2 posts tagged “thriller”

The trailer to one of my favourite films—but it’s very 1960s. A modern audience won’t exactly get excited over this. That’s ironic though: if you see the film, there are plenty of scenes which could be edited in a modern fashion to create a very impactful trailer. But since it was the 1960s, this was perfectly acceptable and there’s just enough of Sophia Loren in a state of undress to get her fans along. And plenty of Christian Dior dresses and shoes (oh, the shoes—they were in Loren’s contract and written in to the script as a fetish of Alan Badel’s character). Gregory Peck, meanwhile, is still one of the top stars of the time—doing a role originally written for Archie Leach (Cary Grant to the rest of us). Note the prominence of Henry Mancini’s name, too. 
   As a movie it holds up remarkably well, far better than the trailer.

Un pub pour le film Arabesque, de Stanley Donen, avec Gregory Peck et Sophia Loren.

 
Fellow blogger and novelist Dawn Rotarangi has a book coming out, Ripples on the Lake, and I’d like to see it come up in the Google index, instead of restaurants in Toronto and Sydney. She writes very well on her blog, and her novel will be even more fab. So here’s a link for you, Dawn, to the highest-placed site mentioning your book so far (Real Groovy). Available June 15, and here’s a synopsis taken directly from the Real Groovy site:

A taut, tightly-written paranormal thriller about what happens when a Pakeha family unwittingly invoke an ancient tohunga’s curse. When an out-of-it Billy Delaney steals coins from a sacred rock on the shores of Lake Taupo to buy a hamburger late one night, he has no idea what he is about to unleash upon himself and his immediate family. But then Billy has always been trouble, and when the oldest of Lucy Delaney’s children, Saffron, steps in to try and take care of him yet again, trouble swarms over the Delaneys like bees on a honey pot. First Saffron and Billy’s young niece suffers an horrific traffic accident, leaving her in a coma, balanced between life and death. Then the Delaneys begin to die horribly, one by one. It is left to a disbelieving Saffron and an unlikely ally, Nick—the burnt out war photographer trying to piece his life back together in a country backwater—to try to appease the wrath of the ancient tohunga Tama Ariki, whose quest for utu for his slain mokopuna echoes down the years. Set in and around Lake Taupo, the author creates a subtle web of superstition and the supernatural, bringing together both Maori and Celtic imagery to create a paranormal adventure that is pure Aotearoa.