Meanwhile, horror writer/director/producer Eli Roth will reteam with StudioCanal and Strike Entertainment to produce a psychological thriller titled The Other Woman. The film will be directed by Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland, who are currently writing the screenplay. Botko and Gurland also wrote The Last Exorcism (previously known as Cotton), which they had originally planned to direct.
Posted on Tuesday, December 15th, 2009 by Devindra Hardawar
I’m currently trying to figure out my top ten list of 2009, but one film that I knew was going to be there from the moment I saw it was Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. I’ve yet to see some of the bigger releases this month, but as of this moment Basterds is definitely my favorite film of the year (I’m not saying it’s the outright best film this year — at least, not yet). I’m confident that this film will be analyzed for years to come because there’s definitely a lot going on underneath all the Nazi killing.
One very personal piece was recently written by Eli Roth’s father, Sheldon Roth, for the Jewish Journal. The piece concerns Roth’s final moments in the film, and is definitely spoiler filled right from the title.
Some excerpts, and more spoilers, after the break.
Posted on Monday, December 7th, 2009 by Russ Fischer
When he joined Quentin Tarantino and the cast of Inglourious Basterds at Cannes in May, Eli Roth announced the title of his next feature: Endangered Species. We’ve since learned that the film was jointly inspired by Cloverfield and Transformers, and that, very much in the vein of those two films, it’ll be a big city-destruction film. We don’t know anything about the antagonist(s), but aliens have been strongly hinted, with humans being the endangered species. He has said it will be “science fiction-based and with lots of chaos and mass destruction.”
Now he’s dropped a few small quotes about the film, which is gearing up to shoot in 2010. Read More »
Posted on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 by Russ Fischer
Summit is best known for Twilight, but the company has put weight behind other genre-ish stuff that has, let’s say, a more masculine appeal. As recent examples, there was the semi-superhero film Push, and the Nic Cage film Knowing. Now the studio is getting behind an adaptation of the Top Cow comic series Alibi and an alien invasion film called, er, Invasion. Read More »
Posted on Monday, November 30th, 2009 by Peter Sciretta
Ben Magid’s spec screenplay Invasion has sold to Summit Entertainment/Participant for low to mid six figures. The story, which is an alien invasion thriller in the same vein as Cloverfield, is being produced by Eli Roth and Eric Newman (Children of Men, Slither). According to Shock, “the film opens with a wicked subway accident in Los Angeles in which the survivors (the film’s protagonists) climb from the wreckage to find the, now “snowy,” city in ruins.” No further details are available at this time. Magid made a name for himself in 2006, selling a pitch to New Line for his script Pan, a spin on J.M. Barrie’s tale of Peter Pan, where Pan is a villain being hunted by a police captain named Hook. He has since taken a stab at an early draft for the live-action adaptation of Hack/Slash.
With the success of recent films like the Transformers movies and District 9 (and to a lesser extent, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which is the 26th highest grossing film worldwide), it seems like Hollywood is going alien crazy, giving the green light and putting a lot of alien-based stories in development — more than ever before. In a couple years, will aliens be the new vampires? Here is a round up of the alien-related projects in development right now.
23 more film projects listed after jump.
Posted on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 by Brendon Connelly
While signing copies of his new novel Under the Dome in a Dundalk, Maryland Walmart last night, Stephen King also took part in a decent-length, rapid-fire Q&A that has already been posted to YouTube. You can see the whole thing below the break, or leave it up to me to tell you which bits and pieces I found the most interesting.
When 2009 is reflected on later, it won’t be the clunky, predictable Oscar-bait pics that standout but rather a new crop of outspoken auteurs that came into their own in ‘09 with stealthy, highly confident fare. A charged determination and can’t-fail idealism is instilled in these directors that makes the filmmaking process once again exciting and truly daring: A young man’s game. Writer/director, Ti West, is one such auteur. Not yet 30 years of age, West has crafted a horror film with an attention to detail, sex appeal, color and sound so as to evoke the paranoid trips of early Roman Polanski and the vintage, pop-darkly appreciation of early Richard Linklater and Paul Thomas Anderson.
Bearing a title that is epic and playfully dry, The House of the Devil reconnects the horror genre with roots-y, genuine, teetering suspense. By doing so, West also manages to grasp viewers in the claws of doom by way of a foreboding graveyard or a pitch black basement, as opposed to, say, a phallic torture chamber aired simultaneously on forty live surveillance cameras. Stylistically, West forwent mining homage from the Grindhouse well—so exhausted this decade—and instead made a film set in the ’80s that not only looks period, but feels of it. The era’s mundane pace of life and lack of social interconnection can be sensed from the movie’s start and is incensed by the decade’s “Satanic Panic”: a media-exploited phenomenon that did for Satanism what coverage of the Zodiac Killer and Son of Sam did for serial killers in the ’60s and ’70s. At Devil’s heart is the lead performance by newcomer, Jocelin Donahue, 27, who gets my vote for movie crush of 2009. Donahue plays Samantha, a smart, unsure college sophomore in dire need of a payday who eventually responds—in that ’80s way—to a nondescript babysitter flyer. No one ever said that $atan doesn’t have great taste.
From the way in which Donahue walks in high-waisted jeans to the way Samantha and her BFF eat and critique pizza, it’s a luscious thrill to witness such a dope actress and director get it and get it some more. Moreover, West appears supported by one of the cooler, simpatico filmmaking crews working in indie films today. Unlike the stereotypical proto-auteur of past and present, West’s horror movie shines as both the work of a driven perfectionist and a clear vision by a superlative collective; this enables the viewer to fall into, and fall in love with, all the creepy, masterful foreplay before West’s plot rocks wildly alongside a devilish eclipse. Afterward, I desired to open a pack of THoTD trading cards showcasing the film’s collaborators and characters alike rather than scan IMDB. Ti West discussed his creative process with /Film, as well as the film’s titular House, its mystic pizza, and why his experience helming the yet-to-be-released Cabin Fever 2 was an effing nightmare straight outta Hell Hollywood.
Hunter Stephenson: Hi Ti. I found this to be a very uncompromising horror film. I think what many are finding to their surprise is that The House of the Devil is not an homage to the ’80s a la Thanksgiving but a real period piece.
Ti West: Thanks, I’m glad you see it like that because that’s how I see it: as a period piece. I appreciate that. I mean, the film is basically about a cultural phenomenon in the 1980s, the Satanic Panic. So, I wanted to create a very accurate depiction of that and not do it tongue-in-cheek, or as a parody, because then people wouldn’t care about the characters in the movie. That’s why there’s a really nice primer to the beginning of the film [explaining the Satanic Panic, complete with statistics], because so much of the film is a contrast between a lot of realism and then these very fantastic horror elements. And that’s why, with the beginning, I wanted it to feel like this is something that could have really happened.
Posted on Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 by Hunter Stephenson
In a new interview with The Onion in which he discusses everything from Dawn of the Dead to sperm cells, the RZA let it be known that a biopic on Ol’ Dirty Bastard, the late id of the Wu-Tang Clan, is in early discussion stages. The highlight of Funny People also updated on his hands-on role on The Last Dragon remake and his directorial debut, the kung-fu flick The Man With the Iron Fist, under the tutelage of his pal Eli Roth. Supremely good stuff…
Posted on Thursday, September 10th, 2009 by Brendon Connelly
I’ll tell you up front that the Splice video is not online and I’ll just be telling you about it, though it was rather marvelous and really very exciting and I’ll try and convey that. The others, though, are embedded after the break - An American Douchebag in London part 1, Eli Roth’s commercial for Peta and some Survival of the Dead publicity.
The following introduction and interview contain moderate spoilers.
When a new film from Quentin Tarantino is released, a film as original and awash in genre-geometry as Inglourious Basterds, the post-viewing sensation that follows remains difficult to describe. In Kill Bill Vol. 1, there is a scene set inside the House of Blue Leaves in which Uma Thurman’s Bride blinks and the film switches from black and white to color. A sizable light switch is then thrown by a yakuza. In seconds, the screen turns a cool midnight blue. At that moment the aural equivalent of digital goosebumps chimes unusually through the speakers. Now everything on screen appears the same but is different, renergized and alive. I remember watching this scene and realizing that it inexplicably captures how I feel after a QT film; the difference being that the sensation of a QT film is not flicked instantaneously; it spreads over the following weeks and months as if by a potent time-release capsule. In addition, as this sensation is occuring at a personal level, Tarantino’s characters and images are similarly infiltrating and titillating the collective mind of endless media, fellow cinephiles, and general moviegoers. Pop-culture synapses connect further until a single Tarantino character is loaded into the permanent highlight reel of a respective year, for film or otherwise. It’s the lysergic, symbiotic propaganda of a true genius.
In this way, Inglourious Basterds is no different from Tarantino’s superlative works: the character that will be remembered in bold fashion is Colonel Hans Landa aka The Jew Hunter, the primary villain in Basterds. Moreover, international viewers, and American viewers especially, will come to remember their surprise introduction to the masterful talent embodying Landa, the Austrian actor Christoph Waltz. His career spanning some 30 years, primarily in theatre and television, Waltz’s performance as the erudite, calculating, and predatory Nazi colonel—a fictional Tarantino creation—is all but guaranteed a Best Supporting Actor nomination. This /Film staffer predicts “a bingo.” If a timely parallel need be drawn to exemplify the breakout performance by this veteran actor—a role that plants the seeds for a long, prosperous career—it would be that of Jackie Earle Haley in Little Children. During his whirlwind of publicity, Quentin Tarantino, doting even for Tarantino, has praised Waltz and his character with the following…
“You gave me my movie.” - to Waltz at the Cannes Film Festival, where he won Best Actor
“Hans Landa is one of the greatest characters I have ever written, and one of the greatest characters that I will ever write.”
