It's been tough to know what to expect from the forthcoming remake of Sam Raimi's horror classic Evil Dead, but let the first trailer put your mind to rest — or, really, unrest: This is good, old-fashioned, red-band terror that manages to evoke the spirit of the original film (evil book unleashes spirits in a cabin in the woods; nothing good comes of it) with all new kinds of messed up, squishy images to keep you awake at night.
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Spike Lee's Oldboy is getting some bad ass company in the Park Chan-Wook remake business, as the Korean director's ultraviolent femme-fronted Sympathy For Lady Vengeance, the third pic in Park's Vengeance trilogy, will be remade into a Charlize Theron-fronted Americanized adaptation by Departed writer William Monahan.
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You can be sure the folks at MGM are really happy they spent $70 million and counting remaking the totally '80s teen insurgency actioner Red Dawn for the CW set. (Not to mention sitting on, then digitally reworking their baddies from Chinese to more marketable Korean villains because they look similar enough anyway, right?) The clumsy, politically misguided, arguably irresponsible, totally "America, f*** yeah!" tale of Washingtonian teens taking up arms against North Korean invaders is so fantastically paranoid and plodding, it's yielded some of the most rancorous reviews in recent memory. Crack open a Budweiser and raise the flag and let's get to poring over the 9 most scathing critical responses to Red Dawn!
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The Evil Dead Red Band trailer has arrived, and it turns out to be the same one that had audiences at NY Comic-Con screaming in their seats (and, apparently, leaking it on the web). If you can stomach it, make sure to hang tight for the tongue-slicing scene at the end. It will make you talk funny for hours. more »
The Evil Dead Red Band trailer doesn't hit the web until tomorrow — look for it here — but in the meantime, here's a little taste of the horror to come. This 36-second amuse bouche doesn't give up much until the final moments, especially if you've seen the 'leaked' trailer that had audiences at NY Comic-Con screaming. But it does feature the eternally amusing Bruce Campbell telling that same audience: "We know what you need. You need horror with blood flowing down the street. We know you need it.'' more »
Bruce Campbell wasn't kidding. On Saturday, I interviewed the actor, who starred in and produced the original The Evil Dead trilogy with Sam Raimi and is now producing a remake, and he told me that Uruguayan filmmaker Fede Alvarez's reinterpretation is "dead serious." Unlike Raimi's movies, which mixed the director's distinct style of humor with groundbreaking (literally) horror, Campbell says the remake is a "full-on old-school horror movie with make-up effects." And lots of blood and gore judging from this stomach-turning trailer that leaked from NY Comic-Con.
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I know none of you David Cronenberg fans out there are super juiced about the Videodrome remake at Universal first time feature director Adam Berg is in talks to helm. Many of you may even be straight up livid. But there's a silver lining to this latest move on Hollywood's part to unnecessarily remake our best-loved film classics...
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The Colin Farrell-starring sci-fi remake Total Recall is readying for release this weekend (read Movieline’s review here) and while Len Wiseman's adaptation of the 1990 Paul Verhoeven film that mixes up bullets, muscles and abstract notions of Cartesian dualism and the specious present isn't the worst thing in the world, it is hardly memorable. (A bit of an unfortunate situation, as the whole thing is about memory.) Still, it's important that we don't present ourselves as the type of dweebs who get all hung up over sci-fi remakes. Sometimes, they're damn good, as this list of ten shall prove.
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Yes, there is a triple-breasted hooker in Len Wiseman's Total Recall remake.
If you happened to have missed the news posts and Comic-Con appearances (it was a lot of publicity for a three-line role), please rest assured that a futuristic working girl does indeed flaunt her unusually augmented bosom for Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrell), just as in the Arnold Schwarzenegger original. It's one of the few callbacks to the hallucinatory nature of Paul Verhoeven's wild-eyed, schlocky, terribly fun 1990 blockbuster, few other qualities of which this redo shares. The two films have the same underlying bone structure, sure, but this new Total Recall is made of more serious, more humorless stuff. It looks simultaneously lavish and interchangeable in its explosions and shoot-em-ups with a dozen other recent action movies, and in its sci-fi stylings with a dozen others in the genre.
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It’s been 25 years since Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop painted a nightmare vision of a near future in which a cyborg policeman became humanity’s salvation — so how will the upcoming reboot, starring Swedish-American actor Joel Kinnaman (AKA Holder of TV’s The Killing), update the tale? Movieline spoke with Kinnaman, who continues his Hollywood cross-over attempt in Friday’s New York drama Lola Versus, about Jose Padilha’s RoboCop — and the real-world technology that suggests we’re already in a much different future than the original envisioned.
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For some reason a remake of the 1987 comedy classic Summer School has been in development hell for years, and it may finally come to fruition under Adam Sandler's Happy Madison banner. Though Sandler hasn't yet threatened to star as the slacker high school gym teacher forced to start caring about education -- a role played with Hawaiian-shirted panache by one Mr. Mark Harmon, and don't you forget it -- the possibility certainly looms over this project, as THR reports that Happy Madison is negotiating to produce. Take a trip down memory lane with the original trailer and decide: If not Sandler, who could fill Harmon's sockless shoes? (And will there be a part for Kirstie Alley?)
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Again with this "teaser for a trailer" business. If you cannot wait until Sunday to get a glimpse of the actual trailer for Len Wiseman's Total Recall remake, here are thirty seconds of Colin Farrell driving flying cars and jumping off of balconies and Kate Beckinsale looking hot. I'm still holding out for evidence that Wiseman kept the three-boobed lady in his version, which will determine if this rehash of the 1990 sci-fi gem gets my ticket dollars or not.
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Back in January, MGM/Screen Gems tapped director Kimberly Peirce to helm their remake of Stephen King's Carrie, updating the supernatural tale after Brian de Palma's iconic 1976 film adaptation. The current frontrunners to play Carrie White, the sexually repressed telekinetic teen who wreaks bloody revenge on her classmates at the high school prom? Kick-Ass star Chloe Moretz and actress Haley Bennett (The Haunting of Molly Hartley, Marley & Me), according to Vulture. Can either fill Sissy Spacek's shoes?
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This week at SXSW Movieline caught up with director Gareth Evans, whose Indonesian martial arts actioner The Raid: Redemption is set to knock your socks off later this month courtesy of Sony Classics. (Haven’t heard of the martial arts form silat? You will, come March 23.) With his film steadily collecting kudos left and right, Evans is already thinking ahead to his Raid sequel (working title: Berandal), and an insane, dangerous-sounding four-on-one car fight he plans on working into the mix.
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It wasn't tough to spot Channing Tatum or Jonah Hill at the after party following the SXSW premiere of 21 Jump Street; they were the ones, beaming unselfconsciously in the middle of the crowd, wearing bicycle-cop uniforms. More specifically, wearing their costumes from the movie, in which they play a pair of bumbling rookie policemen sent undercover to high school -- a set-up that so delivers beyond its premise that the '80s Johnny Depp TV series adaptation is actually one of the best new films of 2012, comedy or otherwise.
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