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by Dan Persons

Come to scenic, Mars-based Neo-Venezia, where beautiful, female gondoliers paddle… gondolas and… look beautiful. That’s essentially the gist of the trailer you’ll find here, promoting Rightstuf’s upcoming release of ARIA THE ANIMATION (click the tabs at the left to start the video). Sure looks pretty, in any case.

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by Dan Persons

No, that title’s not a typo. It’s missing an article, maybe as a favor to multiplex managers who have to conserve marquee letters.

For that matter, I’m not sure what “Adventures” is doing in there either, since Johnny (Matthew Twining) doesn’t do all that much adventuring. The son of one-hit singing wonder Jimmy Dow (get it?), whose magic guitar hangs in the museum/shrine at the back of Johnny’s small-town gas station, the kid takes back seat in a number of the earlier fight sequences, while most of the kick-ass onus falls on agile actress Chris Yen, Continue Reading »

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by Dan Persons

It’s online, it’s free (until Sunday), and man, is it cool. Spawned from a desire to keep people working during the writer’s strike, Joss Whedon’s serialized, musical, low-budget, love-starved supervillain vs. asshole superhero watchamacallit, DR. HORRIBLE’S SING-ALONG BLOG is being debuted all this week. Act I is now up, with Act II being released July 17 and Act III on July 19. (Past Sunday, you’ll have to pony up to watch, either through download or eventual DVD release.)

Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion, and Felicia Day star & sing their hearts out. Catch it here.

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by Dan Persons

One of the more curious entries in the profile-of-a-serial-killer pantheon, They Pushed Him Too Far subcategory. Shot in Denmark¹, CRAIG suffers from some typical, direct-to-video maladies, including time-padding longueurs in the dialogue, sloppiness in the audio mix (room tone, guys — record it, catalog it, cut it in), and an occasional lack of imagination when it comes to a limited budget (a coma victim winds up in a hospital where the staff seemingly feels no need to hook her up to all that pesky monitoring equipment). Continue Reading »

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By Dan Persons

You get the sense that this whole thing kicked off when somebody got a look at all the spikes, picks, hammers, crampons, grapples, etc. used by ice climbers and said, “Shit, this stuff’d be great for killing people!” They would, actually, so points to the producers for that. Unfortunately, instead of taking this relatively inspired idea and placing their insane, spectral mountaineer in a suitable setting (and, really, how much would it’ve cost to mock up a tent interior and a couple of snow banks?), the producers have decided just to resurrect the old reality-webcast-gone-horribly-wrong scenario from 2002 and have quit with it. Continue Reading »

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BBC News links to the trailer for the upcoming CITY OF EMBER. The $50-million science fiction film stars Bill Murray, Tim Robbins, and Martin Landau. Based on a novel by Jeanne du Prau, the story is set in an underground city, built to protect the human race from inhospitable conditions on the surface; unfortunately, the city’s 200-year expiration date is coming up.

Co-financed by Ireland Screen and produced by Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman, the production was filmed partly in Belfast last year; the historic “Paint Hall” in the Titanic Quarter provided s suitable setting for an “underground” world:

Martin Landau said: “It’s amazing. It’s quite an amazing set, extensive and tall and comfortable. I would say it’s quite remarkable.”

The production design looks interesting, but Murray seems out of place, and the emphasis on young protagonists forebodes of a juvenile tone.

The film is scheduled for an October 10 release in the U.S.

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Director Alexandre Aja made a name for himself with two violent thrillers, HIGH TENSION and a remake of THE HILLS HAVE EYES. Now he’s trying a spookier form of horror with MIRRORS, a remake of a Korean ghost story. Check out the trailer below…

Some of the imagery looks interesting, but the whole thing feels overly familiar. The last thing we need is another remake of an Asian horror film, but if it keeps Aja out of the abatoir for a while, go for it, I say.

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Screen Gems releases this unnecessary remake of the old Jamie Lee Curtis slasher film from the 1980s. Donna’s senior prom is supposed to be the best night of her life. But a sadistic killer from her past has different plans for her and her friends. Cast:Brittany Snow, Dana Davis, Jessica Troup, Scott Porter, Collins Pennie, Kelly Blatz, Idris Elba, Jonathan Schaech. Nelson McCormick directs from a screenplay by Ernesto Foronda, J.S. Cardone, and Stephen Susco (THE GRUDGE), trying his hand at writing a non-Japanese horror film remake. Find theatres and showtimes here.

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It’s been since Jennifer Chambers Lynch (daughter of David) wrote and directed BOXING HELENA, a truly bizarro piece of weirdness. Now she has a new film coming out, called SURVEILLANCE, a thriller about a serial killer. That doesn’t sound particularly innovative, but the trailer looks interesting, and it gets points for including Violent Femmes on the soundtrack.

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SUPERHERO MOVIE - the latest in too long a line of obviously named spoofs - opens today without benefit of critics screenings. We will refrain from pointing out the obvious inference, leaving you to draw your own conclusions. The listing for the film at Rotten Tomatoes reveals only one review, posted by Luke Y. Thompson in the OC Weekly blog:

Director Craig Mazin has delivered a groundbreaking, whip-smart comic-book spoof that deftly deconstructs the genre without relying on surface-level parody…it’s called The Specials, and it came out nearly eight years ago. Superhero Movie, which is only Mazin’s second directorial effort, is everything his first film was not: predictable, flat, name-dropping, tragically unhip, and likely to make a decent amount of cash.

Whatever the deficiencies of the movie itself, it has engendered a promotional video that brilliant parodies the infamous Tom Cruise Scientology video. If the whole film were this funny, it would be a comic masterpiece:

Skip the box office lines and buy movie tickets online at Fandango.

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The Los Angeles Times has a brief rundown on Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema, new five-disc DVD box set that combines 13 hours worth of short films made by Méliès between 1896 and1913. Méliès was the father of film fantasy and special effects. A stage magician, he initially thought that the new medium of motion picture film could be used to capture his live act, but he found that the illusions lost much of their appeal when they were not seen live in front of the audience. The story goes that he was out filming a car going down a street when the camera jammed; he fixed the problem and resumed filming. When the footage was processed and projected, he was amazed to see a shot of an ordinary street car suddenly turning into a hearse: Méliès had discovered the magic of the jump cut! (The hearse may be a macabre detail added to make the story more interesting, but I have yet to read anyone who doubts the essence of the story.) Continue Reading »

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Here it is, the trailer for the film, due out May 22…

Harrison Ford, Shia LaBeouf, Cate Blanchett, Ray Winstone, and Karen Allen star for director Steven Spielberg. David Koepp wrote the script, from a story by George Lucas and Jeff Nathanson. The setting is South America, 1957, where Jones races through the jungles, hoping to beat Soviet agents searching for the mystical Crystal Skull.

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This earned some buzz on the festival circuit last year. Release date in England is February 15, but we yanks won’t get it until April (exact date to be decided). Let’s hope it does well on the British Isles, so that the U.S. distributor doesn’t have second thoughts about opening it here.

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IESB.net has an interview with director Guillermo Del Toro, conducted on the set of HELLBOY 2: THE GOLDEN ARMY. Del Toro describes the development of the idea for a sequel:

When we finished the first, we talked about it for a long time and I came up with an idea that was very different from this one. That is the one we pitched to Revolution. The character story was the same, but the anecdote wasn’t the Golden Army but the four titans in the four corners of the Earth. Wind, Water, Fire and Earth. And a prince wanted to awaken the four titans of the Earth. However, this idea felt to me like a more magical idea. The title Golden Army sounded great and I thought, “What could the Golden Army be?” And then when I thought about the princess’ father having constructed them eons before and him wanting them to conquer the world, it sounded immediately great and that is what we pitched.

He also describes how the sequel will differ from the first film:

One of the things I am changing is both the action and the fighting. I went for some things in the first one that I was not that happy with. I think this is a completely different type of fighting. I was lavish to a certain type of thing, trying to reproduce certain things the comic book did. But I tried it on Blade II and immediately after, I tried it on Hellboy. And for whatever reason, it already felt old. So what we are doing are things that I think are more freeing or in a strange way more beautiful or spectacular…There is a spectacle in the action and the fighting, there is a beauty to it.

UPDATE: IGN.com has an interview with actor Doug Jones, who not only reprises his role as Abe Sapien in the movie; he also plays a few other creature characters, including the Angel of Death.

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