Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) have a problem.

Platonic best friends since elementary school, the two find themselves in their mid-20s sharing an apartment and going nowhere fast. Their dead end jobs are not enough to pay their bills and as their utilities are slowly being turned off, they are in danger of being evicted from their shared apartment. But after the one-two punch of a high school class reunion and becoming the unwitting subjects of a popular embarrassing internet viral video, they realize that the only way to earn some money in this downturned economy is to go into the only recession-proof business- internet pornography.

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Warner Brothers has hired Changeling scribe and Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski to script a remake of their 1956 classic film Forbidden Planet.

The original, loosely based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, tells the story of the crew of a spaceship, captained by Leslie Nielson, sent to the planet Altair IV to check up on a colony of scientists. There, they discover that only one scientist and his daughter have survived the attacks of an unseen monster years earlier. Despite the danger perceived by the crew, the scientist refuses to leave with the them, preferring to stay and continue to study the ancient underground city of the planet’s vanished inhabitants. Some may know the film for introducing audiences to to Robby The Robot.

Normally, I’m against remaking classic films. And let’s make no mistake, Forbidden Planet is a classic. Even setting aside the fact the Shakespeare connection, its story was groundbreaking for 1950s science-fiction cinema. In all other sci-fi movies of the time, outer space was the home of strange and terrible monsters who had nothing better to do than land in small Earth towns and terrorize the citizenry. In Forbidden Planet, it is humans who went out into outer space, only to find that the monsters out there are the ones we brought with us. Besides its unusually cerebral storyline, Forbidden Planet also sported some great state-of-the-art special effects, which still hold up today. Amazingly, the movie lost the Academy Award for visual effects to The Ten Commandments’ far inferior work. With its spaceship crew tasked with exploration, many of have seen Forbidden Planet as a direct influence on Gene Roddenberry when he created writer/producer Star Trek.

But Straczynski is a writer whom I am a fan of and I trust on a project like this. He is a fan of the original film and has worked references to it into his classic series Babylon 5. If there is any writer out there who will get the material and will remain true to it, I think it will be Straczynski. As he stated in an online post last night, “Joe the Fanboy has been chasing this one assignment for over a decade.”

(Two remakes that I actually approve of in one week? Am I getting soft in my old age?)

In addition to the Forbidden Planet gig, Straczynski currently has the features Lensmen, based on the E E Doc Smith pulp novels, and The Flickering Light set up at Ron Howard’s Imagine Entertainment and They Marched Into Sunlight, with Paul Greengrass directing, at Playtone and Universal. He has also completed an adaptation of Max Brooks’ zombie apocalypse novel World War Z, which is at Plan B waiting a greenlight. In his online post yesterday, Straczynski also stated that he is signed for two more projects, but couldn’t give specifics until the studios announced them.

Via Hollywood Reporter.

If Romero’s zombie film Night Of The Living Dead reinvented the genre as social satire, Danny Boyle’s 2002 post-zombie apocolypse 28 Days Later feels almost like a reaction to the previous year’s terrorist attacks on New York City. A simple bicycle currier awakes from a coma to discover that London has been evacuated for the safety of the countryside, which he strikes out for with a small band of survivors. What caused such an exodus? An engineered virus released from a laboratory has turned a majority of the population into rage-fueled, nocturnal beserkers. A variation on the zombie motif, though Boyle is careful to never use the word in the movie. Ironically, the fast moving creatures of this movie are reportedly the inspiration for the fast moving zombies in Zack Snyder’s remake of Dawn Of The Dead.

Seventy years ago this evening, Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre Of The Air radio program presented their Halloween episode, an adaptation of H. G. Wells’ (no relation) novel War Of The Worlds.

Much has been written, and not all of it is true, about the panic that is said to have been caused by the show’s faux-newscast approach. While the opening of the show does tip the fact that what was to follow was nothing more than a fiction, many listeners came to the show late, having first been tuned to rival network NBC‘s The Chase And Sanborn Hour featuring Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy for the opening monologue. It was easy to see how they might have been duped by the show’s “We interrupt this broadcast…” conceit, as there was no commercial break for the first half of the hour-long episode.

But the power of the Mercury Theater’s cast is what really sells the show. And what a cast. Many of them, most notably Joseph Cotton and Agnes Moorehead, would follow Welles to RKO Studios and Hollywood for Citizen Kane before going on to their own successful careers. But it was the notoriety that Welles would receive from this special Halloween episode that would generate for Welles the invitations to come to Hollywood to try his hand at movies. The rest, to coina phrase, is history…

(Of course, fans of The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai: Across The 8th Dimension know that the broadcast was really a news report of the escape from their extra dimensional prison of the evil red lectroids of Planet 10 and the Welles was hypnotized into covering up the incident by saying it was “just” a radio show…)

You can hear the complete broadcast for yourself at the Internet Archive. The Archives also has the Mercury Theatre’s adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which is pretty scary in its own right.

Like many, I was disappointed when Bruce Campbell announced that he was not going to be part of Don Coscarelli’s Bubba Nosferatu, the follow up to Campbell and Coscarelli’s elderly-Elvis-fighting-a-mummy collaboration Bubba HoTep. But now, Aint It Cool News has an exclusive interview with Paul Giamatti – whose production company is helping Coscarelli develop the sequel and who will appear in the film as Elvis’ agent Col. Tom Parker – in which he reveals that Ron Perlman is interested in taking over the role of the King.

Apparently, the production and Perlman are trying to find a time in everyone’s schedule to go make the film. Giamatti suspects that cameras could be rolling sometime next spring. In teh interview, Giamatti also discusses his take on Elvis’s agent, Col. Tom. It’s an interesting interview, well worth checking out.

As to Perlman as Elvis… I’m not so sure. The Hellboy films have shown us that he can act through makeup and knows how to keep a light comedic tone. There’s something about him though that doesn’t quite sell the concept to me. Admitedly, I could be hung up on the fact that he is not Bruce Campbell playing the role. Personally, I think a better choice would be Kurt Russell, who has already played a young Elvis in a 1979 television movie.

When one thinks of the modern zombie film, one has to pay respect to its father, George Romero. It was his low budget, independently produced Night Of The Living Dead (1968), which laid the template for every film that was to follow. Previously, cinematic zombies would be those who fell under the spell of a voodoo practicing witch doctor. But from this film on they would be the animated dead, unstoppable in their single-minded quest to feed on  the flesh of the living. Romero would be sincerely flattered by a host of immitators, but his original still retains a powerful hold on audiences today. Romero himself would further explore his zombie epidemic spreading across the globe through a series of sequels which also manage to work in a subtext of social satire.

Twentieth Century Fox has released some more footage, what they’re calling an extended trailer, from their upcoming remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still. The first half seems to expand upon the premise of the film for those unfamiliar with Robert Wise’s 195- original film, while the second half seems to pimp some of the action and effects sequences to try and convince people that the film isn’t as dry as the first half of the trailer makes it. We also get our first good look at the film’s version of Gort, one of sci-fi cinema’s first iconic robots. Unfortunately, this new look, while recalling the original’s design, looks like a man in a rubber wet suit. Not very impressive. Needless to say, there’s nothing here that dispells the lack of confidence I have in this film. 

Columbia Pictures is stepping up to be the next studio to try and bring Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s classic and controversial comic series Preacher to the big screen. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Sam Mendes, director of the graphic novel adaptation Road To Perdition (2002), is set to helm this latest try, with Neal Moritz and his Original Films banner producing. No writer has been chosen, though Ennis has worked on a script for a previous attempt to bring the comic to theaters.

The comic, which ran for a total of 75 issues including spin-off one-shots and miniseries, attracted controversy for its often savage satirical swipes at religion and American culture. The hero of the series is Jesse Custer, a minister who is accidentally infused with the supernatural entity Genesis, the offspring of a union between a devil and an angel. Instilled with a power that rivals God himself, Custer journeys across America to find the deity, accompanied by his girlfriend Tulip and an alcoholic Irish vampire named Cassidy. His quest is constantly opposed by a secret religious organization called the Grail which controls the world’s governments and protects the genetic bloodline of Jesus, whom they claim never died on the cross but married and fathered several children.

For several years, Kevin Smith’s View Askew Productions was developing the property, with ultimately James Marsden attached to play Jesse Custer. Sometime Smith collaborator Ben Affleck was once considered for the role, but he declined after appearing in Smith’s Dogma (1999), not wanting to appear in another film of a controversial religious nature. More recently, Mark Steven Johnson was developing the comic as a series for HBO, but the potential series dies when there was a change of management at the cable outlet.

Akira Kurosawa’s detective drama High And Low is being set up for an English language version with Mike Nichol’s in the director’s chair, David Mamet on screenplay duties and Martin Scorsese serving as executive producer. Scorsese had originally started work on a remake of the film in 1999, but was stymied from moving forward for years due to rights issues.

Kurosawa’s 1963 film was based on Evan Hunter’s 1959 detective novel King’s Ransom. In it, a business executive, longtime Kurosawa collaborator Toshiro Mifune,  prepares to be a large ransom for his kidnapped son only to discover that it was actually his chauffeur’s son who was abducted. He is left with the moral dilemma of using the money to save his employee’s son or for its original purpose of a crucial corporate buyout.

While most remakes and English-language adaptations of foreign films have that “Let’s make a quick buck” stink to them, no such whiff seems to emanate from this project. Scorsese has previously adapted another foreign language film, turning Andrew Lau’s Infernal Affairs into The Departed and in the process managed to preserve the essence of of the original. I think that lightening can strike twice in this case.

Via SlashFilm.

When we last left the saga of Dimension Films’ struggle to remake the Clive Barker horror classic Hellraiser, the sturio had just hired writers Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton to take a pass at the screenplay, as they weren’t too happy with the draft turned in by the project’s co-directors, Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury.

Well, it seems that Bustillo and Maury have left the film altogether, as The Hollywood Reporter has announced that French director Pascal Laugier is in negotiations to helm the remake.

This is a dream project for me. I know Clive Barker’s work very well, and I would never betray what he has done. Fans are expecting a definitive Hellraiser, and I don’t want to take that away from them.

Encouraging words from Laugier, if it weren’t for the fact that many already consider Barker’s 1987 movie, adapted from his own short story “The Hell-Bound Heart,” to be fairly definitive in its own right. Still, it should be interesting to see if Laugier incorperates much of the mythology around the Lament Configuration,  infernal puzzle box that summons forth the demonic Cenobite known as Pinhead, that was developed by Hellraiser‘s numerous sequels.

Laugier’s current film, Martyrs, has been sparking much controversy in his home country of France, where it has earned that country’s equivelant of the NC-17 rating for graphic and disturbing violent imagery.