Funny People Dispatched to Vanquish Aliens, Killers, Guinea Pigs and More

Welcome back to Movieline Attractions, your regular guide to everything new, noteworthy and squeezed into one last massive summer weekend at the movies. And this week really does play like some pyrotechnical grand finale, with films of all sizes going off at once, a dud or two plunging to the ground and the transfixing afterglow of smoke from the season mostly past. Look skyward after the jump.

WHAT'S NEW: Universal has a lot riding on Funny People's last-second bang; you've read Movieline's take, heard from filmmaker Judd Apatow, and now there's nothing left but the counting as the raunchy, maudlin, death-and-laffs epic arrives on 3,000 screens. The studio has done a pretty respectable job running it as a straight Adam Sandler film, with its final marketing push successfully downplaying the film's pathos in favor of jokes and jokes and jokes. Still, if there is indeed a Twitter Effect that can make or break a summer tentpole on Friday night (the way some argue it did with Bruno), Funny People is perhaps the season's ultimate test subject. It could mean the difference between $27.5 million and $34.5 million by Monday morning, not to mention all the tired "Funny Money" or "Un-Funny Money" headlines sure to follow.

Meanwhile, for the kiddies, Fox has Aliens in the Attic, which seems to offers little more than Ashley Tisdale, some curious CGI, and Doris Roberts in kung-fu mode. All will be devoured by Disney's hungry G-Force guinea pigs, who haven't feasted for a week; expect Force to outgross Aliens by about $22 million to $14.5 million.

Much of the rest of the month-ending cascade is pouring into the art house. A mixed but generally OK reaction has greeted Fox Searchlight's Sundance pick-up Adam, which got a head start on Wednesday. International legends Park Chan-wook and the Dardenne Brothers bring their respective latest -- the grisly vampire fable Thirst and the typically austere drama Lorna's Silence -- to the States as well. The Oscar-courting docs The Cove and The English Surgeon open on both coasts, while New York gets the first look at the Danish WWII epic Flame and Citron. Also exclusive to New York, but available everywhere on DVD next Tuesday: The messy, overbearing, post-massacre-recovery drama Fragments (née Winged Creatures), which underwhelmed at last year's L.A. Film Festival despite an extraordinary ensemble cast including Forest Whitaker, Guy Pearce, Kate Beckinsale, Dakota Fanning and Jennifer Hudson. Two Oscar-winners! What happened?

THE BIG LOSER: Freestyle Releasing -- the distributor-for-hire behind such gems as Delgo and Uwe Boll's In the Name of the King -- has never opened a film above $5.7 million in wide release. That won't change with The Collector, the tale of a desperate amateur house burglar who discovers that his target has already been hit -- by a masked serial killer. Who knows, maybe it's awesome, but Freestyle is letting 'er rip on the cheap with no screenings for critics and exactly zero buzz despite some cryptic, genuinely creepy-ish posters slapped around a few big cities. With Orphan still drawing viewers in its second week, this should crap out around $3.9 million

THE UNDERDOG: This is probably where I'm suppose to gush about The Cove, but you'll hear hear enough of that elsewhere over the weeks and months ahead. If I were you, I'd take advantage of this time to catch up on your Australian exploitation-film history. Seriously. Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation makes it easy, entertaining and really quite revelatory, with everyone from Quentin Tarantino to Dennis Hopper (pictured here in Mad Dog Morgan) to Mad Max director George Miller extolling the B-movie culture that laid the foundation for the Aussie film industry. For better or worse, of course: Taste was the first casualty of such oversexed hits as Alvin Purple and Stork, followed by the more literal, liberal bloodshed of such nasty horror/action entries as Patrick and Turkey Shoot. Like most worlds we never knew existed, it's a fantastic place well worth exploring.

FOR SHUT-INS: New DVD's this week include Fast & Furious, Dragonball: Evolution, the first season of Dollhouse, the complete series set of SciFi's Battlestar Galactica and Criterion's much-praised edition of Roman Polanski's early thriller Repulsion.