Actor Michael Biehn, best known for his starring roles in The Terminator and Aliens, and his Blanc Biehn Productions have joined forces with director Xavier Gens (Hitman) to produce a series of grindhouse films, the first of which will be The Farm. Chiller Film, the genre arm of Aspect Film, will represent all three titles as part of its deal with Blanc Biehn announced back in February.
Produced by Blanc Biehn and written by Bradley Marcus and Kevin Marcus, The Farm will star Biehn as a broken man who must fight his inner demons to save his farm from a greedy corporation and an inhuman force. The cast also includes Danielle Harris, Jennifer Blanc, Michael Eklund, Ivan Gonzalez and Courtney B. Vance.
Producers are Jennifer Blanc Biehn, Michel Teicher and Avi Federgreen of Federgreen Entertainment/Indiecan Entertainment. Shooting is set to begin in early 2013 in Canada. Pre-sales are taking place at this year’s Cannes market, with Hugh Edwards from Aspect Film representing Blanc Biehn.
“The inspiration to do The Farm came from a desire to work once again with Michael Biehn,” Gens said. “We had so much fun making The Divide. I really liked him and didn’t want to wait too long before we could go back on a set and work together. I wanted to find the right project in which to reunite the family of The Divide before too much time passed.”
Before taking on The Farm, Gens hopes to make two other films, the first of which is called Cold Skin. “Cold Skin is my top priority project after The Divide,” he said. “It’s a passion project which will be shot soon. We are supposed to lock the budget in Cannes. I am also developing a big French gangster film with LGM and Gaumont in France which will shoot in 2013. The Farm will be a good fun ride after those two big projects.”
Also slated for production under the Biehn/Gens partnership is Up and Down, directed by Carlo Rizzo, and The Predicator, directed by Greg Morin.
Michael Biehn and Jennifer Blanc-Biehn most recently produced the grindhouse film, The Victim, which co-stars Harris. It is currently slated for a late summer theatrical release through Anchor Bay Films.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes received great reviews and strong box office results, raking in over $480 million worldwide, in no small thanks to Andy Serkis, whose motion capture performance even got strong Oscar buzz. 



With the success of Rise, of course a sequel is moving forward, and now The Hollywood Reporter tells us Scott Z. Burns, the screenwriter of Contagion and The Bourne Ultimatum is on board to pen the script.

The original writers on Rise, Amanda Silver and Rick Jaffa, were back to pen the sequel, so Burns will probably do some sort of unspecified rewrite.

As the Reporter tells us, the next Apes “is taking the story to the next level, with the apes on the path to emerge as society’s new rulers,” and that “Burns is well versed in epidemics and breakdowns of society’s orders, having penned Contagion.” 

Last year, Burns was also writing the screenplay for the big screen version of The Man From U.N.C.L.E., which Steven Soderberg was on board to direct, but it fell apart at the last minute.

Another interesting story hint was dropped last year when Indiewire quoted co-screenwriter Amanda Silver as saying, “We’re working on the sequel right now, and so the excitement is are they going to talk or not. Part of the challenge was how to get across what was happening between the apes without words.” 


And indeed, in the original Apes they spoke very well for themselves, which is no surprise because Rod Serling scripted their dialogue.

Also back for the next Apes are Andy Serkis, of course, as well as the director of Rise, Rupert Wyatt, with Fox eyeing a 2014 release.

The movie is an incredible visual and aural nightmare, with amazing set pieces and a groundbreaking score from the Italian progressive rock band Goblin, who also performed the soundtrack for the original Dawn of the Dead.



Like Phantasm, Suspiria was born of a very personal filmmaking vision, it’s way more of a visual experience than one that relies on linear storytelling, and there’s truly no horror film like it.

As regular TG Daily readers know, I’m generally against remakes, and although there are talented people involved in rebooting Suspiria, I think remaking it could be a big mistake on the level of Halloween.

In remaking Halloween, the story was very simple, and it was the artistry that John Carpenter brought to the film that raised it above the usual B movie fodder. Without a strong director at the helm, it’s just another guy in a mask running around with a knife movie. Similarly, another director taking on Suspiria will probably turn it into just another horror film.

Yes, David Gordon Green, who’s onboard to remake Suspiria, is a talented and versatile filmmaker (Pineapple Express, Undertow, George Washington), and Rob Zombie has a lot of potential as a filmmaker too, but remaking Halloween was borderline blasphemy, and any hack could have come aboard to tackle it. 

Similarly, this could be another mis-step for Green’s career after the disaster of Your Highness, and the middling comedy The Sitter.

Dario Argento has always sworn he would fight a remake of Suspiria with everything in his being, and clearly he lost the battle. The original film will always stand as a masterpiece of the genre, as will Halloween, no matter the remakes, it’s just a shame to see Dimension plundering two horror classics like this for little more than a quick buck.

Astro Zombies M4: Invaders From Cyber Space B-movie legend Ted V. Mikels made the original Astro-Zombies in 1968, and now he’s back with the brand-new fourth film in the series. Mikels is a Vegas institution, and he and the local cast and crew will be on-hand for a Q&A after the screenings. May 20, 2:30 & 5 p.m., free, Theatre 7. Email janellkelley@gmail.com for tickets.

Jane Eyre tells the story of a young governess who gets far more than she bargained for when she reports for work at a musty old country manor. In fact, it’s easy to see Charlotte Bronte’s 1847 novel as part of the long tradition of haunted house stories, in which something (or someone) lurks in the shadows, ready to strike when least expected.

Roger Corman paid homage to this same tradition in 1960, when he adapted “The Fall of the House of Usher,” an eerie short story by Edgar Allan Poe. House of Usher, the lead-off film in Corman’s ambitious (if bargain-basement) Poe cycle for American International Pictures, vaulted Roger to a new level of critical respect, while also winning him fans among impressionable teenagers worldwide. In 2005, House of Usher became the only Corman feature to be welcomed into the National Film Registry, a project of the Library of Congress. I had the pleasure of breaking that news to Roger myself: it was a great day for his enduring legacy.

While shooting his Poe films, Corman was discovering Sigmund Freud. Haunted house movies, from Roger’s Freud-infused perspective, capture a child’s fear of the unknown, symbolizing a tiny tot alone in the darkness, confounded by the mystery of what’s happening behind his parents’ locked door. When interviewed by my former colleague Adam Simon for an Italian TV documentary, Roger stretched this idea even further. For Adam’s camera, Roger wandered through the dark, decrepit Concorde studio, lantern in hand, solemnly intoning: “To me the house is a woman’s body. The hallways, the stairways, the corridors are the vagina. I as a teenaged boy am immensely desirous of penetrating those hallways, yet at the same time I am a little bit fearful about the journey.”

The Freudian explanation helps me understand the attractiveness of horror films to postpubescent audiences (though heaven knows I’ve never been a teenage boy!). Still, there’s another reason that low-budget filmmakers love haunted house movies. In a nutshell, they’re cheap to shoot. Just one big set, with lots of nooks and crannies, and little need for a cast of thousands. Add some things that go bump in the night, and you’re good to go.

by Beverly Gray

A recent slide-show on Salon.com, entitled “The Best Remakes of All-Time,” chronicles movies that got better when their plots were re-imagined by later filmmakers. Like David Cronenberg’s chilling 1986 update of the old Vincent Price shocker, The Fly. Or the poignant Judy Garland musical version of A Star is Born. Or Howard Hawks’ transformation of that boys-will-be-boys newspaperman story, The Front Page, into a sparkling battle of the sexes, His Girl Friday.

I’m here to tell you: when it comes to remakes, Roger Corman has no shame. He views a remake as a cheap way to get extra value out of an existing script. Even his own best work as a director is fair game. In 1989, he gave upcoming director Larry Brand carte blanche to re-think The Masque of the Red Death, the Corman-directed Poe adaptation from 1964 that most critics consider his finest artistic achievement. And he was all set to green-light a television series based on his classic black comedy, Little Shop of Horrors, until the bureaucracy of TV production did him in.

I myself got involved with remakes, Corman-style, in late 1992. As the winter holidays approached, Roger realized there was no production booked into his Venice studio. Keeping the studio staff idling was anathema to someone of Roger’s frugal temperament. So he needed a quickie production to allow them to earn their keep. That’s when I was approached by veteran Corman production chief Mike Elliott, and told to grind out a fast adaptation of the 1989 Concorde martial arts hit, Bloodfist. The original script by Robert King (with heavy borrowings from Jean-Claude Van Damme’s KickBoxer) had featured Don “The Dragon” Wilson as an earnest young man who enters a Manila tournament in order to flush out his brother’s killer. My job was to transform the exotic overseas competition into the down-and-dirty L.A. under-the-freeway games, and to change the inscrutable Chinese mentor who turns out to be the villain of the piece into a mysterious African-American street bum. (Oops – did I just give away the twist ending?)

To metamorphose Bloodfist into Full Contact, I was allotted about a week. When it was shot (with kickboxer Jerry Trimble in the Don “The Dragon” role), I scored a cameo as a nurse who supplies some key plot information. Full Contact was released through Twentieth Century-Fox, and Roger was clearly pleased with the results, because four months later I was helping move the same story into outer space. This time we called it Dragon Fire. And soon there was a female version, Angel Fist. Briefly we also considered a sword-and-sorcery variation, but that seems a little much.

The kicker (so to speak) came in 2005, when I opened an American Film Market issue of the Hollywood Reporter and found a Concorde ad for Bloodfist 2050. Here’s the ad copy: “To avenge his brother’s death, Alex Danko must enter the erotic and deadly criminal underground of the near future, where he finds the fight of his life!” Yup, same movie. It’s heartening to know that some things never change.

By Beverly Gray

So—Harry Potter mania is upon us again. In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II, a pantheon of English actors take their final bows as characters in J.K. Rowling’s wizarding world. This seems a fitting time to salute one British thespian who puts a distinctive twist on the old saw that there are no small parts, just small actors. Warwick Davis may stand a mere 3 ½ feet tall, but he’s no small actor in my book. He’s probably unique among the Harry Potter cast in that he plays, with aplomb, two very different roles: the plucky Professor Flitwick (definitely one of the good guys) and the conniving goblin Griphook (indisputably one of the bad).

I interviewed Warwick Davis while working on Ron Howard: From Mayberry to the Moon . . . and Beyond. We spoke by phone, and I couldn’t help being surprised by his rich baritone voice. But he was hardly a baritone when he got his first role. Purely by chance, his grandmother heard a commercial seeking people under four feet tall to play the furry Ewoks in Return of the Jedi. Warwick was eleven years old, and stood a mere three feet eleven. George Lucas cast him on the spot, then quickly noticed that the tiniest Ewok was imbuing his role with some character. Unexpectedly, his time in drama class was paying off. Warwick explained to me, “Because I was a very outgoing and social sort of child, my mum felt that quite a good way of channeling all this energy was to send me to a drama group. It really wasn’t because she felt I would have a career in acting. It was just something for me to do on a Saturday morning.”

Another stroke of luck: the actor set to play a scene with Princess Leia contracted food poisoning. Young Warwick took over, and earned the character name of Wicket the Ewok. Some years later, Lucas hired rising director Ron Howard to helm a sword-and-sorcery epic, Willow, and Warwick nabbed the title role. Aside from the challenge of starring in an action film, he was faced with the fact that, at seventeen, “I was going to be playing the father of two children, a man of the world. And of course I’d never even lifted a baby, let alone had the experience of being a father at that point.” Ron Howard (whose own wife Cheryl was about to give birth to their fourth child) prepared Warwick to interact—as the plot required—with a full-sized baby by scheduling two weeks in which “they had the mothers bringing these children in. I would just rehearse holding them and carrying them and feeding them and changing their diapers.” By the end of the shoot he felt ready for fatherhood, though it took several decades to get that joyful opportunity.

Since then, Warwick has played the creepy title character in the Leprechaun films, a wacky android in A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and the treacherous Black Dwarf in The Chronicles of Narnia. For most roles, he’s resigned to spending long hours in the makeup chair. He’s not bothered that he rarely gets to portray a regular guy in a regular situation: “I’m an actor, and creating characters is what I do, and often these strange creatures are actually more challenging and interesting to create as an actor.” Still, Ricky Gervais has written him a new sitcom, Life’s Too Short, in which he’ll be able to play—for a change—a version of himself.

There are no more details about the character or how he’ll fit into the story, but as usual, the internet provides some more answers– in the Marvel Universe there’s a character named Eric Savin, a Lieutenant Colonel in charge of a secret Army project who investigates wrongdoing within the program, runs over a land mine, and is revived as a cyborg known as Coldblood. The idea of a character who works in tech fits in with the hints of what we know about the plot, namely that it will follow the Extremis story line from the comics, in which a virus is spread through the use of nanobots. But Guy Pearce is already close to signing on as Aldrich Killian, the scientist responsible for reinventing the nanobots, so how would Savin’s work fit into that?

There’s no telling how closely the character might relate to the one in the comics, though, so all speculation would be just that. And it’s entirely possible that Pearce and Badge Dale will fit into the background just fine as Ben Kingsley’s primary villain character takes center stage. But I’m getting more and more worried about a Justin Hammer-like situation, in which a great villain is thrown into the film but totally overshadowed when there’s too much going on. Anyone else out there share my fears?

Before a movie opens, everyone involved is usually understandably wary about talking sequels– even when it’s something like The Avengers, which had the makings of a mega-hit well before it opened at $200 million North America alone. But The Los Angeles Times gave it a shot anyway, talking to Joss Whedon before the film opened in the United States, and asking him if he’d be back for the sequel that’s already in development at Disney. Whedon, of course, wouldn’t give a concrete answer, but he also had a thoughtful reply to go along with it:

“You know, I’m very torn. It’s an enormous amount of work telling what is ultimately somebody else’s story, even though I feel like I did get to put myself into it. But at the same time, I have a bunch of ideas, and they all seem really cool.”

Whedon, who’s written several comic books in addition to all of his TV and movies work, would naturally have a lot of ideas for the sequel, especially after writing the script for The Avengers himself. But it’s curious that he emphasizes the fact that The Avengers is still somebody else’s story. Sure, he didn’t come up with the idea for the team of superheroes on his own, the way he created the Buffy the Vampire Slayer universe or the world of Firefly, but he really made the Avengers team his own, in a way that I think will define the Marvel Universe of movies and even comics for a long time. As a writer Whedon clearly values originality, but he’d be far from the first writer or director to achieve success telling a pre-existing story– Orson Welles’s first claim to fame was a radio telling of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, after all, and Cecil B. DeMille surely didn’t invent The Ten Commandments.

It may be a while before we see Whedon make a decision on The Avengers 2, and the way he’s talking, I wouldn’t be surprised to see him depart– he’s got the capital to do absolutely anything he wants right now, and with a brain like that, he’s surely got a ton of ideas that don’t involve supeheroes. If you want to convince him to take the job, though, now’s probably the time– we’re skeptical he reads the comments here, but just in case, give it a shot!