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Darkness Falls (2003)
Prime example of Hollywood Production Slaughter
We all both hate and love Hollywood for a lot of reasons, and this movie is one of the reasons we totally loathe Hollywood.
Back in 2001, a comic writer named Joe Harris did his first of two short films called The Tooth Fairy, the second being Witchwish. In case you haven't seen the short, you can either search for it on youtube or I can give you the premise: In the original four and a half short film, the story focused on a young boy being tucked in by his mother who tells him that the tooth fairy will come for his tooth he just lost and trade it for a coin, but also kindly warns him to sleep or at least keep his eyes close trough the process cause that is what a good boy would do. Of course, the boy gets too excited as he hears noises from flapping wings and rises up from the bed. While the viewers never sees the actual tooth fairy, we all know that the boy actually sees her and offers her the tooth as a way of childish extortion. Suddenly we see a warm golden bright light as the boy's bed cover literally gets covered by golden coins. But the cheerful tone changes as a shadow covers the boy and we hear a quite disturbing sound followed by the boy screaming in pain. The mother hears this and runs up to the boy's room, and witnesses in fright as the boy's eye lids being brutally sewed together and a paper that says "NOT GOOD ENOUGH" on his shirt.
While the short is pretty standard low budget with bad acting and whatnot, the idea of a twisted version of the Tooth Fairy was pretty a original idea. But could it be transferred from a short film to a full feature film?
At start, it did.
Okay, while I have no idea hoe the early drafts of this movie was, but I do remember about how excited I was when I was at a teaser site for the movie. I remember the site being quite well done, and the storyline had stuff that the finished didn't have amongst other stuff.
The Tooth Fairy was different from the beginning. If you run a search on google image with the key words "Doug Jones Tooth Fairy", we get to see Doug Jones (Hellboy, Pan's Labyrith) getting dressed up in what I would love to see in the movie. The early designs for the creature was quite creepy and in the early drafts of the movie script, the Tooth Fairy wasn't really a fairy of any kind but something more sinister than that and it wouldn't be revealed out clear what it was nor would we see this creature until the end of the movie and even then it would be quite hidden in shadows and such. I remember the plot in the teaser site was different as well, while it was supposed to take place in a town called Darkness Falls, and it did have a unspeakable evil but no one really knew what except something really bad would happen if a child lost his or her tooth and they didn't follow certain rules, mostly resulting in having their children vanished and never seen again. And I think that it was supposed to focus on several persons living in the city, like a family who recently moved in and a man who lost his child to the creature. I don't know, maybe I got it wrong, but at least it would be a hell lot better than the final results.
But as the years went by, a lot of things that would make this movie great were scrapped, rewritten and whatnot. Doug Jones got booted out from the project because the producers didn't like the idea of having a cool looking monster appearing so late in the movie, hiring the late Stan Winston who did one of his worst work in make up designs. Joe Harris is no more involved with the project and the movie is left with a mediocre director and producers with bad taste in movie making.
So instead of building up suspense, the movie starts with a background story about a old woman (in the early trailers, it was a young woman) who used to give golden coins to children who lost their milk teeth. But after accident involving her house burning down, she gets so scarred that she have to wear a mask and walk around at night. Then she gets accused for witchcraft and kidnapping children which result with sad times that ends with a nice hanging.
Then we cut to what the short film should have been if it were done with a higher budget and is the only best part in the movie. Then after that it follows the same lame PG-13-esque storyline, with plot holes and lame dialogs preformed by mediocre actors.
It is quite sad that a movie that had such great premise gets so slaughtered. But still consider this a lesson to those who expect that Hollywood is easy ticket to fame.
Street Fighter: The Later Years (2006)
What if the characters from one the most popular video game series were real and... Not so great nowadays...
There are games that comes and goes throughout history, some forgotten, some barely memorable and some... Well, need I to say more? These games gets to be one of the most popular in video game history, and Street Fighter is a game I hardly need to mention.
With all the games, movies, comics and even books, Street Fighter has become somewhat of a icon... And a target for a group of people from a website called Humorcollege to make a 9-part miniseries called "Street Fighter: Ten Years Later", a satirical take on the game.
The story is pretty basic and funny, yet has some good points. It takes about ten years after the original Street Fighter 2, where the actual characters has aged not very well, not getting any loyalty checks so they have to take ordinary day lives, using the little powers they still have in order to make a living. For a example, Blanka is one of the best in the electricity business, fixing cables and such. The series starts as the former Russian wrestler Zangief gets fired from his job as a janitor. By a freak accident, he meets Dhalsim who works as a taxi driver and together, they decide to start a new tournament by the help of Bison (on a wheelchair). Despite minor setbacks, they manage to gain a few of the major characters. But of course, there are forces at work that will stop at nothing to make sure that the tournament will not succeed.
Needless, this is a sweet webisode that has gone through some major effort to make this work. And even though the episodes are about 5 minutes long, it's a very good show and a great concept that's filled with reference, satirical gags and such. The special effects are top notch, while not movie worth but at least TV worth and it's better than most special effects you see on TV shows.
So write in collegehumor on Google and look for the series in the site, believe me, this is a show worthy of your lunch hour.