Adapting to the Great Vampire Invasion

I was reading the back of the DVD case of the copy of the 1988 (I believe it was) vampire movie The Lost Boys that I had bought. It said that the movie had a novel adaptation (unless the movie was adapted from the novel, like the case was with I am Legend, AKA Omega Man in the 70s, AKA The Last Man on Earth in the 60s). I never knew about that. Although whether it beats even Twilight, that I don't know. All I know is that this movie beats the Twilight movies anytime! If you don't believe me, then go rent a copy at your local video rental store or check out a copy at your local public library. Or you can purchase a copy for only five bucks if you look for it at Walmart or Target (where I got mine).

And today at a comic book store in Davis I bought the first issue of a 4 issue series of Marvel Comics' adaptation of Dracula. I haven't actually read the comic book yet, but I've read the novel at least twice and according to the illustrations it looks like it stays true to the original story. Now are their any interpretive twists in the storyline? (In which every adaptation needs at least to a very small extent because if they didn't have that what's the purpose of adapting the story? Although in comic books and graphic novels the illustrations themselves do a big portion of this.) I'll let you know when I get done reading this mini series which has been collected from portions of a magazine from back in the '70s called Dracula Lives! which was also published by Marvel.

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Book-To-Movie: Stephen King’s 'The Raft'

Credit: Pixabay.com It's the third Saturday of the month and so that means it's time for another Book-To-Movie ! In a Book-To-Movie we review a book and its movie adaptation. One of the reasons I as a horror fan don’t read a lot of Stephen King’s work is because most of it consists of novels that go more than 400 pages. I have a short attention span when it comes to reading, ironically since I consider myself an avid reader, and so I normally won’t read a work that is much more than the equivalent to a 350-page mass market paperback. The other reason why I don’t read a lot of King’s work is that, as literary scholars will tell you, a lot of his writing is poor. However, he does have some good writing in his works, especially his earlier stuff, including his short horror tales. So if I read anything by Stephen King it’s usually his short stories or novellas. One of his collections I’ve read is Skeleton Crew which includes some of his good, or at least...

Book-To-Movie: Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Black Cat'

Credit: Wikimedia Commons It's another fourth Monday of the month and so that means it's time for another Book-To-Movie review! In a Book-To-Movie (BTM), we review a work of prose fiction and its movie adaptation. A few years back, we had a BTM for Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Black Cat" and its movie adaptation. However, the movie we reviewed was actually a segment in Roger Corman’s anthology film, "Tales of Terror", which features three of Poe's short stories, including "Black Cat". And I'll tell you now, I liked that version far more than the version that we're going to review today which is the 1934 Universal adaptation starring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. I like Corman's version better mostly because it stays more faithful to the original short story than Universal's does. However, even though Universal's "Black Cat", directed by Edgar Ulmer, strays (excuse the pun) far from Poe's short stor...

Book-To-Movie: ‘Journey to the Center of the Earth’

Both the 1959 and the 2008 movies based on Jules Verne's novel, "Journey to the Center of the Earth", feature terrifying monsters such as the ones here in this illustration from an early edition of the book. Credit: Édouard Riou/ Wikimedia Commons Warning: This review may contain spoilers. As I said last post , I’ve postponed the month’s Book-To-Movie review from last week to this week. For those of you who are just tuning into this blog, a Book-To-Movie is when we review a work of prose fiction and its movie adaptation. And this weekend’s review is of Jules Verne’s novel, “Journey to the Center of the Earth” and its movie adaptations. There have been several movies based on this novel that was originally published in Paris in 1864 (as “Voyage au Centre de la Terre”). However, most of them have been either made for TV or video. Because I believe movies are best when made for the big screen, I am going to review the theatrical films in which there have been two: the 195...

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