Chocolate Crows Cereal MST3K

Fortified Links!

It’s been too long since I did a links post, so time to change that!

**There is a new episode of Frank Conniff’s radio play series Podhouse 90: Dracula Has Risen in the Polls!

**TarsTarkas.NET pal Todd from FourDK will be dropping a book later this year called Funky Bollywood!

**Julius Kassendorf has an amazing love-hate letter to Mahogany, which i believe started out as a lovefest entry on the Dissolve (where a different commenter each day writes an essay about an underloved film, usually on the daily “essential film writing” posts)

**Beth from Beth Loves Bollywood gives us the lowdown on the “rivalry” between Uttam Kumar and Soumitra Chatterjee that culminated with Jhinder Bondi!

**Film Guinea Pig encounters Darwin’s Nightmare!

**The Cultural Gutter is doing another fundraiser!

**Cinematic Catharsis gets bitten by Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht!

**Teleport-City charges a toll when The Devil Rides Out!

**Blueprint: Review steps into DTV land for Drive Hard!

**Vern meets the mess that is Foodfight!

**Pre-Code.com gets wet with I Cover the Waterfront!

**The League of Dead Films meets Doomsday!

**Someone submitted a FOIA request about Godzilla and got a reply!

**Turban Decay reflects on the passing of Casey Kasem!

**Which legendary animal fires steaming hot poo at you? Find out in Weird and Wonderful Creatures of the Bestiary!

**Joel Hodgson teases possible MST3K crowd-funding perks!
Chocolate Crows Cereal MST3K

Ever After High Dolls

Ever After High gets a movie and series deal on Netflix

Ever After High Dolls

Ever After High is a spinoff of those Monster High dolls, except they’re based on fairy tales instead of monsters. Like Monster High, they have a bajillion characters and complicated back stories, including a bunch of webisodes, tv specials, and a book series. And now they can add a movie and Netflix original series to their piles of content! As Monster High has many more films and webisodes, Ever After High has a ways to go to catch up. But I believe in Ever After High!

All the characters are kids of fairy tale characters, so you get people like Humphrey Dumpty, the son of Humpty Dumpty; Cedar Wood, the daughter of Pinocchio; Dexter Charming, the son of King Charming, the twin of Darling Charming, and younger brother to Daring Charming; and Kitty Cheshire, the daughter of the Cheshire Cat. There are even one or two characters from Monster High that have transferred into Ever After High, because crossover money, baby!

Ever After High has no affiliation with that upcoming Disney Channel movie Descendants which has children of Disney fairy tale characters in high school. It does show that high school is the future of fairy tales.

No word yet on if that rumored live-action Monster High musical film is actually going to get made. UPDATE: @rwmead has pointed out they confirmed a 2016 release date last month, so fingers crossed!

via THR

Zendaya

Zendaya IS Aaliyah on Lifetime!

Stay with me folks, because I’m quoting a site called Necole Bitchie! It’s one of those celebrity gossip sites like Perez Hilton, except it isn’t Perez Hilton, so it’s automatically 10% better. But the gist of it is Zendaya will be playing Aaliyah in a biopic from Lifetime! This is amazing news in Lifetime biopic circles! If you aren’t familiar with Zendaya, she’s the singular-named Disney kid starring in the upcoming original movie Zapped, as well as a lead role on the series Shake It Up. This news has been confirmed by Indiewire and Lifetime thanks to the power of an emergency press release to get ahead of the internet news cycle:

Before Beyonce and before Rihanna, self-proclaimed “street but sweet” Aaliyah was poised to become a global icon with top-selling albums, a hot movie career and an adoring fan base. But behind the spotlight, Brooklyn-born, Detroit-raised Aaliyah Dana Haughton struggled to succeed in a tough business while staying grounded in the midst of her growing celebrity. The film follows the beautiful and talented performer’s inspirational journey, from her debut on “Star Search” at the age of ten to the challenges she faced during her rise to become the Princess of R&B. On August 25, 2001, at the height of her popularity, her life was tragically cut short when a plane carrying the singer and some of her video crew crashed after takeoff from a Bahamian runway. Although just 22-years-old at the time of her death, Aaliyah continues to lead a legacy as Billboard’s tenth most famous R&B artist of the past 25 years and one of the recording industry’s most successful artists in history.

The film will be based on the book Aaliyah: More Than a Woman by Christopher Farley, and currently has the working title Aaliyah: Princess of R&B. I really expect that to change, because, blech!

Lifetime is getting way into the dead singer biopic market, because they also got that Whitney Houston biopic in the works, even though certain relatives are trying to sue it out of existence! The movie is still going ahead with Yaya DaCosta now cast as Whitney Houston!

image via Wikimedia

Zendaya

Cookie Monster Birthday

TarsTarkas.NET turns 10!

Cookie Monster Birthday
Has it been so long? Yes! Ten years ago, TarsTarkas.NET published it’s first review on terrible hand coded html, a review written so badly my random scribbles when taking notes on films are more coherent. Since then, the site has grown and grown and grown, encompassing reviews, news, essays, Mambo, wordpress, political stuff, rare movie information, podcasts, videos, lawsuit threats, friends, enemies, and electoral shenanigans. And I like to think that’s just the beginning…

Our traffic has gone up and down over the years, but our commitment to our readers has never been stronger. If it wasn’t for YOU, there would be a lot less incentive to do this. I probably still would, because I like writing, I like writing about movies, and I like seeing my writing improve, but it wouldn’t be anywhere near as fun. So thanks for sticking around! Maybe soon I’ll even write something worth reading…

A big thanks to all the former TarsTarkas.NET contributors over the years! Our first co-author was Iain Norman who ran the late and lamented FantasyFilmscapes.com. Our collabs are housed under the Slaying the Dragon tag. And let’s not forget our science corespondent, good ol’ Dr. Mobusu, who is totally not me writing under a different name. Once the articles making fun of racist rightwing morons proved popular, skiplogic soon joined in on the fun, becoming our most prolific writer, even joining us at the now on hiatus Politisink. skiplogic‘s abilities to drive rightwingers crazy surpassed even my own! dm was another contributor who joined up from the same forums (that would be the SomethingAwful forums), and also joined in at Politisink. dm is very informed on military privatization, private contractors who abuse their power, and all those suspicious links in between the military and government figures. I even managed to get POTUShead to write one article, amazing considering how little free time she had. POTUShead also helped break open the whole Rosanna Pulido fiasco.

Back to the movie world, some CineD goons headed the call to write as well! Sheldrake has contributed the most posts, he writes the amazingly awesome Pre-Code.com site that you need to check out immediately! Donald Hallene is a Disney expert who knows more about theme park rides than any human I know, you can see more of him on WagTheMovie.net. And let’s not forget Ian Maddison‘s awesome essay on Prometheus! Ian is a regular contributor to the Current Releases crew on Something Awful.

Speaking of collaborators, I can’t leave out Todd Stadtman from Die, Danger, Die, Die, Kill!, who is probably the movie blog guy from the internet I interact with most, including doing things that aren’t related to internet movie sites at all! But most importantly, we cohost the Infernal Brains Podcast when we’re not both crunched for time due to our demandingly popular social lives!

Other amazing people I’ve met in the past decade (and I apologize if I missed anyone!) include: duriandave from SoftFilm, an amazing resource on old Hong Kong/Chinese/Taiwanese films and a great guy. Karl from the xsmarkthespot blog, all the members of MOSS, Keith at Teleport-City, Beth from Beth Loves Bollywood, Miguel from Monster Island Resort Podcast, Carol from The Cultural Gutter, Karl from Fist of B-List, Ninja Dixon, David at Permission to Kill, Denis at The Horror!?, Kevin at Exploder Button, Emily at The Deadly Doll’s House of Horror Nonsense, and Memsaab at Memsaab’s Story. And Markus at Green People Soup, Sir Phobos from Knights of Mars Roundtable, Michael at Film Guinea Pig, Kozo at LoveHKFilm , Blueprint: Review, Matt at DTVConnoisseur, Barry at Cinematic Catharsis, all the goons at CineD, Ryan at TrashFilmGuru, all the crazy cats I follow on Twitter, especially the AICN Talkback refugees who don’t take no crap, Jeremy at DVDtalk, and everyone else!

10 years is just the beginning. There will be more news, more reviews, more weird stuff, more fun, more obscure foreign films, more podcasts. Even the puppet video reviews which will return eventually once I’m happy with a script. The ride will not be stopped! Not by bad movies and not by terrible movies. Not by lack of subtitles nor by lack of camera focusing. Not by webhosting problems, not by Russian hackers, not by scriptkiddie spammers, not by angry actresses mad that I said they were in a movie they were in and not by angry actors upset that I easily deduced their non-softcore acting name (both actual lawsuit threats!)

Now if you excuse me, I have to go buy a cake. And also study programming. And then write some movie posts! HOORAY, movie stuff!

Sharktopus vs Pteracuda SyFy

Sharktopus vs Pteracuda promo art!

Sharktopus vs Pteracuda SyFy

Straight from Roger Corman himself! See Sharktopus vs Pteracuda on August 2nd on SyFy! The second film in the Sharktopus trilogy, to be followed by Sharktopus vs. Mermantula

Sharktopus vs. Pteracuda – Sunday, August 2 at 9PM – In this new Roger Corman movie, the child of Sharktopus goes toe-to-toe with the latest science experiment “Pteracuda” – half Pteradactyl, half Barracuda – in a battle for monster supremacy. A production of New Horizons Pictures, the movie stars Robert Carradine (Django Unchained) and Katie Savoy (Living with Models).

Part of SyFy’s Sharknado Week!

Edge of Tomorrow

Edge of Tomorrow (Review)

Edge of Tomorrow

aka All You Need is Kill
Edge of Tomorrow
2014
Screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie, Jez Butterworth, and John-Henry Butterworth
Based on the novel All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka
Directed by Doug Liman

Edge of Tomorrow
It’s come to our attention thanks to the multitude of video games being adapted into film, that the transition from the one media to the other is just too rife with problems to work. From Mario Mario walking the dinosaur in an alternate dimension to Kristin Kreuk seductively dancing for bathroom funtime, no one seems to have any idea how to turn video games into non-terrible cinema. Which is part of why Edge of Tomorrow is amazing, because it is the perfect video game movie! All they had to do was base it on a book…

Beyond the obvious video game connections, Edge of Tomorrow is a fun action film that stands out from the dour “dark and gritty” or somber 9-11 commentary that so often infects modern action cinema. It really took me by surprised just how entertaining it would be. I was expecting a more serious action drama that took itself too seriously, but that was quickly dashed once the resurrection jokes began.
Edge of Tomorrow
An alien invasion and a time loop is the setting for Edge of Tomorrow. Major William Cage (Tom Cruise) does military PR, having the terrible job of trying to spin nonstop losses into recruitment drives for more meat for the grinder. With a full scale invasion of the European continent imminent by the humans, Cage is in England where he’s told he’ll be joining the battle on the front lines. Cage attempts to talks his way out of the assignment, but ends up arrested for disobeying orders and awakens in handcuffs on a military base where he’s informed he’s a private and a deserter who will be thrown into battle during the invasion which happens in 24 hours.
Edge of Tomorrow