You know those films with titles that just subtly hint at what the movie might contain? Well, Big A– Spider! is not one of them.
Indeed, judging by the Big A– Spider! trailer, this Greg Grunberg-starring comedy-horror movie — which will premiere at next month’s SXSW Film Festival — very much features a big a– spider. Check it out and tell us what you think (unless you think, “Hey, this movie’s about a big a– spider!” because, to be honest, we’ve kind of covered that). READ FULL STORY »
Image Credit: Anchor Bay
Giant alien spiders attacking Los Angeles, mysterious strangers, supernatural phenomena, and a vampire who falls for a screenwriter are just some of the strange and fascinating SXSW picks for their popular Midnighters program.
“We work year-round searching for films that will wow our audiences at Midnight. This year we scoured the globe and brought back a batch that we knew would truly satisfy the gore hounds of SXSW,” said SXSW Senior Programmer & Operations Manager Jarod Neece in a press release announcing the lineup, Wednesday. “Full of scares, sex, madness, laughs, chills and major mind f—-, we hope there’s a little something for everyone.”
The Festival also selected 106 short films which will be shown in ten programs throughout the Festival. Shorts programmer Claudette Godfrey said in the press release that “this year’s selections beautifully capture, in a multitude of ways, the essence of existence in this very specific moment, while still managing to provide a much wider and relatable commentary across time.”
Take a look at a few of the midnight features and shorts that caught our eye.
Would you rather stab a fellow dinner guest in the thigh with an ice pick or strike another diner three times across the back with an African whipping staff? That is just one of the highly unpleasant choices offered to characters in the new horror movie Would You Rather, which opens this Friday at New York’s IFC Center (the film will also be available on VOD).
Directed by David Guy Levy, Would You Rather stars Jeffrey Combs as a sadistic 1%-er named Shepard Lambrick who invites a group of troubled folks to his mansion and promises to solve the problems of whoever wins his homicidal version of the titular game. “I think the movie really has something to say about what’s going on in our society right now,” says Combs, who is best known for portraying Herbert West in the Re-Animator movies. “It really echoes the haves-versus-the-have-nots that we’re all dealing with and seeing in the news — granted, in an exaggerated way.”
Below, the affable Combs talks more about Would You Rather, which also stars Brittany Snow, John Heard, and former adult film actress Sasha Grey. Plus!: Why his days playing Herbert West are probably over and the one movie he would rather not have made. READ FULL STORY »
Image Credit: Ryan Samul
Another Sundance acquisition! Entertainment One confirmed that it’s finalized a deal for director Jim Mickle’s We Are What We Are and will release the horror thriller in theaters later this year. The film, a retelling of the 2010 Mexican film by the same name, is about a wholesome-seeming family living in flood-ravaged Castkills, led by a patriarch (Bill Sage) hiding a taste for macabre tradition. Ambyr Childers, Julia Garner, Jack Gore, Kelly McGills, and Michael Parks co-star.
In a press release, eOne vp Dylan Wiley says: “We’re so very excited to add We Are What We Are to our U.S. slate. Jim Mickle’s talent was obvious in Mulberry Street and Stake Land, but this film fulfills his vision on a whole new level and will put him in his rightful place among the masters of genre filmmaking. It will be our pleasure to introduce him to an even wider fan base and we’re confident that audiences will eat up the film.”
EW has an exclusive photo from the film (see it here) and our own Clark Collis recently spoke with Jim Mickle about the new film.
Director Don Coscarelli is best known for the Phantasm horror series—about folks getting their brains drilled out by silver spheres—and 2002′s Bubba Ho-Tep, about a nursing home showdown between an Egyptian mummy and a man, played by Bruce Campbell, who believes himself to be Elvis. Doesn’t the filmmaker ever dream of making a nice, romantic-comedy? Seemingly not. Coscarelli’s latest offering is John Dies at the End, which stars Chase Williamson and Rob Mayes as a pair of slacker-types who gain the ability to travel to different dimensions after consuming a drug called “soy sauce” and Paul Giamatti as a journalist Williamson’s character recruits to tell their bizarre tale. And “bizarre” seems the appropriate word for a movie whose outlandish sights include a flying moustache, a door handle turning into penis, and a monster made from cuts of meat.
Image Credit: Eric A Reid
On Saturday night, the horror anthology sequel S-VHS will premiere at Park City’s Library Center Theatre just a few months after Magnolia Pictures’ genre arm Magnet released its predecessor, the also Sundance-screened V/H/S. Remarkably, Brad Miska, one of the producers of the found footage series, says the second movie could have debuted even sooner. “We had internally joked about how hilarious it would be to actually have S-VHS premiere at the Toronto Film Festival before the first one came out,” laughs Miska, a cofounder of the horror website Bloody Disgusting. “But we thought that would be incredibly disrespectful to Magnolia, so we didn’t do that.”
Image Credit: Ryan Samul
When writer-director Jim Mickle was touring the festival circuit a couple of years back with his vampire-apocalypse epic Stake Land, he couldn’t help but be envious of another horror film then doing the rounds, Mexican filmmaker Jorge Michel Grau’s We Are What We Are. “It played every festival Stake Land did,” recalls Mickle. “I kept missing it but I was kind of jealous because it sounded like a great concept [which] merged genre filmmaking with the intensely emotional. I was like, ‘Ah, s—, I wish I’d made that kind of movie.’”
In the psychological thriller In Fear, a young couple gets lost in a maze of country roads and attempt to survive a night-turned-nightmare. We don’t know much else about this debut movie from director Jeremy Lovering except that it stars Iain De Caestecker (U.K. TV show The Fades), Alice Englert (the forthcoming Beautiful Creatures), and Allen Leech (Downton Abbey); that it’s set to play a midnight screening at the Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 20; and that, judging by the poster you can exclusively see below, it involves trees — and serrated edges.
Take a look and tell us what you think. READ FULL STORY »
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Good news! (At least, “Good news” for people who like films in which folks are stitched together to form grotesque, insect-like monstrosities!) EW can exclusively reveal that Human Centipede star Dieter Laser has settled his differences with director Tom Six and will appear in the third film of the notoriously gruesome horror franchise.
Like a woodland-trapped demon waiting for someone to read the appropriate, evil-corporealizing incantation, the Evil Dead movie franchise has been quiet since 1992′s Army of Darkness. But that will change on April 12 when the remake of director Sam Raimi’s original 1981 shocker The Evil Dead hits cinemas. Produced by the architects of the previous three films in the franchise — Raimi, Rob Tapert, and Bruce “Ash” Campbell — this new iteration is cowritten by Diablo Cody and stars Jane Levy (Suburgatory), Shiloh Fernandez, and Lou Taylor Pucci. Replacing Raimi in the director’s chair is newcomer Fede Alvarez, whose alien invasion short film Panic Attack! has garnered an impressive 7m views on the ol’ YouTube.
