Not one but two Cabin Fever sequels are coming your way. The Indomina Group has optioned the rights to create two new installments in the horror franchise.

According to a press release the two films, Cabin Fever: Patient Zero and Cabin Fever: Outbreak will shoot back to back in the Dominican Republic in early Spring of 2012

Jake Wade Wall (The Hitcher, When Strangers Call) has signed on to pen the screenplay for Cabin Fever: Patient Zero. When a cruise ship in the Caribbean collides with an abandoned research vessel, a deadly virus is unleashed. Passengers must find a way to survive before the flesh eating disease consumes them all.

Cabin Fever: Outbereak is being written by Adam and Deborah Marcus (Leatherface 3D, I Walked With a Zombie). In this film a doctor and his family travel to a remote Caribbean island to investigate a minor flu outbreak, only to discover a vicious flesh-eating virus that threatens everyone on the island. The family is faced with responsibility to prevent a worldwide epidemic.

Eli Roth, the writer/director who created the franchise while working as a PA on the Howard Stern comedy Private Parts, apparently has nothing to do with the new films. But then again, it sounds like that outside of the fleshing eating virus these sequels have no much to do with the the original film anyway.

Via Deadline.

Director Martin Campbell may be bringing the 1980s action television series The Fall Guy to the big screen. The director is currently in discussions with producer Walter Parkes to helm an adaption of the Glen Larson- created series. Thor and X-Men: First Class writers Ashley Miller and Zack Stentz are working on the screenplay.

The original show starred Lee Majors as a stunt man who moonlighted as a bounty hunter. The show also starred Douglas Barr and Heather Thomas.

Now before everyone blows a gasket over yet another proposed big screen adaption of a classic television series, let’s remember that this could very will never make it into production. For every The A-Team that actually makes it to cineplexes, there are plenty of Hogan’s Heroes, CHiPs and Welcome Back Kotter adaptations that die in development.

Via Deadline.

Andrew Baldwin has become the latest writer to take a stab at Warner Brothers’ remake of the 1976 science-fiction adventure Logan’s Run. Although he doesn’t have any produced credits, Baldwin made 2008’s Black List with The West Is Dead. More recently, he wrote Red Asphalt for Lionsgate.

Logan’s Run is one of those films that has seemingly been in development forever. Currently Nicolas Winding Refn is the most recent director to be attached to the project. Previously Carl Erik Rinsch, Bryan Singer, Skip Woods and James McTeigue all had turns on the project. Baldwin will be working from a draft by Gangster Squad’s Will Beall, who rewrote a draft by Alex Garland.

Refn is looking to have his Drive star Ryan Gosling to star in the story of a futuristic cop who defies society’s laws that demand that anyone over the age of 30 be euthanized and flees to the rumored safety of a place called “Sanctuary.”

Before Refn gets to Logan’s Run, he will be shooting his the Thailand-set thriller Only God Forgives, also with Gosling.

Last week, Joss Whedon surprised the world by announcing that he had completed production on an adaption of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing through his newly formed Bellweather Pictures shingle. Today, he has announced Bellweather’s second project, In Your Eyes.

The film, written by Whedon, is being described as a supernatural romance. Brin Hill, who directed Ball Don’t Lie, is set to helm the picture. Deadline describes the story as “is a metaphysical love story about two seemingly polar opposites who are deeply connected in ways neither could have ever imagined.”

In a press release, Whedon stated -

When I wrote In Your Eyes, I didn’t have the wherewithal (or the moxie) to make it without an established production house… I believe, as I did then, that it’s a pretty timeless romance, and now, with the creation of Bellwether Pictures (and Brin Hill’s elegant, passionate take on the piece), I have the opportunity to prove it. (I also have a 37% increase in moxie.) I love this team and I can’t wait to see them bring In Your Eyes to life.

While I am a big Whedon fan, I have to hope that Bellweather is not going to just become a vanity house for Whedon to turn out his own projects. I hope he is also looking to use it to give a chance to young creatives who have their own unique voices to bring to film.

In Your Eyes is set to begin shooting in February. No casting has been done yet for the film.

Lucy is a college student struggling to make ends meet. To that end she works in a restaurant, serves as a test subject for medical experiments, does temp work in an office and even turns the occasional trick. Responding to an ad in a campus newspaper, she finds herself with a new job, working as a server at rich dinner parties. The only thing is that he work “uniform” is fairly revealing lingerie. After a few months, she is offered a “promotion.” Going out to a stately old manor house out in the country, she takes a sleep-inducing drug and rich customers spend the night next to her. Although she is told she will not be harmed or penetrated during these sessions, Lucy’s curiosity slowly gets the better as to what is going on while she is asleep.

Sleeping Beauty is the debut feature from novelist Julia Leigh, directing from her own 2008 Black List script and it is a fascinating meditation on the objectification of women by society and themselves. The men and women who attend the parties that Lucy works at seem completely oblivious to the scantily glad women serving their dinner and drink, secure in the knowledge that their wealth and power can buy them anything they want, including people. When Lucy works as the sleeping companion for the rich, she becomes a symbol of lost youth for an old man or an object to control for another.

Almost every scene plays out in a single shot and by stripping down the artifice of filmmaking, Leigh is in a way forcing us to regard her characters in the same way that we would regard people in real life. The character’s images are not presented in a series of long shots, two-shots and close-ups as a manipulation of the storytelling. Instead, there is an almost voyeuristic feeling to watching their lives play out in front of us, objects for our amusement.

Emily Browning gives a bravura performance as the emotionally closed off Lucy. Browning is very naturalistic here and there is never a moment when we get the feeling that she is “acting.” Some may criticize that Leigh doesn’t seem to give much background to any of the characters, but I think that is deliberate. We are running up against the same wall that Lucy is using to keep the world around her at bay. There may be a moment or two where a crack in that wall gives us a hint as to what has brought Lucy to this point, but there is nothing that ever gives us any concrete answer.

Interestingly, Browning’s Lucy is very similar to her Babydoll character in last spring’s Sucker Punch. Both are emotionally fragile and closed-off young women who are absent paternal figures and who find themselves in situations where their sexuality has become objectified. The difference is that Babydoll uses that sexuality as a weapon to externally escape the situation where Lucy uses hers as a wall that simultaneously protects her from the outside world while imprisoning herself within its confines. But here, Leigh handles the idea much more cubtly than Zack Snyder did in Sucker Punch,and ironically, Sleeping Beauty is all the more powerful of the two films by far for it.

Last month, it looked like director Shawn Levy may have walked off of Twentieth Century Fox’s planned remake of 1966′s Fantastic Voyage. The director and the studio were reported to be having a rough time settling on casting choices and Levy had just signed on to develop Fox’s Frankenstein movie, leading to speculation that he had left the former project.

James Cameron, who is producing the film for Fox, has dismissed those speculations, stating to Deadline that Levy is still on the project and that script development is about two thirds done.

Cameron also elaborated a bit on the twist they are giving to the original film’s story of a team of scientists who are shrunk down to microscopic level in order to perform a delicate operation inside the brain of a defector from the Soviet Union.

“I gave him my idea about how this should be turned into a love story and he’s really run with it,” says Cameron, who noted that the script (originally written by Shane Salerno) with its complex premise has to be just right before it can get to the production level. Cameron says it’s about two thirds of the way there in the development process. Much like Titanic the new Voyage has a real emotional core to it, basically dealing with a doctor going through troubled times in his marriage who finds himself injected into his gravely ill wife in order to save her life. Apparently, once he gets to the brain, things really heat up.

That’s an interesting twist to the material, but the husband-wife dynamic does sound vaguely reminiscent of Cameron’s own The Abyss.

And even though Levy is still attached, it appears as if Fantastic Voyage may be awhile before the film finally gets into production.  With a sequel to his currently-in-theaters Real Steel is still only being discussed and Frankenstein doesn’t have a finished script either, Levy only has The Three Misfortunes of Geppetto, a prequel to Pinocchio that Fox recently bought as a spec script for Levy to direct as the film that is possibly closest to happening first.

George R. R. Martin’s mutiple-writer anthology series Wild Cards has been picked by Syfy Films to be the first film from the joint venture between the SyFy Channel and Universal Pictures. An adaption of Martin’s other book series, A Game Of Thrones, has proven to be a big hit for HBO.

Wild Cards is a science-fiction twist on standard superhero tropes. Following the end of World War Two, an alien virus is released over New York City, killing 90% of those infected, and leaving 9% with some form of physical mutation. But there was a lucky 1% who survived the virus with some sort of beneficial superpower. Growing out of a long-running role-playing that Martin ran with many of the anthology’s contributors as players, the book series charted how the history of the 20th century was changed economically, politically and socially. the series debuted in 1987 and has more than 20 volumes between four different publishers.

Melinda Snodgrass, who has contributed to the book series has been tapped to write the series. SyFy Films was established last December as a boutique studio to produce films in the $5 to $25 million range.

Ever since A Game Of Thrones was a hit for HBO, I have been waiting for someone to option this series for either television or film. And this is certainly a much better project than many of the made-for-tv productions that SyFy has been associated in the past. I’m a little concerned that the planned budgetary range Syfy announced when it formed might be a little on the low side for a Wild Cards film. But then again, many of the stories aren’t big epic superhero stories, but more “street level” tales. But with Snodgrass on the writing detail, I don’t think we need fear that the film will stray from its roots.

Barton Fink may be a hodgepodge of genres – a satire on Hollywood, a meditation on the creative process, a noir film, a horror film – but it is undeniably a Coen Brothers film. And quite probably, with apologies to the legions of Big Lebowski fans out there, one of their best.

Barton Fink screens this evening as part of the Philadelphia Film Festival’s “From The Vaults” series.

Flush with the success of his first Broadway play, New Yorker Barton Fink (John Turturro) is lured to Hollywood with the promise of writing for the movies. However, his first assignment is a wrestling picture to star Wallace Beery, a far cry he feels from his desire to write about the experience of the “common man.” Living in a rather run down hotel, Barton meets traveling insurance salesman Charlie Meadows, played by John Goodman, who uses and then subverts his usual genial screen persona here. Struck with some writers block, Barton approaches his producer (Tony Shaloub) for advice, who tells him to talk to another writer. That writer turns out to be William Preston Mayhew (John Mahoney), a novelist who was lured to Hollywood years earlier but who has been reduced to alcoholism and can barely write anymore. But as Barton descends deeper into Hollywood he finds himself becoming more repulsed and detached from his muse.

A critical success that stumbled at the box office, Barton Fink remains one of the Coen Brothers more dense films with explorations of the creative process and the dangers of hubris getting in the way of creativity’s true intent. There are allusions that span from Shakespeare to Hitchcock, from Keats to Goethe to Kafka. There’s the irony of Barton Fink declaring that he wants to create “a new, living theater, of and about and for the common man,” and not realizing that motion pictures are exactly that. And of course, there’s the metatextual element that the screenplay was written by the Coens during a three week break from work on the script for Miller’s Crossing.

Students of Hollywood’s Golden Age while find much that is familiar here. In the 30s, studios looked to Broadway for critically acclaimed writers only to assign them to B pictures. Barton Fink has an earnestness that is modeled off of Clifford Odets while the alcoholic Mayhew is inspired by William Faulkner. Michael Lerner’s studio chief Jack Lipnick is definitely a comedic amalgam of the big three studio chiefs of Hollywood’s Golden Era – Harry Cohn, Louis B. Mayer, and Jack Warner. But for all its literacy, the film never forgets to engage us in its characters. We feel Barton’s almost confused detachment from the California lifestyle he finds himself immersed in.

Like an onion, Barton Fink has numerous layers and the more you peel away, the more you discover. It is a film that I return to every now and then and almost invariably walk away thinking about something new that I discovered in it.

If you think you know who all has been cast in the upcoming twenty-third installment of the James Bond franchise, director Sam Mendes has a surprise for you. It is being reported in the British tabloid press that acting legend Albert Finney will be playing a part in the upcoming, untitled film.

Supposedly, Mendes kept Finney’s participation a secret and unveiled it to cast members earlier this week when they sat down to perform the first read through of the screenplay.

According to the Daily Mail, Finney will be playing an official in the British government’s Foreign Office who oversees the British Intelligence Services. Basically he will be the boss of James Bond’s boss “M,” played by Dame Judi Dench. Interestingly, even though both Finney and Dench share much of th same acting background, they have never been in any production together before this. It should be great to see such two acting stalwarts going back and forth.

Now remember that this is the Daily Mail reporting this, so standard British tabloid disclaimers apply. But so far there has been no denial from the franchise producers Eon Productions, so I’m going to hesitantly state that this is probably on the up-and-up.

Bond 23 is set start filming sometime next week and will be released in November 2012.

With MTV’s relaunch of Mike Judge’s classic animated series Beavis And Butthead, I thought it would be nice to go back and take a look at the first short to feature the delinquent duo – Frog Baseball.

While the short did get shown on MTV’s Liquid Television animation anthology series, it originally created to be part of Spike & Mike’s Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation which screened at numerous theaters and college campuses around in the country. (Which is how I first saw the short.) Judge had already created a short series of cartoons featuring creepy cubicle worker Milton for Saturday Night Live. And while the Milton shorts would become the basis for his first live action film Office Space, it was the Frog Baseball short that would take Judge to his first big success at MTV. Not much of the formula has changed from this first short to the classic MTV series to its current revival, but why mess with comedic perfection?