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Movies & TV

Destroy all monsters?

World War Z is a huge disappointment and Pacific Rim is still three weeks away, so where does one go for a proper creature fix? This week, you get yourself to the Revue Cinema for its Monsters Attack! series, celebrating decades of great screen terrors.

Things kick off tonight (Friday) with a double-bill of Alien and Aliens – though Alien is once again presented as Ridley Scott’s unnecessary 2003 director’s cut, rather than his perfect 1979 original – and tomorrow it’s the Bela Lugosi Dracula at 2 pm and the Boris Karloff Frankenstein at 4 pm, with 3D presentations of Jurassic Park at 7 pm and Jaws 3D at 9:30 pm.

Sunday features the original productions of King Kong at 2 pm, The Fly at 7 pm and Fright Night at 9 pm Monday, it’s fighting skeletons aplenty with Jason And The Argonauts at 7 pm and Army Of Darkness at 9:15 pm. Tuesday offers Ghostbusters at 9:30 pm, Wednesday has John Carpenter’s The Thing at 7 pm, and the series wraps up Thursday with a 3D screening of Creature From The Black Lagoon at 7 pm.

Now, if you’re more interested in how movie monsters are made, Donna Davies’s documentary Nightmare Factory screens at 9:30 pm tonight at the Carlton as part of the Female Eye Film Festival. It’s a fun look at the life and career of makeup effects artist Greg Nicotero, who founded the highly regarded KNB EFX Group with his pals Robert Kurtzman and Howard Berger, designing memorable visuals for pretty much every horror movie you liked in the last 20 years.

Nicotero, who’s currently the zombie wrangler on The Walking Dead, is an amiable subject with plenty of fun stories Davies supports them with testimonials from such illustrious collaborators as John Landis, John Carpenter, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. But really, the eye-popping set footage from Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II is worth the price of admission all on its own.

There’s a movie called Dragon Of Athens playing in this weekend’s Toronto Greek Film Retrospective screenings, but there no actual dragons are featured. Instead, it’s a wrong-man thriller from the 50s about an unassuming Athens fellow who’s fingered as a master criminal and decides to enjoy the infamy for a little while … which, of course, proves disastrous.

Screening Sunday at 7:30 pm, it’s the final film in the festival, which takes over the Danforth Music Hall Saturday and Sunday and also includes a matinee of Costa-Gavras’s fantastic political thriller Z Sunday at 2:30 pm. Admission is free tickets are available half an hour before each show. Check the website for the full schedule.

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