The Horror Geek – News, Rants and Reviews From The Horror Geek!

Look, I’ve been pretty vocal about how I feel when it comes to remakes. I don’t really care for most of them, but Hollywood has thrown so many on me in the last few years that I’ve become like a punch-drunk baby seal after being clubbed by some crazed poacher.

This news from New Line Cinemas, however, is a perfect sign of just how fucking insane Hollywood is now, and how bound and fucking determined they are to remake everything ever made regardless of when it was originally released.

The news, which appeared in Variety, states that New Line is moving ahead with a planned remake of The Orphanage. The Orphanage, as you may recall, was a Spanish language film directed by Juan Antonio Bayona and produced by Guillermo del Toro. It released theatrically here in America where it made over 7 million bucks. The real kicker? It was made in 2007. New Line Cinemas wants to remake a fucking movie that isn’t even two years old and had a theatrical release in this country. Insane.

More proof that there’s no one with an ounce of creativity left working in Hollywood.

I posted some news last week about Dee Snider’s planned follow-up to Strangeland. There were a few details floating around at the time, but now there’s even more as Fangoria sat down with Snider and grabbed the exclusive scoop about what we can expect in this long-awaited follow up.

Perhaps the most interesting piece of news is the one that appeared in the first announcement–that Snider and company are still aiming for an NC-17 rating. That’s generally box-office suicide (theater chains tend to not carry NC-17 flicks and newspapers won’t advertise them), but Snider seems committed to pushing the envelope as far as he can. He does add that there probably will be an R-rated cut as well, but the devotion to making a film that doesn’t care what the MPAA thinks is a welcome change of pace in horror cinema.

There’s lots more info in the interview (including a nationwide casting call for fetishists and body modifiers to appear in the film), which you can read here.

Everyone I know expected Dead Snow to be the big hit at this year’s Sundance as far as genre offerings go. However, it seems like the smaller and less hyped film Grace is stealing most of the attention. I’ve posted a few stories about Grace over the past month, but info about the film has been pretty scarce overall. So, if you were like me and still not entirely sold on the buzz the film was generating, here’s another teaser clip from the film, courtesy of the guys over at DreadCentral. Enjoy.

As far as stupid titles go, Donkey Punch ranks pretty high on the list. It’s almost fitting though, that this wannabe shocker would choose such a lame (although desperately trying to be hip and edgy) moniker since the mediocrity of the name matches the mediocrity of the film itself.

The “donkey punch” is a sexual technique wherein a man takes his partner from behind, and at the moment of climax punches the partner in the back of the head—supposedly causing them to twitch and thereby increasing his pleasure. Whether this is a real practice or not is debatable (although like every other sexual thing under the sun, I’m sure someone somewhere has tried it), but it provides not only a title for director Oliver Blackburn’s film, but also the first major plot point. Yes, the film actually features a donkey punch…and trust me when I tell you that it’s all downhill from there.

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According to STYD, Lionsgate (fresh off of earning kudos from horror fans for their uncut, restored version of the original My Bloody Valentine) announced plans last week to release slasher cult classic Slaughter High on DVD. Details were scarce and everyone assumed it would be another cut version. However, the good news today is that according to a Lionsgate representative, the company has found an unaltered print of the film in one of their vaults (does anyone other than me find the idea of film vaults really cool? Companies are always finding lost movies in vaults–I’d love to spend a week looking through some of these vaults for buried cinematic treasure).

This means that the April 14th release of the film will be the uncut and unrated version of the film fans have been clamoring for. How’s that for some good news on a Thursday morning?

Bloody-Disgusting posted an interesting scoop this morning–according to their “reliable source”, Robert Rodriguez’s Troublemaker Studios will be handling production duties on the planned 20th Century Fox reboot of the classic action flick Predator. As a huge fan of the original (and an admirer of the sequel) the idea of remaking Predator bothers me–but if Rodriguez and company are involved, I’m way more optimistic than I would be if they’d handed it off to anyone else.

The bombshells don’t stop there, though–the source goes on to say that according to the pitch this new version of the film will feature more than one Predator. I’m torn about this–the idea of more Predators running around is definitely cool–but one of the best things about the original was that just one alien wiped out almost an entire force of well-armed and highly skilled mercenaries. How could anyone actually survive an onslaught by a group of these things?

Anyway, there’s no script, no writer, no director, no anything yet–but it appears as though this project will be moving forward. Expect more news on this as it becomes available.

ShockTillYouDrop’s Ryan Rotten got a chance to check out a test audience screening of Sam Raimi’s long-awaited return to horror, Drag Me To Hell, recently and offers up his thoughts here. Normally, I wouldn’t post something like this, but since it’s Sam Raimi and a lot of people (myself included) are very nervous about how the film might turn out (early glimpses of it made it seem more like a comedy than a horror film) I thought it would be cool to pass along the link so you can see what a fellow horror geek thought of the film.

The short version? It’s good. Maybe now we can all breathe a sigh of relief and start looking forward to the film’s May 29th release date.

Everybody and their brother has run this World War Z concept art today, and with good reason–it’s pretty goddamn cool looking. Far be it from me to break from the pack, so here it is–artist Daniel LuVisi’s artistic interpretation of what The Battle of Yonkers might look like. I have to say that if it looks like this, I’m going to dig the movie.

World War Z is Paramount’s large scale zombie epic, based on the book of the same name by Max Brooks. Marc Forster (Quantum of Solace) will direct and J. Michael Straczynski has crafted the screenplay.

If you’re a regular reader of the site then you know I’m pretty interested in Lesbian Vampire Killers. As we get closer to the March 20th release date (overseas, unfortunately–the film hasn’t found a US distributor yet), more goodies are starting to turn up.

Take, for instance, these 3 new stills from the production. They’re not like “oh my god fantastic!”, but they do give you a bit of an idea as to what to expect from this horror comedy that some folks are comparing to Shaun of the Dead. So, enjoy the one above and the two after the break, and rest assured that when someone does finally pick this up for a US release, you’ll be reading about it here–and hey, at least it’s not another Friday the 13th story, right?

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Anyone who’s been following Dimension’s planned Piranha remake (helmed by High Tension’s Alexandre Aja) knew there was no way this film was going to make a 2009 release date. It hadn’t even started shooting yet (and won’t until spring). Dimension made that official yesterday, pushing the film’s release date back until March 19th of 2010.

There have been numerous reasons cited for the delay, but two in particular make sense. The first, the fact that it’s hard to shoot a movie where people have to swim when it’s the middle of winter, is pretty obvious. The second, that the film requires extra preparation becuase it’ll be shot in 3D isn’t quite so clear to most people. Compounding that problem is that the film will be a little more tricky to pull off than something like My Bloody Valentine because of the number of underwater shots.

While the news certainly is a bummer, let’s hope this delay allows Aja to create a great film instead of a merely good one.