Don't Go in the Martyrs

There is only one Martyrs in the world. And there should only be one Martyrs! Nobody is ever gonna make another Martyrs, nor should they try -- Pascal Laugier's 2008 masterpiece of trauma remains one of a kind fourteen years on, even bestride the original Texas Chain Saws and such that came before it. There's just something about its marrying of bleakness with its elusive, revelatory structure that remains singular to this day. And so with the new horror flick called Barbarian out this weekend, writer-director Zach Cregger is smart to wink and nudge toward Martyrs -- it is a masterpiece after all, and one I wish that had been more influential. 

And yet... and yet. Perhaps Martyrs hasn't been so influential these fourteen years on because of the "and yet" that I am feeling here about Barbarian. Because of the Martyrs-shaped crater that Martyrs detonated inside of my skull it's sort of kind of unfair to any movie that comes along and tries to emulate it, even in the smart ways Barbarian plays at. Foremost, tonally Barbarian only pokes its nose lightly at that kind of bleakness -- it's much more of a "ride" movie, with you know, "jokes" and "entertainment," none of which Martyrs had much use for. 

But amid the "gross out gags" that are very much played for us to scream-laugh at in Barbarian, there are clear nods toward the earlier film visually, and thematically too. And structurally Barbarian borrows the most, with its unfolding onion of story inside story inside story until things begin to make their sense in just the last act, once the pieces can be seen for what they are.

And because of that, like with Martyrs, Barbarian is a sort of difficult movie to write about without spoiling. Even addressing its structure like this makes me sad -- going in I had no idea it was this sort of movie and I hate to take that from anybody, and that's before I have even whispered a whisper of plot! Let's just say that Barbarian will reveal itself to not be the movie you think it is going to be about three times, and each rug-pull is a little delight -- this movie is "Fun!" and "Scary!" and all of that stuff, really. I'm just so nerd king captain of Team Martyrs that it's hard not to feel, somewhere inside, that I was watching the miracles of Laugier's achievement be watered down, ever so slightly. 

Because (to borrow the terminology of the MPAA for a second) there is Brutality and there is Adult Theme to Barbarian, but it's all in service of Movie Thrills. It feels manufactured, where Martyrs felt unleashed. Like a nightmare loosed. Like proper sin turned cinema. And as much as Cregger is clearly trying to make an entertaining Horror Movie here -- his intent is clearly very different from Laugier's -- my mind just kept nagging at me that maybe some of the stuff he's poking at here shouldn't be made entertaining? Maybe Martyrs was the only proper way to poke at some of this stuff. Walking out of Barbarian on a Movie High, laughing, just felt untoward somehow. Dirty wrong, not dirty right.

(P.S. As far as I am concerned no, the Martyrs remake does not exist.)

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Thirst (2009)

Priest Sang-hyeon: Grant me the following in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Like a leper rotting in flesh, let all avoid me. Like a cripple without limbs, let me not move freely. Remove my cheeks, that tears may not roll down them. Crush my lips and tongue, that I may not sin with them. Pull out my nails, that I may not grasp nothing. Let my shoulders & back be bent, that I may carry nothing. Like a man with tumor in the head let me lack judgment. Ravage my body sworn to chastity leave me with no pride & have me live in shame. Let no one pray for me. But only the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me.

Park Chan-wook's gloriously perverse vampire flick Thirst is turning 10 next year if you can believe that. It was my 6th favorite scary movie of 2009, although I feel in retrospect that I might've under-valued it? Still, looking at that list of Horror Movies that came out in 2009 - Drag Me to Hell, Jennifer's Body, Orphan, The House of the Devil, and motherfucking Martyrs among many others - it strikes me that 2009 was truly an astonishing year for scares. 

Anyway several of Park's movies remain tough to scrounge up in quality editions here in the US - you can't even find I'm a Cyborg But That's OK in a US format - but we've got good news on that front, as Kino's just announced (thx Mac) that Thirst is getting upgraded to blu-ray for us here in the States sometime "soon," is all they say; I'll make sure to keep my eyes out for more info. Add that to the blu-ray boxed-set of Park's "Vengeance Trilogy" that I'm just right now seeing exists and you'll be halfway to having a good start on one of the world's greatest working directors. (Now excuse me while I go stream The Handmaiden for the one thousandth time.)

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Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

The Strangers (2008)

Kristen: She's watching us.
James: She looks like a ghost.
Do you want me to go talk to her?
Kristen: They don't want to talk.
James: Well they want something.
People don't just stand out there, staring
at us like that. They want something.

A happy 10 to Brian Bertino's super great horror film The Strangers today! Here is my original review from when it came out. And our pal Joe Reid wrote up a nice tribute to the film over at Decider this morning, go check that out. I wouldn't go as far as Joe did to call it the best horror film of the past decade (in very related news hey look Martyrs is turning 10 this fall) but it's excellent and very scary indeed, says me. 

And I'm curious - have any of you seen Bertino's two directorial follow-ups - there's the found-footage-esque Mockingbird in 2014 which I personally dug (here's my review), and then there's The Monster, 2016's movie about a mom (Zoe Kazan) and her daughter who find themselves trapped on a deserted stretch of road with... something... stalking them outside. 

I saw The Monster but a check of the archive shows I never reviewed it - I certainly can't do that now, it having been two years since I saw it, but I remember thinking it fine. Of course with something like The Strangers right out of the gate we fans don't really want "fine" - we're still waiting and hoping Bertino will truly terrify us again.

Bertino got a writing credit on the Strangers sequel, The Strangers: Prey At Night, which came out in March (and which you can rent on Amazon right now) but I'm not sure how involved he ultimately was in the end - anyway I coincidentally watched that over the weekend, so here are my thoughts. It doesn't really work. It follows basically the exact same formula as the first movie - the opening introduction to the characters is pretty protracted; it takes the time to let us marinate in their issues. 

In this case it's Ye Olde Nuclear Family, Dad and Mom and Son and Daughter - the latter's a Bad Girl who they're carting off to reform school when dun dun dun they find themselves trapped with masked marauders in a middle-of-nowhere trailer park. All that is fine - Christina Hendricks is once again the best thing in a project well beneath her talents, and Martin Henderson is more DILF than the screen can handle - but once the scares start coming the film relies on the characters acting tremendously stupid time after time after time after time to the point of audience frustration. At a certain point you're just ready for them all to die because of how dumb they've been. 

Take for instance one scene where one of the characters gets trapped in a car and then just sits there, literally just sits there, and lets the killer walk up and murder them without even so much as swatting a hand. That is a thing that happens. It's incredibly frustrating, especially in light of how gorgeous the movie is at times - there are shots of the lone streetlights hanging above empty roads in misty nighttime air that are breathtaking. But sadly the rest of the movie just doesn't live up to its cinematography's level.

13 Off My Head: Siri Says 2009

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I kind of hate it when I ask Siri to give me a number between 1 and 100 for our "Siri Says" series and she gives me a number that corresponds to a year I already did a humungous list for at the time it happened - like say today she gave me the number "9" and so I looked through our awards for the year 2009 and man I was thorough. I did a Top 20; I gave five runners-up even. 

But funny enough, unlike other recent years that we've looked back on there is actually a lot I might change now? There are several movies that have stood the test of time but there are also several I haven't seen in a decade and then there are several I haven't shown any interest in revisiting, is what I mean. Oh and there are a couple of 2009 movies I didn't see until a year or two later that mess everything up. So let's make a new Top 13 (this was a great year) of The Movies of 2009 then, according to current whims...

My 13 Favorite Movies of 2009

(in no particular order)

Fantastic Mr. Fox

(dir. Wes Anderson)

-- released on November 25th 2009 --

Bright Star

(dir. Jane Campion)

-- released on October 9th 2009 --

Bronson

(dir. Nicolas Winding Refn)

-- released on March 13th 2009 --

Thirst

(dir. Park Chan-wook)

-- released on April 30th 2009 --

Where the Wild Things Are

(dir. Spike Jonze)

-- released on October 16th 2009 --

Antichrist

(dir. Lars von Trier)

-- released on October 23rd 2009 --

Julia

(dir. Erick Zonca)

-- released on May 8th 2009 --

A Serious Man 

(dir. Coens)

-- released on November 6th 2009 --

Drag Me To Hell

(dir. Sam Raimi)

-- released on May 29th 2009 --

Martyrs

(dir. Pascal Laguier)

-- released on April 28th 2009 --

Dogtooth 

(dir. Yorgos Lanthimos)

-- released on November 11th 2009 --

The Informant!

(dir. Steven Soderbergh)

-- released on September 18th 2009 --

Inglourious Basterds

(dir. Quentin Tarantino)

-- released on August 21st 2009 --

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Runners-up: Coraline (dir. Henry Selick), Orphan (dir. Jaume Collet-Serra), A Single Man (dir. Tom Ford), Jennifer's Body (dir. Karyn Kusama), The White Ribbon (dir. Heneke), Observe & Report (dir. Jody Hill), Summer Hours (dir. Assayas), Ponyo (dir. Miyazaki), Sin Nombre (dir. Cary Fukunaga), Avatar (dir. James Cameron), Broken Embraces (dir. Perdo Almodovar)...

... Best Worst Movie (dir. Michael Stephenson), Precious (dir. Lee Daniels), My Son My Son What Have Ye Done (dir. Werner Herzog), Watchmen (dir. Zack Snyder), The Headless Woman (dir. Lucrecia Martel), In The Loop (dir. Armondo Ianucci), The Final Destination (dir. David R. Ellis), Splice (dir. Vincenzo Natali), The House of the Devil (dir. Ti West), Trick r' Treat (dir. Michael Dougherty), Taxidermia (dir. Gyrgy Plfi), Mary & Max (dir. Adam Elliot)

What are your favorite movies of 2009?

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Making Martyrs Of All of Us

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If the Cabin Fever remake is, as I just reviewed it to be, a dulled down rehashing with some extra innards sprinkled on top, the brand new Martyrs remake is what you'd get if you asked a five year old who doesn't understand Latin to open up his or her box of Crayolas and draw us a real cute picture of what the Gutenberg Bible says, but while they're sitting inside of a washing machine. 

If you skinned me alive and then handed me my flayed skin and asked me to do an interpretive Dance of the Seven Veils -- again, with my own flayed skin flapping around in my fingertips -- I would give you something better to look at then this thing.

I want you to, for a moment, picture yourself as the person who in 2012 first saw the Ecce Homo fresco of Jesus that that old Spanish woman tried to restore, making Jesus' face hilariously, horribly pancake-like. I want you to imagine what a swoop of the gut that sensation was, for that person - butterflies and nausea rushing over them as the full scope of the epic fail surrounded and swarmed, bleating in their ears like sickened seagulls.

Picture all of that and know less offense 

than I felt looking at this, this thing.

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I Am Link

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--- Man of Iron - The role of Alfie Allen's uncle has been cast (does that make him Lily Allen's uncle as well?) on A Game of Thrones -- Euron Greyjoy will be played by the Danish actor Pilou Asbæk, seen giving some good sex there to the left. I actually think he's great casting physically if nothing else -- I guess he was in Lucy but all I remember about Lucy is that great big black blob at the end so I can't say if he's a good actor. But he looks kinda like Alfie. The role of Euron is a good one, too.

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--- Big Bad Bots - I really don't link over to Monster Brains often enough -- it's such a wonderful site. If you're unfamiliar they've been scanning in archives and archives of little-known and seen horror and science-fiction art for several years now; to fall down the well of their making is to never be seen again. Anyway I bring them up today because somebody pointed me to this original art-work from HG Wells' book War of the Worlds, drawn by Henrique Alvim Correa, and it's breathtaking stuff. The internet is ten thousand percent a better place because of what MB does.
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--- And Speaking of endless awesomeness, our pal Stacie Ponder made an announcement over at Final Girl yesterday -- she's writing a book! Well two actually but let's not get ahead of herself; firstly and foremost and holy shit, she's writing a book about Pascal Laugier's masterpiece of trauma Martyrs. Stacie has been promising to write something on that film ever since it came out, so we're owed a book at this point! Seriously though, I will be giving these away as Hanukkah presents.
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--- First Gere - We wished Richard Gere a happy birthday the other day with some skin of his in that Breathless movie but if you want a more comprehensive take on his career check out this list of 66 things you might not know about him (66 because that's how old he turned, not because he is the devil). I didn't know he was in the original Broadway stage version of Bent way back in 1980, that's pretty crazy! (And I guess Ian McKellen did the original version in London.) God what I would've given to see that!

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--- Cut Wife Comeback - Just like there was in the first season of Penny Dreadful, there was loads to love about the second season of Penny Dreadful. And somehow, inexplicably to this non-fan, Patti Lupone's small role ended up teetering towards the top. I don't know, it's crazy! But she was wonnnnderful on the show. So I'm happy to hear she's going to be back for the third season, but I gotta admit the news that she's playing a different character (which makes sense seeing as what happened to her character last time around!) gives me pause since that role might have been a fluke, and she'll have a role this time around where she annoys me, per her usual. (Thanks Mac)
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--- King Vinnie - We were just talking about Vincent Cassel last night (he will be the villain in the next Bourne movie) so we may as well share the trailer to his new film Partisan, which starts off with him shirtless and speeds right on to more shirtless, more shirtless, and we have speedo, and is therefore in my good graces right off the bat. Watch the trailer right here. In the film is about Cassel leads a cult that trains kids to be killers; it's out on October 2nd. 

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--- Scream Forever - I was hoping that our pal Glenn Dunks would write up something on the passing of Wes Craven (I think Glenn and I first bonded over our love for the Scream films, which Glenn once went through Scene by Scene at his old blog) and he did for The Film Experience, and it's a lovely ode to the man and what he meant to those of us who loved him and his movies, go read it. I wrote up a little thing on Sunday night when the news broke, in case you missed it; we have more coming here tomorrow though, so stay tuned.
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I Am Link

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--- Double Damn - Over at this Henry Cavill fan-site they got to interview Alain Moussi, the stuntman who was Henry Cavill's stunt-double in Immortals; he's also done stunt-work on films like X-Men: Days of Future Past and Pacific Rim, and he's about to tackle the actual on-screen leading role in the remake of Kickboxer. Anyway he seems like a charmer, and he tells a funny story about pranking his girlfriend with tales of Henry Cavill nudity, so click on over.

--- Forever Cathy - I've been telling you about Schitts Creek, the hysterical new Canadian comedy with Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara, for a few weeks now - well it premieres tonight in the US and Vulture has a lovely chat with its two stars right here. I love the repeated instances Catherine's obvious humility shining through - "Let's not act like it's some big coup" - even though Catherine O'Hara of all people has no reason to be humble.

--- Video Star - David Fincher's beginning to have his fingers in so many pies I can't keep up - I can't remember if we'd heard about the comedy series he's making for Netflix or not? It's called Living On Video and it's about the dawn of the music-video in 1983 Los Angeles; some kid from The Killing just got cast in the lead but more importantly the beautiful and under-exploited Sam Page is also cast, as "a meteorologist trying to transition into game-show hosting." I can totally see it. (thanks Mac)

--- Love At Any Age - There's not a ton to this news-story behind the headline but oh what a headline - apparently Bill Murray was seen putting the moves on Catherine Denueve at a restaurant in Los Angeles a couple of days ago. Can you imagine? That is the coolest pick-up scene ever. I need them to have a torrid public love affair.

--- Rosemary's Birthday - I missed Mia Farrow's 70th birthday on Monday - happy belated birthday, Mia! - but thankfully Time magazine was there and they shared a glorious collection of photographs running through the course her several decades in the public eye. (Thanks Mac) Oh and on a related note there've been some raised eyebrows about her son Ronan's inclusion on Out magazine's recent list of hot gay bachelors, since Ronan's never come out.

--- Death Squad - Not only has the cast been revealed for the terribly ill-advised American remake of Pascal Laugier's brilliant and blistering 2009 horror film Martyrs, but apparently the thing's already been filmed too! I guess it was smart of them to just get 'er done and avoid the internet noise. I don't recognize any of the people cast in it but I wouldn't have recognized any of the people cast in the original either so that can't be a knock against it.

--- Hot Time - I haven't read this entire thing yet but Variety did a pretty comprehensive look at the butchering of 54, the "Ryan Phillippe's ass at da club" movie we love despite its awfulness because, you know, Ryan Phillippe's ass, just as the film's brand-new Director's Cut played in Berlin. The good news is the movie's apparently going to play all over the place, and get released (probably on VOD) later this year! We've been waiting for this for a long long time.

--- Bitter Tears - Another movie that played at Berlin that we're very very very interested in seeing is Christian Braad Thompsen's documentary called Fassbinder: To Love Without Demands, which is that's right you guessed it about the career of the great Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The Playlist reviewed it today and it sounds smashing, with interviews with lots of Fassbinder folks.

--- The Winged Stacie - Because I was away at the end of last week I never got to link to the final couple of entries in Final Girl's VHS Week, so head over there to hear Stacie Ponder take on Larry Cohen's Q: The Winged Serpent (a personal fave), Christophe Gans' Brotherhood of the Wolf, and Stuart Gordon's Dagon, which she inspired me to post about right before I left. (And thanks for the shout-out, Stacie!)

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10 Off My Head - Post-Pazuzu Scares

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One week ago yesterday we The Team Film Experience voted on our ten favorite horror movies from before The Exorcist, which came out in 1974. That same day I shared my own personal list, right here. Well now it's time for the movies that came after The Exorcist, you can see the Team's Top Ten right at this link. I have to say, the communal list surprised me as I read through this it this morning - even though there's a lot of overlap (six out of the ten) it somehow feels more contemporary than I was anticipating. But then I suppose my own personal list, which I'm about to share, does skew pretty old-school - seven of my ten fall from between the years of 1974 and 1980. What can I say - that is The Age of Horror as I see it, and I couldn't deny them. Anyway I could make a top 20 list from movies that didn't make the communal list or my own list, and that would be 20 great films too. But here's what I picked.
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10. Black Christmas - The eyeball behind the door, you guys. The eyeball behind the door! The body in the attic. The phone calls. The fact that the bad guy (spoiler alert) never gets caught! Oh and Margot Kidder's monologue about turtles, natch. Halloween gets all the credit (and yes, places higher on this list) but Bob Clark did it all first (Psycho is its own thing). And even beyond claims of "First!" what he did first is still wholly unnerving today.

9. Wolf Creek - Depending on how broad your definition of "slasher" is I'm just realizing that my own list is pretty slasher heavy, which doesn't really surprise me - I came of age in the 1980s, y'all. The lone killer stalking and killing his victims one by one just speaks to me. Greg McLean's 2005 film, the second most recent one on my list, gives us that lone killer with oodles of personality (John Jarett's performance is never not entirely both charming and terrifying all at once), but beyond that it's the film's sense of atmosphere that never stops astonishing me - this is a beautiful film, capturing the cold and barren beauty of the middle of nowhere, and plunking us down in a place where we can't help but know, feel it in our bones, that we are nothing.

8. Suspiria - From the very start - the red lit airport terminal, the violent swishing sound of those sliding glass doors slicing open, Dario Argento's fairy tale sense of gaudy menace never ceases to sweep me up and away in its horrible strange miasma. Goblin's score, chanting and pounding and plinking away, while the kaleidoscopic awfulness swirls around.

7. The Blair Witch Project - I feel like I'm always having to be defensive about Blair Witch, the blow-back against it was so strong, when all I wanna talk about it how it curled up inside my brain and died, and rot, and took with it my ability to ever go camping ever again. I love Daniel's write-up over at TFE (it came in at #8 on the communal list) because I too have such vivid memories of the night after I saw the film, and the way the darkness took on a horrible life of its own.

6. Martyrs - This movie is only five years old but I have had no qualms, pretty much since I first saw it in 2008, at placing it amongst the best the genre has ever offered, will ever offer. It sucked me in and disturbed me on par with anything horror has ever done. The frenetic unsettling pace of the first three quarters is one thing, where the director Pascal Laguier makes you realize you're in the hands of a madman who's got no problem with telling ten more stories in one sitting than you were ever expecting, but it's the brutal last section, when he slows it all down just to break your brain, where Martyrs steps straight into the light and towards the profound.

5. The Shining - I was just saying this recently, when Stephen King once again felt the need to malign the film and more specifically Shelley Duvall's performance (or how Kubrick framed her performance, or whatever), but The Shining really is entirely about Wendy for me every time I watch it, and it is through Duvall that I have felt some of the most real, palpable fear that I have ever experienced from a movie. Close your eyes and tell me you can't immediately summon up the trembling limp-wristed way that she holds that butcher knife clutched to her chest in the bathroom.

4. Alien - I don't know that anyone will ever design a greater movie monster than we got out of HR Giger & Co. in Ridley Scott's classic 1979 haunted space-ship film. And I always think of it as being so strange and different from us, the monster, but then the thing that always unsettles me the most when I rewatch the film is just how very nearly human it is in far too many ways for me to ever be comfortable with. It's just us, turned inside out, dipped in acid and slime and chrome, and shot full of every single nightmare that you've ever had.

3. Halloween - Michael Myers remains the only horror movie villain that I have ever had a nightmare about where I woke up in tears and could not go back to sleep for the entire night, and had trouble sleeping for days after. And I hadn't even watched a Halloween movie any time recently! That mask, that horrible blankness, it just seeps right into you.

2. Carrie - I wrote the write-up for this movie over at TFE's group list, where it came in at #4, but I'll just add this over here: I can see your dirty pillows. Seriously though, as much gloriously over-the-top fun as I find DepPalma's film to be, the real lingering sensation is this deep, deep well of sadness. I can hear the break in Sissy Spacek's voice as she says, "Mama..." and I just want to sob.

1. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - The scariest movie ever made, before or after The Exorcist - ever, says me. When that metal door slams open and Leatherface comes stepping out, everything starts spinning, Tobe Hooper turned the world on its axis. Nothing has ever felt so wrong. (And yes, therefore, so right.) The madness, dear god, the madness. This film captures madness.

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I Am Link

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Alright it is catch-up time. These are links that I saw over the last week or so that I haven't yet gotten around to posting, but could hardly leave unposted. I'll get to newer stuff later, for now let's just get this much done at least.

--- Red Hugh - EW has a collection of the first shots from Bryan Fuller's much anticipated Hannibal Lecter TV show with Mads Mikkelsen, Hugh Dancy, Laurence Fishburne and so forth making appaearances. That shot of a bloody-eyed Hugh is a keeper!

--- Neighborhood Watch - Rear Window (or more specifically the story Rear Window was based on called "It Had To Be Murder" by Cornell Woolrich) is making its way to the stage. I'm only shocked that hadn't happened already, it's such a fitting arena for it. Lucky set designer!

--- Different Nympho - Pascal Laugier, the director of Martyrs and The Tall Man, is figuring out what he wants to do next, which will apparently be some kind of "twisted sex movie." Sign me up!
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--- On The Vine - I have spent the last several days oohing and ahhing over the poster for Park Chan-wook's Stoker, and already wishing there was a copy to buy somewhere...

--- Go West - Horror director Ti West (House of the Devil) has started gathering up his cast for his next flick - it's called The Sacrament and so far he's got Joe Swanberg and AJ Bowen, amongst other mumblecore stalwarts.

--- Eyes Wide Stanley - Alright I'm realizing right now that I forwarded myself this piece written by Nicole Kidman on her time with Stanley Kubrick but I never got around to reading it myself somehow, so that's what I'll do over lunch, I guess.

--- Tape Two - There will be a sequel to V/H/S - of course there will be - and here is the list of directors participating.
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I Am Link

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--- The Long Hardy Road - Here's a sentence that's got several pleasure-inducing words all tumbled up in it - Tom Hardy and Michael Shannon are going to make a movie together, and it's based off a play that was written by the guy who wrote the TV show about Thomas Jane's big cock. Let's hope he readdresses Hung's themes for Tom and Mike! Apparently Hardy already did the play, called The Long Red Road, on stage a couple years ago, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman directed it.

--- Slam Man - Don't click on over to this AICN review of Pascal Laugier's The Tall Man unless you've seen it already - and if you haven't seen it already, see it, I liked it. But if you have seen it, get a load of that nonsense. Dude wasn't even paying attention.

--- Riot Girl - Some behind the scenes shots from the current Carrie remake with Chloe Moretz and Julianne Moore have landed over at BD and you might very well see a giant bucket of blood or two - or three even! - if you click on over.

--- Return to the Shire - I'm saving this for later this afternoon when my lunch-time pizza is sitting in front of me and I need something to read whilst I chew, but hey look over at Final Girl Stacie Ponder reviewed the 1998 horror flick The Landlady starring Talia Shire. I have never heard of it either, but what the hey.

--- First Stand - Slash has the trailer for the new Arnold Schwarzenegger movie called The Last Stand, which I am totally excited about because the guy that made I Saw the Devil directed it, and it co-stars Eduardo Noriega and Rodrigo Santoro. I mean, hello!

--- Supa Two - Joss Whedon's second round with The Avengers will land on May 1st, 2015. Giving the competition lots of time to get out of the way, I guess. Who will play The Scarlet Witch? Amy Acker anyone?

--- New Boloney - The new documentary from the guy who made the wonderful doc Best Worst Movie, about his time starring in the best worst movie Troll 2, has a new horror-themed doc called The American Scream that will be showing at Fantastic Fest at the end of September.

--- The Full LaBeouf - We all wondered when the rumor broke that Shia LaBeouf was gonna be making Nymphomaniac with Lars Von Trier just how far he'd be going in the promised-to-be explicit tale - some of us with gleeful anticipation, and some of us with dawning horror. Well Shia's sharing...

"It is what you think it is. There's a disclaimer at the top of the script that basically says, we're doing [the sex] for real. And anything that is 'illegal' will be shot in blurred images, but other than that, everything is happening."

--- Good Sir Cyborg - Some details on the extras that'll be on the DVD of Prometheus over here, including extra Fassy, because of course there will be. I just want some more full-length shots of him in his snug little suit, s'all I ask.
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