Halloween comes early to the Reject Report

Posted by John Cairns (jcairns@filmschoolrejects.com) on August 30, 2007

It’s a sure sign that fall has arrived at The Reject Report when you’re reporting on horror flicks and lower-profile movies instead of the big-budget popcorn stuff. I’m nostalgic for the summer season already. I can’t help it, I like these summer flicks like everyone else. But now it’s time to get serious- or, in the case of Halloween, to get frightened. Because that’s what we are about to get at the theaters now: stuff for the serious die-hard movie fans.

First of all, it is another one of those weeks at The Reject Report where we have to report on a movie that already came out. Balls of Fury was rolled out in over 2,800 theaters on August 29. It stars Dan Fogler, George Lopez, Maggie Q (!!) and Christopher Walken (!!!!). It’s a sports comedy about a secret society that is heavily into ping pong. It’s about a guy who goes undercover to root out this ping-pong lord Feng, and it sounds like this has a lot of espionage-type stuff going on. Anyway, if you like that kind of thing check it out, it’s in theaters now.

Rolling out on Friday:

Halloween is back. That’s right. This is the 2007 remake of the famous John Carpenter 1978 flick that starred Jamie Lee Curtis.This time it’s Rob Zombie directing, and from the sounds of it he’s looking to reinvent the franchise for a new generation and do some new things with the Michael Myers character that was in the movies before. Looks like they are going to delve deep into the character and find out what made Myers the dangerous monster that he became. Tyler Mane is playing Myers, and Malcolm McDowell and Sheri Moon Zombie are also in the movie. People say this should be good. We’ll see.

I’m sure this is going to be the number one movie of the week, because it’s in 3,800 theaters and is bound to be a must-see for all those die-hard movie fans, who quite frankly have had a pretty good year of it so far with all the scary stuff out there this year. (Grindhouse, 1408, et al.) I am going to predict $25 million dollars and a number one finish for this movie.

Then there is Death Sentence, an action drama directed by James Wan that stars Kevin Bacon. It’s about this guys whose son is killed, and the justice department only offers up a six-month sentence as punishment. So Bacon’s character decides there has got to be a better way to get justice for his kid, so he decides to get violent. Bloody stuff. Kelly Preston is in it, too. It’s in 1,900 movie houses but somehow I think maybe $7 mil is what it will get.

I mean really, it’s the dog days and nobody wants to go to the movies anymore, and it’s Labor Day weekend and it’s the last chance people have to take vacations. Plus, football season is fast approaching. People will be watching college football this weekend, and where I live (frozen Canada) it’s the biggest pro football weekend of the whole season. All the big Canadian rivalry football games go this week. So forgive me if I have football on the brain instead of movies this week. Expect box office to be affected, too.

Anyway here are my predictions for the weekend are as follows:

Check back after the weekend when we see if we’re right. Hopefully, my predictions are a lot better than the ones I made last week. We hope.

Read more articles by John Cairns