For those of you who haven’t heard, there’s a new film festival on the scene and its name is Action Fest! Founded by three men including Chuck Norris’s brother Aaron Norris, Action Fest is the self-proclaimed film festival with a body count. Magnolia exec Tom Quinn is also behind the scenes for the festival alongside Colin Geddes, the man responsible for the Toronto International Film Festival’s venerable Midnight Madness slate. Action Fest is a whirlwind festival held over a weekend in early April in beautiful Asheville, North Carolina. Movies are jam-packed back to back over Friday, Saturday and Sunday. I was able to attend all day Friday and Saturday and saw 9 films in my short time there. I’ve done full reviews for Ironclad and A Lonely Place to Die. For the rest of the films I saw I’ll be breaking things up into two pieces with three mini-reviews each, one for each day. Finally, I’ll do a wrap-up piece summarizing the fest and what played and talking a little about the experience.

A new trailer for the Australian film Tomorrow: When The War Began has appeared online, and it’s basically Red Dawn relocated to the outback. The film is based on the first in a bestselling series of novels by John Marsden that follow the adventures of a group of young adults dealing with a military invasion of Australia.

You can open your eyes now. 2009 is gone, and it’s not coming back. It’s time to move forward, onward and upward, and what better way to start than with the movies we’re most looking forward, onward and upward to?

Stuart Beattie looks to make his directorial debut with an Australian version of Red Dawn. Sort of.