With the Harry Potter and Twilight franchises wrapping up this year, it seems all the studios are scrambling to find something that can replace them. The last teen-book-turned-movie to throw its hat in the ring is I Am Number Four. Whether it holds up to these franchises… well, we’ll let you be the judge of that. But if you get a chance to check this one out on DVD or Blu-ray, you can really enjoy it with a drink in hand. Because even though all the actors are old enough to drink, their characters aren’t.

Rango is the first animated genre movie I’ve seen that, with no exaggeration, works as well as its live-action counterparts possibly could. Gore Verbinski’s latest is a damn fine western, an entertaining throwback to classic B-pictures that pays clever tribute to its predecessors. Sure, it’s populated by walking/talking lizards, rattlesnakes, and Gila monsters. So what? A lizard suffering from some serious existential torment, Rango (Johnny Depp) knows not who he is or of the world beyond the tank he’s called home and the pseudo-tropical knickknacks he’s made his friends. That changes forever when a karmic car accident finds the good-humored, tropical shirt-baring reptile abandoned in the Mojave Desert, his domicile destroyed forever. Making his way through the treacherous terrain, our hero dodges an enormous falcon, befriends roadkill named Roadkill (Alfred Molina) and is eventually escorted by fiery fellow lizard Beans (Isla Fisher) to the long-forgotten, crumbling town of Dirt.

Marti Noxon speaks with the sort of joyous enthusiasm you can’t fake. After the Smallville creators (and at least one uncredited script doctor) took a stab at the I Am Number Four script, Noxon sat down to add her geek-property prowess (with episodes of Buffy, Mad Men, and the script to the remake of Fright Night under her belt) to the project about an alien discovering his powers and hiding out from other aliens that want him dead. Noxon was nice enough to take some time out of her day to talk to us about the science fiction flick, how a ghost named Bertha acted as a catalyst for her writing , and to respond to one critic’s fear that Fright Night won’t be gory enough.

This week, Fat Guy Kevin Carr hit his head and spent the better part of his time wandering around Berlin looking for January Jones. Soon he unlocked the key to his past and realized he was an alien who is hiding among the people of Earth, hunted by big dudes with tattoos and trench coats. Fortunately, he woke up from this terrifying dream to realize the true nightmare… there’s another Big Momma movie with Martin Lawrence and on-screen son Brandon T. Jackson in fat suits. To quote many a movie: “Noooooooooooo!”

The virtual DVD racks on Netflix are littered with hopeful young-adult franchises trying too hard to become the next Harry Potter or Twilight phenomenon. Cirque du Freak? Percy Jackson & the Olympians? The Golden Compass? All based on a popular book series meant to start a whole new franchise… but every single one of them failed at the box-office. Not that that’s stopping the suits in Hollywood from snapping up the rights to even more series (The Hunger Games, Incarceron, etc.), and then bringing them to the screen with attractive teens, mediocre directors, and shitty scripts. Which brings us to I Am Number Four. It seems somewhere out in the cosmos a planet was attacked and decimated by a race of fish people called the Mogadorians. Are they actually fish people? I don’t know, but they do have gills on the face so we’ll go with it. The survivors (known as Loriens) came to Earth hoping to start anew, but the Sea Bass assassins followed and are now hunting them down, killing them, and stealing their jewelry. We’re told there were nine surviving Loriens, all teens, although each has a special guardian assigned to protect them for some unknown purpose that will be revealed at an undisclosed time. Why aren’t the guardians counted among the survivors? Who knows, but maybe it’s because they suck at their job. The killer Carp have already slaughtered teens one through three and have set their sights on number four. Because the only thing 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]

Returning for a second season is Justified, arguably the most well received new show of last year. Film School Rejects had the opportunity to sit down with series star Timothy Olyphant and got the skinny on what is to be expected of the new season.

I know what you’re thinking: “That’s not what the regulation Sex Scouts uniform looks like! Couldn’t this production have done any research?!” And you’d be right, but you’d be missing the point. In Elektra Luxx, Carla Gugino reprises her role as the titular porn star who has given up the business for baby. And, yes, it’s hers. The funny, sexy, strange, soap-y comedy was written and directed by Sebastian Gutierrez as the meat of a Women in Trouble and Women in Ecstasy trilogy. It’s got the same heart, ovaries and potty mouth as the first, and it now has more Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a sex blogger. Check out the surprisingly not-red-band trailer for yourself:

D.J. Caruso is bringing another film (ostensibly in his same brand of lightweight intrigue) to theaters this year, and I Am Number Four has a truly intriguing premise. A young man is hiding his amazing powers for fear of being killed by a mysterious entity. It, on the surface, seems like the movie version of Heroes that everyone was clamoring for (or the movie version of The Tomorrow People if you’re cooler). The movie, stars rising actors Alex Pettyfer, Diana Agron, and Teresa Palmer alongside Timothy Olyphant and fan-favorite character actor Kevin Durand. The twenty new images that just hit our inbox show some brooding, some pensive stares, and a building evaporating in a giant fireball while a young bad ass walks away (without looking back!). Check them out for yourself:

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: A small town is turned upside down when a military spawned virus is accidentally released into their water supply, turning them into raging, blood thirsty crazies with little regard for human life. With no way of stopping the assault, Sheriff Dutton attempts to lead a small group of survivors out of town. Killer Scene: Things get pretty intense inside of a car wash and people you’ve picked to survive drop like flies throughout the story, though the best scene for my money is the ending scene. Sheriff Dutton and his wife have finally made it to the military rendezvous point and discover just how the government planned on dealing with any survivors. While deciding what to do, the group is attacked by three crazed bikers leading to an epic battle in a trucking garage.

Well, that’s not entirely true. You see, Elmore Leonard, famed author and all around interesting chap, created the character of Raylan Givens in a pair of stories. That character was then brought to the small screen via the excellent FX original series Justified, starring Timothy Olyphant. So like, speaking accurately, Elmore Leonard didn’t actually create the show. Just the character. But you know what? Shut up, I’m trying to give you a free book. With a career that spans 60 years, features forty-four novels, twenty-one feature film adaptations, and three honorary doctorates, Elmore “Dutch” Leonard celebrated his 85th birthday on October 11th. Also cause for celebration, his newest novel, Djibouti, was released on October 12th. If you didn’t immediately run out and buy it, you may be in luck: we’re giving away three copies.

On a recent trip to Ogden Marsh, we drank the water, lost our minds, and reviewed the Blu-ray of one of 2010s Best Horror Films – The Crazies, starring Rob Hunter’s boyfriend Timothy Olyphant.

Guilty pleasure movies are the flicks that you’d probably never seek out or intentionally pop into the DVD player, but sometimes when you’re flipping channels you’ll see one and decide to just watch a minute or two. And end up sucked in through the very end. Hitman is one such pleasure. But to be honest, a healthy chunk of that film’s appeal is a naked Olga Kurylenko.

Raylan Givens straps on his guns and heads to Los Angeles for an appointment with a backstreet dentist who knows a bit more than he should about drug money.

We practice the fine art of the quickdraw with Marshall Raylan Givens in ‘Justified.’

We’re happy to announce the Timothy Olyphant modern western “Justified” has been added to our weekly TV review list.

Kevin Carr sits his chubbiness down weighs in on Cop Out and The Crazies.

In some regards, Breck Eisner’s new film The Crazies is the horror genre’s The Hurt Locker. What exactly do I mean by that boldly nonsensical statement? We’ll get to that in a minute. But first I want to talk about a few horror film cliches that crop up in the final half-hour…

In early February, we debuted three exclusive new photos from the upcoming Breck Eisner directed remake of George Romero’s The Crazies. In fact, I noticed that more than a few sites debuted photos over the past few weeks. There were a lot of images floating around, but they all resided in different places around the web. Now that Overture Films has released their final press kit, we have all of the photos from The Crazies — in one place. Now you can see some of the scary ones, the funny ones and the ones with the ever-lovely Radha Mitchell. The Crazies is in theaters February 26, 2010.

Lets get right to the point here. Overture Films has provided us with three brand new exclusive images from Breck Eisner’s The Crazies, a reinvention of the George Romero classic.

Another George Romero flick, this one dealing with “sort of zombies” instead of actual ones, gets the remake treatment and we’ve got a surprisingly awesome trailer for you.