It’s been a few months since we’ve heard anything about Dana Mennie’s werewolf film Dark Moon Rising, but that changed this morning when Mennie shared some very cool news with me: Dark Moon Rising has acquired distribution.
The director says “Lightning Strikes Productions has just penned a deal with Grindstone Entertainment and the film will be released through Lionsgate.” Mennie adds that an official release date has yet to be determined, but promises to keep us posted. He believes the film will be released later this year.
Real love and fate collide in a small town girl’s life as Amy falls in love with a mysterious drifter who brings with him a family curse and the unimaginable horror that follows. Bender, who shares the curse with his son, brings hell to Amy’s small town. As Dan and Amy’s love is put to the test, Thibodeaux, an ex-cop from another city who has witnessed Bender’s lust for blood firsthand; Sam, the local sheriff and an ex-homicide detective; and John, a local farmer and Amy’s father, head for the ultimate showdown with Bender and the evil web of terror that he has drawn them all into.
The film features an ensemble cast, including genre favorites Sid Haig and Billy Drago.
Check out the official trailer below and keep it here for details about Dark Moon Rising’s official release date.
In roughly a month horror fans will finally get to see Universal’s remake of The Wolfman–and we’ll finally know if all the delays, rumor and innuendo about its troubled path to the screen were true or not. Until then, here’s a look at the first 30 second commercial advertisement for the film.
All I’ll say is that this ad and the trailers make The Wolfman look like it’s going to be action-packed fun with loads of style. Hopefully it’s not a case of cramming all the good stuff into the
Benecio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, Emily Blunt, and Hugo Weaving star in the film, which hits theaters on February 12th.
With all the crap swirling around this remake of The Wolfman, it wouldn’t have surprised me if the final nail in the project’s coffin was a cut of the film designed to earn a PG-13 rating. We’ve seen that happen a lot in the past few years as studios shy away from the R in order to have their films presentable to a wider audience. Sometimes it works (Drag Me to Hell was still effective with the more friendly rating), and other times it doesn’t (Terminator: Salvation).
Fortunately for gore fans, we’ll not have to ponder which way The Wolfman might turn out. It’s been rated, and when the film hits theaters next February it will do so with an R for “bloody horror, violence and gore.”
That’s a good start. Let’s hope the rest of the film lives up to expectations.
Whether or not Werewolves will become horror’s “next big thing” remains to be seen, but it’s not for a lack of effort on Hollywood’s part. Between The Wolfman, Michael Dougherty’s in development series Bitches, Howling and Teen Wolf updates, and that whole Twilight fiasco, I can’t recall a time when the werewolf has ever been more in the spotlight. Fox and Dreamworks now apparently want in on the lycanthropic action, as they’ve announced a new werewolf television series, Howl.
Variety reports that the show will be a collaborative effort between the two companies. it’s being described as “an epic family saga about warring families of werewolves in a small Alaskan town.”
“Alaska is a place where people disappear and now you know why,” writer Joshua Miller said.
The script reflects the changes that are going on in the country, and “metamorphosis and constant change is the basis of werewolf mythology,” he added. “Howl” is about “the psychology of living with change.”
Sounds interesting…but this is Fox we’re talking about. There’s no way they’re letting anything that potentially deep on to the airwaves.
It should also be noted that the above photo has nothing to do with the show.
All of the sudden, posters for Universal’s remake of The Wolfman are everywhere. I posted one really cool one yesterday, now today I bring you two more (courtesy of Empire).
I still think yesterday’s poster is the best of all we’ve seen so far, but the one above on the left is pretty nice. I’m not as impressed with the one on the right, if only because it reminds me a lot of the poster for Wrong Turn 3–and that movie fucking sucked.
Here’s to hoping The Wolfman is better. The film hits theaters on February 12th.
Universal’s remake of the classic horror film seems to be in the news almost entirely for bad reasons (reports that the film isn’t very good, replacement editors, losing switching soundtrack composers, etc.) but here’s something positive– a cool looking new one sheet.
“Inspired by the classic Universal film that launched a legacy of horror, The Wolfman brings the myth of a cursed man back to its iconic origins. Oscar® winner Benicio Del Toro stars as Lawrence Talbot, a haunted nobleman lured back to his family estate after his brother vanishes. Reunited with his estranged father (Oscar® winner Anthony Hopkins), Talbot sets out to find his brother…and discovers a horrifying destiny for himself.”
One of the millions of stories to come out of AFM this year involved a potential new sequel for The Howling. I’m not sure why anyone would really feel the need to make a sequel to The Howling, but I guess werewolves are kind of hot at the moment, and what better time to milk some more cash out of a franchise, right? I wonder if this means a Wolfen sequel is in the works…
Anyway, Variety is reporting “indie producers Joel Kastelberg and Moonstone Entertainment’s Etchie Stroh are re-launching the werewolf franchise as “The Howling: Reborn.” Former studio marketing exec Joe Nimziki, who worked at New Line, MGM and Sony, will make his feature directorial debut from his own script.
The film is set to begin shooting in February with a planned release in time for Halloween. Plot details are currently being kept under lock and key, so I got nothing for you there. I’m sure all three of you who care enough about The Howling to actually read this story are crushed by that news.
I’ve seen all three Underworld movies and I’m still not really sure if I like them or not, but apparently someone out there does because production is moving along on a fourth installment in the seemingly never-ending Vampire/Werewolf war.
THR’s Heat Vision Blog is reporting that the fourth film now has a screenwriter: John Hlavin. If that name isn’t familiar to you, you’ve seen his work if you ever watched FX’s The Shield.
Details about the new film are being kept quiet, but Hlavin did offer up this tidbit. “I can tell you it’s not a prequel.It will satisfy old fans and excite new audiences, meaning that we don’t want to redo the first three movies, so steps are being taken to honor what fans have loved but at the same time introduce fresh elements.“
I’ll tell ya what would excite me–Vic Mackey showing up to pop some caps in vampire and werewolf asses. If that happened, no one would even care if it was a remake, a prequel, or if Kate Beckinsale was coming back. Let’s all cross our fingers and hope this comes to pass.
Every time I think I can’t hear anything more that would make me more concerned about The Wolfman remake, something comes along and proves me wrong. /Film has a good article on the latest crew shuffling on the (apparently) greatly troubled film.
Editor Dennis Virkler is out, replaced by Mark Goldblatt and Walter Murch. To people who don’t pay a lot of attention to the technical aspects of filmmaking, these names don’t really mean much (and I’ll be honest, I didn’t really know much of anything about Virkler until today, either) and the idea of shuffling people around this late in the process seems like it should be bad news. However, as the /Film article points out, Virkler’s worked on some really terrible films (check out his IMDB page if you don’t believe me) while Goldblatt and Murch have worked on films like Apocalypse Now, Godfather 2, and Cameron’s Terminator movies. This is definitely a step in the right direction.
However, the film’s shot–and an editor can only make a film from the footage he’s been given. Getting two editors of Goldblatt and Murch’s skill level is certainly a positive, but it doesn’t do much to allay my uneasy feeling that The Wolfman could well turn out to be a disaster of epic proportions.
It seems as though Universal gave us a consolation prize yesterday, when they released two new posters for their forthcoming remake of The Wolfman. How so? Well, yesterday was the day the film was originally slated to hit theaters. That got changed (we wound up with The Fourth Kind in that slot instead) and we all now have to wait til February to see Benicio Del Toro go full werewolf.
The two new posters made their grand debuts at Cinematical (the Emily Blount poster) and Ain’t it Cool News (the wolfman one). Both posters are nifty, although I think the Blount poster would be a walk off grand slam in the bottom of the ninth if it actually had a wolfman lurking around somewhere in the background. I’m intrigued that Universal has taken a “less is more” approach in that one-sheet, but I don’t know that it works as well as it could have. The full on shot of Del Toro in werewolf mode in the second poster is classic, if completely predictable.
Click on either image above for a larger picture. The Wolfman will bark at the moon on February 12th, 2010.
