In all the years of holiday films, one would think every concept has been explored. Family dysfunction, romance, John Candy and Steve Martin, BB guns, ghosts of Christmas past, and George Bailey takes care of everything… or so you would think. Leave it to Tim Burton to take the Christmas holiday and do something with [...]

7th Voyage of Sinbad is classic Hollywood. It is a grand-scale adventure, loaded with goofy costumes, magic, monsters, women, villains, and heroes. It’s not a great movie, with long stretches of dull dialogue and wooden performances, but the special effects of Ray Harryhuasen can make anything a classic.
Not surprisingly, that’s the case here. Regardless of [...]

At 38 minutes into Coraline, the title character walks into a circus tent. There, a collection of musically talented mice perform a circus act, one that could be one of the most startling, jaw dropping animated sequences in the history of stop motion animation.
Every mouse moves, turns, and dances to the music, making the choreography [...]

It is rather surprising that more creature films don’t feature giant squids. We’ve had all sorts of radioactive monstrosities over the years, yet the giant squid is real. Logic dictates that something real is far more frightening than something that isn’t. Though not a giant squid (it’s an octopus), It Came From Beneath the Sea [...]

While a flying saucer seems like the last thing a film would need the stop motion talents of Ray Harryhausen for, it’s amazing to see how his work can make the end result turn out. Without it, you’d have a substandard flying saucer ’50s B-movie. With his skill, you have a near classic.
While hardly the [...]

What makes a ‘50s giant-monster movie more than a ‘50s giant-monster movie? Ray Harryhausen. Stop-motion expert extraordinaire Harryhausen gave life to numerous film icons, and one of them is the Ymir. 20 Million Miles to Earth carries many of the expected genre plot points, but the stunning stop-motion Ymir is too impressive a sight to [...]