At The Movies with Bryan, the Wannabe Filmmaker

“Now he is back. And he’s more magnificent, more glamorous, more devastating than ever. Prepare yourself. The greatest star of all has returned,” proclaimed the television promo for Godzilla 1985. The last time movie audiences had seen the giant lizard in action was in Terror of Mechagodzilla .   In the original movie, Godzilla was a metaphor for the atomic bomb, but by the time Terror of Mechagodzilla has rolled around, he had become a defender of the Earth. His adventures became increasingly sillier throughout the decades. Return of Godzilla was Toho’s attempt to bring the monster backs to his roots; as a result, the movie is a direct sequel to the original movie and ignores that more kid friendly movies of the 60s and 70s.   New World Pictures acquired the rights and distributed it in the states as Godzilla 1985. In order to “Americanize” the movie, over twenty minutes of footage was cut, and new scenes with Raymond Burr (reprising his role as reporter Steve Martin from G

It has been a tradition in my family to kick off the Holiday season by watching A Christmas Story after finishing Thanksgiving dinner. It’s a movie I have seen countless times since my childhood and it still cracks me up, despite overexposure. The majority of Christmas movies have a fantasy element to them – It’s a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Carol, White Christmas, and Miracle on 34 th Street, to name a few – but A Christmas Story is the most relatable out of the bunch, because it has a fairly simple premise: a boy desperately wants a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas. The only fantasy elements we get in A Christmas Story are Ralphie's day dreams. A Christmas Story is one of the most accurate depictions of childhood ever put onto film. The children in Christmas movies tend to be wide eyed innocents that don’t possess a single selfish bone in their body; this is not the case with Ralphie Parker in A Christmas Story , who behaves like complete shithead at times. Af

There is a tendency in the comic book community to retroactively hate on earlier film adaptations of their superheroes, while anointing the new version as “the best adaptation ever.” This was the fate that befell the Tim Burton Batman movies when Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” trilogy hit theatre screens (the same fate also befell Richard Donner’s Superman movies after the release of Man of Steel). This is predicated on the logic that the Nolan movies are a far more faithful recreation of the Batman comic books than Tim Burton’s more gothic approach. The flaw with this argument is that there have been various incarnations of Batman throughout the decades, therefore the argument that the Nolan films are the most “faithful” is based entirely on what version of Batman you grew up with: Everyone talks about how the early Batman comics were dark and gritty, but they quickly took a more fantastical turn; as early as 1939, Batman was fighting vampires. By the time World War II

Cinema history is filled with movies that slipped through the cracks and are condemned to live out their existence to absolute obscurity, whether they deserve it or not. This is the unfortunate fate that has befallen the 1986, made for television Disney movie, Mr. Boogedy. It has never been given a proper DVD release and the only prints that you can find online are VHS quality, or worse.   It’s a fairly forgotten movie now, but it was a big enough deal in 1986 to warrant its own sequel, Bride of Boogedy.   The movie was a huge staple in my childhood; my dad recorded it off of television when it premiered in April of 1986, and my sister and I watched it repeatedly to the point of wearing out the VHS. The premise is fairly straight forward: Carlton Davis, a novelty salesman (he specializes in gag gifts), moves his family to a small town in New England, the aptly named Lucifer Falls, to open a Gag City store and finds out that his house his haunted by ghosts. There is a sce