Friday, May 1, 2026
EIGHTH TOWER'S MUSIC FOR ANCIENT CATACOMBS
Raffaele Pezzella has announced a new Eighth Tower audio anthology: Music for Ancient Catacombs.
The album/CD digs deep into the recess of heart, soul and mind, recalling a disinterred time of bold adventures, harrowing peril and sweet, sequestered surrealism.
The selections are sometimes welcoming and sometimes forbidding, but no matter the tonality, one's imagination will be stoked.
The contents include (artists on the left, titles on the right):
1) Kammarheit - In Quiet Depths
2) Sublimatio Mortis - A pilgrimage towards nothingness
3) New Risen Throne - Entering the Stone Circle
4) Mario Lino Stancat - Somnium
5) SILENI - WIthin the Vaults
6) Ashtoreth & Penumbral Aethyr - Khthon
7) Nerthus - Missa tenebrarum
8) Guru Bobol - linthre
9) Dapalis Sepolcri - La Fosse des Cholereiques (A.G.T.L.L.)
10) Adonai Atrophia - The Lowest Chamber
11) progettosonoro - Underground Sorrow
12) PNEVMMA - kry-pti
13) Aconis - Sanctum in the Depths (bonus dgt track)
This sagacious curation is much too epic to ignore. Preorder at
https://eighthtowerrecords.bandcamp.com/album/music-for-ancient-catacombs
I SAW DEEP WATER (2026)
Rennie (Die Hard 2/Elm Street 4/Prison) Harlin is again in full, action swing with his latest, Deep Water, a companion piece to his previous, sharks-attack effort, Deep Blue Sea, with this one written by S.P. Krause, Shayne Armstrong and Peter Bridges (et al) and co-produced by Kiss' Gene Simmons.
Deep Water is in groove with another plane-disaster, shark picture, Claudio Fah's No Way Up, as well as Tommy Wirkola's recent Thrash, in that they both allude to the infamous, WWII, shark incident that Quint recounts in Jaws, depicted in Robert Iscove's Mission of the Shark: The Saga of the U.S.S. Indianapolis and Mario Van Peebles' U.S.S. Indianapolis: Men of Courage. (Incidentally, in regard to the Jaws saga, there's also a colorful, Jaws 2 nod within the plot. You'll know it when you see it.)
With Deep Water, we get a 747, which while traveling from L.A. to Shanghai, crashes straight into the Pacific Ocean (thanks to a laptop-led explosion), leaving its passengers as scattered, mako bait.
The plane's first officer, Aaron (The Dark Knight/I Frankenstein) Eckhart's Ben, is the hero, a troubled one cut from Harlin's Cliffhanger cloth, mirroring Sylvester Stallone's Gabe Walker, who in his own right mirrors any number of conscientious, Irwin Allen, disaster-movie heroes.
Though Sir Ben Kingsley's Rich, a captain ready to retirement, adds a distinguished but doomed presence to the story, circumstances force Ben to the long-run forefront. However, his guidance is a hard squeeze, considering that the passengers are being taken down one by one, thus raising the panic quotient a hundredfold. (It all comes down to "Who's next?": anything but reassuring.)
The stranded co-participants are headlined by the heedless Jaya, played by Kelly (Plane/Beast 2026) Gale (who holds top, marquee prominence); Cora, played by Molly (Apostacy) Brown Wright, a snippy but anchoring, little girl; and Dan, played by Angus (Fury Road/Insidious) Sampson, his character being the uncouth jerk you'll cheer to be devoured. However, all those involved enrich the dilemma's ups and downs by conveying a palpable, shared panic, with variances among them (good, bad and in-between, some smart, some stupid), which would reflect any realistic, incidental gathering forced into a high-stakes, if not condemned, circumstance.
Eckhart knocks it outta the park, though, as a man with the world on his shoulders, doing his best to reassure the passengers that everything will be okay, even when the gory evidence says otherwise. He dons an adamant visage that could crack at any moment, and because of this, he becomes an identifiable focus for the plot. Everything revolves around him. Everything (in particular the tension) works because of him. He is Deep Water, pure and simple.
Though Deep Water isn't heavy on groundbreaking complexity any more than No Way Up or Thrash, like the latter, it moves right along, creating a heart-pounding diversion and despite its curious, limited release, works as a swell, scary way to christen 2026's big-screen, summer suspense.
THE ORIGINAL DAWN OF THE DEAD'S END
I discovered an interesting video regarding Dawn of the Dead 1979 (and I'm sticking with 1979, because that's when the movie hit mass distribution; a test-run preview occurred in 1978, no more or less; it's an official, 1979 release, period.). The video comes from Captain Gold and delves into the original ending conceived by George A. Romero for his flesh-eating zombie epic, which would have depicted Peter (Ken Foree) and the pregnant Fran (Galen Ross) committing suicide: Peter would have shot himself in the head and Fran would have raised hers into their helicopter's blades.
I'm glad Peter and Fran survived at the end of the movie, although if they had perished, the outcome would have better mirrored Night of the Living Dead's. Also, I've never had a problem with characters dying in movies (unless it's a dog or cat and then my feathers tend to get ruffled). For the most part, great poignancy flows from a major character's demise: case in point, Godzilla's "fatal" meltdown in Godzilla vs Destoroyah. (I know a clueless crybaby who still bemoans that one, to which I say, "Grow the hell up! Imagi characters never truly die. They're designed for resurrection [though sometimes they reappear through prologues, but same damn difference], or have you missed the obvious, perennial point of Star Trek II & III or how about the clever flow between Logan and Deadpool & Wolverine? Oh, and getting back to good ol' Gojira, how many times have we've seen the big guy stomp across the screen after death and/or defeat before or since Destroyah? Capisce?")
Anyhow, Captain Gold's sincere synopsis of the considered Dawn of the Dead ending has been inserted above, but the essay speculates as well on what may have happened to Peter and Fran after the credits rolled. In other words, how long would they have survived beyond the mall? The video's conjecture and the viewers' comments resonate with me. I think they'll resonate with you, too. Why not give the piece a nice, zombie-fied whirl?
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