Attractions: The Weekend We Went to the Dogs

Welcome back to Movieline Attractions, your regular guide to everything new, noteworthy and/or utterly debauched at the movies. And this week that debauchery comes in many forms -- from the genre nasties to the rock-and-roll crazies to the tentpole uglies, you are covered, friends. So let's hop over the electric fence and see if we can't get into some trouble.

WHAT'S NEW: Where to even begin with this crop? It was so easy when America just had a steady sh*t-rain of Sex and the City 2; now we've got Killers and Marmaduke opening together in the multiplex? In_one weekend?_ This is like the Billy Joel/Elton John "Piano Man" tour, but if the pianos were de-tuned and the vocalists were slipped high-grade shrooms before they went onstage. Through that caterwauling comes... something. At least Fox invited folks to preview its adaptation of the classic well-known comic strip, thus allowing for a little less angst-y critical crisis than the one facing Killers, where reviewers will line up to carve their pound of flesh on opening day. Which, of course, means little in the grand, box-office-y scheme of things, where the beloved established Great Dane's live-action adventures will likely catch on among the family crowd that has had its fill of Shrek Forever After. The ogre will siphon off a little cash, but not enough to keep Marmaduke from springing its 100-pound frame atop the new releases with around $20 million.

Killers, meanwhile, featuring Katherine Heigl and Ashton Kutcher in a thriller-ish romcom about a CIA agent and the woman who loves him, will find a nice enough audience worth about $18 million -- which should give Fox at least a little insight into what the varsity version of the same movie will do in a few weeks when it's called Knight and Day and features Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz.

On the bright side, I guess it's good to see a couple movies rolling in for adults as well. Get Him to the Greek is our first R-rated opener, reviving Russell Brand's depraved Forgetting Sarah Marshall rock star Adolphus Snow as the titular wild man whom Jonah Hill needs to chaperon to the titular concert venue (at Sean Combs's request, no less). This could benefit from some good word-of-mouth in the weeks ahead, but I'm not sure how the Hill-Brand-Combs blitz is going to play in week one. Is it good enough for second place among new releases, and maybe even a top-five slot overall with as much as $18.5 million, even $19 million? I probably shouldn't say this, but I have no idea. Aside from MacGruber's faceplant two weeks ago, nothing makes sense to me in this marketplace anymore. Hopefully this can put some smiles back on the perpetually sour faces at Universal.

Then there's Splice, a wicked little piece of work featuring Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody as hot-shot geneticists whose cloning experiment goes all kinds of wrong. Warner Bros. nabbed it out of Sundance's Midnight section and will roll it out in wide release; here's hoping it can break the $13 million threshold this weekend before finding the legs I think it has to become a nifty summer sleeper. It's no District 9 or anything, but a long tail (no pun intended) into August isn't out of the question. At least it had better not be: No spoilers or anything, but this has franchise written all over it.

Also opening in limited release is Neil Jordan mystical romantic potboiler Ondine, while everything else is new in NYC (sorry, L.A. et. al; they'll be there soon!): the Staten Island true-crime/bogeyman doc Cropsey; the porn-industry/filmmaking comedy Finding Bliss; the '08 DNC doc Convention; the avant-garde Hitchcock meditation Double Take; the avant-garde Jonas Mekas meditation Visionaries; the science-competition doc Whiz Kids; and the medical-controversy doc Burzynski. The Nanking biopic John Rabe reaches L.A., meanwhile, as the Hasidic drug-mule drama Holy Rollers expands into mid-level markets as well.

THE BIG LOSER: I'm so sick of the words Sex and the City 2, so let's just count on it having its last underwhelming weekend and never being spoken of here again.

THE UNDERDOG: Here's your revenge, L.A. While you got the world premiere of Gone With the Pope before anyone else back in March, the rest of the country had to wait patiently for its own glimpse at Duke Mitchell's long-lost WTF exploitation crapsterpiece. For the full back story, check out Movieline's interview with Bob Murawski, who won an Oscar for co-editing The Hurt Locker the same week he debuted his restored version of Pope in Hollywood. It's a must-read, and for midnight audiences in New York this weekend, the film is a must-see. You get it next week, Minneapolis, while dates in Houston, Austin and plenty more sites are forthcoming. Here's a trailer, which is NSFW -- and effing awesome -- by every possible stretch.