TV Tinsel: Ring in Halloween with frightful amount of spooky programming
Published in Entertainment News
It’s that supernatural time of year when witches dust off their brooms, bats desert their belfries and things go bump in the night.
For bloodcurdling entertainment, there are screamers all over the streamers as well as cable, networks and the big screens. AMC and AMC+ are under way with “FearFest,” hosted by musician and terror fan Janelle Monae. The specials include 650 hours of the scariest screenplays ever written in blood, including new episodes of the popular “Walking Dead” series “Daryl Dixon.”
And Anne Rice is once again conjuring chills with “Talamasca: the Secret Order.” The Talamasca, a covert organization that monitors and allegedly protects individuals from the supernatural world, is streaming on Thursday and Friday.
The two networks are offering marathons of all the “Halloween” movies you can stomach — both Thursday and Friday — with a doubleheader on Wednesday of “A Nightmare on Elm Street” and “Freddy vs. Jason.”
Almost everybody will be streaming the 45th anniversary of Stanley Kubrick’s phobic “The Shining.” You can catch it on Apple TV+, HBO Max and AMC+. Based on a Stephen King story, “The Shining” stars Jack Nicholson as a writer suffering writer's block. He’s famous for the spine-tingling scene in which he crashes through the door screaming, “Heeeres Johnny!” That scene was improvised by Nicholson.
Kubrick, who was British, didn’t catch on that it was based on the intro to the “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” and almost cut it. Good thing he didn’t.
Viewers will find the intrepid Simpsons streaming on Hulu with “Treehouse of Horror XXXVI.” There are several plots for this special but suffice it to say that Homer is rejected by a “fat eating” glacier because, let’s face it, he’s jut tooooo fat.
And Disney+ is displaying 36 of the memorable “Treehouse of Horrors” episodes, along with a few scary surprises.
Beginning at 5 a.m. on Halloween, Antenna TV begins a marathon of the old sitcom, “Bewitched,” which features the world’s most beguiling housewife-witch played by Elizabeth Montgomery.
The Discovery Channel sports a possible dark horse with its new three-part series, “Bigfoot Took Her,” premiering Wednesday. Half horror flick, half crime drama, the show investigates what happened to teenager Theresa Bier, who mysteriously disappeared in one of California’s national forests way back in 1987.
Researcher Jessica Chobot and 29-year LAPD veteran Robert Collier are reopening the case with the ephemeral Bigfoot topping the list of unusual suspects.
Disney+ scares the kiddies with evergreens like “Scream,” “Hocus Pocus” and “Tim Burton’s the Nightmare Before Christmas.” And Hulu’s streaming a reboot of the dreaded movie, “The Hand that Rocks the Cradle.’’ Some may remember that it’s a psychological thriller about a soccer mom who hires a new nanny. It turns out that the au pair may not be what she seems.
Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays the mom in the new versions. Annabella Sciorra portrayed her in the original, while Rebecca De Mornay upstaged everybody with her menacing performance as the evil nanny.
What would Halloween be without Stephen King? Well, he’s not forgotten. HBO Max is streaming “It: Welcome to Derry,” a new series based on King’s “It” novel and expanded into an eight-parter.
When a young couple and their son move to a new town in Maine (where else?), very “unfortunate” things begin to happen mysteriously. The streamer also features a gaggle of classic horror films like “The Exorcist” and “Gremlins.”
Turner Classic Movies holds its annual horror flick marathon on Thursday and Friday. “I Walked with a Zombie,” arrives at 5:15 p.m. on Thursday as Jacques Tourneur’s classic “Cat People” creeps in a 6:30 p.m. on Thursday (all Pacific times).
Friday at 2:15 p.m. “Dracula” alights, “The Mummy” is disinterred at 3:45 p.m., the original and best “Frankenstein” comes alive at 5:15 p.m., and “The Bride of Frankenstein,” makes her vow at 6:30 p.m.
Then TCM goes for the gusto with the unforgettable film, “In Cold Blood,” based on Truman Capote’s precedent-setting book. The movie earned four Academy Award nominations for its direction, adaptation, score and cinematography.
Netflix introduces the true-life drama “Monster: the Ed Gein Story,” which portrays the real crimes of Ed Gein (played by Charlie Hunnam). He was the serial killer who inspired fictional monsters like Norman Bates, Leatherface and Buffalo Bill. Laurie Metcalfe plays his nightmarish mother. You've never seen Metcalfe, who portrayed “Roseanne’s” practical sister, like this before.
For the kiddies, Netflix is featuring “The Twits,” a lively animated feature based on Roald Dahl’s book. Seemingly kin to the Brothers Grimm, Dahl’s stories always harbor a dark side. “The Twits” is about a couple who hate everything – mostly each other and the community that tries to stand up to them and their dismal amusement park.
Chandler celebrates 'Anniversary'
Kyle Chandler and Diane Lane co-star in the film “Anniversary,” in theaters Friday. It’s a thriller about a couple caught up in a new movement called “The Change.” Chandler, best known as the honorable coach in “Friday Night Lights,” tells me he grew up in a tiny town.
“When I was in college I didn’t know I was going to go into acting,” he says. “I’d met some people at 3 o’clock in the morning at the University of Georgia and one fella became a very good friend of mine. He’s passed away since, but as they were leaving that morning the one guy pulled me aside and said, ‘There’s an audition in the cellar theater at the university for “A Comedy of Errors.’”
“And to this day I have no idea why I went there, got the script. I think because the people we met there were absolutely lunatics, they were insane. And I liked that.
“I went and got the script and studied it, auditioned and got the part and played the one brother. When we did the dress rehearsal and the teachers were sitting around, and when that applause happened and I was center stage, I cried inside. It was like, ‘This is it!’
“And on top of it, just the insanity of the people that were there and the different kinds of folks, all pushed into one thing, wanting to do one thing. It was a gypsys’ world. And I’m, ‘Let me in your caravan, I'm here.’ That’s how it happened.”
Ruffalo up to the 'Task'
One of the themes of the series, “Task” is forgiveness. The show, now streaming on HBO Max, stars Mark Ruffalo as an FBI agent. Ruffalo says, “I grew up in a household where there was the Christianity, Catholicism, and the Baha'i Faith in the same place, and they didn't live peacefully together, right?
“But what I did learn from all of them, and I was steeped in them all. It was very important for everybody ... the essential truths were true across all of them: the idea of compassion, the idea of forgiveness, the idea of something greater than ourselves, organizing this unique thing that we all find ourselves in, a care for those who were less fortunate than you, and the belief that there was something righteous in the end.”
Jeff Goldblum guests
The best part of NBC’s special musical, “Wicked: One Wonderful Night,” will be guest Jeff Goldblum when it airs on Nov. 6. Yes, the show stars Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo (it seems that everything stars Erivo these days) and it’s a two-hour commercial for the movie, “Wicked: for Good,” which opens in theaters on Nov. 21.
For those following the ancestry: the Broadway musical, “Wicked,” was a ripoff of the classic movie, “Wizard of Oz,” which eventually begat the movie, “Wicked,” the “Wicked: for Good” movie and now the NBC special.
Goldblum is known for his several “Jurassic Park” films, “Independence Day,” as well as his jazz piano and ubiquitous commercials.
He tells me that the death of his brother proved a pivotal event in his life. “I had a brother named Rick ... He died when he was 23 and I was 19. That made a mark on my psychic emotional landscape,” he says.
“He was a writer, was traveling — he was very adventurous and kind of romantic. He loved Hemingway, and he was near Casablanca and got a quick kind of disease and died in 24 hours. It makes you ask, ‘What can change about you?’ And even when things change and even when you lose things that you thought were a part of you — as we all do — we lose our youthfulness, our abilities, our relationships seem to be fleeting finally. Everything goes finally. Everything’s going to go. We finally lose our lives.
“Everything is constantly changing but who are YOU? Are you all the arrangement of things, the elements of your life that keeps changing? Or are you something deeper beyond all that that never gets changed no matter what is collapsing around you? That interests me.”
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