Fiendish Films for Ghouls, Girls and Boys: Coraline / 9 / the Vampires Assistant / Casper

Fiendish Films for Ghouls, Girls and Boys: Coraline / 9 / the Vampires Assistant / Casper Description

Coraline As covetous children are often warned: 'Be careful what you wish for'. It's this very cautionary wisdom that sets the stage for Henry Selick's Coraline, an eerily eye-popping stop-motion animation tale of fractured dreams and families made whole. As the films opens, Coraline Jones (voiced by Dakota Fanning) and her parents (Teri Hatcher, John Hodgman) have moved into the Pink Palace, a once-vibrant boarding house that's turned drab and dilapidated. As her parents work feverishly on a new gardening catalog, the bored and belligerent Coraline is admonished to explore her new world's possibilities. Along the way she meets her fellow tenants, including two aging English showgirls and a mouse-training Russian acrobat, as well as an outcast neighbourhood boy named Wybie. But it is a mysterious hidden door that most piques Coraline's interest - a gateway to a parallel world where her 'other' parents and neighbours live only to see Coraline well fed and endlessly entertained. All is not cakes and carnivals for Coraline, though, and the black buttons that have replaced the eyes of these otherworldly imitations hint at darker intentions. When these intentions are revealed, Cora and a friendly magical cat use their wits and willpower to defeat Coraline's wicked 'other mother' and restore balance in the real world. Based on Neil Gaiman's beloved children's novel, director Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas) uses the stop-motion technique to bring Coraline to life with amazing visual and emotional depth. The result is a frightfully magical adventure that will give the whole family plenty to shriek, cheer, and talk about. 9 An action-packed adventure, director Shane Acker's animated fantasy epic 9 is the feature-length expansion of his Academy Award-nominated 2004 short film of the same name. The screenplay for the feature is by Pamela Pettler (Monster House); directors Tim Burton (Beetlejuice) and Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted) are producing. Set in the near future. The world's machines have turned on mankind and sparked social unrest - decimating the human population. But as our world falls to pieces, a mission begins to salvage the legacy of civilization, and a group of small stitchpunk creations is given the spark of life by a scientist - and they successfully survive the apocalypse! With their group being so small, these creatures must summon individual strengths well beyond their own proportions in order to outwit and fight against the still-functioning monster machines. 9 dynamically explores the will to live and how one soul can change the world. The Vampire's Assistant Based on the novels by Darren Shan, Cirque Du Freak tells the adventurous tale of a boy who unknowingly breaks a 200-year-old truce between two warring factions of vampires. Pulled into a fantastic life of misunderstood sideshow freaks and grotesque creatures of the night, one teen will vanish from the safety of a boring existence and fulfill his destiny in a place drawn from the dream world. Casper From director Brad Silberling and Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment comes a live-action fun house ride filled with laughter, excitement and ghostly surprises. Ghost therapist Dr. James Harvey (Bill Pullman) and his daughter Kat (Christina Ricci) arrive at drafty, old Whipstaff Manor. Its greedy owner, Carrigan Crittendon (Cathy Moriarty), has hired Dr. Harvey to exorcise the house's apparitions: a friendly but lonely young ghost named Casper, who's just looking for a friend, and his outrageous uncles Stretch, Stinkie and Fatso (The Ghostly Trio). If the plan works, she and Dibs (Eric Idle), her partner-in-slime, can get their hands on the manor's fabled treasure. Meanwhile, Casper has found a kindred spirit in Kat, but The Ghostly Trio will not tolerate fleshies in their house. With hilarious antics and dazzling special effects from many of the creators of Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Jurassic Park Casper is a fun-packed adventure comedy for the whole family.