31 Days Of Horror returns to Last Movie Outpost as we tackle From Beyond, a horror fest that we rate highly
From Beyond is another classic, directed by Stuart Gordon and based on a Lovecraft story. Jeffrey Combs is in it as Crawford, the assistant to the mad scientist, Dr. Edward Pretorius.
Together they have invented a nifty little gadget that stimulates the pineal gland, in between Pretorius’ side hobby of torturing young co-eds he brings home for some light S&M.
The machine is called “The Resonator” and once it’s fired up at the start of the film, all kinds of unintended consequences kick-off. The good Doctor gets his head bitten off by a creature from a dimension that is next door to our own. It now has access to our world and vice versa thanks to the resonator.
Crawford beats feet, and ends up at the nuthatch when he tries to explain what happened. This is after the cops go to the house and find that Dr. Pretorious is a lot shorter than he used to be. Luckily for Crawford (and us), Barbara Crampton is a Doc at the loony-bin and believes his story.
Using some horror movie logic she decides it would be best for him to go back to the scene of the incident and relive his trauma. For good measure, Ken Foree joins the duo as a cop involved in the case. He’s there to make sure Crawford doesn’t go insane and murder again while Doctor McMichaels makes him re-enact and explain what happened the night Dr. Pretorius got decaffeinated.
After forcing Crawford to put the machine back in working order, things go sideways as Doctor McMichaels is seduced by the pleasure of the resonator. Dr. Pretorius is now part of the other world and wants the three to join him in a dimension of pleasure… or so he says.
From Beyond is a lot of fun. Unlike Re-Animator, this is not a comedy-horror film. It is creepy all the way through. The ambiance is excellent, with a building dread. Even better, we get to see Crampton, God bless her, in some extremely sexy S&M leather gear. Verily!
All the practical special effects are outstanding and look disgusting. The movie is a slimy, gore-soaked bloodbath.
This is one of my favorite horror films. Do yourself a solid and watch it this month.
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The post 31 Days Of Horror – FROM BEYOND (1986) appeared first on The Last Movie Outpost.
Three years ago, director David Gordon Green and producer Jason Blum took on a challenge: reboot the classic horror movie Halloween (1978) with a new sequel that basically ignored all the other sequels and remakes, some nine in all, which had come out in the last 40 years. 2018’s Halloween was a resounding success, both creatively and commercially, acting as a direct sequel to the John Carpenter milestone and dispensing with all the canon (good or bad), and baggage that had built up in the previous decades.
Now that Gordon and Blum have proved that their experiment was viable—and are continuing it with Halloween Kills (which opens this week) and Halloween Ends (which is slated to arrive next year)—the next question naturally arises. Which creatively exhausted, financially depleted, or simply long-dormant horror tentpole could benefit from the same treatment?
There are surprisingly a number of respected, venerable horror titles that could possibly fit the bill, and indeed some of them may be in line for the Halloween-style reboot already. Let’s take a look and see how these could be made to work…
The Exorcist
We’re going to start with one of two projects that’s already in motion, and this first one is from the same team—Blum, Green and screenwriter Danny McBride—that brought you the new Halloween. Yes, they’re tackling the holiest (pun intended) of horror icons next time, with another trilogy that is intended to serve as a direct follow-up to the original 1973 masterpiece from director William Friedkin.
The Exorcist has not fared all too well in the franchise business, with four movies made in its wake—three of them outright disasters and only one of them (The Exorcist III) considered worthy of the name. A short-lived TV series also got high marks, but was cancelled after two little-seen seasons.
Green intends to make a direct sequel to the first film, again apparently ignoring all the films that came out since then, in which Leslie Odom Jr. will play a father whose child has been possessed by a demon, leading Odom Jr. to turn to Ellen Burstyn’s Chris MacNeil for help. Burstyn has already been signed on to reprise her role, although to date Linda Blair—who played MacNeil’s possessed child Regan in the original—is not involved. At least we can be assured that Green isn’t attempting a remake, which had been long speculated. But endeavoring to recapture the terrifying brilliance of The Exorcist is a tall order, nonetheless.
Hellraiser
This reboot of Clive Barker’s signature tale (the original novella, The Hellbound Heart, was first published in 1986) is already in production and perhaps not a moment too soon—or maybe a few decades too late. Following the generally well-received original film in 1988 (which Barker adapted and directed himself) and a fairly impressive sequel (1988’s Hellbound: Hellraiser II), the franchise descended into a seemingly endless stream of dreck with six of its nine sequels going direct-to-video and at least two of them seemingly made just to keep the rights to the brand.
A straight remake has been mooted for years, with Barker himself involved at one point or another, and a Hellraiser TV show was announced by HBO in 2020, although little has been heard from it since. At the same time, a reboot film was unveiled by Miramax and Hulu, with David Bruckner (this year’s excellent The Night House) directing, David S. Goyer (Foundation) onboard as a writer and producer, and Barker involved as well. Goyer recently stated that the film is going “back to the source,” meaning Barker’s original novella, with Jamie Clayton (Sense8) cast as the “Hell Priest” (aka Pinhead). It remains to be seen whether there is enough interest to launch a whole new series of films.
The Omen
Richard Donner’s fourth film and major breakthrough as a director (it landed him the gig directing Superman) was also one of the most successful “Satanic” horror films to follow in the wake of The Exorcist, while also capitalizing on the “end times” hysteria driven by books like Hal Lindsey’s The Late, Great Planet Earth. Sadly, the succeeding sequels to Donner’s excellent thriller failed to live up to their own, uh, prophecies.
Damien: Omen II (1978) offered up nearly a dozen creative death scenes but little else as the Antichrist entered puberty, but The Final Conflict (1981), with Sam Neill as an adult Damien, didn’t even show us the long-awaited title bout between the son of Satan and a reborn Jesus Christ. An unwatchable fourth film (produced as a TV movie), a lifeless 2006 remake of the original, and an already-forgotten 2016 TV series didn’t do Junior any favors either. With the proper budgets and talent, however, a new series of sequels could perhaps effectively visualize Damien’s rise to power, the Rapture and the apocalyptic battle with Christ. Think about it, in the current political climate wouldn’t a new direct sequel to The Omen about a middle-aged American demagogue rising to apocalyptic power be the stuff of nightmares?
Still, all that religious mumbo-jumbo might leave that Left Behind taste in everyone’s mouth.
Friday the 13th
Yes, everyone has a favorite entry or two (or at least a guilty pleasure) in the long-running Friday the 13th saga, but this is a series that was running on fumes almost from the get-go. For Chrissakes, even the 1980 original isn’t exactly a great movie. Nonetheless, it’s renowned for its plentiful gore and that immortal, shocking ending. So returning to that ending could be interesting, particularly since the mythology of the original series has been nearly as snarled and convoluted as that of Halloween. So why not pretend that the (quick count) 11 succeeding films never happened? Pick up right where the first film left off and re-introduce Jason in a creative new fashion.
It’s a good idea on paper, but as late as 2017, a standard prequel/reboot had been in the works with directors like David Bruckner and Breck Eisner attached, while a production company owned by LeBron James was in the mix in 2018. All of that became moot, however, this year when the original film’s screenwriter, Victor Miller, won back the rights to that very first screenplay. There’s a lot that Miller doesn’t own though, including the adult version of Jason, and there are other stakeholders involved that may keep the hockey-masked murderer off the screen for a while to come.
Rosemary’s Baby
Ira Levin’s 1967 novel, Rosemary’s Baby, changed the course of the horror genre: a massive bestseller, it made horror a much more viable brand for publishers and helped pave the way for future hits like The Exorcistand authors like Stephen King. Similarly, the 1968 movie adapted and directed by Roman Polanski was also a tremendous box office success that elevated horror beyond drive-ins and seedy B-movie gutters into something more high-profile.
Levin and Polanski both went on to more success in their respective careers (Polanski’s tragic history and personal criminal behavior notwithstanding), but not much else was done with their singular creation. A 1976 TV-movie, Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby, which brought back Ruth Gordon in her Oscar-winning role as Minnie Castevet (but recast all the other major characters), was poorly conceived and now forgotten. Meanwhile a 2014 miniseries starring Zoe Saldana took a number of liberties with the novel while stretching it out to four unnecessary hours. Even Levin’s own literary sequel, 1997’s Son of Rosemary, took some bizarre twists and turns and ended with both books apparently being all a dream.
So how about it? While we don’t want to see the original movie remade again, certainly a direct sequel (or sequels) detailing what did happen to little Adrian, his mother, the Castevets and their cult could be a formidable horror experience. The term itself, “Rosemary’s baby,” remains ingrained in pop culture.
Children of the Corn
Who would have thought that Stephen King’s 1977 short story, originally published in Penthouse magazine and taking up a mere 30 pages or so in his classic Night Shift collection, would be the unholy progenitor of one of the longest-running franchises in horror history? After some 37 years and 11 films, the highest rating any of the entries were able to muster on Rotten Tomatoes (if reviewed at all) was a measly 33 percent, and that was for the original, which was a lousy piece of junk to begin with.
We’re not going to even pretend we’ve watched any of these pictures beyond the first, and from what we understand, there’s little or no continuity among them anyway. Yet the original tale is creepy enough (if far from King’s best), so conceivably the whole thing could be rebooted from scratch and perhaps even given the kind of folk-horror angle that has been back in fashion in recent times. Or since the original has nostalgic value, imagine coming back on the same town 40 years after “the children” took over and may have been replaced by other generations. No, it doesn’t make sense, but a screenwriter could hammer out the logistics. The name alone still has some kind of cache, after all. Someone’s been watching these things for nearly four decades!
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
Along with Zack Snyder’s 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead, the 2003 “re-imagining” of Tobe Hooper’s seminal 1974 classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre proved to Hollywood that iconic horror brand names could be repackaged for maximum box office appeal while fending off naysayers who decried the potential desecration of the genre’s tentpoles. Fortunately, the 2003 Massacre was quite an effective film on its own, even if it didn’t quite match the nightmarish surrealism of the original.
Then again, few films have, including all seven other titles that fall under the Texas Chain Saw umbrella. Even Hooper’s own, long-delayed 1986 sequel is only intermittently gripping, while more recent misfires like 2013’s Texas Chainsaw 3D and 2017’s Leatherface have only continued to sully the brand. Now the franchise seems to be going the Halloween route. There’s an alleged “direct” sequel to the original film, shot last year and directed by someone named David Blue Garcia, and it’s slated to be released by Netflix at a yet-to-be-determined date.
The Howling
Incredibly, The Howling is another horror series that somehow lasted for 30 years, encompassing eight films (not to mention the three novels by author Gary Brandner on which the movies are loosely based) that have almost all gone direct-to-video and bear little resemblance or relation to the much loved 1981 classic directed by Joe Dante and featuring groundbreaking transformation effects by Rob Bottin.
The legendarily bad Howling II…Your Sister is a Werewolf was the first and last more-or-less direct sequel to the Dante film. But since the franchise has been dormant since 2011, the time is probably ripe for a full-on remake/reboot rather than a direct sequel to the now 40-year-old original, although any new film can certainly make plentiful references to the Dante movie. It director Andy Muschietti was supposedly going to direct a remake for Netflix, although his current involvement with DC’s The Flash has clearly set that aside for now, with no updates since early 2020.
Frankenstein/Dracula
Hey, why not? The list of adaptations, reboots, reimaginings, and sequels related to these two iconic monsters is far too long to go into, with too many different twists and turns to their long, winding roads onscreen, so rather than a direct sequel to anything, we’d love to see—imagine this—a faithful adaptation of the original source material.
Francis Coppola’s 1992 Bram Stoker’s Dracula, while a superb film on its own, didn’t quite live up to its title, while Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was actually extremely faithful, only way too jacked up on histrionics (with Robert De Niro, let’s face it, miscast as the Creature). We’d love to see Guillermo Del Toro’s long-awaited take on the latter, with sequels akin to Bride of Frankenstein and Son of Frankenstein to follow.
As for the Count, he’s been mostly relegated to cartoon antics in the Hotel Transylvania series, so any reboot would need to make him as dark, decrepit (at least at first), and menacing as Stoker originally envisioned him. Whether a Blumhouse reboot directed by Karyn Kusama, first announced in March 2020, can raise Dracula from his cinematic coffin remains to be seen.
Halloween Kills opens in theaters and begins streaming on Peacock this Friday (October 15).
The post Horror Movies That Should Get the Halloween Reboot Treatment appeared first on Den of Geek.
Back 4 Blood is the spiritual successor to Left 4 Dead in every way that matters most, but first-time players may be surprised to learn that each of the game’s playable cleaners actually come equipped with unique skills and abilities that make them so much more than interchangeable survivors.
While Back 4 Blood does a surprisingly good job of balancing those cleaners in a way that makes it easy to justify inviting any of them to the party, the fact of the matter is that there are just some cleaners that feel more powerful than others (at least at this early stage of the game).
So while the best Back 4 Blood character may end up being the one you feel most comfortable with, here’s our current power ranking of each of the game’s playable heroes.
Back 4 Blood: How Do You Unlock the Locked Cleaners (Doc, Hoffman, Jim, and Karlee)?
If you want to unlock every cleaner in Back 4 Blood, you’ll need to finish the first chapter of Act 1 in the game’s campaign. Once you’ve completed those four levels, you should unlock a special cutscene that introduces you to the previously locked cleaners. After that, you’ll have full access to the game’s (current) roster of playable characters.
Back 4 Blood: The Best Cleaners in the Game
8. Holly
Abilities: Team Bonus: +25 Stamina Recovers 10 Stamina for Every Ridden Killed +10% Damage Resistance
Holly is the best “melee” cleaner in Back 4 Blood by some distance. Her stamina recovery ability and natural damaged resistance mean she is uniquely capable of stepping into the fray and living to see another day.
Ultimately, though, Holly is a somewhat limited character whose weaker team bonus and incredibly specific skill set mean that you really have to commit to a somewhat limited playstyle in order to get the most out of what she brings to the table. She’s not terrible, but there are certainly safer options.
7. Jim
Abilities: Team Bonus:+10% Weak Spot Damage Precision Kills Increase Damage by 5% (up to 50%). This Temporary Effect is Lost if Jim Takes Damage +25% ADS Speed
Jim excels at two things: battling special enemies and sniping. To be fair, having Jim in your party certainly makes it easier to deal with some of the most powerful (and annoying) enemies in the game.
However, Jim is ultimately another one of those characters who feels comparatively limited when you start talking about the overall value they bring to the team. I feel like Jim could certainly help you out of some jams, but he’s a hard sell as a first choice.
6. Karlee
Abilities: Team Bonus: +25% Use Speed Ability to Sense Hazards +1 Quick Inventory Slot
To get the “negative” side of the conversation out of the way, Karlee’s slightly lower ranking on this list comes down to the very specific nature of her abilities and how they’re best used in conduction with other character abilities you will absolutely want to have access to at higher difficulty levels.
However, Karlee is an interesting option. Her additional inventory slot is shockingly useful, as is her buff to a team’s “use speed,” which is one of those attributes you don’t think about as often until it’s getting you out of a bad situation.
5. Evangelo
Abilities: Team Bonus: +5% Increased Movement Speed Can Break Grabs Every 60 Seconds +25% Stamina Regeneration
Evangelo is really the first Back 4 Blood cleaner that we’re looking at who feels generally useful in the vast majority of situations. He offers a great team bonus, and his stamina regeneration ability is nice (if not necessarily game-changing).
What really makes Evangelo interesting, though, is his escape ability. That makes him one of the best options for solo players as well as a solid teammate.
4. Walker
Abilities: Team Bonus: +10 Increased Health Accuracy Increases by 20% for 5 seconds After a Precision Kill +10% Damage Increase
As you can probably tell by his abilities, Walker is a pure damage dealer who will certainly be a popular pick for solo players but brings enough to the party to justify a spot on most team rosters.
Honestly, the biggest “problem” with Walker is that you could argue there’s another cleaner in the game that offers more from a DPS perspective.
3. Mom
Abilities: Team Bonus: +1 Extra Life Instantly Revive a Teammate (Once Per Level) +1 Support Inventory Slot
In case you can’t tell, Mom’s “team skill” is reason enough to add her to just about any group composition. Her instant revival ability is also absurdly powerful, even if the “once per level” limit means that you do need to be careful with it.
As you can tell, though, Mom’s revival-focused abilities mean that you’re weirdly almost depending on your teammates to fall at some point in order to get the most out of her. While that will happen at higher difficulty settings, you might not get as much out of her during “easier” runs.
2. Doc
Abilities: Team Bonus: +25% Trauma Resistance Can Heal Each Ally Once Per Level For 25 HP +20% Healing Efficiency
In a way, it’s almost a shame that Doc is as useful as she is. There’s a degree to which you’re almost going to feel compelled to add her to most parties.
Doc is simply the best overall healer in the game, which means that she’s also a nearly irreplaceable part of most team comps. Her +20% healing skill is honestly enough to put her in the “must-have” conversation. Everything else she can do is just all the more reason to justify bringing her into battle.
1. Hoffman
Abilities: Team Bonus: +10% Ammo Capacity Bonus Chance to Find Extra Ammo After Kills +1 Offensive Inventory Slot
If you play Back 4 Blood at higher difficulty levels, you will run out of ammo at some point. It’s why a lot of the most prized cards in the game emphasize ammo preservation/regeneration, and it’s why Hoffman is the most valuable overall cleaner in the game at this time.
Hoffman is essentially a support character whose unique abilities will increase your party’s damage output in the long run while also increasing your general chances for survival. It’s that unique combination of support and DPS that makes him irreplaceable.
The post Back 4 Blood: Every Cleaner Ranked appeared first on Den of Geek.
Emma Mieko Candon, author of Star Wars: Ronin, is pulling from Star Wars the way George Lucas drew from Akira Kurosawa films. Her novel redefines pop culture vocabulary like “Jedi” and “Sith” in order to bring them back to the ideas that inspired them: Force-users as samurai, and all that implies.
In the novel, it’s the Jedi who are affiliated with Imperial lords and the Sith who have rebelled against them. Forget lore about Darth Bane or the Old Republic — or rather, set Ronin aside as its own alternate universe. Without anything so literal as Marvel’s multiverse, Ronin opens up a new well of creativity in terms of how Star Wars stories can be told.
Speaking to Den of Geek, Candon says the novel is heavily influenced by Japanese art, culture, and folklore.
“Jidaigeki [Japanese period pieces] were a huge part of what I was thinking of when I was looking at what the anatomy of the drama would be like,” Candon explains. “What do jidaigeki think about samurai? What do they feel about ronin [samurai who don’t serve a master or lord]? And also coming back to what about Kurosawa films George Lucas was like ‘I see the lone swordsman, I’m going to interpret him as this.’ Or the lone swordsman with a code of honor. So bringing the George Lucas interpretation a little closer to the original Japanese sensibility is a lot of what I was doing.”
Some of that comes down to changing the story’s relationship to the idea of “empire.” Since the days of A New Hope, the Empire has been the unquestionably evil opposing force with little political specificity that the underdogs must fight against.
“But that doesn’t quite code the same way in Japanese storytelling,” Candon says. “Often you’ll see the hero trying to overcome the corrupt government, but also a lot of the time ‘no, we’re the empire!’ And there are varying feelings about that. Sometimes it’s ‘we’re the empire and we suck!’ Sometimes it’s ‘we’re the empire and we just live in it, we’re just here, it’s what we are.’ It felt a little more honest to the source to [show] the Jedi and the Empire are in alignment because the samurai are in alignment with the emperor and the shogun. Because that’s where their loyalty lies. That’s why they exist.”
By taking the idea of Jedi as samurai back to its roots, Candon found an angle on it different from what has been portrayed in Star Wars lore before.
“One of the things I think is really interesting about jidaigeki that didn’t really make it over in how they influenced Jedi in Star Wars is that jidaigeki are actually rather skeptical of samurai,” she says. “They don’t really like them all the time. Their favorite samurai is one who is torn between his internal code, his sense of honor, and his realization that his sense of honor is being used to make him hurt people. So he’s like ‘wait, this is good, but also on the other hand I am being told to do some really shitty things.’ That’s the classic samurai.
“That’s really what I was digging into. It was also a huge part of how I shaped the Jedi and Sith in Ronin. Because in Star Wars the Jedi are noble, [but] for their failings you can dig into the Prequels [and] their stagnation. That’s writ large in Kurosawa and other period pieces. The samurai have problems!”
Real-world events played a part in shaping the storytelling of the novel as well, especially when it came to examining the politics of novel’s empire.
“This is especially important for me to lean into a bit these days where all around the world different places are suffering from various kinds of nationalistic movements, and the same is very much true in Japan, and the far right over there really loves to idolize the samurai. I can’t get behind this right now. It doesn’t feel good! That was a huge part of what I was thinking of when I figured out what the dynamics of this new iteration of the world would look like.”
The character in which this tension plays out is the nameless Ronin also seen in “The Duel,” the first episode of the animated Star Wars: Visions. In the episode, Ronin is depicted as a wanderer with a mysterious past. When he’s drawn into a conflict with other Sith while visiting a small village, he must decide whether to help those in need or do nothing. While he turns out to be the hero of the piece, the color of his lightsaber suggests that hasn’t always been the case.
The Jedi were even more closely tied to the book’s version of the Empire in her initial pitch. But, Candon says, the Lucasfilm story group “wanted to stay a little more true to the Star Wars roots of there’s a history where the Jedi aren’t necessarily tied to the Empire in their origin.”
Drawing from classic elements of Japanese folklore was also essential to the formation of the novel. As seen in this lengthy excerpt, not everyone who dies in the novel stays dead. And some of Candon’s early concepts for the book focused around questions inspired by folklore archetypes. “What if Benkei but an oni?” she asked during very early planning. “Benkei is this legendary warrior-monk who’s like ‘Samurai suck! I’m going to beat them up and take their swords.’ So he does that, he goes around the world and his goal is to do it a thousand times and he does it 999 times,” Candon explains. “He finds one guy and is like ‘You’re good, I’m going to follow you, I’m going to be your retainer for the rest of my life.’ There’s this space in Japanese history where it is a cross between legend and history, and that’s where Benkei lives.”
In Ronin, the title character himself plays the Benkei-like role. First teased in his Visions episode after he defeats his enemy, we learn that Ronin’s on a quest to kill Sith and take their kyber crystals, which he carries like trophies. Why he’s doing this become clear later in the story.
A kitsune Jedi — envisioned in the novel as the character known as the Traveler — was another idea she wanted to include “That basically makes no sense, but I have to make it work.” In Japanese folklore, the kitsune is a fox spirit known for the ability to shapeshift. The Traveler, a mysterious former Jedi, doesn’t literally shapeshift. But their obscured past, who and what they really are, and their use of a mask throughout the novel convey the essence of the creature.
One character she didn’t get the chance to include was yamauba, the “mountain hag” who eats travelers and their wagons alike. “I love yamauba and didn’t find room for her,” Candon says.
Candon also drew from kishōtenketsu, the classic four-act structure used in Japanese narratives, distinct from the three-act structure seen in most Hollywood films. “Kishōtenketsu involves slow escalation and a twist at the end,” Candon explains. “Inadvertently, that did fit rather well with what I structured. Partly because I’ve just found in my own internal brain I think in four beats.”
The novel does indeed have a measured escalation throughout — and a late-game twist — but we’ll leave that for you to discover.
If you loved Visions and want to learn more about Ronin and his world, Candon has crafted a uniquely Japanese-influenced book that interrogates what the idea of Jedi being inspired by samurai really means, all while finding new and interesting things to say about them. It’s the kind of deep exploration of what Star Wars is and where it came from that the saga needs more of.
Star Wars: Ronin is out now.
The post How Star Wars: Ronin Brings the Saga Back to Its Roots appeared first on Den of Geek.
Home Sweet Home Alone, the latest entry in the long-running Christmas comedy family film franchise, has made its impending Disney+ arrival known with a debut trailer. Similar to the many sequels that preceded it, the new movie apparently adheres to the same structural beats set from 1990’s original Home Alone. However, besides distinguishing itself with a recent break out star in Jo Jo Rabbit’s Archie Yates, the film is seemingly grounded in the canon of the original, as evidenced by the return of Devin Ratray’s Buzz.
As the trailer implies, Home Sweet Home Alone’s ordeal of Yates’s Max is far from unique in the now-six-film Home Alone franchise. Indeed, he’s an unassumingly prodigious kid accidentally left behind by distracted, vacation-departed parents—notably an agitated mother (Aisling Bea)—and forced to fend off invaders from his family’s advantageously-spacious American upper-middle-class suburban abode using clever traps. Granted, the idea of said invaders being an unthreatening couple (Ellie Kemper and Rob Delaney) reluctantly attempting to recover an heirloom from the house is a bit of a twist, but a perfunctory nature prominently adorns the film’s proverbial sleeve. Thankfully, the flash appearance of a cop intriguingly brandishing a McCallister name on his uniform provides a unique narrative.
Check out the Home Sweet Home Alone trailer just below.
Of course, extended analysis is hardly necessary to discern that the cop briefly shown in the trailer arriving at the scene of Max’s house is none other than Home Alone franchise original character Buzz McCallister, as reprised by Devin Ratray. The bulky bellicose older sibling of original accidentally-abandoned kid Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin), Buzz was not only the prototypical bombastic bully brother, but tended to be the surreptitious instigator of the very family squabbles that would lead to Kevin being lost in the logistical fray before the McCallisters’ frantic family vacations.
Interestingly enough, Ratray’s return as Buzz is the franchise’s first real callback to the continuity of the John Hughes-penned, Chris Columbus-directed original iteration, last represented by Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992). While one might point out that 2002 TV movie Home Alone 4: Taking Back the House returned to the McCallister family—with Kevin played by Mike Weinberg and Buzz played by Gideon Jacobs—that entry ignored the passage of time, and can hardly be considered canonical. Sure, such terminology bestows Home Alone with a level of poignancy that’s comical in its own right, but it is nevertheless factual.
Additionally, the Home Sweet Home Alone trailer’s brief Buzz scene manages to convey some slightly intriguing exposition about the film’s setting. As we get our surprise glimpse of Ratray’s familiar face (and all of Kevin’s trauma it represents), we hear his police radio dispatch divulge something about “reports of suspicious people around 36 Lincoln Ave.” Contextually, exterior scenes of the McCallisters’ house in the first two films—notably the first, for which it was the primary setting—were shot at 671 Lincoln Ave. in Winnetka, Illinois. Thusly, it can be deduced that the new film is not only taking place in the same continuity as the first two films, but on the very same street—albeit much farther away. There doesn’t seem to be any intrinsic consequences attached to that notion, but it does further cement the idea of this film’s clear attempt to ground itself on or near the franchise’s roots.
While Home Sweet Home Alone is clearly family fare, it is the product of creative personnel who don’t typically dwell in the genre, notably its director, Dan Mazer, a frequent collaborator with Sacha Baron Cohen going back to Da Ali G Show to recent offerings like Who Is America? and Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. Moreover, Mazer worked off a screenplay by current SNL onscreen personnel in Mikey Day and Streeter Seidell. Consequently, a satirical edge might just be hidden beneath the surface of this unapologetic, trope-mimicking franchise family feature. Moreover, the film will serve as the first major starring platform for Archie Yates, whose seemingly-imminent stardom off his scene-stealing role in 2019’s Jo Jo Rabbit has been delayed by the pandemic.
Home Sweet Home Alone will attempt to make viewers thirsty for more when it hits Disney+ on Friday, Nov. 12.
The post Does Home Sweet Home Alone Follow the Original Canon? appeared first on Den of Geek.
