Watched Vamp two nights ago to see what what else screenwriter Richard Wenk (’16 Blocks’) had done. He wrote and directed Vamp in 1986, a movie that got pretty good reveiws and, as I mentioned before, starred Grace Jones. Yet Wenk has only three writing credits to his name in the last twenty years and only 5 directing credits. And that’s not tantamount to failure – Terrence Malick has only directed five films in 36 years. But his career trajectory is interesting to me, if only because it serves as an example of someone not following the normal path. And who knows – maybe all those years between projects he was a heroin junkie. Or maybe he was having kids. I’m just saying, I’d like to know more.

Also, I don’t know whether to be dismayed or excited about the deal that Eclectic Engineering has going on. Apparently, they take your FX heavy script and shop it around to potential buyers, their main selling strength being that they can present to producers the actual cost of all these effects. So… is this good or bad? It’s good if someone has a great script with a great story and great characters that unfortunately is set on another planet filled with 20 foot tall walking, talking fish. It’s bad if someone has a script with nothing but a series of nuclear bombs going off. Will it lead to good movies with FX or bad FX in movies?

As I have nothing else interesting to offer right now, here are some good links:

Wisconsin Screenwriters Forum – Can this organization really do all the things they claim? Don’t know, but I’m gonna find out. They do, in fact, have non-profit status.

David Anaxagoras’ Bloglist – This is basically a gigantic list of sites that deal with screenwriting in one way or another. Some aren’t so great, but some are priceless.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith Treatment – Always good to see an example of a treatment that has made it big.

And finally there’s Elmore Leonard’s Ten Rules of Writing – a list of good ideas and solid writing advice.

Enjoy.

How is it that, since Scream exploded in 1996, we are still drowning in cliched horror movies? I could’ve sworn that was the end of an era. Scream laid bare all of the old trite contrivances, made fun of them, and then scared us in spite of them for one last bloody kick in the teeth.

But now we’re inundated with remakes and sequels – When A Stranger Calls, The Fog, The Amityville Horror, House of Wax, etc. etc. etc. The only scary thing about these movies is the fact that they so blatantly rip off the style of Scream. That they do it so poorly is their own lame, limp-ankled, bloodless kick in the teeth. Really, if your name isn’t Kevin Williamson, then you need to find your own thing to do, because you aren’t going to do Kevin Williamson’s thing better. Not by a long shot.

Now — none of these movies got very far with critics, but then horror movies rarely do. And this is what boggles my mind about Showtime’s terrible ‘Masters of Horror’. Mick Garris, TV mini-series mogul, gathered together 11 other directors who hadn’t done anything remotely scary in 20 years (Stuart Gordon, John Carpenter, Tobe Hoooper) if, in fact, they ever HAD done anything scary (William Malone? Larry Cohen?) and 1 director who could save the day (Takeshi Miike) and set out to create a horror anthology series. From the first episode, it was obvious the ball had been severely dropped. The stories were terrible, the acting was horrendous, and the effects were hokey, to say the least. With the exception of Joe Dante’s ‘Homecoming’ (which, let’s face it, is a comedy), not a single episode went by without making me cringe at one point or another, embarrassed to be in the same room with it.

And that’s why I can’t understand the critical response, which seems to be glowing. Variety, Entertainment Weekly, Hollywood Reporter, and on down the line – even the ones that don’t say it’s a great show at least indicate that this is what horror fans have been waiting for.

So… I turned to the horror fans to see what they thought. Fangoria? Every episode gets three out of five skulls. Bloody Disgusting? Says that Coscarelli’s crapulent first episode “kicked [MoH] off with a bang…”. And so on. Each review left me asking myself – “What am I missing?”

But I waited and I watched, because I knew that Garris had snagged Miike for one of the episodes, so surely someone at MoH HQ had contemporary horror in mind. Someone wanted to change the landscape, right? And so I kept hope alive and stayed tuned.

Then the bomb dropped – Showtime decided not to air Miike’s episode. It was deemed to graphic, apparently. Which sums up what’s wrong with Masters of Horror: it’s a show that, from its inception, has no ambition to push the envelope. It has brought together middle of the road filmmakers, turned out 12 mediocre episodes and, when a story was found that was actually horrifying, they canned it.

What a wasted opportunity.