Movies
[Kickstart This!] ‘Harbinger Down’ Promises ALL Practical Creature Feature!
We promised to try and bring you guys a few more crowdsourced projects that we thin you’d dig – well, this one promises to deliver the gore on an Academy Award winning scale (see who is involved here)!
In the spirit of sci-fi/horror classics, Alien and The Thing, Harbinger Down promises to be a tense, claustrophobic full-length creature film that will feature only practical Animatronic and Makeup Effects!
The pic, which will will celebrate animatronics and makeup effects, is coming from Creature FX Designer Alec Gillis.
Gillis will write and direct and ADI co-founder Tom Woodruff, Jr. will produce. Their company, Amalgamated Dynamics, will create the kind of Oscar caliber Creature Effects for which they are known.
The pitch?
“A group of grad students have booked passage on the fishing trawler Harbinger to study the effects of global warming on a pod of Orcas in the Bering Sea. When the ship’s crew dredges up a recently thawed piece of old Soviet space wreckage, things get downright deadly. It seems that the Russians experimented with tardigrades, tiny resilient animals able to withstand the extremes of space radiation. The creatures survived, but not without mutation.
Now the crew is exposed to aggressively mutating organisms. And after being locked in ice for 3 decades, the creatures aren’t about to give up the warmth of human companionship.”
As of this writing they have $65K of their $350K goal. Knowing that the company MAKING the effects are the filmmakers means there will be no false promises. Expect a whirlwind of insane special effects work as they can utilize their entire shop to deliver one hell of a new sci-fi film. You can check out the packages here. What do you guys think?
Movies
R-Rated ‘The X-Files: I Want to Believe’ Director’s Cut Gets New Title and Streaming Premiere Date
After a slight delay, Disney has finally announced a new streaming date for the R-Rated director’s cut of The X-Files: I Want to Believe. According to Gizmodo, it’ll also come with a new title.
The X-Files: I Want to Believe Vrach Frankenshteyn begins streaming on Hulu on August 14.
The new cut was first teased in an interview with director Chris Carter on the Fail Better With David Duchovny podcast from last year, where he teased a much scarier movie he intended.
“Now I have a chance to go back and make the scary movie that I always intended to make,” Carter explained last year. “It’s not just doing a Director’s Cut to do a Director’s Cut. It’s really kind of bringing to life something that for me was on the page and never got to the screen.“
The director’s cut of the film was initially set to arrive on Disney+ in June, but quietly disappeared from the schedule without a word. Polygon reported the delay was “due to some last-minute adjustments being made to the film.”
The release’s new “Vrach Frankenshteyn” title certainly suggests those adjustments have been made, likely referring to a Frankensteining of bonus footage.
In the film, Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) have been out of the FBI for several years, with Mulder living in isolation and Scully having become a doctor at a Catholic hospital, where she has formed a bond with a critically ill child patient.
When an FBI agent is mysteriously kidnapped, and a former Catholic priest who has been convicted of pedophilia claims to be experiencing psychic visions of the endangered agent, Scully is asked to bring Mulder back to the bureau to consult on the case because of his work with psychics.
The brand new R-rated cut will “faithfully restore the filmmaker’s original vision.”
Look for it on Hulu next month.