Crossover Films and Shows

For those who watch Penny Dreadful or who plan to watch it but are not fully caught up, I want to give you a heads up that this posting contains spoilers.

Awesome show

So I was watching the latest episode of Penny Dreadful today, an awesome and bizarre horror show on Showtime that manages to combine the characters from different classic horror novels so that they are all living in London together. Not the most unique idea. It's been done before (and has failed miserably).

Exhibit's A and B (League of Extraordinary Gentleman was so bad it made Sean Connery quit acting forever).

But Penny Dreadful has managed to place Dorian Grey, characters from Dracula (but not the head vampire himself… yet), and Victor Frankenstein into this show where they all interact with one another and deal with crazy supernatural shit. The spoiler surprise ending from the last episode of season one was Joshua Hartnett's character turning out to be a werewolf the whole time (totally unexpected with nothing to give that twist away). It was like The Sixth Sense of endings.

And now, this latest episode, you find out that Hartnett's character, Ethan Chandler, has been hiding his identity and that his real name is Lawrence Talbot.

Lawrence Talbot

So now my only question at this point, is where the hell is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?

Or Jack Griffin?

When trying to combine franchises, characters, movies, etc. into one big combined mess, sometimes you can get it right, and sometimes it ends up being… a giant turd of a movie.

Giant turd of a movie

Gianter turd of a movie

Seriously?

Avengers got it right, but they are also taking their stories from comics where all of the same said characters also share the same universe and interact on a regular basis. The source material is a combined universe, so I am not sure how much that one counts. But it seems like more often than not, these kinds of mergers are not too successful. It takes a good story, good writing, to make something like this work. A Sci-Fi Channel (sorry… SyFy) original movie is most likely not going to be revered for its outstanding story and amazingly written script. Sometimes it's good to just leave a good thing alone. You don't always need sequels, you don't always have to have in-depth background stories, and you definitely don't need to have characters from one film meet characters from another completely unrelated film.

Yeah… don't think this one would work.

Toy Story 4 fan fic poster from http://brechtvanco.deviantart.com/art/Toy-story-4-321291433

Christopher Lee: The most interesting man in the world

I meant to write this yesterday when I heard the tragic news, but things got busy, as life so often is. As an avid fan of horror, and of film in general, as well as a metal head, I find the news of Christopher Lee's death to be something I never in my life wanted to hear of. I knew, and I'm sure anybody who is a fan knew, that it would come eventually. The guy was very old, but he was the most badass old man in the history of men over 90. Christopher Lee was the star of Hammer horror films in the 50's, 60's, and 70's. The original horror monsters of the 1920's, 30's, and 40's were shared by Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and Lon Chaney, Jr. Christopher Lee played them all in the Hammer Horror film revival years.

The man spoke six languages, fought the Nazi's, played a Bond villain, starred in my two all time favorite movie franchises (Lord of the Rings and Star Wars), and all around, he was awesome. I have his two heavy metal albums Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross and Charlemagne: The Omens of Death, both of which were recorded in the last five years.. The man was superior in everything he did, and he was a hero of mine. I have a list of five people I wanted to meet in my lifetime, and unfortunately, that list is down to four because he was number one at the top of that list. I could go on and on about his life, about how awesome he was, but this has been done so many times that my ranting would be moot and redundant. Just Google Christopher Lee, read about the most awesome man in the world, a man who live his live to the fullest, who did more and accomplished more in his lifetime because he knew that he could, and because he is the definition of pure awesomeness. He will be missed, and this world will have an emptiness without him.