Star Wars: The Force Awakens Trailer to be Released with The Hobbit on December 17!

From starwars7news, The mystery surrounding the release of the much-anticipated teaser trailer may not be a mystery much longer!

That’s right folks, we might finally know exactly when the Star Wars: The Force Awakens teaser will be released. We are receiving strong hints from multiple sources that it will, in fact, accompany The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies when it is released on December 17th.

Firstly, our own Echo-07 has spoken with a local theater manager, who has indicated that the teaser for The Force Awakens will indeed be released along with the new Hobbit movie in December. The manager said they don’t get the trailer info very far in advance. It comes on a drive (all digital now). He said he didn’t think it would come in with Hunger Games: Mockingjay. He also said that companies (like Disney) aren’t allowed to “cross-promote” except for two times in a year. There are rules and regs about this apparently. However, since Hobbit comes out a year before Star Wars: The Force Awakens it could be close enough to be within these rules.

Secondly, we have this tweet from Reece Steel containing a fairly definitive quote from Tommy Gormley, the first assistant director on The Force Awakens (who recently received a BAFTA award):

UPDATE! The tweet and the whole account of the person who posted it has been deleted. Here’s a screencapture:



And as we recently reported, director Peter Jackson has visited the set ofThe Force Awakens during principle photography. Was this a coincidence? Who knows…

We will keep you posted with updates as we receive them, but it is beginning to look a lot like we’ll be getting our first glimpse of the new Star Wars movie along with our last cinematic visit to Middle Earth next month.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies opens December 17, almost exactly one year before Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

'The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death' trailer

ATM

(2012) **

In the aftermath of a company holiday party, nice-guy David is thrilled when his office crush, Emily, allows him to drive her home. David has been admiring Emily for a while and he is finally gathering up the courage to make his move. However, his excitement is quickly quashed when his obnoxious co-worker Corey (anyone named “Corey” is obnoxious, am I right? *crickets*) invites himself along. Adding insult to injury drunken Corey insists that they stop at a remote ATM Kiosk in the middle of a large, dark parking lot so he can get some money for pizza. Out of spite David parks far away forcing Corey to walk through the foreboding parking lot. When Corey’s ATM card does not work the other two go into the ATM to see what the problem is. Glancing out onto the parking lot they spy a menacing hooded figure in a parka. Corey suggests that they head to the car, where all 3 conveniently left their cell phones, but Emily fears the man will rob them and reasons that it would be safer to remain in the ATM building where one needs a card to get inside. Anxiety turns to horror when the hooded figure murders a dog walker. Soon the menacing, hooded figure disables the heat to the building and the temperature begins to drop to match the sub-freezing temperature outside. The cat and mouse game begins.

ATM is a 30 minute (at most) idea stretched to 70. I generally like a good “predicament” story (this is the same director who directed ‘Buried’) but watching these three ding-a-lings make one stupid decision after another was maddening. Right from the outset the trio of dumb dumbs should have simply walked out the door. There are three of them and only one of him, he doesn’t look like he could move very quickly and he is not brandishing a weapon. Other nitpicks; It’s 5 below zero yet none of them thought to wear a sensible jacket? Also, what is the probability that three people would leave their cell phones in the car at the same time? If you’re like me, your phone is never more than a few feet away from you, am I right? *crickets*. ATM commits ‘The Strangers’ sin; we are never provided with the killer’s motivation so what’s the point of it all?

'The Peanuts Movie' trailer!

New Universal monster movies are officially going to be awful

From slashfilm, Universal has a plan to reboot its Universal Monsters characters, and it shouldn’t even come as a big surprise: the monsters will anchor action/adventure movies, not horror films. That’s the angle we knew the studio was planning with the new Mummy movie, to be directed byAlex Kurtzman. They’ve done this before, with the last Mummy franchise, and it was a success. (For a while.) They tried it with Van Helsing, which was a joke of a movie. But theFast/Furious model seems too good to ditch now, and so the “horror” part of these monster movies is being pitched in the bin.

Read what Universal’s chief said about the new reboots below.

During a THR roundtable featuring studio heads, Donna Langley, the head of Universal, said that while Universal doesn’t have superheroes, it does have the Monsters. And they’ll basically be approached as superheroes:

We don’t have any capes [in our film library]. But what we do have is an incredible legacy and history with the monster characters. We’ve tried over the years to make monster movies — unsuccessfully, actually. And we had an epihany, which is that the horror genre has a ceiling; it’s not global. There’s a reason why monster characters are enduring, generation upon generation. So we took a good, hard look at it, and we settled upon an idea, which is to take it out of the horror genre, put it more in the action-adventure genre and make it present day, bringing these incredibly rich and complex characters into present day and reimagine them and reintroduce them to a contemporary audience.

For a couple of the monster characters, there’s reason to deviate from horror. The Mummy clearly can work as action/adventure, though the character’s horror underpinnings are important. And the Invisible Man can be a thriller more than anything else, but the story should still have that underlying element of derangement, as the central character really loses his mind. There can be a superhero-like element to these stories, and that principle doesn’t have to be the downfall of the monsters.

But they are monsters, and the stories are horror at their core, even if they’re not modernParanormal Activity-type horror. And rather than trying to innovate or forge a path with these characters that is unusual in the current landscape, Universal — facing the eventual end of the Fast/Furious films — seems to be playing it safe, and cramming these characters into a model that already works for other stories.

Happy Halloween from the Griffins!

It was another great horrorthon this year (until I read how much Octo hated Insidious), and I look forward to next year's!  Now, on to my Christmas movie blog!  (not really) (Wow, that'd be rough.  Do you think there's another group of people like us that try to watch as many Xmas movies as possible during December?  And if so, have they reviewed Black Xmas?)

Insidious

2010  *1/2

Or as I like to call it, Insidpid...ous!  Anyone?

Okay I know that's not so great, but the only emotional places this movie struck me were various points on the annoyance-to-rage spectrum.  Nossir, I didn't like it.

It's possible my feelings were adversely affected by JPX's review of the sequel (which I read the day before I watched this), but I sincerely doubt it.  Actually I think that review just helped me better define my anger as it swept over me, especially this delicious quote from director James Wan himself:

“What I like to do with the soundtrack is set you on edge with a really loud … atonal scratchy violin score, mixing with some really weird piano bangs and take that away and all of a sudden, you’re like, 'What just happened there?'"

For me this translates directly as "I don't know what I'm doing."  I mean, jeez, that's every bad thing we ever say on this blog about the music and sound design in American horror movies rolled into some kind of mission statement.  That's like hearing Michael Bay say "What I like to do is get some army guys and some robots and bkkeewww!  Blamm!  Kaboom!  Pew pew!  And then like tons more of that bullshit until the movie time is all filled up!"  For me the music in Insidious seemed like somebody was rolling a bowling ball around inside a piano, which served less as a soundtrack and more like an annoying distraction.  

Coupled with that was the arrogant notion that you can build a whole movie around "There was an indicator that something or someone was there, but when I checked there was neither anything nor anyone there!  Gaw!"  Don't get me wrong, that tactic can be used to amazing effect, indeed much of my  beloved original Ju-on relies on a variation of that technique.  But it requires some skill; it's not scary on a base level and can therefore be easily abused.  

Take mister Darth Maul ghost up there in the picture.  I'd seen this still before so when the scene started and I saw Dumb Dad with that painting behind him I knew Darth Maul was probably showing up soon.   But I was puzzled, because it just a scene of Dumb Dad sitting around a table talking with his mom and his wife (Barbara Hershey and Rose Byrne, both actresses who I like and forgive for being in this movie).  Sure enough, Barbara Hershey sees Darth Maul behind Dumb Dad and she screams, and then gulp!  He's not there anymore!  

I watched Bob from Twin Peaks advance across the living room and it chilled my blood, but these maneuvers are cheap and artless and deployed all through the movie.  D-minus.

Little did I know it was about to get much worse

Insidious does deserve a technical credit for listening to Eddie Murphy and having the white people in the haunted house move out of the haunted house, but when that doesn't work they revert to type and invite more white people over, led by the impossibly cloying Elise.  I never thought I would ever miss the crazy midget psychic lady from Poltergeist so much.

Should I give credit to JPX's review for influencing my feelings here?  I don't think so, it seemed to come from within, and I hated this woman immediately upon hearing her speak.  It seemed obvious that she was meant to be as friendly, normal and grounded a person as possible to provide a solid basis for the parapsychological jibbity jabber that would soon be coming out of her mouth, but they waaaay overdid it.  Even hearing her ask for tea made me want to slap her, and then when she started saying things like "I believe your son is a very talented Traveler" and "I call it 'The Further,'" I just rolled my eyes.  I think I actually wanted there to be no such thing as ghosts in the movie about ghosts just so I could rub her stupid face in it. 

Besides this series and Sinister, I haven't forayed too deeply into the new generation of haunted house flicks (spawned I guess by the Paranormal series, none of which I have yet seen).  I adored Sinister, but my suspicion is I'll be wading through more experiences like this before I adore another.  I know this flick worked better for some of my fellow Horrorthonners, and I'm truly pleased for you, but Insidious was, for me, a pretty thorough failure.

Coming up next:  I review Insidious: Chapter 2, because I can't resist a good train wreck!

More Universal Monster Writers Confirmed

From slashfilm, It’s like something out of a mad scientist movie: Universal is building its own brain trust like a Frankenstein’s monster version of the Pixar brain trust. We know that two key players in this team are Chris Morgan (Fast/Furious) and Alex Kurtzman (Star Trek), with Kurtzman writing and directing a new Mummy picture. Aaron Guzikowski (Prisoners) wasrecently confirmed to be on board to write a new Wolfman movie. Now Noah Hawley(Fargo TV series creator/writer) and Ed Solomon (Men in Black, Now You See Me) are confirmed as part of the group as well.

THR reports the names, though we’ve known that Hawley was working on a Universal Monsters movie. We don’t know what characters most of these guys will tackle, or in what order. But THR does say that “other planned movies [besides the Mummy and Wolf Man] revolve around the characters of Dracula, Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, Bride of Frankenstein and vampire hunter Van Helsing.”

Earlier this fall, the film Dracula Untold was given a modern-day coda which theoretically allows it to be linked to this series. Whether that version of Dracula will be the one explored going forward it something we don’t know.

The trade also says that this crew is being assembled to work in a manner that is somewhat like Pixar’s brain trust, and something like a TV writer’s room, where everyone collaborates on the broad strokes of the series and characters. The goal is to “work on a model of serialized storytelling.” Guzikowski’s Wolfman will be a new version of the character, and “hopefully re-launch a franchise and also weave in with the movies of the other monster characters.”

As we’ve reported, Kurtzman’s The Mummy will be the first effort in this overall series, with a release date set for June 24, 2015.

Crowsnest

(2012) **1/2

Justin and his girlfriend Brooke decide to film their camping trip in the deep woods with their best friends Kirk and Amanda. For no particular reason Amanda brings her 5th wheel, bitchy sister Danielle, who spends much of her time complaining and rolling her eyes. Despite several red flags that suggest the locals do not want them in their territory, the group push on to their cabin destination for a weekend of debauchery. When an accident renders one of them dead they suddenly find themselves in the fight of their lives with a group of faceless yokels.

Thin on plot, Crowsnest is a paint-by-numbers, very generic found footage story that offers absolutely nothing new to the genre. Having said that I still found myself interested enough to stick around for the predictable conclusion. Crowsnest combines two popular genres, ‘found footage’ and
‘psychotic hillbillies’ effectively enough to keep you engaged for a brisk 70 minutes.

Suspended Animation

(2001) ***

Animator Tom Kempton travels to Northern Michigan with two friends for some much-needed R&R. After setting up camp to go ice fishing Tom realizes that he forgot something in his car. Leaving his friends to retrieve this item he crashes his snowmobile onto the property of two unstable sisters, Vanessa and Ann Boulette (think Gray Gardens without the Bouvier fortune). After being tricked into drinking some poisoned tea Tom awakens to find himself duct taped to a chair. It soon becomes apparent that the sisters are cannibals who consume passers-by and that Tom is marked to be their next meal. Just as Tom is about to receive a drill to the head his two friends show up and rescue him. In the aftermath Ann is dead and Vanessa escapes into the wintery hills where she is presumed to perish. Following his tribulation Tom becomes obsessed with Vanessa and sets out to make an animated film based on her life. During his research he learns that Vanessa has an illegitimate daughter, Clara, who was given up for adoption 30 years ago. Tom locates Clara and hires her to be the model for his animated film based on his ordeal with her mother and aunt. She has no idea who her mother is and Tom is reluctant to tell her until her 15-year old son Sandor, begins exhibiting signs of psychopathy.

‘Suspended Animation’ is surprisingly complex and can be distilled down to three acts. After the harrowing first act the film slows down as Tom becomes obsessed with the Boulette family history, as he tracks down information like Columbo. The second act of the film is not bad, but it is so different tonally from the first act that you might feel like you have been tricked into a bait-and-switch. The third act brings us back to the terror and violence of the opening to deliver a satisfying gut-punch. Well-acted and ultimately satisfying some might be put off by the middle third of the film but for those who stay to the end you won’t be disappointed.

Swamp Thing #6 in Lego! Something else I've been doing instead of writing reviews...

Had to crank this out for a vinyl toy/designer/Lego convention this past weekend.

Comic Bricks! is the invention of my friend Brandon and you can see more here.

More reviews coming soon...