The girl with the eyebrows won’t be playing the man with the chin. According to The Hollywood Reporter, “scheduling issues” (which they also put in quotation marks) have forced Lily Collins to back away from taking the lead role in the remake of Evil Dead being produced by Sam Raimi and directed by Fede Alvarez. On the one hand, this is good news. On the other, it seems likely that the production team is still trying to make the film about a young drug addict trying to get clean when bad people with melting faces start biting at her. Why they’re moving so far away from the original concept is unknown, and whether or not the finished product will even resemble the original movie is also unclear. The real victim here? Alvarez – who has the impossible task of recreating a cult phenomenon. Too much to the right, and he’ll have a bland retread with no outside appeal. Too much to the left, and he’ll piss off fans. If he teeters both ways, he might fall off the tightrope altogether. Can’t we just pop in the discs in our Book of the Dead Box Set and forget about all this?

Well here we are in the last week of December, coming up on another 365 days of anger at the entertainment industry. In 52 installments, I’ve been upset about a wide range of topics, criticized directors, defended 3D, argued with my peers and said the f-word a whole lot, much to the disappointment of my mother. As a way of saying so long to 2011 and hello to the End of the World as We Know It (aka 2012), I wanted to take a brief look back at the previous year and pull the heaviest themes from Boiling Point and take a look at the recipients of my rage. So take off your shoes, grab a warm cup of cocoa and let’s take this journey together, provided you’re nowhere near me. If by some strange miracle you are near me, put your shoes on, put down my coffee cup and get the fuck out of my house.

Hollywood is a business. A big business. A ten billion dollar box office per year kind of business. While that is an impressive number, you also have to remember that I said “box office,” which is ignoring the home video market. If you include direct sales only, that’s another $5 billion. I swore that I would never do math again after college, so I’m not going to bother with rentals and licenses and all that shit. Suffice it to say, Hollywood is a big business. And they want to be bigger, like all businesses. Enter the shady world of rehashing. The repeated raping of your wallet. There was a time when it was as simple as releasing a Special Edition or Collector’s Edition of a movie. Now, films have two theatrical releases, get remastered in 3D and sent to theaters, and are then released on three to four separate DVD releases. As a super-fan, I’m excited to get Collector’s Editions – I’ll even double dip now and then, but the process has gone too far and offers too little.

Since we all have a million dollars, our minds are almost always tuned to the day dream of what kind of movie we’d make with all that loose cash just lying around (since banks do nothing but lose things). Would it be a romantic horror film? Would it be a silent action film? Would we blow of all of it on lighting and forget the other elements of production design? Probably. Fortunately, we’ve all had a few filmmakers tread before us in using their million bucks with efficiency and artistry. In a world where Michael Bay needs 200 suitcases full of $1m, these directors made it happen with only one of those suitcases (or no suitcases at all), and they created a lasting legacy despite their lack of foldin’ money. If they can do it, why not us? Here are 8 great films made for under a million dollars that we can all learn from. (And if you enter our contest sponsored by Doritos, you might actually win that $1m you need for all those lights.)

There is a giant maze of odd circumstances when it comes to re-making, re-imagining, sequelizing or prequelizing a beloved property. You get into situations where you’re making a “prequel” to a movie while sharing the same name as said movie (see: The Thing). You also fall into a weird zone where you have to keep enough of the DNA of a project to earn the name while making enough of it different to accommodate for new fans (see: every reboot ever). Then, you have the strange personnel situation where you’re remaking a fan-favorite film, but your lead actor from years past is both 1) still alive and 2) too old to reprise the character. So what do you do? Do you re-cast some poor schlub into a role he can never own? Do you scrap the character entirely and raise eyebrows? According to Bruce Campbell, it’s the latter. Shock Til You Drop was keen enough to find some tweets from Campbell responding to the Ash Question looming over The Evil Dead remake. “No Ash character currently,” was the straightforward message. It still seems to leave the door open for Ash to walk through, but as of now, it sounds like the production team is attempting to remake a movie without its main character. It’s just one of those weird choices that must be made when walking the tightrope of remakes, but they’re damned if they do or don’t. There is no right answer here, but for now, it looks like [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

San Diego’s Comic-Con has come and gone once again with 2011 marking my fourth straight year of attendance. Living in Los Angeles, it’s easy for me to shoot down there for the weekend, but beyond that, I actually like Comic-Con, seemingly unlike the majority of my colleagues. It’s only been three days since the Con ended, which means the memories are still fresh and the bones still ache, so it’s a perfect time to pop some Advil and reflect on SDCC, on the good and on the bad. Without further words to flush out the introductory paragraphs on the homepage, I present to you Comic Con 2011: 10 Things I Liked, 5 I Didn’t.

If you’re in the mood for definitive news about movies, you pretty much have to wait until they’re done. If you’re in the mood for loose promises and casual statements, then San Diego Comic Con 2011 is the place for you! At a panel early-ish Thursday morning at SDCC, Bruce Campbell captivated audiences as he’s apt to do and then was asked about Evil Dead as he is every single day of his life.

If you tried, you could probably find a bigger Evil Dead fan than me. It might take a little bit, but you could. I mean, I’ve got my three T-Shirts, my Necronomicon copies of the movies on DVD in addition to several other versions, including Blu-ray transfers, I’ve got my toys, books, comics, and video games too. So while I’ll never claim to be the biggest Evil Dead fan, I can say I’m a pretty big one. For years I’ve waited on a continuation to the story. I remember my first experiencing watching the original movie at a sleepover. It was Steve’s house, but he fell asleep early after playing too much Command & Conquer. Only me and Matt were awake and he, no joke, got a boner from the tree rape scene. There was always something off about Matt. But it wasn’t long after that I found the second. I remember Army of Darkness in theaters. Everything Bruce Campbell wrote or said about the franchise, I ate up. Waiting to hear about Evil Dead 4. When talk turned to a remake instead of a continuation, I was upset but hopeful. Maybe Campbell would be in it. Maybe they would cast Seann William Scott and that wouldn’t be all that bad, would it? Now we have firm news that the Evil Dead reboot is moving forward – time to praise the lord? Hardly. What we know sucks and here’s why.

After years and years of talk about a fourth film or a remake treatment for The Evil Dead, Raimi and the brass have finally gone with the latter route. While I know some of you cringe at the idea of this remake, like at most of the “who cares?” weekly remake announcements, I’m sure the news of Diablo Cody reworking the script has made all of you go from cringing to sharpening your pitchforks. Not a surprise.

A fourth entry in Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead series is one of those long talked about, never going to happen, projects like an Arrested Development movie, or another Ghostbusters sequel that I’ve grown kind of tired of hearing about. I’ve been hearing the rumors about this movie since I was a teenager: Ash goes to the future, Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash, it’s going to be in 3D, etc.  It’s gotten to the point that whenever the next set of rumors about a new Evil Dead crop up, I roll my eyes and move along. So it was not out of maliciousness, but out of rumor fatigue when I rolled my eyes at Dread Central’s claim that they had a “very reliable source” telling them that Saim Raimi’s frequent editor Bob Murawski was headed to Detroit to start work on a new Evil Dead film. They also had a quote that the new Evil Dead would be “a small indie thing like the first two.” Turns out I wasn’t the only one to be suspicious of these claims, because Bloody Disgusting did a little digging of their own and said they discovered that Raimi was actually casting his widely known next project Oz: The Great and Powerful in Detroit. That would make more sense, and would have ended my interest in the matter, if not for another little wrinkle. Ash himself, Bruce Campbell, recently opened a Twitter account and when asked point blank by one of his followers about the [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

If it’s even possible to reboot a reboot (and that’s essentially what Evil Dead 2 was for its originator), Sam Raimi is willing to try it. Of course, he’s been willing for a long time, but that’s never translated into results before. What makes this situation different? Nothing. However, according to Digital Spy, the director/producer’s business partner Rob Tapert claimed recently that he’s looking at a script for what would be either a reboot or a fourth installment in the franchise. The money quote: “What’s interesting about Evil Dead is very few people saw it in the format we made it for, which is for the theater… I think Sam wants to embrace the ultimate experience in grueling terror and see it remade for a proper theatrical experience.” That’s interesting, considering that the fan base has opportunities every so often to see the original on the big screen at festivals and special second run screenings. The world needs another Evil Dead movie like it needs another hand chopped off (although the success of 127 Hours might be the catalyst for the renewed interest here). Tapert mentioned that Bruce Campbell would be involved, which would be great, but this feels like a Crystal Skull situation. Let’s hope Raimi continues his streak of talking about it without actually doing it.

What is Movie News After Dark? This is a question that I am almost never asked, but I will answer it for you anyway. Movie News After Dark is FSR’s newest late-night secretion, a column dedicated to all of the news stories that slip past our daytime editorial staff and make it into my curiously chubby RSS ‘flagged’ box. It will (but is not guaranteed to) include relevant movie news, links to insightful commentary and other film-related shenanigans. I may also throw in a link to something TV-related here or there. It will also serve as my place of record for being both charming and sharp-witted, but most likely I will be neither of the two. I write this stuff late at night, what do you expect?

When the calendar page turns to October, we Rejects have only one thought: horror. To celebrate this grandest and darkest of months, we’ll cover one excellent horror film a day for the entirety of the month. That’s 31 Days of Horror and 31 Films perfect for viewing on a dark, chilly, October night. If you, like us, love horror and Halloween, give us a Hell Yeah and keep coming every day this month for a new dose of adrenaline. Synopsis: The night shift at a local grocery store are thrown into a tizzy when the ex-boyfriend of one of the cashiers shows up and starts some trouble. When employees start turning up dead, the minor scuffle escalates into a fight for life and death. (Death wins, for the most part)

When Anchor Bay announced they were bringing two awesome horror movies to Blu-ray, we knew it’d be mighty swell of us to share them with you. The Bruce Campbell-starring, Sam Raimi-when-he-was-good directed classic The Evil Dead makes its debut on Blu-ray with a few new features. Also on high definition for the first time is director Adam Green’s 80s throwback slasher Hatchet, which features a villain who could hold his own with the likes of Freddy and Jason. So if you want to win yourself a set of these Blu-rays, click on through to find out what to do. (Hint: We’ll need a blood sample.)

Tommy Wirkola sat down with us to talk about his much buzzed about Nazi zombie opus.

Love is in the air for some reason, so we’ve developed a fool-proof way of testing whether your significant other is worth your time. Now for guys!

Bruce Campbell: “My fans are my clients. I’m never going to really insult them. I’ll dick with them in the movie because I interact with them. I know how to mess with them. And I’m going to do just that. It’s an old Sam Raimi rule: The innocent must suffer.”

So you want Bruce Campbell in your film. He shared with us his four rules he follows when he accepts a part.

AMC’s Horror Hacker started it and we intend to finish it — the debate to see who is the baddest monster hunter in cinematic history.

If you’ve seen The Evil Dead films, you already know they’re awesome. If you haven’t, you really need to quickly read this article, then go to the store and purchase all three right now.