Thompson On Hollywood

Twilight MySpace Teaser Trailer Clicks Over 2 Million Views

Summit Entertainment is doing cartwheels. That's because they're already in production on a movie, Twilight, based on the first book in a trilogy vampire saga by book phenom Stephenie Meyer.

The 34-year-old Mormon author just landed a takeout in Time Magazine calling her the new queen of fantasy with the head: The Next J.K. Rowling? The article praises Meyer's books for being about the "erotics of abstinence." She "rewrites stock horror plots as love stories."

She's basically the young adult Anne Rice, because Twilight is a romantic 17-year-old Romeo and Juliet with vampires and humans. Rising star Kristen Stewart (discovered by Jon Favreau in Zathura, Panic Room) plays a girl who falls for a handsome guy (Robert Pattinson, of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) who turns out to be a vampire. But he's a good vampire who has renounced sucking human blood. He and his mother coven feed on animals. His virtue--his psychological struggle against his lust for blood--makes him interesting. The movie, directed by thirteen's Catherine Hardwicke, is due December 12.

Vampires have fed Hollywood since its infancy, from Bram Stoker's Dracula and Nosferatu to Rice's Interview with a Vampire, Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Underworld series. But this series has femme appeal.

When Summit slapped a teaser trailer up on MySpace on Monday at 11 AM, it pulled 1 million views in 36 hours and has now passed 2 million. The teaser will premiere on E.T. Friday, and will run in front of family-friendly Speed Racer (maybe that will boost its ticket sales). "I would have been happy with 500,000," says Summit chief Rob Friedman, who scooped up the rights to Twilight when it had sold 10,000 copies just after he started Summit's new production/distrib arm. Paramount had the option and let it go. Since then the first three Twilight books have sold over 6 million copies in the U.S. "I knew the book had a fan base but it's always good to see it's bigger than you think," says Friedman, who has a potential franchise on his hands. This is what any new company lusts after.

UPDATE: Wired is also tracking this. The trailer could break the current record of 4.1 million views in one week set in March by Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The internet fan buzz on this is so intense that Summit marketing may want to consider pulling back a tad.

Here's the HD teaser trailer:

Twilight in HD

[Illustration for Time by Anita Kunz]

Trailer Watch: All Hellboy Breaks Loose

(Posted by Peter Debruge)

Few filmmakers can connect with their inner child the way Guillermo del Toro does, although that quality looks like it just might undermine how much we grown-ups have to look forward to in Hellboy II: The Golden Army.

After an elegant teaser that laid out many of these same images in a semi-logical fashion that adults could appreciate comes this "show everything" cocktail designed (it would seem) to appeal to the kiddies. It's fitting that del Toro is making this series for Universal since he clearly has the studio's classic monster movies in mind — then again, Uni's recent Mummy retreads sacrificed the creaky, B-movie appeal of the original series for noisy CG-heavy effects, and del Toro's first Hellboy picture wasn't much different.

This franchise, of course, is del Toro's big passion project, and he's admitted that he didn't have the budget he wanted last time. But surely script comes first, and it's tough to judge by this trailer — which puts the visuals front and center — how strong the story will be. Still, amid the frenzy, it's possible to decipher that all manner of monsters (how 'bout those visionary "forces beyond our understanding"?) emerge to do battle with the humans, and that Hellboy and his gang will have to choose sides. Sounds a lot like the "mutants vs. humans" dilemma of the X-Men series. Can we trust del Toro to get it right?

Rick Baker Talks Del Toro as Wolfman

EW has exclusive pics of Benicio Del Toro as Wolfman. Who would we rather see exploring his out-of-control id, Edward Norton as The Hulk, or Benicio del Toro as The Wolfman? Hmmm.

Who's your fave Wolf Man? Michael J. Fox? Michael Landon? Or Lon Chaney (pictured)?

Incredible Hulk Photos

Empire Magazine posts some exclusive photos of Edward Norton and Bill Hurt in Marvel's new and presumably improved The Incredible Hulk, which Norton rewrote. The movie opens June 13.

[Hat Tip: Premiere.com]

Wired Does Iraq and Horror

Wired.com has three movie stories up:

The Oscar-nominated Iraq films.

An interview with Phil Donahue on his doc Body of War.

And a piece on The Signal, a horror movie about the dangers of too much information.

Diary of the Dead Horror Shorts Contest

From January 30 through February 29th, MySpace Film members who submit their horror shorts via the Diary of the Dead MySpace profile can try to win a spot on George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead DVD. Visitors to the Diary of the Dead MySpace profile can vote for their favorite short films; the top ten will be judged by Romero, who will pick the five best for inclusion on the DVD. (The film, which was reviewed out of Toronto, hits theaters on February 15.)

Here's the Diary of the Dead trailer.

Weekend Boxoffice: Cloverfield Kicks Butt

Cloverfield ate up the weekend boxoffice, reports Pam McClintock.

Cloverfield: Variety Review

Todd McCarthy likes it.

Cloverfield is Fun

Cloverfield is fun. It's a hand-held, cleverly manipulated monster movie told from the point-of-view of a bunch of Manhattan 20-somethings trying not to get killed. Some of them die. They pass the camera back and forth. Cloverfield is a fitfully scary, amusing, annoying rollercoaster thrill-ride that lasts 74 minutes. It cost only $25-million--so who cares how big the opening is this weekend? I will bet money that the pic does well with moviegoers in the end. God forbid it should build word-of-mouth. Doesn't anyone believe in that anymore? It works like a charm.

J.J. Abrams talks about his mystery box.

UPDATE: Jeff Wells has the tracking numbers, which are ticking up.

But critics may be harsh, judging from one friend of mine who wrote me this response: "i thought my eyes were bleeding when i left. i thought my head was going to explode." My sense was that it played for the fan boys at the screening on the Paramount lot last night. Variety critic Justin Chang and I ran into a headless Statue of Liberty on our way out, swathed in moonlight.

And the LAT's Mark Olsen writes up the making of the movie.

Teeth Posts First Five Minutes

Teeth opens this Friday, and as the tagline says: "Every rose has its thorns."
Check out the first five minutes:

Cloverfield: Knowles is Over the Moon

If moviegoers respond to Cloverfield the way Harry Knowles has on AICN--and I was damned impressed with the footage I saw--then when this movie opens on January 18 it will be, forgive the expression, a boxoffice monster. Paramount, which has been holding back the movie to preserve the mystery--they don't want that freaking monster to hit the net-- can start screening it now! (And yet again a studio has solicited the ultimate fanboy review before going to more critical reviewers. UPDATE: And they showed it to Jeffrey Wells.)

It cost $25 million. No stars. Do the math.

Here are portions of Knowles' rave:

The movie is fucking brilliant. It’s what we were told it was going to be. An intimate perspective on an impossibly grand scale human disaster beyond most human levels of comprehension.

What is the monster? How do you describe something that doesn’t look like anything you’ve ever seen before? It’s not a fucking upright walking whale. It doesn’t look like any iteration of GODZILLA that we’ve ever seen. It is enormous. And even though I’ve seen it… I am hard-pressed to come up with a comparative creation. You know that big fucking thing in THE MIST? It isn’t that. Is the creature a biped? I’m not sure, I think it might’ve been a four-legged beastie… it has a tail, it has teeth and freaky eyes like that horse that died in ANIMAL HOUSE. It’s kinda of a grayish-yellowish-off-white looking thing. But more important than the creature is what this fucker does. He basically goes bug-nuts.

The creature isn’t the groundbreaking thing about the film. It is, but it isn’t.

You see, what has me so excited about this film is that this is the giant monster movie that isn’t at all like any giant monster movie we’ve seen before… but is exactly that movie.

I guarantee you that as this movie takes place… all the shit that you’ve seen in Giant monster movies is happening. Somewhere a general is screaming about nuking New York…. Somewhere is a politician screaming that you can’t nuke New York. Another General wants to know why our weapons are not affecting this thing. A PRESIDENT wants to know where it came from – and several thousand journalist are trying to figure all that out too.

But this film isn’t about the scientist, the generals, the Presidents, the mayors or any of the big people. This time, the film is from the perspective of those people that live in those buildings that the monster is breaking through. This is about the people running in the street that scream, “GODZILLA!!!” and run. This is about trying to survive that insanity. Not just that, but to try and save one life.

Like SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, but instead of Nazis it’s a giant monster.

This is a handheld camera movie – knowing this and knowing not to sit too close is probably a good thing… but having said that… you can’t sit far enough from the screen to feel safe. As many of you people know, I am in a wheelchair – and while watching movies, I have my brakes on. There was one moment, so unexpected and so intense that I went 3 ft back.

J.J. Abrams produced and came up with the concept; the script was written by Lost collaborator Drew Goddard, working closely with Abrams and and his Felicity collaborator Matt Reeves, who directed. To suggest that Reeves did not direct this is silly. Movies are by their nature collaborative.

Again, the queasicam aesthetic is here to stay. Directors like Paul Greengrass and Kevin MacDonald and yes, Matt Reeves are answering a moviegoer demand for authenticity. In this case, it's about taking something unbelievable and making it seem real. No matter how much fake movie magic it requires.

UPDATE: Fandango has a new clip, in which the monster seems to go by, real fast. And speculates about the meanings behind the title.

Cloverfield Shows Monster, Gets "Intimate"

There's some new info on Cloverfield in this week's column. I saw some scattered scenes on an Avid, not the whole movie. But I got a good sense of the film, and can't wait to see the whole thing. Paramount is purposely holding back on screenings--there's no junket at all--because they want to preserve as much of the mystery that has worked so well for them. They'll start screening the film next week.

Cloverfield not only reveals the monster several times in several ways, says director Matt Reeves, but "by the end you have intimate contact." Also, Cloverfield was always the film's title. The strategy was to go out with an untitled trailer, which referred to 1.18.08, the release date. Then when the internet took off with the early trailer, the filmmakers needed to use fake titles like Cheese in order to shoot around New York.

Moviemarketingmadness updates the movie.

Sweeney Todd Opens in 5th Place

Sweeney Todd opened to excellent reviews (87% fresh on Rottentomatoes.com) and strong initial numbers on Friday, but the movie dropped an estimated 28 % (actually 25%) between Friday and Saturday. (Here's Sunday's Variety weekend boxoffice report.) This indicates that many viewers were lured by Paramount's mainstream horror-driven ad campaign, which did not sell the film as a Stephen Sondheim musical, and walked away disappointed. (The company also seeded the internet with clips showing the musical numbers.) Selling a unique movie like this, where there is no tried-and-true pattern to follow, is admittedly tricky. So Paramount made the call to go wide with 1200 runs--and not build the movie from fewer runs in sophisticated urban markets. It now looks like Dreamworks' initial strategy might have been the right way to go. That way early adopters would spread good word and build an audience slowly over time, rather than folks being lured into seeing a movie that they wind up not liking--and spreading bad word.

Sweeney Todd is a great movie. But it is the kind of unusual and arty film that requires delicate, special handling. OK, so what if it isn't a movie with mass-market appeal? Will the Academy come through for a great film that is tainted in the marketplace? And what happened with the Screen Actors Guild bypassing Sweeney? It's quite possible that many of the SAG committee members did not see the late-breaking Sweeney; the DVD finally went out Saturday.

UPDATE: According to DreamWorks, the plan was to start at 800 screens; based on tracking and reaction to the movie they expanded to l200. The two studios agreed to the plan. There were several different spots for the movie, some with music, some not.

Trailer Watch: Del Toro's Hellboy II

Guillermo Del Toro has put up a trailer for his next, Hellboy II: The Golden Army.

Trailer Watch: Cloverfield

Harry Knowles has a clip from Cloverfield, Paramount's new monster movie due January 18.

Dark Knight IMAX Featurette

Chris Nolan has shot several sequences of The Dark Knight--due next summer--in IMAX. Here's the promo featurette:

Teeth Trailer: Every Rose Has Its Thorns

Writer-director Mitchell Lichtenstein's feminist horror comedy Teeth is a must-see for women who can handle some ultra-violence and men who can handle the subject matter. Here's the trailer. Virginal high school student Dawn (Jess Weixler, who won an acting prize at Sundance) tamps down her budding sexuality by volunteering at a local chastity group. Provoked by her nasty stepbrother Brad (John Hensley), Dawn unwittingly discovers that she has a toothed vagina (vagina dentata) more than willing to fight back against unwelcome intruders. Dawn struggles to understand, control and accept her unusual anatomy. Roadside Attractions will open the horror pic in February, more than a year after its debut at Sundance.

AFM Video: Animals in Love

The Circuit's Mike Jones swears that no animals were hurt while making this AFM video:

Halloween Week: Saw IV Leads Boxoffice

Saw IV butchered the weekend boxoffice, natch. Here's Variety's Sunday b.o report and review. I have never seen a Saw movie, and probably never will. Saw's strength suggests that despite the recent decline in the fortunes of torture porn, established franchises with brand cred like Saw and Resident Evil can still do well.

Here's Pamela McClintock's astute analysis of the depressed fall boxoffice, which is down from last year by 6 %. There were too many R-rated dark-themed movies and too many indie pics crowding theaters and scrabbling to keep screens when they need time to build word-of-mouth. Thursday, the LAT took a stab at the indie boxoffice, without making clear distinctions between limited and wide releases and long-playing and short-term pics. MCN's David Poland adds his take: in the long term, many of these pics will catch up with last years equivalents. McClintock points out that the pattern is: summer tentpoles, softer entries in September and October, holiday tentpoles.

Salon lists The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Torture.

And this 2001 article posits a 20-year cycle theory on horror films. Hmmm.

DVD Spindoctor is making daily Halloween week scary movie picks.

UPDATE: The second annual After Dark Horrorfest runs from November 9 – 18th on over 300 AMC, Regal and Cinemark screens across the U.S. Horrorfest 2007 will premiere 8 Films to Die For, scary flicks that run the gamut of horror: from thrillers to gore to the supernatural. Here's the lineup:

[Seven Days of Halloween graphic courtesy of DVD Spindoctor]

Sweeney Todd 2: The Halloween Version

There's a hint of Psycho screeching violins in the score of the second Sweeney Todd trailer. The music is Stephen Sondheim, but there's no singing in this one. It's the R-rated horror Halloween version.

Horror Round-Up: Carpenter and King Share the Halloween Spirit

As Halloween approaches, EW extracts John Carpenter's scariest moments. I knew Carpenter well at the start of his career, when he was still an indie maverick making Halloween, The Fog and Escape from New York. Crews and actors loved him. But he never delivered on his promise inside the studio system.

Stephen King gets in the Halloween mood.

And here's a list of the most controversial horror flicks ever, like Luis Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou (right). That woman is about to get her eye sliced with a razor.

13 Most Horrifying Screen Chills Ever

The London Times chooses the top 13 scariest horror scenes ever. Be afraid. Very afraid. [Hat Tip: Colin Boyd.]

When I was a kid, I was terrified by three movies: Robert Wise's The Haunting, which featured a menacing house that pounded, turned doorknobs, wrote notes on the wall to "Eleanor" and morphs a young girl in her bed into a old woman banging on the ceiling with a cane. That'll scare anyone.

The Window is a tight little thriller about a little boy (Bobby Driscoll, who won a special Academy Award) who witnesses a murder. No grownup will believe him while he is being chased--and caught--by the bad guys. He's utterly on his own.

In Mirage, Gregory Peck keeps seeing the image of a watermelon splatting on the pavement--he's traumatized by having seen someone fall out of a high rise to their death. He's lost his memory and keeps getting lost in the wrong stairwell.

Nothing has ever scared me as much since.

There is that wonderful moment at the end of Brian De Palma's Carrie (my favorite film of his) when the arm reaches up through the grave. Ridley Scott's Alien has the creature busting out of John Hurt's stomach. George Romero's original Night of the Living Dead is one of the creepiest movies ever made. And this list's number one choice, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, is packed with truly scary stuff--like the blood rising out of the elevator. Redrum. Redrum.

Horror Writer Takes Research Too Far

Would-be horror writer Jose Luis Calva was arrested in Mexico City when police investigating the disappearance of his girlfriend discovered her dismembered body in his apartment:

Jose Luis Calva told police he had boiled some of his girlfriend's flesh but that he hadn't eaten it, the spokesman said.

The official also confirmed other details released by the prosecutor's office Wednesday night: that body parts were spread throughout the apartment, and that Calva is being investigated in the deaths of three women whose mutilated bodies had been found in and around the capital.

How soon before someone gobbles up the film rights to this?

Kenny Vs. Finke on Torture Porn

Premiere's Glenn Kenny does not buy Nikki Finke's Elle.com suggestion that a Hollywood blogger can change the way the studios do business.

Musical Thriller Repo! The Genetic Opera Starts Filming

This announcement grabbed my attention. Maybe it's because it's a movie musical with an interesting title, maybe because it's being directed by a horror film refugee and it's based on a musical play. (Sweeney Todd meets The Phantom of the Opera!) Lionsgate starts principal photography this week in Toronto on Repo! The Genetic Opera, starring an odd assortment of actor/singers: debuting musical theater star Sarah Brightman (Phantom of the Opera), Anthony Head (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Paris Hilton (oy), Bill Moseley (The Devil's Rejects), Paul Sorvino (Goodfellas), & Alexa Vega (Spy Kids).

The director is Darren Lynn Bousman (Saw II, III, and IV, due October 26) from a screenplay by Terrence Zdunich and Darren Smith, co-creators of the original stage production. Japanese musician, songwriter and composer Yoshiki is producing the film’s soundtrack.

Lionsgate is obviously backing their in-house director, Bousman, who is a passionate devotee of this genre-bending bizarre future fantasy world: he directed the first Los Angeles stage production in 2002 as well as a 2006 short film version. The plot is worthy of Richard Kelly's Southland Tales: after an epidemic of organ failures devastates the planet, killing tens of millions, scientists make plans for a massive organ harvest program. Biotech conglom GeneCo offers payment plans to those lacking funds to purchase new body parts: but financed organs are subject to default and repossession at the hands of organ repo men.

This is one of those projects that could be fresh and fun or gross and godawful. I've never seen the Saw pictures, so I have no idea if this guy can direct or not.

Twisted Pictures, headed by Mark Burg and Oren Koules, also produced the Saw franchise and Catacombs, part of their nine-pic deal with Lionsgate.

Funny Games: Haneke's Thriller Remake Trailer

Here's Michael Haneke's 1997 version, starring The Lives of Other's Ulrich Muhe.

And here's the 2007 version, ten years later, starring Tim Roth, Naomi Watts and Michael Pitt:

Tartan Warner Independent plans to release Funny Games in February 2008.

Uwe Boll, Bloggers Go Postal

[Posted by Peter Debruge]
I have an unnatural preoccupation with Uwe Boll, the director fanboys love to hate. Why do they despise him so? In their eyes, Boll butchers their favorite videogames by directing nonsensical adaptations of Alone in the Dark, BloodRayne and House of the Dead (the latter inexplicably intercuts shots from the first-person-shooter zombie game with frantic action scenes).

Is the German-born Boll any worse than all the low-budget genre directors working today? Not necessarily. He just catches flak for defiling hardcore gamers’ sacred cows. But Boll's strategy is pretty clever, when you think about it, since the popularity of the titles compels studios to give him decent budgets and respected actors to make his movies.

Personally, I’m not so sure someone like Peter Jackson could do much better with the same material, but it’s always entertaining to see how the fan community reacts to the latest Boll “abomination.” Variety’s own Dennis Harvey attended the San Francisco premiere of Postal (another vidgame adaptation, this one doubling as post-9/11 satire) and didn’t completely hate it.

A couple writers from Wired caught the screening, too, instigating an angry (and amusing) back-and-forth with the director over the nasty remarks in their review. Boll writes:

Chris wrote that article in bad faith to damage me. His whole goal is to destroy my business. If he cannot see that scenes (for example WELFARE OFFICE, Job Interview) are genius in that movie - then there are 2 possibilities: he is dump and has no idea what movies are or he hates me and is dissappointed about his own shitty career.

He ignored also that the audience enjoyed the movie and tons of other critics LOVED it.

That’s right. Boll referred to the “genius” of his own work. “Tons” of critics loved it. Those late to the Boll bandwagon are in luck. He has three more films in the can: BloodRayne: Deliverance (a straight-to-video sequel that inexplicably takes place halfway across the world a full century later), Seed (which sounds like that Cleaver movie on The Sopranos) and In the Name of the King (a Dungeon Siege vidgame adaptation starring Jason Statham and Burt Reynolds).

The Invasion: DOA?

The Invasion, Warner Bros. and producer Joel Silver's troubled remake of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers--which for some strange reason does not lean on that recognizable title--did not play well in Comic-Con. Nor is it screening any better here. The troubled production, for which the Wachowski brothers apparently did reshoots, was expensive, too: some $80-million, I hear. Aren't horror classics supposed to be remade on the cheap?

Here's the Variety review. Safe to say, this is not a rave: "a slick but forgettable characterless thriller," writes Dennis Harvey.

Trailer Watch: Del Toro Presents The Orphanage

This Spanish thriller got great notices in Cannes and brooks comparison to The Others. Presenter Guillermo del Toro is mentoring young director J.A. Bayona. The picture stars Belen Rueda of The Sea Inside, and is expected to be the Spanish submission for the Oscar. The Orphanage opens in Spain on October 11 (this is a Spanish trailer) and stateside on December 28.

Comic-Con Wrap: Iron Man, Marvel, Hulk, Watchmen, Narnia, Golden Compass, Shoot 'Em Up

While Comic-Cons past have heralded the advent of such future blockbusters as 300 and Superman Returns, this year only Jon Favreau’s new Marvel entry starring Robert Downey, Jr. as the mighty Iron Man roused the fan hordes in the 6000-seat Hall H to rise up and give a standing O. The crowds also responded well to Pixar's Wall-E, from Finding Nemo creator Andrew Stanton, about a robot trash compactor left behind on earth, who is being "voiced" by sound wizard Ben Burtt, who created the whistle-language for Star Wars' R2D2.

Many of the big fanboy titles had no footage to show because they were just heading into production, from 300 director Zach Snyder’s The Watchmen, an adaptation of the Alan Moore graphic classic, to Edward Norton’s page-one rewrite of Marvel’s latest iteration of The Hulk. Snyder, Norton and Favreau all promised fans to stay true to the spirit of the source material. "We're not going to make it accessible to teenyboppers for marketing reasons," said Snyder, who is setting “The Watchmen” in the R-rated 80s and drawing his way through the novel, shot by shot. "It doesn't feel PG-13. It makes sense that now it's a period film. It has resonance, it's separated from the Cold War, it's almost cool to go back."

Snyder had hoped to announce his Watchmen cast at the Con, but was scooped by the press by several days. "We have real actors for this movie," he said. "This movie has no stars in it! 300 had no stars in it either. A couple people saw it." The actors will start out young and evolve into old age with the help of CGI, he said. “Technology is on my side.” Billy Crudup, Patrick Wilson and Jason Patric didn’t show, but Jackie Earle Haley and Malin Akerman were on hand. The crowd in Hall H applauded when The Hulk producer Gale Ann Hurd assured them that this time--as opposed to Ang Lee’s 2003 Hulk, which did not score a bullseye with fans--The Hulk would remain the same size throughout the film. Marvel’s latest design for The Hulk seemed to play for fans.

Disney’s Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian panel promised a deeper, richer, more action-packed realistic take on the next installment of the fantasy series, which will now unspool at the rate of one a year. (It will be interesting to see how much interest there is in the lesser known books that don't feature the four kids.) Audiences were wowed by an well-paced animatic of the capture of a castle featuring airborne sword fights.

On the other hand, New Line Cinema’s bid for a new fantasy franchise, Chris Weitz’s adaptation of The Golden Compass, starring Nicole Kidman, Dakota Blue Richards and many CG polar bears, yielded a more muted response. Kidman keeps rolling her tongue around something called "the Aletheometer lethiometer." Like Stardust, The Golden Compass features flying ships and witches. But it also looks all too familiar...

While Twentieth Century Fox cancelled its show-and-tell, citing materials that were too hard-R for a family-friendly event (which nonetheless showed plenty of violent, edgy material), the studio did send a convoy of trucks to promote the movie Jumper emblazoned with black-and-white billboards reading “If you were a jumper you’d be home now.”

Short action clips from Shoot ‘Em Up, starring Clive Owen as a Chow Yun Fat-inspired gunfighter toting a baby amid blood-splattering mayhem, played well in Hall H; the full-length movie screened Thursday night to a wide range of reactions. The pic clearly plays best for hard-core action fans with a taste for a taboo-busting, hard-edged R. (A women gives birth during a gun battle; when the baby cries, Owen shoves the infant onto her breast to shut him up. And there's more.) Storyboard-artist-turned director Michael Davis thanked Angry Films for rescuing him from oblivion after 35 screenplays just as he was about to give up his filmmaking career. Owen thanked Davis "for making an original movie in a time of sequels," he said.
Here's Variety's review.

Neil Marshall’s viral thriller Doomsday generated some fan heat, along with Rob Zombie’s reimagining of Halloween, the graphic novel-based 30 Days of Night, a hard-R return to killer vampires who terrorize an isolated town in bleak midwinter, and writer-director Frank Darabont’s reunion with Stephen King on the $17-million “The Mist.” But many other horror titles fell flat, including Warners’ Japanese remake One Missed Call, the conclusion of Paul Anderson's zombie trilogy, Resident Evil: The Extinction, and Silver’s The Invasion, yet another version of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

“Comic-Con elder” Darabont, who started coming to The Con as a teenager in 1973 when it was held for 1000 people at the El Cortez Hotel, had a good time this trip. “Every year it’s gotten crazier and bigger.”

Trailers from Hell: Dante Dissects Genre Trailers

Horror Master Joe Dante is one of the geniuses at work behind the new website Trailers From Hell. Other Grindhouse gurus offering commentary on horror trailers are Mick Garris, Mary Lambert, John Landis and Edgar Wright. UPDATE: here's a Q & A with Dante.

[Hat Tip: Dave Kehr.]

Horror Watch: Stephen King Movies Ranked

In honor of the release of 1408, Criticker, a website with smart recommendation software for amateur movie critics, looked at its members' rankings of Stephen King movies and came up with a Top Ten list: so far 1408 comes in at number four:

1408 opens in wide release this weekend. The film, starring John Cusack, is based on Stephen King's short story from Everything's Eventual: 14 Dark Tales and, according to the critics, is the best King adaptation in years.

How does it stack up (so far) at Criticker? Not many users have seen it yet, so this list might change, but here are the top 10 Stephen King adaptations, based on average tier at Criticker:
1. The Shawshank Redemption - Avg Tier 8.73
2. The Shining - Avg Tier 7.84
3. Stand By Me - Avg Tier 7.55
4. 1408 - Avg Tier 7.33
5. The Green Mile - Avg Tier 6.99
6. Misery - Avg Tier 6.73
7. The Dead Zone - Avg Tier 6.46
8. Carrie - Avg Tier 6.14
9. Storm of the Century - Avg Tier 5.57
10. The Stand - Avg Tier 5.57

I'd put The Shining, Carrie, Stand By Me and Misery ahead of Shawshank. And I'd put The Dead Zone and The Stand ahead of The Green Mile. I never saw Storm of the Century.

Criticker also ranked new movies in theaters:

Of all the new films in theaters, we were able to generate 9 PSIs (Probable Score Indicators) for you, based on your top 30% of Movie Critics. Here they are, in order of your PSI: 1. Ocean's Thirteen - 95 2. Mighty Heart, A - 74 3. 1408 - 65 4. Surf's Up - 60 5. Gracie - 54 6. Nancy Drew - 44 7. Mr. Brooks - 40 8. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer - 34 9. Evan Almighty - 26

OK, they're using my Criticker votes to peg me as a relatively discerning smart adult (presumably), which thus skews the films accordingly. Hey, I didn't hate Evan Almighty that much! But I did go to see the top two films on the list—and none of the others.—except for Evan Almighty. Which suggests they've got me wrong. And I do plan to see 1408.

Horror Watch: 1408's Stephen King Defends Torture Porn

As his 1408 goes into release, Stephen King defends torture porn in the LAT:

I go to see the films because I like them, I like to be scared anyway. And I think you have a tendency to see things come in waves. If one thing is successful others follow in its wake. And the thing is, "Hostel 2" is actually a better picture in every way. It's very clever and Eli Roth is a tremendous talent, and has a tremendous eye as a director. The material makes a lot of people uneasy, it makes me uneasy.

There's another side of that too. The gore obscures, particularly in the minds of critics, some of the reasons why those movies are successful. The gore in movies like "Last House on The Left" was so new that it kind of slapped audiences in the face, "I can't believe I saw that, let's go see it again!' Like driving past an accident. But people get desensitized to that in a hurry and you cease to get involved on a level where there are characters. It's like watching people in a shooting gallery being knocked over one by one. You can't go for gore for the sake of gore in movies anymore.

Lunch with David

I accepted Movie City News webmaster David Poland's invitation to have lunch at Ammo with him, critic/film editor of the LA Weekly and Variety contributor Scott Foundas, and The Geek Culture Artist formerly known as Mr Beaks, Jeremy Smith. We talk about Cannes and summer movies and horror flicks at some length on David's The Hot Blog:

Hostel Issues

I have never seen a Hostel movie. This does not mean that I don't like horror. I'm a pro. I was raised by a movie buff father who took me to see everything, from Kinji Fukasaku's Tora, Tora, Tora! and Hammer Dracula flicks to Audie Murphy westerns. I grew up on action epics and violence. I loved Lawrence of Arabia and The Haunting, which scared me more than any movie I have ever seen since. In other words, I can handle anything.

My approach to horror is the same as my approach to genre fiction. The better the auteur, the more I like it. I want to admire the skill and the craft, from John Carpenter, George Romero, Wes Craven and Brian DePalma to Edgar Wright, Guillermo del Toro, Wes Craven, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. But I try to avoid bad writing. So where do I draw the line? I can handle Dawn of the Dead but I have yet to see a Freddy or Jason movie. I confess. I'm a horror snob.