Movies
Hopefully ‘Mandy Lane’ Won’t Be Too Old When Released
I wanted to see Senator’s MANDY LANE when she was young and sexy, not an old hag. Some interesting news was sent to us this morning by B-D regular Joey M. who pointed us to a website that had some interesting news about Jonathan Levine’s All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, which has been sitting on the shelves here in the US collecting pounds of dust. Read on to see what the latest is on this popular teen slasher pic…
Mark Urman has left ThinkFilm to become head of distribution at Senator Entertainment, reports Pro Networks.
“Why does this matter to independent film fans? Well, word is that one of his first major tasks will be to get ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE out of limbo and get this film into the 1000+ theaters that Senator originally promised when they bought the film from the Weinsteins over a year ago following an auspicious debut at the 2006 Toronto International Film festival (no, that’s not a typo — 2006). One needs only to look back on this blog to see why this is such a “big deal” and why it matters to this reporter.”
So for those of you who haven’t already seen the film, there’s still hope that we’ll get to catch a 35mm print of this baby sometime in the near future. Until then, click here for stills, posters, trailers and more.
In the film a group of high schoolers invite Mandy Lane (Amber Heard), a good girl who became quite hot over the summer, to a weekend party on a secluded ranch. While the festivities rage on, the number of revelers begins to drop quite mysteriously.
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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