Screenhead

Rachel McAdams is saying that she absolutely has NOT been cast in Spider Man 4 in the role of Black Cat.

This would be a pretty definitive response, all right…if it weren’t for one critical problem. The rumor is that she AUDITIONED.  This is what she had to say:

“That’s a total rumor, I have to say,” going on to back up the story with a super-Canadian anecdote: “I was hanging out in Toronto the other day and someone came up to me and said, ‘I just heard you’re doing Spider-Man 4.‘ And I said, ‘Really? No one told me!’ It’s not true.”

There have been a lot of rumors swirling around the ether and the blogosphere alike about what’s going down with Spider Man 4. Everybody from Bruce Campbell to random toddlers has been mentioned.  And now with Rachel McAdams possibly stepping in to play Black Cat (unless what she says is actually true), well, that’s just a little more fuel on the fire.  You know we’ll be keeping an eye on this one!

One of the single most terrifying concepts in the world is evil children.

Children epitomize–or at least are supposed to epitomize–the concept of innocence in the world.  And the thought of something turning children into murderous sociopathic little monsters is chilling beyond all reason.  The thought of having to defend yourself against children inherently makes your mind rebel.  Children are to be protected, not to be protected FROM!

And that’s exactly the trope that’ll be riding us in The Children, last, and ultimately best, of the newest round of the Ghost House Underground series.  Lions Gate sent a copy on and it’s a downright peach.

Basically, it’s about what I said–it’s a family Christmas celebration, and all seems about as normal as can be when the kids, for reasons that are utterly unexplained, turn into murderous psychopaths.  And they’re utterly gleeful about the transformation, too.

What follows is about an hour of harrowing, terrifying mayhem as the children go from normal fun loving tykes to monsters that make the children from Village of the Damned look like an ad for Romper Room.

Frankly,  I cant remember the last time I saw the “killer kid” trope played this well.  Orphan?  Nah, not hardly.  These kids would eat that crazy little tot ALIVE.  It’s a whole new standard for killer kids run amok. They’re devious, they’re careful, they plot like…like…well, probably like ROMULANS, I can’t even get them an earthly equivalent.

And when you put these horrendous little child nightmares in a blender with some oblivious adults and one rebellious teenage girl who gets the picture WAY before anyone else, the end result is a horror flick on par with some of the greats.  Granted, the explanations as to WHY this all is happening is flimsier than wet tissue in a windstorm, but hey!  It’s still pretty creepy!

The Screenhead Ten Scale’s already pricing shotguns and hands up a whomping eight out of ten for being some pure-T horrendous horror filmmaking, guaranteed to scare just about anyone.  Watch this on a winter night with someone you love and watch them hit the birth control.

No cameos for the B-movie horror industry’s leading chin, Bruce Campbell, in the future installments of the Spider Man series, no sir!  In fact, by all reports, he’s looking to play a MAJOR role this time around.

The only problem is, Sam Raimi thus far has been very hush hush about it all–not even Campbell knows just what that “major” role is.  Of course, there’s speculation.  Maybe he’ll tackle Mysterio’s part.  Maybe he’ll wind up being Spider-Man in some kind of future setting.  I personally thought he’d make a great J. Jonah Jameson.

There are a whole lot of possibilities here, and with each being nearly as likely as the other to be the right possibility, all we can do is sit, wait, and hash it out endlessly over the sheer array of possibilities.  However, we won’t have long to wait–filming on this one begins January of 2010, with an eye toward releasing it May of 2011.

I, unlike a lot of other people, actually enjoyed the original iteration of The Messengers.  I thought it had plenty of scares in it and served solidly well as a horror flick, especially given that Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures was involved.  That and I loved the fact that the only one who could see these monsters was the little kid–that’s an old trope (parents out there, how many times did your kid wake you up because of “monsters in the closet / under the bed / in the dresser”?) subverted by making the monsters in question real.

But even I had misgivings about doing the second one–sometimes these things go too far.  So today, we’re going to get our look at The Messengers 2: The Scarecrow, only recently out on DVD, and see if they went too, or rather two, far.

The Messengers 2: The Scarecrow really isn’t a sequel so much as it is a prequel, going back to explore the events that happened on that ill-fated sunflower farm.  John’s desperate for a way to keep his crops safe, and with them, his family.  Thus, he turns to the old practice of erecting a scarecrow in the field.  But the scarecrow turns out to work too well, and scares off a whole lot more than crows.  Thus, John now has to protect his family–and himself–from exactly what he had hoped would help protect him.

Let’s kick this right off by saying that we’ve ALL seen killer scarecrow movies.  I have.  I KNOW you have.  We can all probably even list them, going back as far as the eighties and possibly even beyond.  And let’s be further earnest in our assessment that many of them are not what you’d call good.  On the one hand, this doesn’t bode well on the surface for this one.  On the other, well, it’s not going to be hard for it to be one of the best in the field.

I admit that the first part of the movie, devoted to showing us how dire the family’s straits are becoming, is nicely done.  I genuinely felt for this guy–and we’ve all been to that point where there’s just too much month at the end of the money.  And I have to admit, watching that turnaround when the first scarecrow goes in is a bit unsettling but downright satisfying.   And then, inevitably, when the turnaround turns around, and everything goes wrong for totally different reasons, it’s just amazing.  I know, it’s predictable, but the way they’ve done it here is actually sufficiently solid to make a good movie out of a huge block of cliches.  This is like taking a lousy flank steak that wouldn’t be good by itself, adding a few things, and making it part of a salad instead.  The shortcomings are made up for by the alterations, and that’s exactly how it goes in The Messengers 2: The Scarecrow.

I’m actually really surprised at how this turned out.  It’s actually somewhat more foreboding than the original, the only difference being that it’s lost a lot of the stylized Asian flair of the original.  The sequel is actually slightly better than the original because it’s not depending on monsters for its scares, but rather relies a lot more on the sheer force of one man going insane.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives up a seven out of ten for a rule-breaking sequel that actually shows more class than the original, plus manages to be somewhat scarier, in a low-budget way.

You might wonder why I’m tackling such an “older” film today–after all, A Simple Plan was released back in the dim dark days of 1998.  A long time ago by anyone’s reckoning–I graduated from high school that year.  But there are reasons, rest assured.  One, it just got a rerelease just a couple weeks ago.  Two, its director, Sam Raimi, has recently been announced to take the director’s chair for the World of Warcraft movie, so some mention is due.  Three, this movie’s too good not to, and there’s a fair chance a lot of you haven’t seen it.

In A Simple Plan, three guys out in the woods one day find a downed aircraft quite by accident.  They go in to investigate and find a pilot, long dead at the stick, and a duffel bag with just shy of four and a half million dollars in it.  The three come to an agreement–keep the money and leave the plane behind.  What follows as a result of that decision is a series of horrific events that’ll change their lives forever.

If you enjoy anything about this masterful suspense / thriller, based on the book by Scott Smith, enjoy the fact that this sucker BUILDS suspense like an absolute master.  You’d never imagine that Sam “Evil Dead” Raimi had the subtlety for this kind of thing, but once you see A Simple Plan, it will be clear as daylight that he’s more than up to the task.   There’s a wonderful series of escalations and point / counterpoint going on here that shows what happens when people get greedy, or just plain old get needy.  The human capacity for deceit is in full bloom here, and it makes for incredible movie watching.  Watching the relationships interplay, not just within the three who found the money, but also from without, makes a interweaving tapestry of distrust, deceit and sheer thrills that just blows me away.

Even better are the actors he’s got handling the job.  I’m a little ambivalent about Billy Bob Thornton even in the best of times, but there’s no denying that he’s in fine form in this one.  This could be the best thing I’ve ever seen

It’s like I said–it’s that escalation that really makes this movie absolutely amazing to watch.  Every minute that passes, things only get more involved and steadily worse.  It doesn’t just shoot up to a plateau and stay there–it climbs, steadily, until its inevitable conclusion.

By the end, an incredible web of suspicion and paranoia has been built, and when it reaches its inexorable end, it’s downright amazing.  Okay, sure–it’s not all sunshine and lollipops here.  There’s a good few slow moments in here, a little drama between the foursome, but this really shouldn’t distract overmuch from the sheer amount of quality they’ll bring to bear here.

One thing is clear, Sam Raimi is some kind of insane freaky genius.  The guy knows what he’s doing.  This bodes incredibly well for the upcoming World of Warcraft movie, and there’s every reason to catch A Simple Plan, whether for the first time or the tenth.  The Screenhead Ten Scale responds with appropriate love, giving A Simple Plan nine out of ten for being a high-quality thriller with only a few rough edges.

When someone dies in the grip of a powerful rage, a curse is born.  The curse gathers in that place of death.  Those who encounter it will be consumed by its fury.  Those who survive will carry the curse with them…until it is reborn.

If that sounds familiar, especially to horror buffs, there’s a good reason—it’s pretty much the plotline of the last two Grudge titles, and now, thanks to Sam Raimi and the crew at Ghost House, there’s a third.  I bucked convention with this series, with the belief that the second was, in a limited way, just as good as the first one.  I felt it was a lot more authentic, and not having Sarah Michelle Gellar around for long to Buffy her way through really perked things up, making them a whole lot less “action hero”.

This time around, we’ll be back in the apartment complex we left in the second installment.  The young survivor of the last installment managed to get locked up in an insane asylum, where he was promptly and messily killed by unknown forces. Of course, we know EXACTLY what those forces were—homicidal wackjob ghost extraordinaire Kayako and her squatting harbinger, son Toshio.

Meanwhile, the young survivor’s doctor (played halfassedly by Shawnee Smith) has gone to Chicago in search of answers, and that’s when the killing starts up again.

Frankly, watching this thing was a disaster.  They took all the worst parts of the first two—shoddy explanations, some for-no-clear-reason style killing, plot elements they clearly just pulled out of their asses—and introduced them all into one.  The Grudge 3 isn’t as atmospherically scary as the first one, nor is it as implicitly scary as the second.  All The Grudge 3 can do is do a whole lot of killing of characters we really don’t care about because we barely know who they are.

There will be so many elements of this movie that don’t even try to make sense that listing them all would require me to describe roughly a quarter of the movie.  And even worse, there are elements of the movie that make sense, but only because they’ve been doing them since the beginning.   For instance, I’m getting abundantly tired of Toshio showing up at random intervals and yowling.  Okay, I get it, you died just before your cat so you scream like one at every given opportunity.  And I’m also getting sick of Kayako stumbling around in that weird boneless fashion of hers and killing whatever happens to get in front of her for absolutely no reason at all.  Okay, I get that TOO, you’re a ghost and you’re just plain old enraged, but for crying out loud, absolutely none of these people you’re killing did ANYTHING to you.  Most of them weren’t even in the same TIME ZONE as you when your husband killed you.  Just lay off the random strangers, huh?

Perhaps the worst part about the whole thing is that they weren’t content to just let this misery pass by unchallenged and let the whole thing fade away into trilogy status.  The ending makes it crystalline-clear that there will be, at some point, a Grudge 4, and frankly, after this wreck of a movie I’m not looking forward to it.  At ALL.

I can’t imagine future sequels managing to save this wreck—though I have been wrong before—at this point, I’m not even cautiously optimistic.  I EXPECT this to continue to be a wreck.  If The Grudge 3 is any indication, look for this one to suck hard for years to come.

Sam Raimi’s poster for Drag Me to Hell is wicked. The movie is sure to draw horror fans from all dregs of life.

Spider-man directer Sam Raimi is back to his old-horror tricks with panache.

Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures is remaking a pair of European horror films.

Anguish is the first one, which will be a remake of the 1987 Spanish horror film that was written and directed by Bigas Luna.  

Ghost House Pictures has also acquired the remake rights to the Danish movie Room 205.

Anguish is a typical horror film that follows two girls who, while watching a scary movie, find themselves in a horror film of their own when their life starts to mirror the movie’s plot.

Jake Wade Wall (When a Stranger Calls) penned the screenplay.

Ghost House has signed up Room 205 director Martin Barnewitz to helm the English-language remake, which is being rebooted The Dorm.

Room 205, is another typical horror film, that follows a college freshman who moves into a dorm only to find that her room is haunted by sinister forces.

With the Spider-Man 4 vehicle slowly moving into production, franchise director Sam Raimi expressed his excitement for the film, and then some.

"I’m really excited about Spider-Man, and I’m hoping to direct it" he told MTV. "I don’t have a script yet, but production would start probably by March of 2010, I’m guessing."

"It sounds like a long time away, but we need a script first, and a lot of pre-production has to take place," Raimi continued. He hopes that Dunst will be back for the sequel.

Additionally, he talked about the possible back-to-back sequels: “It’s Amy Pascal’s [Sony studio chief] decision. I don’t think it has been decided yet, and she’s the one that’s really going to make that decision; I’m really curious myself."

The movie is expected to be released sometime in 2012.