The Horror Geek – News, Rants and Reviews From The Horror Geek!

A few days ago, I posted a story over at HorrorSquad (which, in case you didn’t know, is the other place I’m writing these days. I’d never leave my own little slice of internet Hell here at the HorrorGeek site, but I’d love it if you managed to head over to HorrorSquad and support me and the rest of the brilliant staff as well–you can never really have too much horror in your day, can you?) about Rob Zombie having finished his director’s cut of Halloween 2 and how it might differ from the theatrical print many of us endured back in August and September.

Now Zombie’s taken to Twitter once again, this time to assure us that the new cut (which will be available on DVD) is his preferred version of the film. As proof of this, I offer you exhibit A.

“Just finished doing the director’s commentary for the DVD of Halloween 2. Love the new cut. This is the real film.”

In Zombie’s defense, he did make Halloween 2 in an incredibly short time frame. It’s easy to imagine that he had to rush things and cut corners to meet the release schedule (he signed on to make the movie in the beginning of 2009–the film was in theaters at the end of August…), so maybe this director’s cut will be the film we were all anticipating. No release date has been announced yet, but you’ll read about it here as soon as I know.

One of the cruelest of this year’s April Fools pranks came from Twitchfilm.net. They claimed (going so far as to make a mock cover…) that Criterion was in the process of bringing Guillermo Del Toro’s Mimic to DVD in a special collector’s edition. A lot of people (and sites) were fooled and it was a real letdown when the news came out that this was a hoax.

Yet, it turns out that it really wasn’t. The Twitch story was made up, but Criterion is bringing us a Director’s Cut of Mimic as well as Cronos. Yay for self-fulfilling prophecies.

Del Toro updated the status personally on the Del Toro Films message board. Here’s what he had to say:

“CRONOS is evolving nicely. We are including a NEVER-SEEN-BEFORE version of GEOMETRIA (1987) the short that I made for 1 thousand bucks and that I was never able to finish the way I wanted it. NOW I re-finsihed it for this disc (dont worry, no CGI or fancy stuff) and I like it- I never did before- but now I do.

CRONOS has never looked so beautiful and we found dozens of photographs of the making of the device, etc

MIMIC is looking fabulous. Some of the negative had been lost but we found alternatives and are finishing the Director’s Cut. VERY HAPPY!!”

No word yet on a release date, but I’ll let you know as soon as it’s announced.

Clive Barker’s Nightbreed is very popular all of the sudden. News came last week that the long lost “missing” footage from the film was easily found–which was followed up by a studio executive crushing everyone’s dreams of seeing it by saying they’d never release it because the movie wouldn’t make enough money to justify the effort.

News from Barker today (courtesy of his twitter feed yet again. I still can’t really get used to the idea of sourcing news to twitter accounts. I can only imagine how real journalists must feel about this sort of thing) brings even more bittersweet news. There’s more lost footage than he remembered.

For years, the number tossed around when discussing the movie was 25 minutes worth of scenes excised from the final version. Here’s Barker on the topic:

“I was wrong. Phil and Sarah Stokes called .They possess a video copy of my Work Print,44 minutes longer than the theatrical release.”

44 minutes…how exciting is that? How frustrating is it that unless something monumental happens to convince the studio to release it, we’ll never actually see it. Keep signing that petition–it’s probably a futile effort (as most online petitions are), but it can’t hurt to try. You can find it by clicking here.