Archive for December, 2008

A terrifying story of a young girl who wakes up in a casket with a traumatic head injury and no memory of her identity. She quickly realizes she was abducted by a Deranged Serial Murderer and in an isolated rural town she must survive the night and outsmart the technologically inclined killer who is hellbent on finishing what he started.

Dorothy Mills is suspected of assaulting a young baby in a contemporary but timeless rural village. She is visited by psychiatrist and outsider, Jane, who discovers that Dorothy may not be responsible for her actions and may be possessed by a horrifying and malevolent force. As she helps Dorothy, Jane is confronted with her own past tragedies – and starts to unravel another terrible secret hidden by some of the local villagers.

There is a place… a place called Grockleton, wherein, high on a hill-top stands the lonely Beesley’s Manor, governed by the villainous ‘Landlord’. Accompanied by his henchmen Pooch and Pike and the diesel-swilling Dobbin, the Landlord keeps a watchful eye over Grockleton and anyone who dares to enter his land. When three improbable heroes stumble unsuspectingly into the Beesley’s realm they are cruelly snared into a menacing hunt and an unstoppable frenzy of heart racing mayhem! Will the Landlord triumph and collect his trophies, or can the unlikely trio be victorious against him in his own game?

Stewart Hopewell will direct Slaughter from a script he co-wrote with Tim Long. Chris Milburn, Matthew Kuipers, Aimée Barth and Eryl Cochran Woodlief will produce. In Slaughter, a young woman thinks she is leaving her abusive life behind when she moves to Atlanta and ends up living at her family farm. She quickly learns that abuse comes in even crueler forms.

Three mysterious strangers terrorize a young couple in a remote house after they return from a wedding.

Directed by the collective group known as the Ronin Team, ‘Art of the Devil 3′ is the 3rd installment in the extreme Thai horror series.

In one of the special features on this new release, infamous director Paul W.S. Anderson said that he hopes Event Horizon will someday be like The Shining in that its initial lackluster reception would later be overturned by a strong following of film aficionados.

Unfortunately, that day has yet to come. Event Horizon has become the ultimate hate it or like it movie – people either can’t stand it because of its lame effects or cheap scares or casually enjoy the campy atmosphere and homages to old-fashioned horror movies. Few have yet to classify it as a great movie, but there are those – myself included – who find it a fun watch. Regardless, Paramount has found enough of a fan base to double-dip the movie in this new special edition.

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Horror is a genre that lends itself to remakes more than any other. In fact, there are probably more studio remakes in development right now than there are original properties. Why is this? Is it because they’re cheap to produce and don’t require an overpaid “A List” actor to get asses into seats at the theater? Or is it because they have the most doggedly loyal fan base in the entire entertainment industry? I’m sure that’s part of it, but more correctly, I think that it’s because scary stories are inherently timeless.

Take a movie like “My Bloody Valentine” for instance. It’s a story of a miner that was trapped in a collapsed mineshaft for weeks, surviving off of the flesh of his fellow victims, driving him mad. This was due to the negligence of his foremen, who had knocked off to attend a Valentine’s Day Dance. Of course the sole survivor, Harry Warden, emerges to take revenge on his supervisors and anyone that would dare celebrate Valentine’s Day ever again.

It’s the sort of story that you would tell over and over again at your yearly camping trip without ever losing what was great about it in the first place: That scary stories elicit an actual physical response from the receiver, a rare quickening of the pulse that comes more and more infrequently in this oversaturated age of entertainment.

To further prove this point, that there is always a place for horror remakes in our theaters and our homes, I’ve compiled a list of my top 10 favorite horror remakes of all time (in no particular order):

Cape Fear

Scorsese’s 1991 remake of “Cape Fear” is a textbook example of how to properly do a remake. Not only do you get a sense that the original subject matter is fully understood and honored, but the small changes and updates that were made actually improve upon the original. (In the world of horror/thriller remakes, you’d be surprised how seldom this is the case.) It certainly helps that Robert De Niro is as kinetically menacing and aggressive as he has ever been in this tightly wound revenge epic… Seriously, Max Cady even makes Travis Bickle look like a snuggly bunny in comparison. Additionally, Nick Nolte and his on-screen family are deeply flawed in ways that give much needed depth to this particular game of cat and mouse.

The Fly

Pretty much every one of David Cronenberg’s films deal with the themes of dysfunctional relationships and the fear of uncontrollable mental or bodily transformations (Videodrome, Scanners, Crash, Naked Lunch, etc.). Never was this strange union of ideas put to better use than it was in “The Fly”, the story of a man becoming less human in his stubborn attempt to take by force the love and glory that may not have ever been in the cards for him in the first place. Jeff Goldblum was at his finest as the “Brundlefly”, and the special effects hold up pretty well today, even though this film was made in 1986. Just be glad the producers didn’t let the originally slated director, Tim Burton, get his hands on it and turn “The Fly” into another Johnny Depp gothic-geek circle jerk.

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The Landlord is an independently produced horror/comedy film about Tyler, the unfortunate young owner of a demon-haunted apartment building.

Finding tenants has never been a problem for Tyler, though he does have trouble keeping them alive to pay rent. No matter how nicely Tyler asks the demons not to eat the renters (or to at least wait a month or two), they never listen.

But all that might change when Tyler takes a liking to the newest tenant, a desperate young woman running from monsters of her own.

When a sudden plague of blindness devastates a city, a small group of the afflicted band together to triumphantly overcome the horrific conditions of their imposed quarantine. “Blindness,” starring Academy Award®-nominee Julianne Moore, Gael Garcia Bernal, Mark Ruffalo, Sandra Oh and Danny Glover, is a psychological thriller about the fragility of mankind. Adapted from Nobel Laureate José Saramago’s masterwork, the film is directed by Academy Award®-nominee Fernando Meirelles (“City of God”) from a screenplay by Tony Award-winner Don McKellar (“The Drowsy Chaperone”).