And Another

Variety reported yesterday that Ridley Scott is attached to direct a prequel to Alien. Writer is Jon Spaihts. More as it develops!

Can I get a comment, cast of Planet of the Vampires?

I found this discouraging.

Quoting a recognizable image has its artistic and commercial pros and cons, and isn’t inherently trouble – I dig Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 aping The Breakfast Club as much as anyone – but it becomes problematic when you borrow an image with a more direct tie to the meaning of the text it represents. Glasses and windows, whole and shattered, play a symbolic role in Straw Dogs, and so this feels to me like a lift of the image without an understanding of the weight behind it. But then I haven’t seen the movie version of Tyler Perry’s I Can Do Bad All By Myself, or the play it’s based on, so maybe I judge too harshly.

Rod Lurie’s Straw Dogs remake is still in the works. James Marsden, Kate Bosworth, and Alexander Skarsgård have been added as the leads since last discussed.

In downtown Los Angeles for part of last weekend, I was surprised by the overabundance of billboards and posters for today’s release of The Orphan, a new entry in the evil-kid subgenre from Jaume Collet-Sera, the director of the watchable remake of House of Wax and the sequel to Goal! (I’m avoiding spoilers so far, but am gonna be amused if The Orphan turns out to be a remake of a certain scary story many of us read as kids.)

Anyway, the poster is designed to be just slightly off and kind of Photoshop-disturbing, but it just put me in mind of other recent image-manipulated would-be creepy kids.

Esther, with whom it seems there is something the matter, or so I hear:

Fi-Fi, charming star of Chris Cunningham’s “Mental Wealth” commercial for Playstation, 2000

The kid from David Slade’s “Aerials” video for System of a Down, 2002

Both directors worked with Aphex Twin previous to these inventions – Slade on Donkey Rhubarb, 1995, and Cunningham on Come to Daddy, 1997, and Windowlicker, 1999. I wonder if knowing Richard D. James does weird things to a person?

But seriously, folks, K-9 did have two sequels, and Jim Belushi did stick around for both. Ed O’Neill didn’t make it back, and neither did Koton the dog. A pilot was shot for a TV spinoff*, wherein Koton appeared as Rondo (not Jerry Lee, as in the film) alongside Robert Carradine, but ABC didn’t pick it up.

*Not to be confused with K-9, an upcoming half-hour Doctor Who spinoff series revolving around “several fictional robotic dogs” (thanks to Wikipedia for the charming phrase).

A Kansas City police dog offscreen, Koton was shot and killed by some real-life Kevin Tighe while pursuing a suspect in the murder of a police officer. I’m surprised they even bothered going ahead with K-911 and K-9: P.I. without him.

Didn’t care much for the first Messengers, an unexciting little rural ghost story mostly directed by the Pang Brothers, until it was given to Eduardo Rodriguez for reshooting. The flick was the first real lead role for a pre-Twilight Kristen Stewart (the poor dear, only fifteen or sixteen, was subjected to the indignity of an unfortunate malady known to marketing science as Photoshopping Of The Breasts – this struck right around the same time as the DVD release, see exhibits A & B).

The Messengers, an Americanized, PG-13 take on the vengeful Japanese spirits then in vogue, stars Kristen (here “Jess”) in a story about a family leaving the big city for a new home in the countryside. A handyman (John Corbett) seems helpful at first before gradually being revealed as something more ominous, and the family is left doing detective work to unearth the strange history of their new home.

Cold Creek Manor, just four years earlier but feeling like more, also starred Kristen (here “Kristen”). This time, she appears in a story about a family leaving the big city for a new home in the countryside. A handyman (Stephen Dorff) seems helpful at first before gradually being revealed as something more ominous, and the family is left doing detective work to unearth the strange history of their new home. Also, Cold Creek Manor features Ray Paisley as Dink (It could be a dink – IMDb is unclear and I don’t remember the character).

Despite mediocre reviews, The Messengers took in a pretty solid $55 million worldwide take on a $16 mil budget, so here comes Messengers 2: The Scarecrow, straight to DVD today. Starring Norman Reedus, Claire Holt, and nobody from the first movie, it’s the U.S. debut from Danish director Martin Barnewitz, with a script from Todd Farmer, who wrote the story for the first Messengers, and also scripted the My Bloody Valentine remake and Jason X. Can’t say much for the trailer, which fills a third of its time with footage from the first film and ends up indicating pretty clearly that an evil scarecrow is responsible for the farm’s woes. All of this said, “The Shining goes country” (Screem magazine) is a compelling argument, though I suspect more entertaining a pitch than the movie probably merits.

According to Kristen Stewart’s IMDb page, she’s appearing soon in K-11. I didn’t even catch K-10! James Belushi no longer appears to be involved.

Yesterday was Terry O’Quinn’s birthday, and it reminded me to check in on that Stepfather remake. O’Quinn’s mostly known these days as Locke on Lost, for which he’s won an Emmy, but the role that brought him to prominence was the murderous Bluebeard-style killer (more precisely, John List-style killer) of The Stepfather, a 1987 flick generally billed as a slasher, but one which, if you substituted bladed hand for bladed weapon, would make a pretty serviceable afterschool special on domestic abuse. (Or, if you prefer, “Makes Fatal Attraction look like high-gloss trash!” -The Scotsman)

New version is from director Nelson McCormick and writer J.S. Cardone, the creative team behind last year’s Prom Night remake. If you liked that one, you’ll be further excited to hear that not only the crew, but some of the Prom Night sets were repurposed for Stepfather. Cardone says the new script is closet to the original John List inspiration.

Even Roger Ebert agreed that O’Quinn did a great job in the first one (Ebert used the word “wonderful”), so Dylan Walsh has big shoes to fill. Seems like fair casting, though O’Quinn still looks great (see right) and could probably do it himself. Sela Ward is the wife; the new production swaps out minor horror icon Jill Schoelen for a son, to be played by Noun Nounley of Gossip Girl. Sorry, almost neglected to fix my placeholder text there – looks like “Penn Badgley” is the proper arrangement.

At least it’ll mean a DVD transfer; the original Stepfather is curiously absent on DVD, despite a bit of a cult following. Parts 2 (“Make Room for Daddy”) and 3 (3, sans O’Quinn and attempting to make do with Robert Wightman, is especially ignored) are available, but the first never arrived in North America. A probably-unnecessary special edition of Stepfather 2 is in the works and will hit on 9/29; the DVD release of the original hits on 10/13, three days before the remake’s scheduled theatrical release.

I can’t not take a moment to mention that a Sony internal memo apparently is penciling in a September 17, 2010 release date for Resident Evil 4, presently Resident Evil: Afterlife. Much more on this to come, of course.