Editorials
Game Over, Man! 10 Genre Roles of Bill Paxton
Predator 2
Paxton continued his tradition of playing doomed sidekicks in Stephen Hopkins’s Predator 2. In the film, he portrays Jerry Lambert, the rookie on Danny Glovers’s character’s team. He bites it about halfway through the film, but still manages to make an impression.
The Vagrant
Paxton’s gets to play it straight in his role as yuppie Graham Krakowski in Chris Walas’s (The Fly II) The Vagrant. It’s not the best film on this list, but there’s something oddly entertaining about seeing Michael Ironside drive Paxton crazy. The black comedy doesn’t always work, but somehow you just can’t look away.
Tales From the Crypt – “People Who Live in Brass Hearses”
Who would have ever thought Bill Paxton and Brad Dourif (Child’s Play) would make for a compelling brotherly duo? Dourif is great, but Paxton completely steals the show as the thuggish Billy DeLuca. Paxton imbues Billy with a considerable amount of cockiness and energy that he makes what could have been a run-of-the-mill Tales From the Crypt episodes one of the best episodes of the series.
Frailty
Paxton’s directorial debut was this highly effective thriller about a father who believes that God has commanded him to kill demons disguised as people. Paxton also portrays the father in the film and gives a truly chilling performance as a man who may or may not be completely insane.
Club Dread
Paxton’s last genre outing is not so much a horror film as it is a comedy. Since it came from the minds of the Broken Lizard (Super Troopers, Beerfest) comedy troupe, that shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Club Dread isn’t a great movie, but Paxton’s Coconut Pete always managed to inspire a few laughs.
What are your favorite genre roles of Bill Paxton? What film of his, horror or otherwise, will you be watching to celebrate his life (mine will be True Lies). Let us know in the comments below!
The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.
Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.
That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.
Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’
Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”
And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.
Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.
Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.
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