Elaine Chung
The opening minutes of a movie can be a make-it-or-break-it proposition. They’re like the first 50 pages of a novel. If the author hasn’t hooked you and reeled you in by then, well it’s time to move on to the next book on your nightstand. Of course, no one’s going to get up and walk out of a movie after ten minutes not when they’ve already forked over fifteen bucks. But a less than great start puts a director at a disadvantage. He or she has to win you back.
I keep a list of movies with perfect openings filed away in my head, from tried-and-true classics like
Elaine Chung
The opening minutes of a movie can be a make-it-or-break-it proposition. They’re like the first 50 pages of a novel. If the author hasn’t hooked you and reeled you in by then, well it’s time to move on to the next book on your nightstand. Of course, no one’s going to get up and walk out of a movie after ten minutes not when they’ve already forked over fifteen bucks. But a less than great start puts a director at a disadvantage. He or she has to win you back.
I keep a list of movies with perfect openings filed away in my head, from tried-and-true classics like
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How Critters, a Gremlins knockoff, spawned a horror comedy franchise
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Critters, a tongue-in-cheek horror comedy also directed by a protégé of exploitation maestro Roger Corman, shares the same elevator pitch. And, because it arrived in 1986 just two years after the impossibly cute-turned-murderous puppets known as Mogwai first hit screens
Critters was inevitably, yet unfairly, dismissed as a pure knock-off.
Stephen Herek has always insisted that his directorial debut, which turns 35 on April 11, was conceived long before Joe Dante explored the dangers of feeding antique store-bought pets after midnight. Alongside co-writers Domonic Muir and Don Keith Opper, he even went through the script with a fine-tooth comb to remove as many similarities as possible after being beaten to the punch. That s perhaps more effort than the makers of