Harbinger Down!

Hey guys, I normally don’t post items like this but I am just so excited about this upcoming film that I had to spread the word. 3 of my favourite horror films of all time are Jacob’s Ladder, Event Horizon and John Carpenter’s The Thing. This upcoming movie Harbinger Down is a film akin to John Carpenter’s The Thing and heavily features the use of practical creature effects and animatronics as opposed to CGI.

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjiCQgiM7-I

Official site: http://harbingerdown.com/index.html

Harbinger Down wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harbinger_Down

From what I’ve read, the folks at studioADI were responsible for the traditional creature effects in The Thing prequel, and had much of their hard work replaced by CGI. While CGI has its place, I am of the camp that prefers the more traditional methods of doing this as I find that CGI sometimes fails in creating convincing and natural creatures and effects. Apparently this wasn’t the first time that this has happened to them and so they took to crowd-funding to build an Independant movie and ‘…an opportunity to bypass the studio system which had been compromising their work in the past.’ (quoting the wiki)

It sucks that there is this sort of Hollywood mentality and formula for doing things in movies today that I sometimes don’t agree with and because of this, I find most mainstream movies today (whether they be Action, Drama, Comedy, or Horror) really pale in comparison to movies in the same genre of the 80’s and 90’s and to some extent, the early 2000’s.  Can anyone really admit that the new Robocop is better than the original Robocop movie? Or the new Terminator movies an improvement over Terminator 1 or 2?

The Game Industry also has a certain mentality and formula of doing things (similar to the Movie Industry) which is, in my humble opinion, why most mainstream games for the past 10 years or so have been utter garbage. For example, Resident Evil Remake, 1 DC, 2, 3, Veronica are far superior to anything post RE: 4, especially in recent years. I still play Silent Hill 1, 2 and 3 (finished all 3 just a little while ago again) and have only ever played through Silent Hill: Shitty Memories and Downpoop once before it returned to my shelf to collect dust. Compared to the old, this new generation just completely misses the point from an artistic, gameplay and psychological horror standpoint. The slew of Call Of Duty and modern FPS games don’t hold my interest when compared to the original Half-Life 1/2 or even Doom 1/2 (I actually played through all the PC episodes (1/2/TNT/Plutonia) and then through the PSX version of Doom 1 and 2 a couple months ago)

…but enough of my game rant (I’ll leave that for a future post) and back to Harbinger Down.

Much respect to studioADI for doing this out of the love for the craft. I simply cannot wait for it.

Oh, it also stars Lance Henriksen (YESS!)