Word: horror
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...example, we know the film will be visually front-loaded. His London is very murky and dark, its citizens very pale and sickly, the better perhaps to complement all the blood they're about to be sloshing around in--or to remind us of old black-and-white horror films. We also know there will be an abundance of quirk. What's not certain is whether the film can find an audience. Will the buckets of gore and the presence of the erstwhile Captain Jack Sparrow--not to mention an appearance by Borat's Sacha Baron Cohen--draw...
...with pathos, as much for monster as for man. Grendel is a horror, a plague, to Hrothgar's kingdom, but he seems plaintive, lonely, in his cave. He complains to his mother in some Scandivanian tongue, as if Gollum had shown up in a Bergman film. Up close he has the physiognomy of Rondo Hatton, the actor whose acromegalic face got him roles as villains in ?40s mysteries and horror films. Grendel too seems typecast for villainy, but maybe the humans just don't understand how close he is to them. Why, they might...
...senior at New York University, Ira Levin placed second in a CBS screenplay competition, pretty much the last time he was edged out of the top spot. He followed his first, Edgar-winning novel, A Kiss Before Dying, with such iconic horror-thriller mega-best sellers as Rosemary's Baby, The Boys from Brazil and The Stepford Wives and later wrote the long-running 1978 Broadway hit Deathtrap. Levin...
...Start with the source material. Young Frankenstein, Brooks's update of Mary Shelley's horror tale, in which the monster-maker's grandson returns to Transylvania and gets pulled back into the family business, probably has more laughs, and more fondly remembered bits, than any film in the Brooks canon. And Brooks (working again with his Producers writing collaborator Tom Meehan) has faithfully reproduced most of them on stage: Igor and his wandering hump; the steely Frau Blucher, whose very name incites the horses; the monster's visit to the cabin of a kindly blind man who turns into...
...difference is that The Producers had a solid, even ingenious, comic storyline - about a Broadway producer who sets out to create a bomb show so he can run off with all the investors' money. Young Frankenstein is, by contrast, mainly a series of goofs on old horror-movie clichés - gags that don't resonate as well on stage, and that lack the comic propulsion that keeps The Producers moving along. That puts a lot more burden on the usual Brooksian jokes about big knockers and small penises - which, as a result, seem more desperate this time around...