You’ll find a lot familiar about the journey in the new sci-fi thriller Underwater, but it’s certain to keep you on the edge of your seat, trigger your claustrophobia, and get most of the beats of the survival thriller genre right. Most of that is thanks to Kristen Stewart, who stars as an engineer named Norah, working in an oil drilling facility seven miles down at the bottom of the ocean. Stewart makes our own recent tour of isolation seem pretty tame, as her world literally explodes due to some deep-sea fracking that causes an earthquake, breaking up the facility and severely minimizing the opportunities to leave for the surface. If that weren’t enough, the earthquake releases some kaiju-inspired beasties. It all allows Stewart to create a character as tough and heroic as Alien’s Ellen Ripley with a modern homage to the original sci-fi survivor.
Super7, the toy company known for its wide variety of action figure licenses and its retro Kenner style carded, 3.75-inch action figures, greatly surpassed its delivery at last year’s Toy Fair (shown here and here) by bring hundreds of prototype figures, card back mock-ups, and final versions to New York Toy Fair 2020 this past weekend. More than the typical sneak peek, Super7 previewed a huge variety of action figure cards for its ReAction line, with pre-ordering forecasted for later this year and some items available now here at Amazon.
New action figure licenses at the show include Army of Darkness, An American Werewolf in London, Aliens,Andre the Giant, Back to the Future II, Knight Rider, The Munsters, Archie, Red Dawn, Beavis and Butt-Head, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Son of Frankenstein, Spongebob Squarepants, Halloween II, and a new line of NBA All Stars. Bands with new figures seen for the first time in the Super7 line include RUN DMC, Notorious B.I.G., and Ol’ Dirty Bastard.
Plus past figure lines will see more additions this year. Those include Universal Studios Monsters, Peanuts, several Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Nightmare Before Christmas, lots of Transformers, Toxic Crusader, Thundercats, Ghost, Misfits, Mars Attacks, Alien, Chucky, and Robocop, and Super7 displayed several final figures this weekend that were previewed last year here at borg, includingThey Live, Teen Wolf,Major League Baseball All Stars, MLB Mascots, and characters from the Rocky movie series.
Take a look at close-up views of just a sampling of the action figures on display at this year’s event:
If you’re a fan of action figures, Super7 delivered again with a sneak peek at a whole host of action figure cards for its ReAction line, expected to be fleshed out even more this weekend at New York Toy Fair 2019. How much fun is in this single photograph? We’re expecting Super7 will be revealing details this weekend, but until then, here’s what we can tell is coming soon from the toy company’s line of licensed, retro 3.75-inch action figures with the classic Kenner five points of articulation.
In the top row we’re seeing that Super7 is preparing three figures from John Carpenter’s They Live, a sci-fi classic fans of the ReAction line have been asking for for years. So there are cards for Roddy Piper’s JohnNada (before the fight and after? without bubblegum?), and a male and female alien (nope, no Frank or Holly).
The eight Rocky IV figures include the previously announced Rocky Balboa and Ivan Drago (both in boxing ring attire), Rocky and Drago (in final round outfits), Rocky (winter training), and Sico the Robot. Add to that a Carl Weathers Apollo Creed and a mystery figure (most likely blacked out because the likeness hasn’t been approved yet), maybe Brigitte Nielsen’s Ludmilla or Talia Shire’s Adrian? Burt Young’s Paulie? We’re hoping Super 7 may be looking back a movie to Rocky III and Mr. T’s Clubber Lang.
The Super7 Major League Baseball “Supersports” line-up has some great picks: In addition to Jackie Robinson, we see Roy Campanella, Orlando Cepeda, Willie Mays, Carl Yastrzemski, Ted Williams, Carlton Fisk, and two others under the Classic All-Stars logo, including Juan Marichal, Mickey Mantle, and Yogi Berra, plus Madison Bumgarner and at least one other under the Baseball All-Stars logo. We’re guessing there are four Mascots in the initial wave, including the Giants’ Crazy Crab, Mr. Met, and the Phillie Phanatic.
The first Aliens line has all the right figures, a new Sigourney Weaver Ellen Ripley, plus Bill Paxton’s PrivateHudson, Jenette Goldstein’s Private Vasquez, a seriously messed-up Lance Henriksen’s Bishop, and a new Xenomorph variant. Is there a Michael Biehn Corporal Hicks hiding off-camera? Maybe a Jonesy and Newt combo pack?
Two new book releases will get you (or your favorite writer) back on track, whether you’re trying to write a novel or communicate any other way. “Words have meaning” is the theme of That Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means, a look at the most incorrectly used words in the English language–and how to turn around your usage if you’re doing it wrong. The second book is a new look at a classic work on writing, Save the Cat! Writes a Novel: The Last Book on Novel Writing You’ll Ever Need, a step by step approach to address the writing process if your goal is to write the next Great American Novel.
It’s not just a good paraphrased line from Inigo Montoya. For That Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means, sister and brother writers Kathryn Petras and Ross Petras (authors of You’re Saying It Wrong) researched surveys, dictionaries, language usage panels, and language experts to identify the 150 most commonly confused, abused, questioned, and misused words and phrases in the English language. It’s a small but jam-packed book that should go next to your copies of Strunk & White, The Chicago Manual of Style, andThe New York Times Manual of Style and Usage. It also will help anyone preparing for their SATs, as words on this list have been commonly used in past tests. The handy pocket-size also might make this a good choice for stocking stuffer.
Each word or phrase is listed by its frequent mistaken usage followed by quotes by celebrities, periodicals, or online articles getting it all wrong. Even the most critical writer will agree with the authors’ selections of the way you should or shouldn’t use the term, although you might disagree with one or two along the way and purists may think a few times the writers have caved to modern usage choices. The authors will reinforce, remind, or educate readers about many traps. Can anything ever reach a crescendo? No. Is “contiguous United States” almost always used incorrectly by nearly everyone? Yes. If you regularly use words or phrases (or non-words in some cases) like chronic, begs the question, cliché, alright, in regards to, just desserts, from whence, peruse, verbal, verbiage, and utilize, and you’re not sure of what you’re doing, you probably need this book. The Petras’ book should be required reading in every high school senior English or first year college English class.
An excerpt from That Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means.
Writers of screenplays and novels may have already heard about one of the handful of books on writing for film, Blake Snyder’s 2005 bookSave the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need, one way to approach writing for movies. In Save the Cat! Writes a Novel, author Jessica Brody takes Snyder’s original book and tweaks it for novel writing, arguing the same basic rules for storytelling apply for novels and film. If you’ve read the original you’ll be familiar with the approach taken here: the best stories include 15 basic “beats” or plot points. The theory is that if your novel includes these beats and applies them correctly and in the right places, you’re more likely to have a story that agents, publishers, and readers will take note of.
Halloween is going to be upon us before we know it. It was only three months ago that we got our first look at the new Halloween movie, and today Universal Pictures released a second trailer. I had a friend momentarily confuse Sigourney Weaver and Halloween star Jamie Lee Curtis today, and I think there is a good reason for that: Curtis has been the Scream Queen for 40 years and this latest trailer seems to indicate this next movie may be what the franchise needs to give Curtis’s character full badass screen hero status.
In case you missed it, take a look here at borg.com at the prior trailers for the run of the Halloween films showing Strode’s appearances. Strode is one of those heroines audiences love to see return, as proven by her multiple appearances from a variety of writers and directors. Like Weaver’s Ellen Ripley and Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor, Curtis has created and re-created one of genredom’s enduring characters, even if that character is usually running from a crazed killer. Like fans hope for Hamilton’s return as Connor again next year in a new Terminator movie from James Cameron, in the latest trailer for the new Halloween, Curtis looks tougher and smarter, and more badass than even shown in the first trailer.
In the real world it is public knowledge that Curtis and Weaver are close friends. Can you imagine walking into a restaurant with these two women having a normal lunch sitting across from you? You’d either feel very safe or keep looking over your soldier for something bad to happen.
Get ready for Halloween with this great trailer with Curtis’s character–40 years in the making–taking charge:
The crazed killer in the William Shatner Captain Kirk mask returns. Again. Much has been said about John Carpenter’s 1978 horror flick Halloween. It launched the career of Jamie Lee Curtis and an entire genre of movies. Curtis is back for more in the eleventh film in the franchise, this Halloween’s holiday horror release, Halloween. Yes, that makes the third movie titled only Halloween. A plus for horror fans is Nick Castle returning as Michael Myers–the first time since 1978. Castle has had an interesting and varied career, directing films including The Last Starfighter, and writing films like Escape from New York. Even better, this sequel disregards everything but the original: Halloween 2 (1981), Halloween 3: Season of the Witch (1982) (the only film not about Michael Myers), Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988), Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989), Halloween (6): The Curse of Michael Myers (1995), Halloween H20 (1998), Halloween: Resurrection (2002), and the reboots Halloween (2007) and Halloween 2 (2009). So forget that stuff about Myers being Strode’s sister. Or Myers being dead. Or Strode being dead. It didn’t happen. And best of all, John Carpenter is back, this time as executive producer and composer (cue the creepy piano keys now).
Laurie Strode is one of those heroines audiences love to see return, as proven by her multiple appearances from a variety of writers and directors. Like Sigourney Weaver in the Alien franchise as Ellen Ripley and Linda Hamilton in the Terminator franchise as Sarah Connor, Jamie Lee Curtis has created and re-created one of genredom’s best loved cinematic heroines. Like fans hope for Hamilton returning as Connor again next year in a new Terminator movie from James Cameron, in the trailer for the new Halloween, Curtis looks only edgier, and, well, more badass than ever before.
This will be Curtis’s fifth time playing Laurie Strode. First was Curtis’s first appearance as Laurie Strode in the original film. Keep an eye out for film audience’s first look at Curtis as Laurie Strode, plus Carpenter movie staple Donald Pleasance (Escape from New York, Halloween 2, 4, and 5), a young P.J. Soles (Stripes, Law & Order), and an even younger Kyle Richards (The Watcher in the Woods, ER). Curtis was back one more time–we thought, in 1981 as Carpenter and Debra Hill tried to bank on the original’s success with Halloween 2, finding Strode stalked by Michael Myers in a hospital (with an appearance by The Last Starfighter’s Lance Guest). Twenty years later Curtis returned as Strode again, this time teaching at a private school, and protecting her son from the return of Michael. The 1998 sequel is pretty good for a horror sequel, and so is the trailer (keep an eye out for Curtis’s real-life Mom or horror icon Janet Leigh (Psycho, The Fog), Josh Hartnett, Adam Arkin, LL Cool J, and four-time Oscar nominee Michelle Williams). And Curtis then came back another last time five years later in 2002’s Halloween: Resurrection, possibly the lowest point in the franchise (yep, that’s Battlestar Galactica’s Katee Sackhoff in the trailer). Strode returned to confront… her brother (?) Michael and he didn’t seem to make it out of Halloween H20, and Laurie didn’t make it out of Halloween: Resurrection. Now we forget all that: Donald Pleasance’s psychiatrist character did shoot and wound Myers, and he’s been in jail since.
Check out clips of their last stands and film trailers featuring Curtis below–you can really see comparisons like those between Linda Hamilton’s transition from Sarah Connor in The Terminator and Terminator 2 comparing Curtis as Strode in Halloween (1978) versus Curtis as Strode in 2018. But first here is the trailer to the latest, director David Gordon Green’s Halloween:
James Cameron has plenty to say about science fiction and he pulls in some sci-fi directors and dozens of sci-fi actors and creators to lay it all out in his new AMC series James Cameron’s Story of Science Fiction. Many series have wrestled with the subject of defining science fiction, most recently Ridley Scott’s Prophets of Science Fiction, where the Alien and Blade Runner director honored George Lucas, Robert Heinlein, Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, H.G. Wells, and Mary Shelley. Not known for his interviewing, Cameron opted to record more informal chats with a small circle of his contemporaries, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Guillermo del Toro, Ridley Scott, Christopher Nolan, and Arnold Schwarzenegger (plus an interview by friend/science fiction writer Randall Frakes of Cameron himself), attempting to guide them down his framework of analysis, sometimes gaining agreement and other times sparking interesting tangent questions. The interviews are divided up and sprinkled across six episodes of the AMC television series, and the blanks are filled in with sound bites from creators, professors, writers, and popular names from modern science fiction. But the companion book, also titled James Cameron’s Story of Science Fiction, is far more insightful, showing the broader unedited interview text for each of Cameron’s six key contributors, plus great color artwork to illustrate his history of the genre. Ultimately the book is a more useful, informative, and interesting overview of science fiction than what the series provides, and recommended for fans wanting to dig deeper into the history of the genre.
For those that haven’t encountered a review of the genre, Cameron’s Story of Science Fiction, available now from Insight Editions, will provide the appropriate highlights. The combined narrative is at its best when attempting to find the reasons for the importance of science fiction as literature and art, as influence to society, and as a reflection on mankind’s discovery of self, but it’s also fun for any diehard genre fan to follow along, agree or disagree, and ponder the myriad alternatives to the examples given to illustrate the topics covered. The book is better than the TV series at analyzing and presenting the coverage, tying each key contributor to a sub-genre or major sci-fi concept: alien life, outer space, time travel, monsters, dark futures, and intelligent machines. Cameron has done his homework and claims to have read nearly anything and everything since he was a kid on the subject. His own significant science fiction contributions, namely Terminator, Terminator 2, and Aliens, and developing the two biggest women film roles of the genre–Sarah Connor in Terminator 2 and Ellen Ripley in Aliens–are only slightly overshadowed by more than required attention to his film Avatar as frequent centerpiece topic. He also spends more time on modern science fiction films, sometimes leaving behind classic films that had done it all before. So surprisingly great influences like Star Trek, Rod Serling, and John Carpenter get far less attention proportionately than you’d find in another science fiction overview, and the vast body of science fiction television series is barely tapped at all.
The most insight comes from George Lucas and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Lucas provides rare reactions to fan criticism of Jar Jar Binks, his Star Wars prequels generally, and his concept of midichlorians manipulating the Force, which he states would have been key to the third trilogy had he kept control of the franchise. Immersed in an interview about science fiction his responses seem to reflect regret in selling Star Wars to Disney, as if he had far more Star Wars stories to tell. The rest of the book’s seriousness is counterbalanced nicely by Schwarzenegger, who Cameron repeatedly attempts to get introspective about playing science fiction’s greatest villain and hero cyborg as the Terminator. Not a method actor, Schwarzenegger reveals himself as fanboy and entertainer when it comes to science fiction, drawn more to the spectacle and excitement of science fiction roles and how the characters appear on the screen more than any life-changing meaning from the stories that Cameron is searching for.
Aliens is a film like no other, a rare sequel that is arguably as good or better than the original. It’s horror, but even more so than the original Alien, it is a science fiction classic in its own right. Aliens was ahead of its time, a successful blockbuster from James Cameron, who quickly put together a story treatment and sold the studio on his vision of the follow-on to Ridley Scott’s unique and acclaimed original. Last month here at borg.com we reviewed Aliens–The Set Photography, a new book chronicling the creative work behind Aliens released for the film’s 30th anniversary. Action-packed with top-notch acting from Sigourney Weaver and a great supporting cast, plus some of Stan Winston’s best creature work, Aliens rightfully is getting the 30th anniversary treatment this month in Blu-ray.
Aliens is one of about a dozen science fiction or horror films to earn Academy Awards. It won two, for visual effects and sound editing. It was also nominated for art direction, sound, film editing and original score. Better yet, Sigourney Weaver earned her much deserved first nomination for best actress. Weaver’s Ellen Ripley is among science fiction’s best performances, and Weaver the core of what made the franchise and this film successful. The anniversary release includes two previously released versions, the 1986 original theatrical version and the 1991 extended edition. If you missed the extended edition, it’s well worth your time. Ripley gets more screen-time, and more character development, including the dichotomy between the death of Ripley’s daughter mirroring the Alien queen’s protection of her offspring–it’s great fun to see a character you think you know in scenes not included in the original version you saw in the theater.
The extended edition commentary track is as good as you’ll find on any disc. Where most releases these days include the director or producer and one or two cast members, the commentary accompanying the extended edition includes far more–a treasure trove of content and insights into the film. You’ll hear details on movie making from director James Cameron, producer Gale Anne Hurd, the late, great, alien effects creator Stan Winston, visual effects supervisors Robert Skotak and Dennis Skotak, miniature effects supervisor Pat McClung, and actors Michael Biehn, Bill Paxton, Lance Henriksen, Jenette Goldstein, Carrie Henn, and Christopher Henn.
Following on its success with last year’s Back to the Future Day celebration and the annual Star Wars Day (May the Fourth), 20th Century Fox has created a new day to bring fans back to the Alien franchise. Although we believe they should have gone with Mother’s Day, April 26, 2016, is being targeted for the first Alien Day in honor of the doomed world, LV-426, where Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley first encountered the vile xenomorphs in 1979’s Alien. This means bringing the movie back for a limited theatrical release and plenty of product tie-ins. It’s all in anticipation of Fox’s release of Ridley Scott’s next Alien franchise film next year, Alien: Covenant, starring Michael Fassbender.
For action figure fans, NECA is releasing Lieutenant Vasquez, Newt, and Kenner-style Ellen Ripley figures, and Funko is releasing a Kenner-style Queen, Power Loader and Ripley figure set and Super 7 will offer several figures. Hot Toys will sell a 1:6 scale Ripley figure. Look for Kotobukiya to release a 1:10 scale xenomorph. Sideshow and Medicon Toy company will also release new Alien figures.
Titan Books is releasing a new Tim Lebbon tie-in novel, Alien: Invasion. (Check out our review and interview with Lebbon here at borg.com of Lebbon’s first awesome Alien novel Alien: Out of the Shadows). And Alien: Out of the Shadows will get its own audiobook featuring the voice of Rutger Hauer. Insight Editions will release a new book, The Weyland-Yutani Report.
The Renaissance of movie and TV tie-in action figures arrived in 2013 with Funko’s classic Kenner-style ReAction figure line. Other companies focus on single licensed figures and getting the likenesses spot-on, but Funko’s diversification of lines meant everyone could find something that fit their personal niche at an affordable price point. A true throwback series, one of the overlooked features of the line is the incredible variety of no-names-taken, classic kick-ass heroines represented.
In fact you can find here the top of the world’s best, in-your-face, take-no-prisoners, genre heroines. Buy them for yourself, for your friends, or get your favorite as a totem to inspire you each day from your desktop. And where the early sculpts in Funko’s line admittedly looked nothing like the actresses that made the roles famous, the new lines have only improved. And nobody has better packaging designs than the ReAction line.
Who would you add to the Funko roster of heroines? Compare your list to our more than 85 suggestions for future kick-ass women action figures below.
First, check out this Baker’s Dozen of our favorites in the current Funko pantheon:
