musters is a non-creepy and waterlogged story that feels like an unwieldy CW episode — not meant as a compliment. Not even the chiseled beauty of an early 2000s Tom Welling in a wool turtleneck can save this travesty from becoming another forgotten wreck.

So what did we learn?

● Not all CW figureheads have a hit horror remake in their blood.

● Less is so often more when it comes to horror movies, as long as you’re selling scares and confidently telling a story within your means.

● Some movies from the 2000s horror era will always suffer thanks to dodgy digital effects because while it was the shiny new toy everyone wanted to play with, golly, the technology was rough to start.

● Horror fans can be easy to please, but they’re also first to call out your bullshit — get out of here with these ghosts and their inability to pick a lane.

Wainwright’s film never knows what kind of horror movie it wants to be, and that’s the kill shot. Is it a slasher flick? Zombie movie? A large-scale haunted house blueprint? There’s never any indication that Wainwright or his screenwriter conceptualize a path forward, so they barrel on, praying there’s enough horror familiarity to appease the masses. There isn’t, it’s a boneheaded slog, and that’s that. Horror fans deserve better than to be fed the equivalent of table scraps for 100 minutes. To each their own and all, but now that I’ve finally seen 2005’s The Fog, the only times I’ll think about this movie again will be if someone interacts with my Letterboxd post.

Continue Reading