Mary Harron’s The Moth Diaries is appropriately titled in more ways than one: Groups of the fluttering, flittery creatures make a dramatic appearance in the story, which is adapted from Rachel Klein’s popular young adult novel about a possible vampire stalking unsuspecting adolescents at an all-girls boarding school. And the picture itself is wispy and translucent – it has no weight or body, and in some ways it feels more like a TV pilot than a feature film, barely substantial enough to fill up the big screen. Even so, it offers glancing pleasures of the atmospheric kind – the impact is the equivalent of a filmy cobweb brushing against your cheek. It tickles more than it bites.
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Where does Martin Scorsese stand on the enduring cultural clash between vampires and zombies? Where else? "I happen to like vampires more than zombies. A vampire, quite honestly, you could have a conversation with. He has a sexuality. [...] I mean the undead thing... Zombies, what are you going to do with them? Just keep chopping them up, shooting at them, shooting at them. It's a whole other thing that apparently means a great deal to our culture and our society. There are many, many books written about it and many movies. I saw one in London when I was doing Hugo. I saw one late at night one weekend. It was called Colin, by a young filmmaker [Marc Price]. He shot it, I think, digitally by himself, edited it himself. It was savage. It had an energy that took the zombie idea to another level. Really interesting filmmaking. Disturbing." Also: He gets Raging Bull II just about as much as you and I do. [GQ via /film]
Saturday at WonderCon, Timur Bekmambetov debuted new footage and a 3-D trailer for his upcoming revisionist fantasy-actioner history lesson Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter -- the Seth Grahame-Smith-penned retelling of how America's 16th President saved the nation... from vampires. Watch the 2-D version of the trailer after the jump and marinate on the wholly new lessons we can learn from the saga of Honest Abe -- or, as star Benjamin Walker explained to the crowd in Anaheim: "As an American, I want to know that my leaders are strong and have the capacity to make decisions -- and cut some heads off."
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In what seems like a smart move for everyone involved, Disney has hired Edgar Wright (Scott Pilgrim, Shaun of the Dead) to direct Johnny Depp in The Night Stalker, a feature remake of the 1972 ABC made for TV movie of the same name and the series spin-off it inspired. The property follows reporter Carl Kolchak, whose investigations into criminal happenings lead him to all manner of supernatural villains; Depp will star as Kolchak, which sounds promising given Wright's proven track record in genre work, even if it feels like similar stories have come and gone of late with nary a blip (the Vegas-set, vampire-themed Fright Night remake, for one).
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Devotees of Tom Holland's 1985 vampire pic Fright Night, Anton Yelchin would like to allay your fears about Craig Gillespie's remake of the horror cult classic. The new Fright Night, in theaters today, pays loving homage to the original even as it updates the setting to suburban Las Vegas, turns teen hero Charley Brewster (Yelchin) into a savvy, sneaker-freak cool kid with a hot girlfriend (Imogen Poots), and makes new changes to Fright Night's cast of characters, from the dangerously sexy vampire next door (Colin Farrell) to the angry geek "Evil" Ed (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) to the drastically re-imagined Peter Vincent (David Tennant), now a Criss Angel-like Vegas magician with a penthouse suit on the Strip.
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Don't be surprised if Craig Gillespie's new, updated Fright Night bears only partial resemblance to the 1985 cult horror-comedy of the same name; with a suburban Las Vegas setting, a much cooler teen protagonist, and a modern milieu filled with iPods and 4G-equipped cell phones, the tale of a high schooler's (Anton Yelchin) battle against the seductive vampire who moves in next door (Colin Farrell) is more like a slick second-cousin to the totally '80s Chris Sarandon/William Ragsdale-starring original. And as such, 22-year-old Christopher Mintz-Plasse isn't your parents' "Evil" Ed Thompson. Far from it.
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DreamWorks has released the first trailer for their remake of the '80s horror comedy classic Fright Night, which either qualifies as heresy or amazeballs, depending on which side of the remake debate you're on. After the jump, watch smart-ass teenager Anton Yelchin do battle with his dreamy vampire neighbor, Colin Farrell, for moviegoers who were but a distant twinkle in their parents' eyes when the first movie came out.
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Beneath the wanton, CG-aided destruction caused by invading alien hordes in this week's sci-fi actioner Battle: Los Angeles there lies a deeply human core: the bond among soldiers under siege, banding together in the face of certain extinction. And as the naive Pfc. Shaun Lenihan, 26-year-old Canadian actor Noel Fisher is the face of Battle: LA's humanity -- a too-young Marine thrown into the harrowing chaos of war, separated from his unit, with only his rifle to cling to as terror sets in.
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