Land That Time Forgot being remade

It was bound to happen sooner or later with all the rumors of remakes and such. We knew Amicus would eventually be touched in some way or another. A new version (or remake, as it's being touted) of Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Land That Time Forgot is heading into production this week with actor C. Thomas Howell (The Outsiders, E.T., Red Dawn, War of the Worlds) behind the camera working from a script by Darren Dalton (The Day the Earth Stopped, Scanner Cop). The book was famously adapted for the screen in 1975 for Amicus Productions and spawned a sequel, which was also produced by one half of the original Amicus partnership - Max Rosenburg. It was also historically significant as the last film that original Amicus co-founders Milton Subotsky and Max Rosenberg worked on together, ending a partnership that was over 20 years old at the time. The new version will star Howell, Christopher Showerman (Frankenbabe, George of the Jungle 2) and Timothy Bottoms (Land of the Lost, Vampire Bats, The Man in the Iron Mask). More additions to the cast are to be made soon. The film is expected to premiere on DVD and is said to be following the original film's plot pretty closely. In the original Amicus version, "a German U-boat sinks a British ship and takes the survivors on board. After it takes a wrong turn, the submarine takes them to the unknown land of Caprona, where they find dinosaurs and Neanderthal."

We thought that it was only appropriate to report on this, being that Mr. Prowse appeared in The People That Time Forgot as The Executioner. He also donated some autographed 8x10's for my Hammer Horror Holiday I did as a charity event for a local food bank. May we all pray for his health and well-being. This was taken from SciFi Wire:

"David Prowse, who wore Darth Vader's black armor in the original Star Wars movies, revealed that he is battling prostate cancer but is responding well to radiotherapy treatment for his illness, according to a report in the British Daily Mail newspaper. The 73-year-old-actor, who appeared as Luke Skywalker's nemesis, has been undergoing radiotherapy for the last couple of months, the newspaper reported. Speaking on a British radio show, Prowse added that he was feeling fine. Prowse is being treated at the Royal Marsden Hospital in London. Originally a bodybuilder, Prowse played the Dark Lord in all three original films. Producers decided not to use his West Country English accent for the role, instead giving Lord Vader's lines to deep-voiced American actor James Earl Jones."

Harold Pinter - writer of The Birthday Party - dies at 78

The Birthday Party is one of the "off the beaten path" films Amicus did in the late 60's. It really isn't a horrror film at all, but more of a psychological thinking man's film. It was based on the play written by Harold Pinter, who died Wednesday at the age of 78. Here's the news straight from Yahoo!:

"British Nobel laureate Harold Pinter -- who produced some of his generation's most influential dramas and later became a staunch critic of the U.S.-led war in Iraq -- has died, his widow said Thursday. He was 78. Pinter died Wednesday after a long battle with cancer, according to his second wife Antonia Fraser. In recent years he had seized the platform offered by his 2005 Nobel Literature prize to denounce President George W. Bush, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the war in Iraq. But he was best known for exposing the complexities of the emotional battlefield. His writing featured cool, menacing pauses in dialogue that reflected his characters' deep emotional struggles and spawned a new adjective found in several dictionaries: "Pinter-esque." "Pinter restored theater to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue, where people are at the mercy of each other and pretense crumbles," the Nobel Academy said. "With a minimum of plot, drama emerges from the power struggle and hide-and-seek of interlocution." His characters' internal fears and longings, their guilt and difficult sexual drives were set against the neat lives they constructed in order to try to survive. Usually enclosed in one room, the acts usually illustrated the characters' lives as a sort of grim game with actions that often contradicted words. Gradually, the layers were peeled back. "How can you write a happy play?" he once said. "Drama is about conflict and degrees of perturbation, disarray. I've never been able to write a happy play, but I've been able to enjoy a happy life." Pinter wrote 32 plays; one novel, "The Dwarfs," in 1990; and put his hand to 22 screenplays. The working-class milieu of his first dramas reflected his early life as the son of a Jewish tailor from London's East End. Born Oct. 30, 1930, in the London neighborhood of Hackney, he was forced along with other children during World War II to evacuate to rural Cornwall in 1939. He was 14 before he returned. By then, he was entranced with Franz Kafka and Ernest Hemingway. By 1950, Pinter had begun to publish poetry and appeared on stage as an actor. Pinter began to write for the stage, and published "The Room" in 1957. A year later, his first major play, "The Birthday Party" was produced in the West End. In it, intruders enter the retreat of Stanley, a young man who is hiding from childhood guilt. He becomes violent, telling them, "You stink of sin, you contaminate womankind." The play closed after just one week to disastrous reviews, but Pinter continued to write and was most prolific between 1957 and 1965. "With his earliest work, he stood alone in British theater up against the bewilderment and incomprehension of critics, the audience and writers, too," British playwright Tom Stoppard said when the Nobel Prize was announced. "I find critics on the whole a pretty unnecessary bunch of people," Pinter once said. In "The Caretaker," (1959) a manipulative old man threatens the relationship of two brothers, while "The Homecoming" (1964) explores the hidden rage and confused sexuality of an all-male household by inserting a woman. In "Silence" and "Landscape," (1967 and 1968) Pinter moved from exploring the underbelly of human life to showing the simultaneous levels of fantasy and reality that occupy the individual. "The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don't hear," Pinter once said. "It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, and anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its true place. When true silence falls we are left with echo but are nearer nakedness." "Betrayal" (1978) was reportedly based on the disintegration of his marriage to actress Vivien Merchant, who appeared in many of his first plays."

The movie was brought to the screen by legendary director William Friedkin, who would bring such groundbreaking films to the screen as The French Connection and The Exorcist. The actual screenplay for the movie was written by Harold Pinter and starred such classic actors as Robert Shaw (Jaws, The Deep, From Russia with Love) and Amicus supporting regular Patrick Magee (The Monster Club, ...And Now the Screaming Starts!, Asylum, Tales from the Crypt, The Skull).

William Gaines biopic to be made

Since Amicus released two movies based on the EC Comics, we felt that this was news fans would want to know. Here it is straight from Variety:

"John Landis will direct "Ghoulishly Yours, William M. Gaines," a biopic based on the life of the publisher of EC Comics and Mad magazine. Landis will develop the project with Joel Eisenberg, who's also penning the screenplay. Pic's centered on an anti-establishment group of artists and writers, led by a reluctant Gaines and cohort Al Feldstein, as they produce their comicbooks. At the peak of his success, Gaines became a First Amendment figurehead due to his unapologetic testimony before a Senate subcommittee investigating juvenile delinquency. Landis most recently helmed "Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project" for HBO. Eisenberg is a partner in production concern EMO Films with Tim Owens and Eugene Mandelcorn."

The Beast Must Die! picked as one of the AICN Horror Movie A Day

Quint, one of the writers for Ain't It Cool News, chose the Amicus classic The Beast Must Die! as one of his Horror Movies A Day for October. He regularly does a "column" of sorts entitled A Movie A Day, and of course, because of Halloween he chose to do all horror movies for the month. You can check out his review of the film by clicking here. He had never seen the film before, as that is one of his "rules" that he follows. Thanks to Quint for choosing an Amicus title and true horror classic and we hope that he enjoyed the film.