The world has descended into chaos. An artsy, color coordinated chaos to be sure, but still, society has taken a turn for the worse. To combat it the world’s government bans all firearms in an effort to quell the escalating violence. The result is a fusion of the Old West and the Far East as disagreements and feuds are handled solely through fisticuffs, swordplay, and a strict code of honor. Two strangers ride into town, not on a horse, but on a train. The Drifter (Josh Hartnett) is looking for a card game and Yoshi (Gackt) is here at his dead father’s request, but both men also have a secret purpose involving the town’s big boss, Nicola the Woodcutter (Ron Perlman). Their dueling quests will bring them in contact with each other, but it also finds them crossing paths with The Bartender (Woody Harrelson), Yoshi’s hot cousin Momoko (Emily Kaiho), the mysterious Alexandra (Demi Moore), and Nicola’s red-suited army led by Killer #2 (Kevin McKidd). What follows is a storybook tale with an arresting visual style that brings comic book pages to life on a stage-like setting. It’s theater for a new age that works as often as it doesn’t depending on who and/or what is onscreen, but even when it fails as an engaging narrative it often manages to delight the senses with a barrage of imagery both broad and specific. It’s a genre movie in cotton candy trappings, and while it runs a bit too long it’s a

Guy Moshe‘s live-action cartoon, Bunraku, lives or dies by its cast. The poppy world Moshe created calls for a specific type of acting, and not an easy one. The film requires a sense of unrealistic cool. Josh Hartnett plays a silent, but suave cowboy, and he has to spout out some dialog you would never hear a normal human being say. With Lucky Number Slevin, The Black Dahlia, and his brief scene in Sin City, Hartnett’s done that style of acting before. Here, he went about it differently. Instead of worrying about finding a grounding, as Hartnett says below, he wanted to embrace the odder tonal aspects. It bridges on cheesiness. But when one’s acting against Woody Harrelson cracking jokes or Ron Perlman looking the way he does in the film, it’s understandable that Hartnett would want to fit in with that scenery-chewing gang.

Bunraku premiered almost a year ago at the Toronto Film festival, and since then, nothing but mixed things have been said about it. Based on this trailer, the love it or hate it reaction the film has received up to now makes even more sense. What director Guy Moshe seems to have done is taken a sizable budget with a respectable cast, and make a film that will appeal to, at best, five people. Count me in as one of those people.

The antidote for your boring day (at least your boring day today) is this new trailer for Girl Walks Into a Bar which might seem like another sequel in the sequence of Sebastian Gutierrez’s Vagina Dialogues (aka Women in Trouble and Elektra Luxx), but even though a lot of the actors are the same, this one seems to take place in a new universe altogether. This trailer is a hell of a lot of fun, which is why I love Gutierrez’s movies. They’re smart, wacky, ridiculous and heartfelt. Plus, there are multitudes of remarkably beautiful women in various states of undress showing off their acting chops like there’s no tomorrow. Write a strongly worded letter to Congress, because there just isn’t anything wrong with that. Check out the trailer for yourself:

Welcome back to Junkfood Cinema: where the tricks and the treats are indistinguishable. This is the internet’s spookiest of bad movie columns dedicated to digging up the corpses of long-dead schlock. I’m tempted to do a Vincent Price laugh, but that doesn’t come through in text too well. Every week I slash a bad movie down to size and then, through a seance of praise, invite its spirit into my own heart. The result is truly terrifying. I will then pair the film with a supernaturally tasty junkfood item to haunt your waistline as the movie haunts your brain! So, as it turns out, horror sequels win the month of October here at JFC. And being that we are just two days removed from my favorite holiday, I thought it best to wrap up the year’s creepiest month with another film in the Halloween franchise. Today’s film is Halloween H20.

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a film so in love with it’s perception of how cool it thinks it is. Bunraku really thinks it’s cool. It’s the hot high school kid in the leather jacket who lights his cigarettes under a dark shade, but when it comes to talking to girls all that comes out is, “…….I’ve got jock itch…..” Only when Bunraku says it it isn’t funny. It’s tragic.

Josh Hartnett plays a drifter (that cool kid in the leather jacket, except not wearing that. He has cigarettes though) in search of a man named Nicola (Ron Perlman), a ruthless killer who employs nine decreasingly less ruthless killers to do his bidding. His Killer number 2 (named Killer #2) is played by Kevin McKidd who may be the most fun character in the piece if not for Woody Harrelson as the bartender who isn’t written nearly as fun as a Woody Harrelson bartender should be, especially considering we know how hilarious a Woody Harrelson bartender can be. Rounding out the cast is Japanese actor Gackt (yes, real name) also on the trail of a man with a specific medallion. I won’t spoil who that is.

‘I Come With The Rain’ opens with someone beating the crap out of Josh Hartnett with a baseball bat. Sounds like a missed opportunity for the marketing department doesn’t it? You probably would have heard of the movie if that scene was the entire trailer.

Well, it’s Halloween, and there are scant few horror films in the theaters. However, films like Things We Lost in the Fire and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford are scarier than anything else on the screen because they’re bore you to death. We can’t help you with boredom from Oscar bait, but we can help ease the pain from Alaskan vampires.

Actress Melissa George called 30 Days of Night director David Slade a “modern-day Hitchcock.” We’ll say this: he did make one intense, scary ass flick.