Stephen (ed.) - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

Scripted by Larry and Andy Wachowski and based on Alan Moore’s cult graphic novel (he asked for his name to be taken off the credits, as usual), Natalie Portman and Hugo Weaving starred as the political revolutionaries in James McTeigue’s delayed V for Vendetta , set in a near-future Britain controlled by John Hurt’s totalitarian dictator. It opened at #1 in the US with a lower-than-expected gross.

When Bryan Singer pulled out to revive another comic book franchise, Brett Ratner took over at the helm of the third and possibly final entry in the mutant superhero franchise, X-Men: The Last Stand . With a war between the mutants triggered by the discovery of a “cure” for their powers, this flashy but bland sequel featured former footballer Vinnie Jones as the brutish Juggernaut and a surprisingly good Kelsey Grammer as Beast.

Despite technically being a semi-sequel to Richard Donner’s 1978 film, Singer’s Superman Returns was unable to match the heights of that movie, with newcomer Brandon Routh failing to fill Christopher Reeve’s tights as the Man of Steel and Kevin Spacey apparently content to simply channel Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor. The less said about Kate Bosworth’s insipid Lois Lane the better, but at least the late Marlon Brando was back as Jor-El in an extended cameo. In the US, the film dropped 58% at the box-office in its second week.

Shown theatrically in Beverly Hills for one night only in November to benefit The Christopher Reeve Foundation, original director Donner’s cut of Superman II (1980) was finally destined for DVD release.

Ben Affleck portrayed former Superman actor George Reeves, found dead under suspicious circumstances in 1959, in Allen Coulter’s period mystery Hollywoodland .

Ivan Reitman’s harmless chick-flick comedy, My Super Ex-Girlfriend , starred Uma Thurman as the jealous superhero girlfriend unwisely dumped by Luke Wilson. Meanwhile, Bollywood’s own superhero adventure, Krrish , earned an Indian record of £8.3 million in its first week of release. Featuring a masked singing and dancing hero (Hrithik Roshan) saving the world from a mad scientist, around one-third of the film’s takings came from overseas, mostly in the UK and US.

Based on Patrick Süskind’s best-selling novel, Ben Whishaw played the Parisian serial killer with heightened olfactory sense in German director Tom Tykwer’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer .

Olivia Bonamy and Michaël Cohen were the married couple menaced by feral schoolchildren in their remote Romanian mansion in the French production lls ( Them ), supposedly based on a true story.

A blonde angel (Rie Rasmussen) gave a man (Jamel Debbouze) contemplating suicide his life back in Luc Besson’s pretentious Angel-A , while Virginia Madsen played a mysterious blonde who may or may not have been the Angel of Death in Robert Altman’s final film, A Prairie Home Companion . Penelope Cruz was haunted by the ghost of her dead mother (Carmen Maura) in Pedro Almodovar’s offbeat family drama Volver .

Over a weekend in November, Freestyle Releasing/After Dark Films offered a “horror fest” of independent films under the umbrella title 8 Films to Die For , plus Snoop Dogg’s Hood of Horror , starring Snoop Dog, Danny Trejo and Jason Alexander, which quickly came and went.

The same month, cinemagoers got a sneak preview of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix when the first trailer was released with the animated Happy Feet .

Gerard Butler, Sarah Polley and Stellan Skarsgård starred in the mythological saga of Beowulf & Grendel , while Eragon was based on the successful young adult fantasy book series and featured some nice-looking CGI dragons and shameless scene-stealing by Jeremy Irons and John Malkovich, who obviously realised how terrible the script was.

Based on the popular series of YA novels by Anthony Horowitz, Stormbreaker (aka Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker ) introduced the teenage super-spy (Alex Pettyfer) battling Mickey Rourke’s crazed computer genius, and two thirteen-year-old friends discovered a teen mermaid (Sara Paxton) in Aquamarine .

Veterans Dick Van Dyke and Mickey Rooney added a much-needed touch of class to the Ben Stiller fantasy/comedy Night at the Museum , also featuring Robin Williams, Owen Wilson and Ricky Gervais. It stayed in the #1 slot for two weeks at Christmas.

Adam Sandler’s office workaholic discovered that he could take control of his life with a universal remote invented by Christopher Walken’s crazy scientist in Frank Coraci’s crass comedy Click .

John Favreau’s children’s adventure Zathura: A Space Adventure was a SF follow-up to Jumanji and also based on a book by Chris Van Allsburg, while Charlotte’s Web was based on E. B. White’s classic children’s novel and starred Dakota Fanning as the girl befriended by the titular spider (voiced by Julia Roberts).

Tim Allen’s deputy DA found himself transforming into a were-pooch in Brian Robbins’ contemporary remake of Walt Disney’s The Shaggy Dog , while Allen’s Santa had to prevent Jack Frost (a mugging Martin Short) from hijacking Christmas in Michael Lembeck’s The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause , also from Disney. The busy Allen also turned up as Captain Zoom, who (along with Chevy Chase and Courtney Cox) instructed four children with special powers how to be accepted in the dire superhero comedy Zoom .

Britain’s Aardman Studios eschewed its usual claymation technique for computer graphics with DreamWorks’ derivative mouse-out-of-water adventure Flushed Away , featuring the voices of Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet and Sir Ian McKellen, and the likeable rodent Scrat and his prehistoric friends from the original were forced to flee the melting polar ice caps in the cartoon comedy sequel Ice Age 2: The Meltdown. Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties was a reworking of The Prince and the Pauper as the fat ginger cat (a CGI creation voiced by Bill Murray) was accidentally switched with an upper-crust British feline.

Featuring the voices of Julia Roberts, Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep, John A. Davis’ children’s animated adventure The Ant Bully was produced by Tom Hanks and released in some Imax theatres in very impressive 3-D. Ricardo Montalban replaced the late Marlon Brando as the voice of the Head of the Ant Council, while genre artist Bob Eggleton worked on the film’s designs.

Also shown in selected venues in 3-D, Gil Kenan’s Monster House was a disappointing motion-capture animated children’s adventure in which a trio of children found themselves trapped in a living house that ate anyone who ventured inside. Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg were executive producers.

Tim Burton’s classic The Nightmare Before Christmas was reissued for the Holiday Season in Disney Digital 3-D.

Although the original King Kong (1933) never won a single Oscar, Peter Jackson’s overlong and self-indulgent remake picked up no less than three (Visual Effects, Sound Mixing and Sound Editing) at the 78th Academy Awards, presented on March 5th in Hollywood. It was mostly a night for independent films, although Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit collected the award for Animated Feature, and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe won for Make-up.

2006 became the year that we finally said “goodbye” to the VHS (“Vertical Helical Scan”) cassette. The revolutionary home entertainment format went the way of Sony’s Betamax tapes and laserdiscs when DVD, new high-definition formats and the emerging video game consoles finally replaced it after thirty years. When the studios stopped manufacturing the tapes, retailers were left with no choice but to pull the plug on the format.