Anne Hathaway Catwoman

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I was a big fan of the first Paranormal Activity movie (my review). I know it wasn't everybody's cuppa but I loved the slow build and the way it forced you to just stare and stare at a static image until you thought your brain would snap from the tension. In the way that The Blair Witch Project mastered its teeny tiny budget through an electrifyingly creative manipulation of its sound-design so I felt that PA pulled a similar trick with its rigid visuals, turning a limitation to their favor.

Unfortunately the second film mucked it all up (my review). There were too many cameras around the house that they kept editing between, slicing any mounting tension up into ineffectual ribbons.

Plus the characters went way too far above and beyond the call of unbearable douchiness. Micah and Katie were deeply flawed characters in the first film - some might call them, and many did, monstrously annoying - but the movie was smart about it, I thought, and seemed to have built their less-than-savory aspects inextricably into the tale they were telling. Their passive-aggressive relationship became a game of one-upmanship and the final frame brought the game, and the camera and the home, crashing down. The awful people in the second movie were just ciphers with no interaction between who they were and what was happening to them. The film never found a purpose, and ended up treading stale steps in the first film's much more successful wake.

Point! We now have a teaser trailer for the third film.

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(via) So it's a prequel way back to the 1980s with the two sisters as little girls who've got access to what would have been at the time super-expensive crystal clear video technology. Mkay. What makes me most sad about this is we won't get to see any more of Micah.


Bye Micah! You were a sexy asshole. The most curious thing here is the fact that this is coming from Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, the directors that made last year's buzzy curiosity Catfish (my review), the questionable documentary of a slightly adorable dorky New York douche getting caught up in a sad lady's Facebook espionage. I was pro-Catfish for the most part but didn't really keep up with it once it came out and people began picking it apart.


Anyway I am curious to see what these chaps might bring to the Paranormal table. Catfish was sold as a horror movie but really didn't end up being that at all. But it still managed to wring a lot of tension from that curiosity before you knew what was coming. I vividly remember being freaked out when Nev & Co. get to that horse-farm late at night and are peering through the darkened windows of the barn. So they can maybe handle suspense? I guess we'll see. PA3 is out on October 21st...


... which is a date that's making my brain question a question: What horror movies are we getting for Halloween this year? The Saw franchise is blessedly over and blessedly done with its nearly-decade-long campaign of ruining the holiday, and I thought we were getting Cabin in the Woods but as we found out this morning it turns out that's not coming out until April.

So as long as this is on our brain, let's take a look-see at all the major horror movies coming out between now and All Hallows. (There will probably be smaller films that will get scheduled between now and then that we're unawares of just yet.)


-- The only horror movie out before July is over - if you don't count The Smurfs - is the "teenage British thugs vs. aliens" movie Attack the Block on July 29th, which I reviewed right here. I had a fairly complicated reaction to the film and I'm still sort of plagued by it. Fantastic monster design and some wonderfully staged action scenes though, even if I'm not sure they didn't ruin everything with an erratic tone and possibly irredeemable main characters.


-- In August we get Final Destination 5 on the 12th and the Fright Night remake on the 19th. I've stopped writing about the latest FD movie because I can't look at any more trailers or pictures, I don't want to spoil anymore of the deaths than I already did with the first trailer, but I wanna see this like crazy, like I do with every installment. I hump this series to death. I think Fright Night looks generally terrible but Toni Collette and Sexy Vampire Colin Farrell might get me there anyway.


-- The Guillermo Del Toro produced remake of Don't Be Afraid of the Dark starring the soulless Katie Holmes and the asstastic Guy Pearce is out on August 26th.

-- Shark Night 3D - from the director of two Final Destination movies, including my favorite the second one! - is out on September 2nd. The trailer for this movie is just absolutely awful, but my FD-loving brain keeps arguing with me about it. Whole conversations have been had inside of my head! Crazy ones!


-- Also on September 2nd comes Apollo 18, which is "Blair Witch on the Moon." Space horror isn't done often enough if you ask me - it don't get much more isolated than that! I hope there's a shot of someone being killed reaching towards Earth in the sky for help. That'd be neat-o.

-- September 9th brings us Contagion, Steven Soderbergh's global pandemic movie with an impressively starry and serious cast. Winslet, Paltrow, Law, Damon, Cotillard, and wait what's this John Hawkes! Love him.

-- The closest thing to horror on September 16th is the Straw Dogs remake but that might just be terrifying us because of the basic fact that they remade Straw Dogs. It does have lots of violence and rape though so close enough. But it also has Alexander Skarsgard and Jimmy Marsden swanning around half-naked and there's nothing scary about that. Stimulating, yes. Intimidating, definitely. But certainly not anything even approaching scary.


-- Dream House, which we just saw the shirtless-Daniel-Craig-ified trailer for yesterday, is out on September 30th.

-- As is Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil, the supposedly pretty funny horror-comedy starring Alan Tudyk and Reaper's Tyler Labine as two innocent hillbillies caught up in bloody shenanigans. I think the idea is that they get mistaken for serial killers by a bunch of stupid vacationing college kids who then try to kill them as if they're in a horror movie fighting off Jason Voorhees. And it's a really fun idea.


-- The Thing remake is out on October 14th. We just saw the first trailer for that last week. Love the cast and want it to be good but it has been sitting around gathering dust for a little while now. That could just be due to factors other than its worth though - I think, like Cabin in the Woods, it got held up due to studio problems.

-- Also out that same day, at least in limited release, is The Skin I Live In. It's Pedro Almodovar's newest movie. It reunites him with 80s man-muse Antonio Banderas, and it's apparently very dark and very creepy. The teaser trailer scared me. All of these things are making me want it something insane.


-- On October 21st, the same day as PA3 is out, Kevin Smith's Red State finally gets a proper release after Smith toured the country earlier this year with it. But from what I hear it's not really the horror movie it's been sold to be either?


-- Same day, another indie weirdo cult movie (as in a movie about a cult) that got talk at Sundance - Martha Marcy May Marlene also isn't really a horror movie in the oogie-boogie slobbery monster sense but it's supposedly pitch-black and horrifying in its own way. Plus it has John Hawkes again and I will mention him whenever I can. Hi again John Hawkes!

As of right now there's apparently nothing scary scheduled for October 28th, which seems bonkers. Expect something to pick up the slack, I imagine. After Halloween we're into Oscar season so there's not as much spooky scheduled - I refuse to categorize the Twilight movies as horror (except for what they say about our culture); Piranha 3DD is supposedly out on November 23rd - perfect for taking Grandma to over Thanksgiving holiday!; David Fincher's Girl With the Dragon Tattoo movie will presumably be pretty horrific a la Straw Dogs with the violence (a lot specifically of a sexual nature) and the throbbing NIN techno; The Darkest Hour has Emile Hirsch fighting killer aliens.   

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--- Animal Rites - A writer's been hired to adapt Beasts of Burden, a comic book series about a bunch of talking animals that fight witches and demons, for a CG-animated adaptation. I just read the first collection of this series a couple of weeks ago and they're a lot of fun and much darker than you might think from the description. This is no Scooby Doo. There's some real horror tucked up in here. Which is why I'm worried that it's a bunch of folks from Walden Media, the production house that's made an effort to create family-friendly spiritual-friendly entertainments like the Narnia series, that have their hands on the stories. There is a lot of room for error tone-wise here that could ruin the reason the series works in the first place.

--- Still Siggyless - Lost's Damon Lindelof is one of the screenwriters for Ridley Scott's not-an-Alien-prequel Prometheus and he gave up a bunch of details the other day on what this whole "not-a-prequel" business actually means. Sounds promising in theory, although all his praise of Ridley Scott's "genius" is undercut by the steady string of godawful movies Ridley Scott has been responsible for over the past 20 years. Anyway Fassy!

--- Dewey Sliced - I hope everyone's been keeping up with Glenn's "Scream to Scream, Scene by Scene" series! He's made it to what he calls his "favorite scene in the entire trilogy," and you know, now that he says it I think it could be mine too. I remember the way I felt in the theater watching this scene - so helpless and horrified. Courtney Cox is phenomenal here. Plus, the second scariest pizza of all time!

--- Fall Carnage - Slash rounds up some release date announcements of note: Steven Soderbergh's Contagion - his flick about a world-wide virus starring a cast of thousands! - will be out on Spetember 9th, a month and a half earlier than expected. Plus Roman Polanski's Carnage, his adaptation of the play God of Carnage with Kate Winslet and Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly and Christoph Waltz, is out in limited release on November 18th.

--- Miss July - I was just thinking the other day that it was about time for another installment of Low Resolution's Movie Preview, and poof a new one appears. I think perhaps I've got a mental clock devoted to them at this point. Never let me down, Joe. My sanity's built around these now. I mean, I'm linking over even though you diss Miranda July, which no.

--- Call It 301- There is a chance that the director of Orphan might be directing the sequel to 300, which is awesome! But the film is now retitled from Xerxes to 300: Battle of Artemisia, which is awful.

--- Dead Mission - I'm so conflicted about Mission Impossible 4. It is the first live-action movie movie directed by Brad "The Incredibles" Bird, and it stars Jeremy Renner! If I could pretend that was where it ended I would be so excited! But it really for real stars Tom Cruise and Renner's just his sidekick or whatever, ugh. If they build their advertising campaign upon promises of Cruise's brutal death with Renner taking over the film & franchise, I will make it over the hump. PopWrap has the first teaser trailer.

--- Whinny Whine - Listen, I grew up loving Steven Spielberg. I saw Jurassic Park in the theater 14 times. There aren't many movies that he's made that I dislike, even at this point. And perhaps my first impression will be misleading. Because this first trailer for War Horse is a pile of sentimental goo that I'm gonna be barfing up for a week. Maybe it's just the fact that I've never gotten "horse movies" - horse eyes creep me out. They're not as bad as cow's eyes, but they're up there. So mooning over a pet horse in movies always makes me sour.

--- Silent Snow - I'd mentioned awhile back that most of the cast of the original Silent Hill film - which is a bit of a curious mess but is genuinely creepy at times, as well as being visually spectacular and well-acted - were coming back for the sequel. What I hadn't noticed, since this was before HBO's A Game of Thrones had aired, was that Kit Harington, aka everybody's favorite emo-bastard Jon Snow, had joined the cast as well. He'll be co-starring with his TV papa Sean Bean! BD has a gallery of images from it.

--- Big Bad - I've avoided spoilers as well as I could but I could've sworn that who the villain is in Joss Whedon's The Avengers had leaked awhile back? Perhaps not, like I said I was trying not to notice. Maybe it was discredited. Anyway io9 is listing their top 10 picks for who the villain ought to be, is the point.

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It's amazing how quickly I freeze up - 24 hours without blogging access has left my gears a little bit stuck. My timing's all off. Gotta grease myself right! Anyway I have yesterday's Way Not To Die sitting here but I've decided, since it's already approaching 4pm on Friday, to just save it for next Thursday. Try not to explode from all the stored-up anticipation. For now though, here be some links that've come and gone in importance in the past day. Enjoy!

--- First Gear - First up and most importantly, there a picture of Ryan Gosling in Drive that I hadn't seen yet, via IMDb. If you click over you can see the rest of the picture, which includes Carey Mulligan, but I've edited it down to what matters most I think. God he's aged well.

--- Speaking of pictures, The Playlist has the first image I've seen anywhere from Rian Johnson's next movie Looper. The movie stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who worked so magnificently with Rian on Brick of course, but for some reason the first image they released is of Bruce Willis. Okay.

--- Nosy Business - After he makes the (first?) Hunger Games movie, Gary Ross will direct a new version of Cyrano de Bergerac. Apparently "the twist" will be its use of modern social media, like Facebook I guess. So Cyrano will be a cyber-stalker, and it'll end with somebody raped and dead. Hooray!

--- G-String Apprentice - Steven Soderbergh has tapped (heh, I'm sure) Alex Pettyfer to play the young stripper that gets tutored by Channing Tatum in Channing Tatum's true life story of male stripperdom. That's a sentence I never thought I'd write, that's for sure. Anyway I am happy that the "Alex Pettyfer" tag here at MNPP is not for naught; his prickishness and terrible choices were beginning to cast it in doubt.

--- Mark's Playbook - Mark Wahlberg is reteaming with David O. Russell, aka the only director not named PT Anderson that knows how to effectively get anything out of Mark Wahlberg, for an adaptation of a book called The Silver Lining Playbook, about a high school teacher who gets outta the loony-bin and tries to restart things with his ex-wife, while having no idea he was just in the loony-bin. The last time Mark Wahlberg tried to play a teacher, we got The Happening.

--- Quite A Fright - You can watch the trailer for Fright Night over at PopWrap. I haven't watched it yet, so you tell me. Well? I'm waiting.