Though Fantastic Fest still has three days left packed with movies, the best of the best have been revealed. Monday night, the awards for the best films, actors, writers and directors of the festival were announced in several different categories. Some of the winners are films I’ve already reviewed and loved. The Audience Award went to A Boy and His Samurai by Yoshihiro Nakamura, the AMD Dell Next Wave Spotlight Competition winner was Bullhead directed by Michael R. Roskam (review coming soon) and You’re Next by Adam Wingard swept nearly all the horror awards. Read all the winners after the jump. Read More »
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After an much buzzed about world premiere in Toronto, Adam Wingard‘s action horror film You’re Next had its U.S. Premiere early Sunday morning at Fantastic Fest 2011. In its most basic terms, You’re Next is about a family reunion gone horribly wrong when a gang of animal-masked men invade a home and Lionsgate just purchased the rights for domestic distribution. So, sometime next year, everyone will get a chance to see it. Some people who won’t get a chance to see it just yet, though, are the majority of Fantastic Fest attendees because Lionsgate pulled one of the two scheduled showtimes making the late night screening one of the festival’s hottest tickets.
So did it live up to the hype? What makes You’re Next so different from other home invasion movies? Is this the next Scream? Watch a video blog featuring myself and Erik Davis of Movies.com for the answers. Read More »
This is why we always give a lot of attention to the Midnight Madness program assembled each year for the Toronto Film Festival: it generates some of the most fun in the fest, and some of the quickest sales. (If not always the quickest releases: don’t bring up the All the Boys Love Mandy Lane.)
The Raid was sold before Toronto started, so the biggest Midnight Madness sale is undoubtedly the horror flick You’re Next, directed by Adam Wingard and written by Simon Barrett. The two were TIFF vets thanks to their previous film A Horrible Way to Die, and Barrett’s script for the 2004 film Dead Birds. Now we’ll all get to see You’re Next sometime in 2012 thanks to Lionsgate. Read More »
The horror anthology The ABCs of Death, inspired in part by early kids’ books and bearing a real resemblance to Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies, is a who’s-who of current horror and genre stars and up and comers. The film will be divided into twenty-six segments in which a letter of the alphabet corresponds to a method of death. The segments will be short, but given that they’ll be directed by people like Nacho Vigalondo, Jason Eisener, Noburo Iguchi and many more, they might pack a punch.
Two more directors were added to the list today, bringing the total number of signees to twenty-five. Xavier Gens (Frontier(s), Hitman) and Christopher Smith (Severance, Triangle, Black Death) are now on the roster. Details of a contest to choose the final director are after the break. Read More »
The horror anthology is really coming back, and if things work out well Drafthouse Films, with Timpson Films and Magnet, might be right at the forefront of the mini-trend with a new project called The ABCs of Death. This is a massive anthology inspired by kids ABC books, in which twenty-five directors and one contest winner will each “be assigned a letter from the alphabet that represents a word to act as a springboard for a short. It will be up to each filmmaker to interpret, from accidental deaths to murders committed in cold blood.”
In other words, this might be a bit like Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies. But with directors like Jason Eisener (Hobo With A Shotgun), Yoshihiro Nishimura (Tokyo Gore Police) and Srdjan Spasojevic (A Serbian Film) making the shorts, it could get a lot crazier than that. The full director list and a cute teaser poster is after the break. Read More »
A.J. Bowen, Amy Seimetz, and Joe Swanberg have been cast in Adam Wingard‘s thriller A Horrible Way to Die. Written by Simon Barrett (Dead Birds), the story follows an escaped murderer (Bowen) in pursuit of his ex-girlfriend (Seimetz), who has fled to start a new life in a small town. Swanberg plays the ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend. The photo above is from the movie, which is currently shooting in Columbia, Missouri.
Barry Pepper (Saving Private Ryan, The Green Mile, 25th Hour) joins Matt Damon, Jeff Bridges, Josh Brolin and Hailee Steinfeld in the Coen brothers’ adaptation of True Grit. Pepper will play “Lucky” Ned Pepper, the notorious outlaw played by Robert Duvall in the 1969 film adaptation. [Variety]
Ryan Reynolds and Jason Bateman will star in Wedding Crashers helmer David Dobkin‘s body-switching comedy The Change-Up, written by The Hangover scribes Jon Lucas and Scott Moore. Bateman plays a responsible family man who switches bodies with his lazy man-child best friend (Reynolds). [variety]
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