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[JohnIan101]

Past Tense - Ghouls Just Wanna Have Fun Part I


[An earlier version of this PT was originally posted on October 6th, 2011 on JoBlo's "DVD, Blu-Ray & Home Theater Discussion" forum.]

We are in the Halloween season (my favorite). This month we kick off the first annual, Limited Edition Horror (at this site).

All month I'll showcase various theme collectibles. Week one of L.E. Horror has "Tim Burton's Corpse Bride"...



The motion picture opened on September 23rd, 2005. It was made with a budget of $40,000,000 (estimated) and grossed over $53 million during its U.S. theatrical run. The film opened number twenty-three at the box office, the following week it rose to number two.

The feature opened against "Just Like Heaven", "Transporter 2", "March Of The Penguins" and "The 40-Year-Old Virgin".

The regular release was case only - no slipcover issued, nor insert(s).

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There was one exclusive this was from Wal-Mart; a thicker than normal lenticular slipcover (for widescreen or full screen editions) with a small, soft cover book (96 pages from New Market Press), "Tim Burton's Corpse Bride: The Illustrated Story".

As far as I can tell, this was a complete, not part of a bigger compendium. Retold the story through text and stills. The collectible was sold on January 31st, 2005 for $18.99.

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Rant.

Tragedies on your tongue.

- The Endparty

Of all the Tim Burton presents (stop-motion) features, this is the weakest. On paper, the story sounds solid; a man accidentally marries a dead woman and gets sucked in the underworld, tries to get out of his covenant and along the way helps his bride find closure and eternal peace.

Good?



The thing; only the two main characters have any depth, the rest are filler and plot devices.

What hasn't at fault is the animation. Just frackin' amazing, such tiny subtle movement. No mistake about it, kinetics is an art. Even if you have the volume off (along with subtitles), you still know what's going on.

Maybe that's it, this should've been a silent feature.

But man, this ain't no "Nightmare Before Christmas" (1993).

And the music fills and fills; terrifies, horrifies - forever scares.

- Roky Erickson



NONE of the songs are memorable, as if Danny Elfman was busy with other projects and tried to write and couldn't. So he looks about, finds one of his old song books - the rejects. Ends up polishes off some turds and hands them over.

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Tangent.

Back in 2010, L.L. Vynterchilld did a fan a video; mixing scenes with music from the goth rock/electropop band, The Birthday Massacre. "Two Hearts - The Birthday Massacre (music video HQ)" (from the album "Pins And Needles" ['10]) it's on YouTube; works quite well, damn well. Makes me wonder how this could've been if they had used the band to write the songs. Search for it or if you know how, "6vV7TatArt0". It's still there (as of writing), checked.

Do seek them out, The Birthday Massacre. I'm still amazed that they're still not as popular as they should be. They're Canadian. They're last album came out in 2014, "Superstition". Great stuff.

Anyway, this is a tale that would make an excellent addition to the Tim Burton stop-motion cinema series...

Better yet made by Laika Entertainment; makers of "Coraline" (2009), "ParaNorman" (2012) and "The Boxtrolls" (2014). And directed by Henry Selick. By the way, Laika has another animated film coming out in 2016, "Kubo And The Two Strings". A Japanese ghost story.



Published in 1991 from Signet Books (now Penguin Books) was a 256 page paperback, a murder mystery anthology (ten thrillers) called "Murder At Christmas And Other Stories". A holiday theme collection edited by Cynthia Manson.

One of these is "Death In The Christmas Hour" by James Powell. Some back story. During the '90s I listened to the radio far more than I do now. There were shows I would hunkered down to; one of them was a science fiction and fantasy magazine program called "Mike Hodel's Hour 25" then hosted by Warren James.

Some perspective, this was before internet for me. If you wanted to know movie news, fandom stuff you had publications like Starlog, Cinescape, Femme Fatales (magazine died in 2008, the relaunched didn't happened) and Imagi-Movies (remember that?). Of course, Fangoria and Cinefantastique to name just a few. The radio show was an excellent add-on for my fanboy cravings.

Distance makes it fuzzy, but this could've happened in 1997 or 1998, the Christmas show. For that broadcast, Warren James read the Powell short. The man had the voice. I still remember that broadcast after all these years. Sorry, each Christmas they read various sci-fi/fantasy themed shorts.

The story...

Every Christmas at midnight, toys come alive for just one hour. They get drunk, party and/or reminisce. This Christmas Hour we follow the toys in a department store which haven't sold. One of them is a Sherlock Holmes action figure... you know where we're going with this. He is helped out of his dusty old box (the figure was put away and became long forgotten) by a teddy bear - his new Dr. Watson.

One of the toys is killed, the motive may have been a discovered affair. The body was discarded downstairs where toy crocodiles ate the corpse. One clue leads to another. The mystery comes to a climax - a chase. Holmes pursues the culprit up the store's Christmas tree, some of the ornaments are alive and try to stop the fleeing killer.

It ends with our villain reaching the summit where an angel ornament sits attached. He untethers and threatens to killer her (knife, I believe) if she doesn't take off - an aerial getaway. During this chase the clock tics down, we're coming to the end of the hour. The wrongdoer falls to his death in the struggle with Holmes; both hanging for dear life on the flying angel.

The tale ends the next day with both the bear and Holmes bought by a family giving a late Christmas gift. It was an awesome story, it rocked!!! SCREAMS to be made.

In 2000, "Hour 25" left the airwaves of KPFK (90.7 FM; Southern California) and became an internet show, podcast. While doing research, it appears that the program died on January 30th, 2011. No new shows listed. Too bad, I had fond memories of that.

I need to buy that book.