Director Lucky McKee’s most recent film, The Woman, garnered a lot of critical praise at Sundance in 2011 but gained the most publicity when some old codger decided to have a freak out that was caught on tape where he said the film was degrading to women and demanded it be burned. Luckily for the sake of art and free speech, the negative was not burned and the film has indeed been released on DVD and Blu-ray. The film follows the Cleek family and their zany adventures trying to ‘civilize’ a wild woman the patriarch finds in the woods. I put civilize in quotes back there because that’s how the film is officially described, but in my book giving someone a bath and making them wear clothes doesn’t actually amount to trying to civilize them. No, for that, one must teach them proper dining etiquette. Obviously, as this is branded a horror film, the titular woman chained up in the basement must cause some havoc, though she’s not the true villain in this story.

In 2010, Patrick Wilson got haunted in Insidious. In 1999, Lili Taylor got haunted in The Haunting. Now the two are heading back into the haunted house together with Vera Farmiga and Ron Livingston in James Wan’s The Warren Files. Now they’ll have children to look after as ghosts chase them around in New England. According to Variety, Mackenzie Foy (Twilight) and Joey King (who will play young Talia Al Ghul in The Dark Knight Rises) have both been tapped to play young members of the based-on-real-life Perron family who claimed they were living with spirit from beyond in the 1970s. Taylor and Livingston play the adult members of the family, while Wilson and Farmiga play ghost investigators The Warrens. So, for those keeping track, with Insidious, The Warren Files and Insidious 2, James Wan is going to be telling ghost stories for a long time.

James Wan is back. Leigh Whannell is back. Insidious is back. That loud burst of discordant music you just heard is all part of the plan to scare you out of your seat. The cat that just ran by isn’t part of it; your house is just infested with cats. According to Variety, the green light has been given to Insidious 2 which means a continuation/birth of a horror franchise that genuinely delivered excitement to a big audience. It’s screenwriter Whannell’s goal to have the main players from the first film return. That also means that Whannell has what he and the team assume to be a solid creative idea for the next installment. Last year, producer Jason Blum claimed they wouldn’t move the massive moneymaking beast forward simply for more large checks. Looks like they’re smart enough to do it for the right reasons and to strike when the iron is hot. Now what would spell story success for the sequel?

Why Watch? Despite the amateur nature of the filming here, it’s the last 20 seconds that really count. For added fun, have a friend take a picture of your face when it sinks. Plus, it’s only a minute, and its punchline hits hard. Can someone buy them a camera rig and some sound gear? What will it cost? Only 1 minute. Skip Work. You’ve Got Time For More Short Films.  

By now, you should probably have realized that we will never reach the final destination, since we’re already a destination past that with more on the way. Likewise, you should probably have a pretty good handle on how these things happen. A kid gets a vision of a totally awesome and very lethal disaster, which prompts him and several others to leave the danger zone, abandoning hundreds of others to die. Death, not liking the idea of being cheated, then kills all of the survivors through an elaborate series of accidents. And for the most part, it’s all good. So recognizing all that, for the fifth installment of the franchise you can just plug in all the new names and faces with the scenario suspension bridge collapse. While there isn’t much new, Final Destination 5 manages to be an entertaining entry in the series, providing plenty of gruesome kills – in three dimensions!! OOoOoOoOoOoooOOOooOoOOOo

Fresh off of making one audience member pass out and another one puke into a bucket at Sundance, V/H/S has found a home with Magnolia, and it’s a matched made in hellacious heaven. The horror flick is both an anthology, which seems to be a rising trend, and a found footage movie that has many critics claiming that it refreshes the genre considerably. It’s made up of vignettes from writer/director David Bruckner (The Signal), writer/director Glenn McQuaid (I Sell the Dead), writing/directing team Radio Silence, actor/director Joe Swanberg (Autoerotic, The Zone), writer/director Ti West (House of the Devil, The Innkeepers), director Adam Wingard (A Horrible Way to Die, You’re Next), writer Simon Barrett (A Horrible Way to Die, You’re Next), and writer Nicholas Tecosky. The story focuses on a team hired by a mystery person (or persons) to break into a broken down house to steal a rare VHS tape. Horror ensues. So it’s a found footage horror film with an interstitial device of people looking for found footage. Already off to a good start. This is another ear on the necklace of the You’re Next team of Wingard, Swanberg and Barrett who will see that film released in October of this year as well. Thank god that V/H/S will be seen outside of Sundance. These are the kinds of horror filmmakers that deserve to blow up big. Personally, I can’t wait for the inevitable George Lucas mash-up trailer, V/H/S 1138.

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?

Why Watch? Gorgeous gore, an exploitation grain, and a last shot that’s supremely disturbing (and not at all safe for work, which is why this one is embedded after the break, due to YouTube’s unfortunate pause placement). This little chunk of horror from Damien Leone is not afraid to deliver the goods. It sags slightly in the middle, and it could use a pinch more backstory, but it features a soul-smashingly fearsome new icon in Art the Clown. With his beaming black-toothed smile and tiny top hat, he really is the stuff of nightmares. Enjoy seeing him when you close your eyes at night. He’ll be waiting for you there with his rusty tools and indomitable will to stay alive. What will it cost? Only 19 minutes. Special thanks to Brad McHargue for suggesting this bad boy.

At one point in its recent development history, The Stand was planning on sending the Harry Potter team of Steve Kloves and David Yates to a cornfield in Colorado to write and direct the incredibly difficult source material. With that team passing on Stephen King‘s novel, Ben Affleck picked it up for a directorial project, and Vulture is reporting that Affleck has hired screenwriter David Kajganich to provide the blueprint. The only problem here is Kajganich’s track record. It’s always difficult to assign blame/credit to writers for a finished film because of the labyrinthine group effort the art demands, but so far his two biggest features have been the flat Invasion (starring Nicole Kidman) and the nasty horror flick Blood Creek. Neither inspires much in the way of optimism for an adaptation that even the most talented writer would struggle to make sense of. According to the report, Warners was impressed with Kajganich’s draft for a feature film version of It and decided that he was fit for crowing King again. What’s more, he’s also the writer of the Pet Sematary remake at Paramount, which means the studio system only knows of one guy who’s interested in writing these things for some reason. The question here is why Affleck would pass off writing duties (although the answer may be that he just doesn’t have the time to deal with a tome of that size). The silver lining, of course, is that Affleck so far has proven himself to be a [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]

Genre buddy and fellow root canal survivor Rob Hunter came to my aid this week when it was time for title selection. I was stupidly about to put in The Wild Hunt, which has something to do with LARPing and virgins or something, when the Foreign Objects author suggested I try something a little more sub-titled. Dream Home is the story about the American dream taking place in Hong Kong. Young Cheng Lai-sheung (Josie Ho) is a phone representative for a bank in Hong Kong and all she wants out of life is a nice flat with a view of the ocean for her ailing grandfather to live in. She’ll stop at nothing to get that home, from scraping together every penny and working two extra jobs. After raising enough capital to buy into the flat, the sellers decide to ask for more money and Cheng reacts completely reasonably. For a psychopath.

When Ben Solovey last checked in, it was with a busted print of Manos: The Hands of Fate and the high hopes that someone would give a damn about the infamous cult classic enough to help fund an effort to see it restored. He asked for $10,000, and he got $25,000. It turns out that a lot of people care about this movie enough to see it saved. His Kickstarter campaign has officially been kickstarted which means that the restoration will happen, and with it come a 2K to 35mm film-out preservation negative (meaning even more Manoses can be born), a commentary track featuring surviving cast members will be recorded, and a doc about the process to save the movie will be made and added to the DVDs and Blu-rays. That’s right. There’s going to be a Blu-ray of Manos: The Hands of Fate. Let that massage in for a second and rejoice!

This week, on a very special Reject Radio, we talk with the filmmakers behind The Devil Inside about going guerrilla in Vatican City (and responding to negative reviews) and writer Derek Haas (3:10 To Yuma, Wanted) about jumping between screenwriting, short stories, and his “Silver Bear” novel series. Plus, it’s Rob Hunter vs. Robert Fure in the first Movie News Pop Quiz of the season. Let the slap fight commence! Download This Episode

The Devil Inside is the talk of the town for two reasons: number one, it made around $35 million in its opening weekend, which is big no matter what qualifier you tack on, but when that qualifier is a reported $1 million acquisition cost, it’s gigantic. Number two (heheh), it sucks. It sucks bad. That’s nothing new, really, as everything about The Devil Inside screams shitty movie. First of all, it’s from the team that brought you Stay Alive. Second, it’s found footage. Third, it’s an exorcism movie. I’m surprised that people went to see it, because you list those three qualities and I am about as far from interested as possible. But rather than just throw another voice on the “what the fuck” bonfire, I wanted to take a few minutes and examine what we can learn from this situation.

Movies presented in real-time are a sort of rarity. High Noon and Rope jump to the mind immediately, and they’re fantastic, but there are also a handful of films that never got past the concept as pure gimmick. However, it’s always been interesting to guess at what the appeal of taking away the possibility of jumping forward or back in time really is. One obvious trick, is the creation of suspense. A constantly ticking clock that the audience is physically aware of. That seems to be alive and well for Sundance favorite Silent House which features Sundance favorite Elizabeth Olsen. It comes from Open Water creators Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, and tells the story of a young woman and her father who are stuck inside a home where a noise continues to grow louder and louder. It’s based off the Uruguayan movie from Gustavo Hernandez that Rob was not a big fan of. Gimmick-based or not, the trailer here is pretty damned limp. It’s composed almost entirely of shots of Olsen breathing heavily and then a poorly shot “thing of some sort” grabbing her? Not grabbing her? Hard to say. Check it out for yourself:

I’m not certain why, but when Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale played during the one Fantastic Fest I was present at, I missed it. I was probably drunk on Peanut Butter Milkshakes and also whiskey and Rob Hunter had yet to convince me to start watching movies with subtitles. Over the recent Christmas season (it’s over now, take down your decorations), I caught up with the film in the comfort of my own home all while being mostly sober. Rare Exports is a Finnish import about the havoc created when the truth about Santa Claus is quite literally unearthed. You think you know all about this jolly fat man, but brother, you ain’t seen nothing yet. If you watch this film though, you’ll see plenty of old man dicks, so there’s that, in addition to a pretty pleasing film.

In our first show of the 2012 season, we set off the filmmaking fireworks by finding out why Innkeepers director Ti West doesn’t believe in spooks, and by talking to indie icon Ed Burns about the twitter revolution, his $9,000 budget, and his new must-see movie Newlyweds. Plus, Neil Miller stops by to dangle the hope and potential of 2012′s most anticipated movies over our noses. Will he say the movie you’re thinking of and validate his opinion to you, or will he neglect it, making everything he says in the future suspect? Be prepared to find out a metric ton about movies and their makers, because it’s our third season, and we’re only getting started. Download This Episode

Why Watch? In a world populated by terrifying horror movie monsters, you’ve got to organize who gets to kill on what nights, right? This short from Mark Blitch had me at the male porn star’s giggle and just kept the laughs coming. It admittedly gets into weird territory for the action, but, hey, why the hell not? This is what happens when horror gets interrupted by red tape, and the ridiculous results speak for themselves. What does it cost? Just 5 minutes of your time. Trust us. You have time for more short films.

The 3D reboot of Piranha from 2010 was one of my favorite movies of that year. And I don’t usually much like horror stuff, especially winky, self-aware horror parody: that means they did something very right. So word of a followup should have been great news. But as soon as Piranha 3DD was announced as re-teaming the creative team behind the Project Greenlight winning horror film Feast rather than re-teaming the creative team that already worked so well together on a Piranha movie, director Alexandre Aja and writers Pete Goldfinger & Josh Stolberg, I was dubious. The next hint that this movie wasn’t going to turn out so great came in October, when Piranha 3DD was scrapped from having its planned November 2011 release and was instead marked with the ominous “sometime in 2012” release date instead. It was starting to look like the writing was on the wall, that Dimension didn’t have much faith in the film and that it was now residing in limbo, probably until an eventual straight to home video release. Well, it looks like the next step toward making that doomed future a reality has happened. It’s looking like the UK has now become the first market to scrap a theatrical release plan for Piranha 3DD in favor of dumping it onto disc. According to the British Video Association website, March 19th is the day it will happen. Unless this is a mistake by the BVA site, this means that not very many people will [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]

It seems like every year I find myself disappointed in the horror offerings of the preceding twelve months. Especially if you think of widely released theatrical flicks, few of which ever make the lists. If it weren’t for DVDs and VODs, I don’t even know if I could in good conscience pretend that 10 (or 11) horror films were good. That said, I did manage to find some enjoyment in theaters and at home this year, but it wasn’t the easiest task in the world. In a good year, it’ll be hard to eliminate films from the list, but when it comes to horror most years, its scraping the bottom of the barrel to come up with a full list. Quickly, in terms of eligibility, I write my lists a little differently than many others – for me, a film has to be widely available in this year, either in theaters or DVD or VOD. So films that only show at festivals generally aren’t eligible for my lists until they’re released on DVD. For example, Ti West’s The Innkeepers has made several lists, but it’s not widely available until 12/30 so most people won’t see it until 2012, so that’s that.

If you had asked me about The Devil’s Carnival yesterday, I wouldn’t have known what you were talking about. I probably would have assumed it was a 70s exploitation flick that took place behind a patchwork tent where a woman gets raped in a pile of elephant dung and then seeks revenge (or something). But I would have been wrong. The movie is a new project from the overworked Darren Lynn Bousman, who has a full dance card but decided he wanted to put another record on. The teaser trailer for the movie is an extended, 11-minute-long shot of a woman (Emilie Autumn) going about her lingerie-clad business. It’s experimental, but it looks more like it was directed by Bela Tarr because it’s a lot of nothing. There are clever little notes that are struck with some cartoonish CGI, but mostly it’s a woman just hanging around doing nothing in particular. Now, that doesn’t mean the movie itself won’t be a hellish explosion of style. According to Shock Til You Drop, Bousman is collaborating again with Repo! writer Terrance Zdunich. Check it (and the poster) out for yourself: