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Horror-comedy seems to be all the rage these days and above you’ll see the first art for the upcoming Lesbian Vampire Killers. As far as titles go, this one is right up there with Snakes on a Plane, Zombie Strippers, and Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter as far as titles that tell you everything you need to know goes.

James Corden and Matthew Horne star as two dudes trapped alongside a busload of foreign female students in a Welsh town overrun by female vampires. Apparently, they want out and the best way to achieve this goal is to become the Lesbian Vampire Killers of the title. Director Phil Claydon is currently doing post production work on the film. No release date has been set.

Also, I’d advise against going to the film’s synopsis page on production company AV Pictures Ltd.-it’s pretty spoilerific.

Hellraiser 2: Hellbound has the distinction of being one of the only film sequels that I honestly enjoy more than the original. I love the first Hellraiser, don’t get me wrong, but there’s something about Hellbound that’s just better. It’s got more Cenobite action, it’s got Dr. Channard (who became the coolest Cenobite outside of the main four-and if you put a gun to my head, I’d tell you he’s the coolest outside of Pinhead), it’s got the cool showdown scene between these warring Cenobites, and it’s got an overall cheesy sense of apocalyptic grandeur that just sucks me in every time. For my buck, this is the best film in the entire series.

Which makes Anchor Bay’s announcement that they’re releasing a 20^th Anniversary DVD of Hellbound all the more exciting for me. For whatever reason, I’ve owned a shoddy bare bones edition of the film for years, but come December 30^th, I’ll be able toss that one in the trash and replace it with a shiny new version loaded to the brim with extras-including three brand new features unique to this release.

Here’s the list of extras:

Audio commentary with director Tony Randel, screenwriter Peter Atkins and actor Ashley Laurence

Theatrical Trailers (4) and TV Spots (2)

New: “The Soul Patrol” featurette - interviews with Cenobite actors

New: “Outside the Box” featurette - interview with director Tony Randel

New: “The Doctor is In” featurette - interview with Kenneth Cranham

“Under the Skin” featurette — Doug Bradley on Hellbound: Hellraiser II

“Lost in the Labyrinth” featurette

On-set interview with Clive Barker

On-set interviews with cast and crew

Poster and stills gallery

And if all that weren’t enough, the disc also includes a reproduction of the film’s poster. Sounds like the perfect after-Christmas gift to me.

It’s another huge week for DVD releases-which is always a good thing (particularly in October), unless you’re a one man film reviewer who’s still trying to see and write about everything that came out last week. I’ll take it though-it’s better to have too many movies to watch and cover than nothing for weeks on end.

The biggest releases this week are undoubtedly Lions Gate’s Ghosthouse Underground flicks. Eight new films, all released in the same week, under the same banner. It’s a lot of eggs to place in one basket, but early reports seem to indicate the gamble has paid off. The eight films featured are: Dance of the Dead (which appears to be the bonafide best of the bunch-I’ll let you know for sure once I see the last two films in the set), No Man’s Land: Rise of Reeker (a sequel to the cult hit Reeker), Room 205, Dark Floors, Last House in the Woods, The Substitute (no, not the one with Tom Berenger), Brotherhood of Blood (which features both Sid Haig and Ken Foree), and Trackman. I’m going to try to review all of these in the very near future, but like I said, I’m a one man show so it’s gonna take a bit of time.

If all that weren’t enough for you, there’s also the director’s cut of the 1983 film Sweet Sixteen. Melissa is the new girl in town and the boys are all dying to meet her…literally.

Stuck is the strangest sounding film to come along in quite some time. Stuart Gordon helms this odd tale wherein Mena Suvari plays an overworked nurse who hits a homeless man on her way home one night. The homeless guy (Stephen Rea) is lodged in her windshield, but Suvari’s character doesn’t want to get him help since it might jeopardize her promotion. So she leaves him stuck there and the two engage in a battle for survival. Trust me, you just have to see it-words can’t really do it justice.

Finally, Cinema Epoch gives us Deadly Game, a slasher flick set in Holland. A group of gamers are invited to check out a hot new title, only they soon discover that they’re trapped inside the building and being stalked by a serial killer. Gamers and horror seem like they should fit together really well, but if we learned anything from Stay Alive it’s that horror movies revolving around gaming and gamers are something to be approached with a great deal of trepidation.

And there you have it, your horror DVD releases for the week of October 14^th, 2008.

Some of my fondest memories growing up involve Stephen King books. For children of the ’80s, King’s novels and the slasher exploits of Freddy and Jason were our gateway drugs–they opened the door to a life-long love of horror in all its forms. Yeah, we might have moved on to more exotic and darker delights, but I’ll always love King and those other mainstream horror icons for starting me down the path. Without King, this site might not even exist. I might be sitting in a cubicle right now, telling someone about the joys of period costume dramas while I finish up my latest TPS report.

None of that has anything to do with Del Rey’s (a division of mega-publisher Random House) announcement that they’ve acquired the rights to bring Stephen King and Peter Straub’s The Talisman to comic shops everywhere, but it seemed more interesting than just reposting the same boring press release you can read on a hundred other sites (you can read it here, too…you just have to scroll more). I will tell you this, though–every time Run Through the Jungle comes on the radio, I immediately think of this book.  Anyway, here’s the official press release:

Del Rey, an imprint of Ballantine Books at the Random House Publishing Group, announced today the acquisition of the comic book and graphic novel rights to The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub.

The creative team on the project will be announced soon, and the first issue of the monthly comic is planned for late summer/early fall 2009.

Originally published in 1984, The Talisman is the story of a young teen named Jack Sawyer, who can save his dying mother only by retrieving a magical talisman. To find it he must cross back and forth between our world and the frightening and dangerous landscape of its “twinner” counterpart. The hardcover edition, published by Viking, spent 12 weeks in the #1 slot on the New York Times list. Both The Talisman and its sequel, Black House, are in print with Ballantine Books.

Television rights to The Talisman are under development by Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy.

“Illustrating The Talisman in the depth that it deserves will involve at least 24 issues of comics, probably more,” said Del Rey Editor in Chief, Betsy Mitchell, who acquired the project from agent Ralph Vicinanza. “It’s a tremendously visual story, filled with images that burn in memory long after the book has been closed.”

King’s Dark Tower comics (published through Marvel) consistently inhabit the top of the comic book sales charts, and his recent series, Dark Tower: Long Road Home was the top-selling comic book in North America in March 2008.

This isn’t the most exciting picture ever, but anything that gives me a chance to talk about Park Chan Wook (the director of Oldboy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, and Lady Vengeance) is eventually gonna wind up on the site.

The photo above is from the director’s latest flick, Thirst. The story of the film centers around a priest (The Host’s Song Kang-ho) who undergoes an experimental medical procedure that leaves him a vampire. Fighting his newfound urges, the priest spirals into ever deeper acts of depravity as he struggles to retain his humanity.

Thirst marks Park’s first feature length foray into horror (he helmed the short, Cuts, a few years back-you can find that in the anthology film Three…Extremes) and should be of interest to anyone who loved Oldboy and the rest of the Vengeance trilogy.

Thirst has apparently finished principal shooting and Park is now working in post-production to prepare the film for its 2009 release.

AMC’s Halloween film marathon, Monsterfest, has a new name and host this year.

Re-christened Fearfest and hosted by Rob Zombie, AMC has an eight day slate of horror flicks guaranteed to please just about every conceivable taste-everything from Son of Frankenstein, to Christine, to the unholy trinity of Freddy, Jason, and Michael Myers.

Zombie will introduce the films and also provide commentary and trivia. Considering his well-documented love of the genre, this is a good choice (almost as cool as when IFC got Savini to host their Italian horror film festival a few Halloweens back).

The only downside to all of this is that AMC edits films for content, so horror movies aired on the station do suffer a bit. They also run commercials, is usually disappointing, but in this case it might be a benefit since it will give Zombie more opportunities to speak about whatever’s being aired (and maybe give us some more info on his upcoming Tyrannosaurus Rex).

AMC has the full Fearfest schedule up here

Dread Central is reporting that Anchor Bay has acquired the rights to Roar Uthaug’s (Coolest. Name. Ever.) stylish Norwegian slasher flick Cold Prey (or Fritt Vilt in the native tongue) and plans to bring it to American audiences on DVD.

The film finds five young adults out for a day of snowboarding in the mountains. When one breaks his leg after trying to pull off a crazy maneuver, his friends take him to an empty old hotel-only the hotel isn’t as empty as they thought. Before you can say “watch out, that dude has a pickaxe”, they’re being stalked by a madman.

No word yet on an official release date for the DVD, but when the news breaks, you’ll read it here.

The original Feast is a deeply flawed yet thoroughly entertaining monster movie that I probably like more than I should (which is mostly attributable to the film’s development being featured in the third season of Project Greenlight. Seeing what Jon Gulager and crew went through to make the movie had me rooting for the guy to succeed). I felt the film’s greatest failing was that the script (penned by first time screenwriters Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton) could have certainly used a little more polish (despite being inventive in its subversion of genre film expectations). Despite all that, I was still really excited when Feast 2: Sloppy Seconds hit DVD this week.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dimension Extreme has announced a release date for the much talked about and long anticipated British zombie film, The Zombie Diaries. Fans of the morti viventi can see if this import lives up to the hype (Dark Side Magazine hailed it as “the best zombie film ever”) on November 18^th.

Directed by Kevin Gates and Michael Bartlett, The Zombie Diaries tells the story of a zombie outbreak in England. Footage from various people’s video cameras is used to form the narrative. Yes, this sounds like Romero’s Diary of the Dead-but hopefully The Zombie Diaries will have a higher ratio of zombie mayhem to social commentary-one of the major things that kept Romero’s film from being as good as it could have been.

The disc comes packed with extras, including two commentary tracks (one with the directors, the other with the actors), deleted scenes, and a documentary on the making of the film.

Here’s the trailer, just in case you’ve never seen it before.

Writer-director Michael Dougherty seems poised to make a run at becoming the “next big thing in horror”. His debut, the feature length anthology film Trick ‘r Treat is still trying to get a release date, but has drawn rave reviews from everyone who’s seen it on the festival circuit. Now, he’s poised to add a television series to his burgeoning resume with his forthcoming Fox show, Bitches.

According to Dougherty, Bitches is a “dramedy” following a quartet of New York women dealing with the fact that they’re also werewolves.

Shock Till You Drop caught up with Dougherty and he spent a few minutes telling them about his inspirations for the show (including the sex scene transformation in The Howling) and that so far, Fox doesn’t seem to have a problem with the show’s tentative title (although he has backups on standby).

You know it’s a slow news day when a story like this actually makes it on The Horror Geek. I mean, for real, could this sound any more awful? Bitches? A “dramedy”? Why do I get the feeling this show is basically gonna have the four skanks from Sex and the City running around turning into monsters once a month (and I mean aside from when they’ve got PMS)? I can just see the standard episode now. Werewolf chicks go shopping for shoes. Shoe salesman makes a joking comment about broad A’s hairy feet (”What are you, part Hobbit?”), girls turn into werewolves and rip him to shreds. Show ends with a funny zinger like “you know, I didn’t really want those shoes anyway, they were killing my dew claw.” See? It writes itself.

I don’t think anyone has to worry about Fox changing the title either. This is the network that gave us the “find your father” show Who’s Your Daddy? I’m amazed that they haven’t already trotted out at least three shows called Bitches. I will admit to being morbidly curious as to what the standby titles are though. If Bitches was the best of the bunch, I can only imagine what didn’t make the cut.

All snarkiness aside, I would be happy if the show turned out to be good. We need more werewolves in horror and more horror on television.

I’d say “more on this as it develops”, but I really wouldn’t hold my breath on that if I were you.