Good day, dwellers of the devil’s basement. Are you guys ready for Devil’s Due coming out later this week? Yeah, me either. Fortunately there are much more interesting and original films hitting theaters and VOD sites over the next few months. And two of them include Dan Fogler and an evil clown, which were formerly assumed to be the same thing.
There's another found footage movie coming out this year, Mark Neveldine's The Vatican Tapes, which will center on a leaked video of an exorcism that goes extremely wrong. While these kinds of films usually rely on practical sound effects and deep booming noises for their soundscape, The Vatican Tapes will receive a score composed by bonkers musician Mike Patton, lead singer of Faith No More, Mr. Bungle, and about a dozen other side projects. That fact alone has me 20% more excited about this movie than I already was. So now it stands at 22%. And growing.
Jason Voorhees Might Not Be In Friday the 13th's 13th Film
Okay, so that's a bit of story bait for you guys to immediately get angry about, but Crave Online caught up with Platinum Dunes' Brad Fuller, one of the Friday producers, who said that Jason's absence is at least a possibility, and the found footage angle is still in the air. I suppose next we'll hear about a Fast & Furious movie without any cars and a Roland Emmerich movie that won't destroy half of the world's population.
When asked if actor Derek Mears would be reprising his role as the hockey masked murderer, Fuller said, "I don’t know because I don’t know if we’re going to have Jason, I don’t know which Jason we’re going to have. I can tell you this: I love Derek Mears, I love working with him and he’s a dream so we’d be lucky to have him." That's a pretty strange way to answer a question, even if it doesn't reflect on the final product. They don't even have a script yet to go along with their March 13, 2015 release date.
Fuller acknowledges that Platinum Dunes' Welcome to Yesterday is a found footage movie and that The Purge has some of the same elements, and says they understand that a large portion of their fanbase doesn't want to see this film in that format. But Fuller pretty much sums it all up by saying, "Until we figure out exactly what the story is for the next Friday the 13th movie, I can’t tell you what it’s going to be." Now if you guys will excuse me, I'm going to have a bowl of soup without a bowl or any soup.
Dan Fogler’s 2009 Directorial Debut Hysterical Psycho Gets Release
Actor Dan Fogler is getting ready to release his second film, the drugged-up surreal comedy Don Peyote, all while his first film Hysterical Psycho has been sitting on the shelf since 2009. I think at this point, after a year that saw the releases of long-delayed slashers You’re Next and All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, horror should have its own gold-plated shelf.
According to BloodyDisgusting, Indican Pictures will be releasing the film on DVD on February 18, four and a half years after its 2009 premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. Dubbed a "Hitchcockian homage mixed with fart jokes," the film follows a group of misfits who go out to Moon Lake, unaware of the lunar radiation that turns anyone nearby into lunatics. The cleverly paced trailer seen above kind of says it all. "Standing" and "concerning" especially.
Clown - Trailer - Funny home videos are a click away
Eli Roth Turns Fake Evil Clown Trailer Into Real Evil Clown Movie
While I’ve never been too taken with the films that director Eli Roth has given the world, I completely appreciate how he has used his fame to help out newer filmmakers, as well as just promoting the shit out of horror in general on a constant basis. Case in point: director Jon Watts made a fake trailer for an evil clown movie called…Clown using Roth's name in it, and Roth eventually saw the video and jumped on as a producer. It's now a full-blown feature called ...well you know, with Watts directing from a script he wrote with Robot & Frank screenwriter Christopher Ford.
Thanks to DreadCentral, we have our first look at the actual film, and boy is it a doozy. The admittedly ridiculous plot involves a father who puts on a clown costume for his son's birthday party, only to find the costume doesn't come off, and it begins changing him both physically and mentally. There will never be a clown scarier than Tim Curry's Pennywise in IT, but I'm already saying that at least in this trailer, Clown could find its way into the top five.
Starring Peter Stormare, Laura Allen, Christian DiStefano, Elizabeth Whitmere, Matthew Stefiuk and Any Powers, Clown doesn't have a release date just yet, but you bet your seltzer we'll be talking about this flick again. Check out Watts' crafty original trailer below.
ABCs of Death Releasing Fanmade Spinoff ABCs of Death 1.5
A while back, we got a look at the winning entry for The ABCs of Death sequel’s fan submission contest. Robert Boocheck’s M is for Masticate was a clever hoot, and stands alongside the best segments of the original film. Drafthouse Films, along with producers Ant Timpson and Tim League, recently revealed they’ll be releasing a quasi-spinoff film called The ABCs of Death 1.5 that will compile 26 of the best "M" segments that didn’t make it to the flagship film. It will hit VOD in early 2014 and will screen at a few select Drafthouse cinemas around the same time.
While the cynic in me questions why anyone would want to watch a bunch of losing films, I understand that this is about promoting 26 indie filmmakers that horror fans might not have heard of otherwise. There were 541 entries, so there are pretty good odds that the cream of that crop will be worth the 2-hour runtime or whatever it is. As Timpson said in their announcement, "There’s enough horror, humor, weirdness, and frankly – truly fucked up material to give even the most jaded fan a wakeup call from Hell."
Head to BloodyDisgusting for a rundown of all the directors. In the meantime, check out the winning film if you missed it before.
M IS FOR MASTICATE from Robert Boocheck on Vimeo.
Reminiscence Trailers Goes Into Black Holes and Comes Out Noseless
One of the great things about being a horror fan in the modern age is stumbling upon film trailers that are so mindblowingly amazing that it seems like there’s some guerilla Internet group conspiratorially keeping them unseen. That isn’t exactly the case with Blue Arc Studios’ upcoming WTF feature Reminiscence from Turkish director Akçay Karaazmak, but I think it’ll be a long while before I see another preview that is so eyeball-provoking.
The completely unintuitive plot goes like this: A Slovak physicist named Miska discovers a gateway opening up in the universe every six years when the planets align and a new magnetic field is created. She finds that a gateway will appear in a nearby town and goes to investigate it with her boyfriend, and she finds a shitload of really spooky shit, such as a woman without a nose, and another woman who doesn’t mind the feeling that a vagina stabbing inspires. The mostly dialogue-free trailer above is full of similarly insane visuals that seemingly belie the low budget that went into it.
I’m not sure how much truth there is to the physics that inspired the filmmakers, but I really don’t care. They could have called it The Philadelphia Experiment 5 and I would have still been interested.
