Billy Crystal, John Goodman and Steve Buscemi were among those who voiced the nightmare inhabitants of Monstropolis in the Disney and Pixar computer-animated Monsters Inc., which opened in November and took more than $244.8 million. However, it was overshadowed by rival DreamWorks’ revisionist fairy tale Shrek, featuring the vocal talents of Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Cameron Diaz and John Lithgow. The computer-created cartoon grossed $255.5 million, consequently blowing Disney’s traditionally animated adventure Atlantis — The Lost Empire out of the water!
Inspired by the video game, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within went one step further and created its realistic human characters and alien invaders totally through CGI animation.
In May, director William Friedkin and screenwriter William Peter Blatty sued Warner Bros, and others for unspecified damages in the federal court, claiming they were denied residuals from both the 1973 and 2000 versions of The Exorcist. They also maintained that the latter version violated federal copyright law by identifying the studio as the movie’s author and by failing to register the film as a derivative of the original.
Despite having already been shown on UK satellite television, in August the British Board of Film Classification finally passed Tobe Hooper’s long-banned 1986 sequel The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 uncut with an ‘18’ certificate.
In America, films such as Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings helped boost cinema attendances to their highest levels since the 1950s. Ticket sales rose to 1.5 billion in 2001, a 5 per cent increase on the previous year and the highest since 1958. Despite the September 11th attacks, US box-office takings were a record $5.9 billion. The same upward trend was also to be seen in Britain, where the number of admissions rose by four million to 141 million, the highest figure since 1972.
Unjustly banished to video, Ellory Elkayem’s They Nest was an enjoyable chiller set on a remote island invaded by mutated African cockroaches that nested inside the bodies of their victims. A likeable cast (including Thomas Calabro, Dean Stockwell and John Savage), fine special effects and a knowing script raised this often gory chiller into a whole different class.
Despite featuring music from Kid Rock, Rob Zombie and others, the third film in The Crow series, Salvation, starring Kirsten Dunst and Eric Mabius, went straight to video and DVD in most markets.
Tom Arnold and Tiffani-Amber Thiessen investigated a series of murders at the Bulemia Fall High School in the slasher spoof Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th.
Venomous starring Treat Williams and some genetically engineered snakes was just what you would expect from director Fred Olen Ray and co-producer Jim Wynorski working under pseudonyms.
Brian Yuzna’s Spanish-made Faust: Love of the Damned featured Andrew Divoff and Jeffrey Combs and was based on yet another comic book series.
Donald F. Glut’s low-budget softcore comedy The Erotic Rites of Countess Dracula was simply embarrassing. The unlikely-named Brick Randall played a singer bitten by Count Dracula (a sick-looking William Smith), who lived in Hollywood with her faithful servant Renfield (Del Howison). From the same producers, Glut’s half-hour short The Vampire Hunters Club resembled a home movie. John Agar, William Smith, Bob Burns, Dave Donham and Forrest J. Ackerman played members of the eponymous group, still searching for a young girl kidnapped in 1958 by Dracula (Daniel Roebuck). This included special guest appearances by Belinda Balaski, Conrad Brooks, Del Howison, Irwin Keyes, Carla Laemmle, Brinke Stevens, Mink Stole, Carel Struycken, Mary Woronov and others.
Erotic Witch Project 2: Book of Seduction was another of Seduction Cinema’s softcore lesbian romps from the production team of producer Michael Beckerman and director John Bacchus, who were also responsible for The Erotic Ghost. Terry M. West’s The Sexy Sixth Sense was more of the same, also from Seduction.
From Video Outlaw, Cremains was a shot-on-video anthology movie from writer/director Steve Sessions that featured Lilith Stabs and Debbie Rochon. In David A. Goldberg’s Demon Lust, Brinke Stevens was a sexy demon confronted by Tom Savini’s hit man for the mob, while Jeff Burton’s The Night Divides the Day was about a psychopathic killer stalking a group of students camping in the woods.
Blood: The Last Vampire was an anime about a sword-wielding girl battling shapeshifters on an American military base during the Vietnam war.
All Day Entertainment’s The Horror of Hammer and Tales of Frankenstein contained numerous trailers of varying quality, while the latter also included the 1958 Hammer TV pilot Tales of Frankenstein as a bonus.
Some of the scariest bogeymen to appear on film, including Jason, Freddy, Michael Myers, Chucky, Leatherface and Pinhead, were profiled in Bogeymen: The Killer Compilation, a three-hour documentary featuring an audio commentary by Robert Englund.
Jay Holben’s Paranoid was an eight-minute short adapted from the 100-line poem ‘Paranoid: A Chant’ by Stephen King.
Hallmark Entertainment’s The Infinite Worlds of H. G. Wells was an enjoyable three-part mini-series, based upon the author’s short stories. Tom Ward portrayed Wells, interviewed by a secret government agency about the mysterious adventures he and his future wife (Katy Carmichael) were involved with.
Co-produced with The Jim Henson Company, Jack and the Beanstalk: The Real Story was an inventive two-part TV movie in which a millionaire industrialist (Matthew Modine) discovered that the fairy tale lied. Daryl Hannah and Richard Attenborough turned up as giant gods.
Allan Arkush’s Prince Charming was just as good, as two humans (Sean Maguire and Martin Short), transformed into frogs 500 years earlier, found themselves in contemporary New York. Hallmark’s Snow White was yet another version of the fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, with the princess (Kristin Kreuk) menaced by Miranda Richardson’s wicked queen. Clancy Brown played a creepy Granter of Wishes, and Warwick Davis and Vincent Schiavelli were amongst the dwarves named after the days of the week.
The Disney cable TV movie Halloweentown II: Kalabar’s Revenge reunited the cast of the 1998 original, including veteran Debbie Reynolds, for an inferior sequel where everyone living in Halloweentown was placed under a warlock’s spell.
Christopher Lloyd played the zombie who helped a town overcome its Halloween curse in the Fox Family movie When Good Ghouls Go Bad, based on a story by R. L. Stine.
In The Evil Beneath Loch Ness, Patrick Bergin and Lysette Anthony discovered that a giant prehistoric creature had been released from an underwater abyss. Infinitely better was the two-part BBC-TV movie of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, in which Bob Hoskins’s gruff Professor Challenger led an expedition to discover superb-looking CGI dinosaurs.
Murder Rooms: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes was a series of four superior BBC films created by David Pirie. Charles Edwards portrayed Arthur Conan Doyle, who teamed up with his old friend Dr Joséph Bell (the superb Ian Richardson) to investigate various murders. The Kingdom of Bones (scripted by Stephen Gallagher) included a number of allusions to Doyle’s The Lost World while, in The White Knight Stratagem, comedian Rik Mayall gave a stand-out performance as the likely inspiration for Professor Moriarty.