Posts by Emily Langton

Aliens, time travel, sex, monsters, violence, sex, conspiracies, cover-ups and oh yeah, sex.  "Torchwood," which comes to the United States this Saturday on BBC America, is the little brother of "Doctor Who," or maybe the raunchy cousin who's got all the good porn on his computer.  "Torchwood" takes the popular character Captain Jack Harkness from the first season of Russell T. Davies's revival of "Doctor Who" and gives him a team and a show of his own.  He's the leader of Torchwood Three in Cardiff, Wales, a team that's "separate from the government, outside the police and beyond the United Nations."  (Torchwood One was destroyed in the season two finale of "Doctor Who" and we never hear much about the other Torchwood bases.)(read more...)

He sleeps in a freezer, not a coffin.  He gets his blood from his dealer, a guy who works at a blood bank.  He doesn't burst into flames in the sun and he can't be killed with a stake through the heart.  He likes golf, Steve McQueen movies, classic Star Trek and Miles Davis.  That's the modern vampire as seen on the new fall show Moonlight (airing Fridays on CBS at 9PM EST/PST, starting September 28th).

Mick St. John, played by Alex O'Loughlin, is the latest vampire detective to hit primetime TV.  It's a subgenre that most people equate with Joss Whedon's prematurely cancelled Angel.  Executive producer Joel Silver says that Moonlight will not be Angel 2.0.  "It's just a different world," he says.  "There are no demons, there are no other entities.  It's a world where there are vampires, and they're around, and they're living among us.(read more...)

Friday afternoon at ComicCon, Joel Silver presented a look at Moonlight, a new vampire detective show that premieres on CBS this fall. (Fridays, 9 pm.)

The show focuses on Mick (Alex O'Loughlin, The Shield), a vampire who was turned by his wife Coraline (Shannyn Sossamon) on their wedding night sixty years ago and still hasn't forgiven her. He now works as a private investigator and refuses to drink from living people. Internet reporter Beth (Sophia Myles, Doctor Who) meets Mick at a crime scene (unaware that she had met him previously as a small child) and he becomes her protector.
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Lionsgate presented a look at Midnight Meat Train at their Comic-Con panel Thursday. Based on Clive Barker's short story from Books of Blood, the movie follows photographer Leon Kauffman (Bradley Cooper) as he stalks serial killer Mahogany (Vinnie Jones).

Mahogany works in a meat factory by day and on the subway at night, where he "gets victims on the train and takes them to a special place to feed people." Further research outside the panel clarified that Mahogany is turning his victims into meat to feed subterranean cannibals.

Director Ryuhei Kitamura says his goal was to "make something better than Hellraiser and Candyman." Apparently he has succeeded - Clive Barker says of Midnight Meat Train, "This is the best adaptation - and I'm including my own work - of any short fiction that I've ever seen."

Shooting for another Books of Blood short story, "Pig Blood Blues," begins in October.
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