The 11th Hour

Texas Chainsaw Massacre's Gunnar Hansen, Buffy's best villains, fall movie preview, more...

The Sixth Sense, Stigmata, The Haunting, Deep Blue Sea

Wing Commander, Virus

G vs E

Upcoming films list, Stir of Echoes, Lost Souls, more...

The success of The Blair Witch Project, seemingly by word of mouth and Internet buzz alone, has some studios wondering what exactly they're doing wrong when their highly promoted films can't make comparable profits. Luckily for them, I live to enlighten. While many studios haven't even caught on to the fact that their films deserve a companion web site, others are jumping on the bandwagon with little or no idea why exactly their movies need sites. This fall's cinematic offerings, in any event, are accompanied into the ring by their promoters: web sites of all colors, styles, and degrees of suckage.

	http://www.blairwitch.com/ The site that caught the world's attention by not sucking like a Hoover just keeps on going... the official page for summer's scariest movie, The Blair Witch Project, mostly sets the stage for the film, offering video clips of the "student filmmakers"'s parents and photos of the "recovered" tapes, even a timeline. But perhaps the most surprising thing about the site is that despite the buzz surrounding it, it's fairly boring. A bit of text and a bunch of pictures pretty much sums it up. More of interest -- including the film trailer and merchandise -- can be found at the site of Blair's production company, Haxan.
	http://www.deepbluesea.net/ You might think that the lame and uninteresting "would you like flash with that, sir?" page would be the first bad impression you'd get upon visiting deepbluesea.net. But it's not. As a WB web development, deepbluesea.net sports a far more annoying feature: "The Comet Cursor". The WB's sites all carry it, and it's a pop-up annoying on the level of those ad banners. The point of the "Comet Cursor" window? Click here and your cursor will look pretty. NO, I DON'T WANT YOUR GODDAMN CURSORS, YOU WARNER BASTARDS! Ahem. Anyhow, deepbluesea.net probably isn't worth sticking around for even after you get rid of the pop-up menu; the navigation in both the flash and non-flash sites is convoluted in an attempt at originality, by dividing everything into sections and putting them in parts of the "research vessel". Want to find pictures? Interviews? Good luck; they're scattered all over the entire site. And the flash site doesn't really carry anything more than the non-flash one; just some unimpressive blinking.
	http://www.foxmovies.com/lakeplacid/ Bobbing bodies, cow-carrying choppers, and a really big croc. That's what you'll get when you slip inside the Lake Placid site. Just don't look at it too long; it starts to get to your brain. A big background image that's fairly large and detailed may slow the experience considerably for those with slower connections, but once its cached your browsing experience should speed up considerably. Almost surprisingly, considering the silly nature of the main page's animation, Lake Placid's official site has some cool features: with Flash, you can design and send custom animated postcards; and there's photos, behind the scenes info, and other such important info. But by far the best feature of the site is a shockwave game called Croc Drop, in which you play the crocodile and try to snatch up the items dropped at you from a hovering helicopter. The folks in the chopper drop out everything from horses to cows to books to somebody's granny; eat the meat and you get closer to winning; eat the junk (or get bonked on the head by something) and your score drops. Yes, it sounds pretty stupid. But it's oddly mesmerizing.
	http://www.asylum.com/movies/h/haunting/ Need a cure for insomnia? The Haunting's web site could be just the thing you need. Far from frightening, it's just plain boring. The non-Flash version is particulary snooze-festy, featuring only one image and links to the film synopsis and trailer. The Flash version is only slightly more interesting, but the type will give you eye strain and there's frankly nothing interesting to read. The navigation, too, could use a bit of work; your menu is a picture of a room, with certain things highlighted. The painting on the wall will tell you about the director, the chandlier leads to the trailer, a mirror takes you to pictures of the cast... but none of it's really worth your while anyway. Add to that the fact that the site's somber colors are spoiled by the bright and gaudy ad banners, navigations, and animated gifs of Entertainment Asylum, where the site is hosted, and you might as well just find something better to do with your time. Maybe you can finally beat that 10-year-old punk at Yahoo chess...
	http://www.end-of-days.com The End of Days site is heavy on Javascript (so if you turned it off to avoid those annoying geocities ad banners, flip it back on for a bit), and uses cool graphics and creepy Biblical verse to draw you into a labyrinth of graphic-heavy pages. The site's propensity to change from visit to visit does lead to some rather interesting browsing, even if you're doing it entirely blind. You can go from a lovely image at one second to ten different auto-scrolling frames in the next. It's often an unpleasant transition, and visitors have to spend too much time trying to figure out where to click to get on to the next page. So when you do get to the actual content about three billion clicks later, with your mousing finger having little finger-spasms, you've seen some pretty cool artwork and if you're on an older computer, you've probably crashed at least ten times. But what is the holy grail on content that they've been holding out on? A screen saver. And the trailer. And that's it. All together, now: ARGH!
	http://movies.go.com/sixthsense/index.html After End of Days, the Sixth Sense site is pretty refreshing: it's small, it's simple, and there doesn't seem to be a bit of Flash or Javascript in sight. Unfortunately there's not much else, either. The graphics are fairly neat, but the same no matter where you go from the main page, and the content is slim. You'll find an extremely short synopsis, tickets and showtime information, a whopping two photographs, a list (not bios, just a list) of the main cast and crew, a 2.2 MB trailer in Quicktime format, and a little form to send in your own review of the film to... well, I don't know who gets it. Somebody at Buena Vista Pictures, I suppose. In any event, with a reasonable connection you can get through the entire site in about a minute and a half; with a slower connection, you may have to wait for the trailer awhile, but you might as well go somewhere else in the meantime.
	http://www.astronautswife.com/ Holy HTML, Batman! Could it be? Finally, a site whose design is simple and elegant, while at the same time managing to be slightly menacing (geez, I never thought Johnny Depp was scary before!). It's a thing of beauty! If you've got the high-speed connection (or the amazing patience), hit that nondescript "explore" on the left side of the page for some cool Flash-y goodness that you could probably spend at least an hour watching (yeah, I heard the film's lame... but I want to see it anyway just because of this cool Flash thing!); it doesn't contain the info you're likely to be looking for, but it's really neatorifico and sets up the film itself well. But if you're looking for direct information, it's easy to find; the menu on the right side of the main screen leads into the basic stuff: story, media, production, cast, and the (off-site) store. Bits of this informational area are fairly graphical, though, so it may take a bit longer than you'd like; it hitched even on my high-speed connection, and the beauty of the main page is diluted by the subsequent ones: the logo's animated, the menu's animated, and even the background's animated (shudder).
	http://movies.go.com/the13thwarrior/index.html The front page of the 13th Warrior web page is pretty eye-catching; in shades of yellow and orange and other such sunset-y colors, the graphics are quite nice. But you see that little brown box below the main graphic? The site's entire content fits in that box. Literally. When you first load up the page, you get the one-paragraph synopsis. Click on "cast" and you get a very un-exciting, very short cast/crew list with nothing but jobs and names. Click on "photos" and don't hope to hit the jackpot: there's just two of them, and they're not very good photos at that. But then, I suppose most movies get the website they deserve, eh?
	http://www.stirofechoes.com/ The Stir of Echoes site was created by dIGITAL dISCIPLES, the same web production house that created the Blair Witch site... and it sure shows. Take a look at both sites and ponder what you see. That's right... they're essentially the same. A really, really bad splash page asks whether you want Flash or not. If you don't, you end up with cumbersome animation. If you go the other route, you'll end up with a lot of Flash that really isn't needed (and there's no way to skip past the initial Flash introduction if you're doing multiple visits and just want to get at the goods). In both versions there's really annoying scrolling "news" going on (though for Stir of Echoes they've moved it to the top of the screen instead of the bottom) that nobody wants to wait around for. The shockwave game, an ESP test, is boring, and you eventually start clicking randomly to get it over with. The soundtrack info is nice (I was wondering who sings that bitchin' "Paint It Black"), but it doesn't allow you to order; most of the site bears "Coming Soon" signs; the interview with Matheson is boring and the questions sound like something a ten-year-old would ask. The one big high point is the availability of the film's excellent teasers, which is kind of a gimme for any movie site.
	http://www.sleepyhollowmovie.com/ "Ooooh. Pretty." At least, that was my first thought coming into the Sleepy Hollow site. My second thought was, "I wonder if we have any Doritos." And my third thought (upon discovering that no, there were no Doritos to be had) was that while it looks really cool, the Sleepy Hollow site is all hat and no cattle. It tells us only that the film (which it doesn't bother to hype yet) will be coming out around Thanksgiving, and its only other offerings are the film's trailer (in low or high resolution Quicktime) and an e-mail newsletter to subscribe to. Hopefully the site will beef up closer to the film's release; right now it's looking snazzy but there's no reason to stick around.
	http://www.mgm.com/stigmata It's very ummm... red. But despite it's somewhat bloody appearance, Stigmata's site pulls off some actual content; there's information on the real phenomenon of stigmata, as well as the cast and crew. But the real beef is in the middle icon off the main page ("the movie"); a click on that will yield up the soundtrack sweepstakes, a short story summary, a whole bunch of photos, desktop pictures (wallpapers) available for download in three different sizes, a view of the movie poster that zooms in cool and magical ways, the Quicktime video trailer, and sound samples from the soundtrack. While it's not an altogether exciting site, it is straightforward and mostly pretty quick to load. It delivers the goods in a way that, while not incredibly engaging, doesn't drive visitors away, either.