Canned Hype
As usual an incredible amount of Fantasy movies were announced at the recent Cannes Film Festival. They include :

• James Hickox’s Krocodylus
• Tobe Hooper’s Crocodile
• Gary Jones’s Spiders
• Tony Shyu’s Mexican Horror Tequila Body Shots
• Mitch Marcus’s adaptation of the Henry James classic supernatural tale The Ghostly Rental
• Eli Necakov’s Cybermaster
• Brian Helgeland’s supernatural thriller Sin Eater starring Antonio Banderas
• the first Danish monster movie Cat about an evil feline from outer space
• Shaky Gonzalez’s vampire thriller Angel of the Night
• Spanish director Fernando Trueba’s remake of the 1947 RKO classic They Won’t Believe Me
• H20 scripter Matt Greenberg’s SF tale Reign of Fire
• Jacques Dorfmann’s Druid starring Christopher Lambert (does that man never get tired of making schlock?)
• and a $35 million film version of Dungeons and Dragons, the Fantasy game that obsesses billions world wide, to be produced by action maven Joel Silver, directed by Courtney Solomon (who cannily bought the rights seven years ago) and shot in Prague.

Then there’s a foursome from producer Brian Yuzna: Faust, to be directed by himself, HP Lovecraft’s Dagon directed by Stuart Gordon, Beyond Reanimator featuring Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West and Arachnid.

Fantasm Postponed
First the bad news. The British Film Institute have decided to cancel Fantasm at the National Film Theatre this coming July. Although the Edgar Allan Poe season of movies will still go ahead throughout the month, it was decided that the lack of decent preview movies meant the proposed Festival would be a washout this year. The good news is that the organization intends to move Fantasm to earlier in the year – February and March are being discussed as I write this.

The Edgar Allan Poe season was devised by yours truly to celebrate the first ever ‘brand name’ Horror author’s 150th anniversary. Although I did want it to have a strong Italian leaning, most of the movies I originally asked for are completely unavailable. But The Black Cat (1934), The Student of Prague (1926), and The Raven (1935) are well worth watching on the big screen. Two Roger Corman’s will be on show – House of Usher and Tales of Terror – the former in a brand spanking new digitally re-mastered print. If you’ve never seen director Gordon Hessler’s criminally undervalued Spanish-made Murders in the Rue Morgue (1971), then that’s the one I urge you to head for as it’s one of my all-time Seventies favourites.

Scream Spoofs
In a neck-and-neck race to put out the first teen horror spoof, Rhino Films has moved into the lead, beginning production on I Know What You Screamed Last Summer. The project is shooting in Los Angles on a $5 million budget. Meanwhile, Dimension Films’ Scream If You Know What I Did Last Halloween, to be directed by Keenen Ivory Wayans, starring Shawn and Marlon Wayans, has yet to find a firm start date. Rhino, who also produced the dreadful Tarantino spoof Plump Fiction is shooting its satire with a cast including Tom Arnold, rapper Coolio, Tiffani-Amber Thiessen (from Beverly Hills 90210), Harley (A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries) Cross, Danny (Pleasantville) Strong and Aimee Graham (sister of Heather).