Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. I'm feeling like Clint Eastwood these days telling 3-D horror movies to get off my damn lawn! Which is weird because of all the potential 3-D vehicles horror is one of my favorites because they love the stab-you-in-the-eye gimmick... to show someone getting stabbed in the eye. And I miss that in this trend of Viewmaster 3-D. But that works for the cheesy horror movies. The Friday the 13ths, the Final Destinations, the My Bloody Valentines, not so much movies that lean on atmosphere for their scares... Hence why I can't fathom Ridley Scott's insistence that the Alien prequels be shot in 3-D and why I'm not sure I understand the reasoning behind going 3-D with the next RING movie. I mean, I understand the financial reasoning. "Avatar made a ton of money. So did a dozen other movies released in 3-D, so that means a 3-D movie is an automatic success!" I'm talking more creative. Maybe I'm alone in this, but the craftmanship that goes into these classier genre tales is one of the biggest draws for me and 3-D adds many restrictions to the filmmaker, the lighting the most important. I just did an interview with Jon Favreau this morning where we talk about 3-D a bit and he's under the impression the darker the 3-D glasses make the screen, the better that is for atmosphere and horror, but I disagree. The problem isn't that the glasses darken the screen, but it forces the filmmakers to shoot brighter or risk muted, hazy images. So, this is a whole lot of talk to essentially say that THE RING 3 will be in 3-D. The first film was very atmospheric and the best of the Asian horror adaptations by a country mile, thanks mainly, I'd say, to the fact that it had an incredibly visual director in Gore Verbinski that was able to translate the slow under-the-skin creepiness of J-horror to American audiences. All this discussion about serious horror being shot in 3-D making me a grouchy old man might be all for naught considering that Borys Kit's Heat Vision Blog says the next Ring film is likely to be "teen-centric," a phrase that turns me off right away. I loved that the focus of the first film was on a mother and her son. There's a million PG-13 teeny-boppers-played-by-twenty-somethings horror movies out there. David Loucka is penning the script and this might be the silver lining. I can't vouch for Loucka's work, but I've heard good rumblings about his in-development scripts for DREAM HOUSE and HOUSE AT THE END OF THE STREET. Now excuse me while I go take a swig of my Milk of Magnesia, hike my belt up under my tits, order some Dia-Beet-Us medication and go golfing, away from these damn kids and their foolishly-conceived 3-D. -Quint quint@aintitcool.com Follow Me On Twitter
