I really don’t know what to say about this, but this teaser trailer for “The Trollhunter” made me laugh and the movie looks like fun. H/t from earlier this week at Bloody Disgusting which reveals it is, of course, a mock-doc. I’m personally not at all sure if this is more like “Cloverfield” or Zak Penn’s very funny “Incident at Loch Ness,” however.
Category: Horror Movies (Page 19 of 96)
Folks, you have no idea how tired I am as I write this. Therefore, while we have four new wide releases this weekend, all interesting in their own way, I’m be keeping it as short as possible tonight/this morning.
Jolly Carl DiOrio expects the weekend winner to be the Emma Stone comedy vehicle, “Easy A.” I, an adult male, personally found the trailer and premise for this movie about a girl using a false reputation for promiscuity to various ends, which is supposed to appeal primarily to female teens, pretty amusing. Moreover, it’s getting unusually good — if slightly muted — reviews for a teen film.
Though M. Night Shymalan’s name is hard-to-spell-and-pronounce version of “mud” with hardcore fans, the PG-13 scare-suspenser, “Devil” — which Shymalan did not direct but produced and wrote the story (with a twist, no doubt) — is expected to do relatively well. It is being carefully protected from bloodthirsty critics.
The movie I’m most looking forward to is actor-writer-director Ben Affleck’s crime thrilller, “The Town,” co-starring Jeremy Renner and marking the big-screen semi-starring debut of “Mad Men” star and Mercedes pitchman Jon Hamm. Never a critic’s darling as an actor, Affleck is turning into one critically liked auteur and the highly positive reviews are making me anxious to see this one.
The movie I doubt I’ll ever see — and which is expected to make a shockingly low amount for a 3-D animated family film is “Alpha and Omega.” The cheaply made and critically unloved animation should at least should help some kids learn what are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet.
UPDATE: One quick thought I meant to include last night. Jolly Carl said there might be a slightly depressive effect on the box office this weekend because Friday night and Saturday until sundown is Yom Kippur, the holiest holiday on the Jewish calendar. The interesting part of this is that we Jews are only 2% of the population — though if you live in New York or L.A. you’d never know it and some of us almost completely ignore these things. Are we that overrepresented as moviegoers that our impact is felt beyond places like NYC, L.A., and Chicago?
Two notables passed away yesterday, each of whom deserves more than a mention.
Claude Chabrol was the member of the French New Wave most commonly compared to Alfred Hitchcock, though he arguably influenced most of the directors in the movement to a greater or lesser extent. I’m not sure how this happened, but I can barely remember seeing anything by Chabrol, though I know I’ve seen at least one or two of his acclaimed movies at some point, even if I can’t name them specifically.
Anyhow, if the embed below doesn’t cure my cine-amnesia, it does make me want to cure my shameful filmic omission. Yes, this trailer is entirely in French but, believe me, this is the kind of work where you don’t need to understand a single word (and I barely do).
The web’s master Chabrolian, Ray Young, has a great remembrance up and MUBI has a lot more.
Kevin McCarthy was a highly reliable, stage and movie actor with some notable film credits, including playing Biff in the film version of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” and scads of TV work — he has over 200 credits on IMDb. Still, as this very short E! obituary indicates, he’ll forever be associated with one particular film classic which, at the time, didn’t appear to be much more than another B science fiction flick. How little we know.
It’s been a hard day and I’m going going to keep it short and sweet. And how sweet it is for the husband-and-wife team of star Milla Jovovich and director Paul W.S. Anderson. Aided by those premium ticket prices for 3D movies and — as pointed out by Nikki Finke — using footage actually shot in 3D, the film easily won the weekend as indicated earlier and sailed to a record gross for the action-horror franchise. Specifically, the estimate for the weekend was $27.7 million for Screen Gems/Sony according to Box Office Mojo. It’ll likely drop off in significantly next week, but the damage is already done.
Elsewhere, there wasn’t that much box office love going around on this traditionally weak weekend. “Takers” came in at #2 and showed some relative legs with $6.1 million, again for Screen Gems/Sony, which is having a decent month. Meanwhile, both of last week’s toppers suffered significant second week declines. “The American,” from Focus Features, really did seem to suffer from some poor word of mouth and netted only a bit under $5.9 million.
Last week’s silver medalist, “Machete,” with two sequels announced in its end credits, suffered the geek second week curse and dropped by over 63% netting only 4.2% million. On the other hand, after seeing the film myself this weekend I heard some highly informal Hollywood scuttlebutt indicating the budget was significantly lower than $20 million figure we’ve heard for the very funny, but awfully slack, straight-faced tongue-in-cheek homage. So, it’s still possible Danny Trejo as Machete may kill again, if so, I’m guessing Fox will keep him on a tight budget.
And they get pretty good reviews. The newest international fave from Japan’s insanely prolific Takashi Miike looks plenty bloody but still a lot less extreme and a lot more classical than the ultra-gorefests that made his reputation as an action and horror director. In fact, it’s more in the vein of a traditional samurai flick and is actually a remake of a 1963 film. It already screened at Venice and will be playing next week in Toronto, which has introduced more than a few great Asian action fests to North America.
This trailer isn’t subtitled, but trust me, it’s worth watching.
Regular readers won’t be surprised to see that I’ve assiduously avoided Miike’s notorious “Audition” and “Ichii the Killer” but did see, and very much enjoyed his insane but actually rather restrained musical horror-comedy, “The Happiness of the Katakuris.” I think this might be my second Miike.
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