Red Dawn remake to feature Kurt Russell - Go Wolverines!

Kurt Russell is always cool in my book - Escape from New York, The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China, Tombstone and many more - he is cool and knows how to kick ass.

ComingSoon.net exclusively learned today at the San Diego Comic-Con that Kurt Russell is talks to star in Red Dawn, the MGM remake scheduled for a September 24, 2010 release.

To be directed by Dan Bradley, the war film's cast includes Chris Hemsworth (Star Trek, upcoming Thor), Josh Peck and Adrianne Palicki (upcoming Legion).

The original Red Dawn was the Cold War brainchild of writer-director John Milius, who devised a World War III invasion of America by the Soviets and Cubans. The film followed the scrappy insurgency of a group of Midwestern teenagers who take on their high school mascot name -- "Wolverines!" -- as a rallying cry of resistance.

I wasn't that bothered about this remake, but now that Russell may be involved it suddenly got interesting. We just have to find out what role he will be playing. I wonder if he will be leader of the bad guys?

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Classic Scene - We're gonna draw a little bit of everybody's blood - John Carpenter's The Thing

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One Eyed Monster - Trailer

In a darkly comic homage to "Alien" and "The Thing", the cast and crew of an adult film, stranded in a blizzard, must band together against a mysterious and deadly alien, which has possessed the actor with the biggest part--Ron Jeremy (naturally). Now, with the monster on a killing spree, the race is on to trap and destroy it before there are more victims of its peculiar skills.

Starring Amber Benson ("Buffy The Vampire Slayer"), Charles Napier ("Silence of the Lambs", "Rambo") and Ron Jeremy

Check out the official site.


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The Thing prequel's Ronald Moore written script is binned. Elm Street reboot scribe is doing the rewrite

John Carpenter's The Thing is a true classic. Great story, great effects and just chock full of greatness. One of my favourite films of all time. Then there is the Battlestar Galactica reboot by Ronald D Moore. That was a brilliant reimagination of a camp 70s show. The new version was dark, deep and cool.

Put the two together and that is potential cinema gold. That was what was happening. Moore had written the script for a prequel to JCs The Thing. However, Hollywood being Hollywood this looks as if it has all changed.

Filmstalker and Bloody Disgusting have posted the news that the script was heading for a rewrite by Eric Heisserer. He is the chap who has written the script for the Nightmare on Elm Street reboot.

Now Heisserer has confirmed this on his own blog:

Yes, Matthijs and I are hard at work with the very smart team at Strike on
the prequel. We are all so much in love with Carpenter’s film, so protective of
it, we’re doing all we can to avoid stepping on its toes. I jumped at this job
because I hold the Carpenter adaptation to very high standards, and I knew it
would be a challenge to create a comparable companion piece. Sort of a “Nobody
better screw this up, especially me” mentality. Lucky for me, the people at
Strike and the director have the same standards.

This is a “from scratch” rewrite assignment for the most part, as was
my work on A Nightmare on Elm Street. I can’t say any more on that. I have the
highest respect for both Ron Moore and Wesley Strick.

I'm not sure what to make of this news. I was really excited to hear that Moore had turned in his script for the prequel (all about what happened at the Norwegian camp). I enjoyed BSG so thought he was the right man for the job. Now this "from scratch" rewrite comes out of nowhere. I can't really comment on Hesserer's work so I have no idea whether he will be good or bad. Glad that he says he wants to avoid stepping on any toes.

The fact that the studio has asked for the rewrite does worry me though. Unless the script is an absolute stinker the trend for studio's doing this is usually when the script is intelligent, cool and breaks the mold. Studio gets scared and asks for a rewrite to make it into a generic sci-fi slasher kind of deal.

That is just my opinion of course. What do you think about the rewrite news? What does this mean for the film?

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The excellent image above is from the Guinea Pig Theatre.

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Is Kurt Russell going to be in Stallone's The Expendables?

Recently the news came to pass that Forest Whitaker would not be starring in The Expendables. He was replaced by 50 Cent who was replaced by Terry Crews. I still think Carl "Action Jackson" Weathers should have been the guy.

Now some word has come from the Stallone Zone about what Kurt Russell (Snake Plissken, R J MacReady, Elvis Presley, Jack Burton, Captain Ron, Elvis Presley, Cash, Wyatt Earp and Stuntman Mike) has said about the possibility of starring in the film. Will Tango and Cash be reunited?

I know that many people on the site have asked for Kurt Russell. I asked for him too. Actually, I was taken aback when asked to put the request in a letter and send it to his agent. Subsequently, I was called back by the agent several days later after refusing to send a letter and he said Kurt Russell is not interested in ‘ensemble acting’ at this time.

So, People, I came, I saw, I failed.

Best,
Sly

That will be a no then.

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Ronald Moore talks about The Thing

SCI FI Wire have a brief interview with Ronald D Moore (Battlestar Galactica) about how work is going on his script for the prequel to John Carpenter's The Thing.

Where are things at with The Thing?

Moore: I was working on The Thing. I finished. I did my last draft a few weeks ago and turned it in. They [Universal Pictures] seem happy. They have a director [Matthijs Van Heijningen] assigned, and we'll wait to see when and if they green-light it.

What was your goal with this new version?

Moore: Well, the idea was to make a companion piece to Carpenter's. I started on the project with the feeling that Carpenter's version is just an amazing piece of work. It's a great film, and we really wanted to honor that version.

And so you've gone the prequel route?

Moore: We wanted a piece that would link up to [the Carpenter film] and not supplant it. So we didn't try to sort of completely reinvent what it was. We wanted a movie that would sort of live alongside it.

Going from that it doesn't actually tell us much more than we already knew. However, it is good to know that a script has been written and, more importantly, it isn't going to mess up the or play with the story from John Carpenter's film.

Sounds as if Moore has a lot of respect for the original (or remake of the original The Thing from Another Planet). I'm wary and excited about the whole thing as I do love John Carpenter's The Thing.

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The Random - Return of the Thing, Ghostbusters 3, Iron Man 2, Megatron, Metal Gear Solid, Brick, Little Ashes,

Check out the first part of a two-part review for the aborted Return of The Thing mini-series that Frank Darabont was working on a few years back... full details

According to Dan Aykroyd, when asked about Ghostbusters 3, he said they “hope to be in production by late fall 2009″. That;s an exact quote from the Boston Globe (via: AICN).

Iron Man 2 production designer J. Michael Riva says that the first scene he had to design for is "Tony, in the Iron Man armor, pukes in a toilet." Sounds like the 'Demon in a Bottle' storyline may be involved...- full details

"Megatron returns! Keep it quiet!" said scribe Roberto Orci this week about the involvement of the classic villain, in other words Michael Bay's quote last month that "He’s not in this movie. That’s not misinformation" was not quite true. More here

David Hayter admits that the other week he had a conversation indicating that he may be involved in the Metal Gear Solid video game adaptation. He is currently adapting the Capcom vidgame Lost Planet for Warner Bros. Pictures full details

Brick and The Brothers Bloom filmmaker Rian Johnson has donated a rare painted BRICK poster from Sundance to the AIDS Project Los Angeles and is auctioning it off on eBay full details

Little Ashes, the Robert Pattinson-led Salvador Dali gay romance drama, has been pushed back from March 27th to May 8th.

Source: Dark Horizons

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The Thing - Ron Moore to write the prequel

First Showing have this brilliant piece of news.

In 1982, John Carpenter released The Thing, the second film to be spawned from John W. Campbell Jr.'s short story "Who Goes There." Universal has officially announced today that Ronald D. Moore, the mastermind behind such groundbreaking shows as "Carnivale" and "Battlestar Galactica," will pen the script for the prequel which focuses on a Norwegian camp overrun by shape-shifting aliens. The film has commercial director Matthijs Van Heijningen attached to direct.

You can read the full text of Campbell's original short story right here.

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The Thaw - Val Kilmer and co v ice age parasite in The Thing...I mean The Thaw

Quiet Earth spotted this one.

A deadly prehistoric parasite is released when a Woolly Mammoth is discovered in a melting ice cap. Faced with a potentially global epidemic, four ecology students must destroy the parasite before it reaches the rest of civilization. One-by-one they are infected and one-by-one they turn on each other. Soon the survivors are left with only one choice - to make the ultimate sacrifice and burn everything to the ground... including themselves.

Sounds a little like the dilemma the people had in John Carpenter's The Thing - plus lots of the visuals have a similar quality (which is no bad thing as long as it is done well. The Thaw stars Val Kilmer, Steph Song, and Kyle Schmid and is set to be released sometime this year.

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The Thing will not be a remake but a prequel

We've all known about the remake of John Carpenter's The Thing that's been in development for a while. Latino Review has brought some exciting news on the remake today. George Roush talked with producer Marc Abraham recently and was able to chat with him about the remake — but wait, it's not a remake. So what is it? "This is more of a prequel than a sequel… it's going to be taking place in the same time frame." So what exactly does that mean we'll see? Abrams explained that this film will show "the events leading up to the 1982 film."

The Thing is one of my all time favourite movies and this news sounds very promising for the new film. A remake just wouldn't work so a movie before or after was definitely the way to go.

I've you've been living a secluded life and haven't ever actually seen The Thing, it's about scientists in the Antarctic that are confronted by a shape-shifting alien. In the film, we're introduced to an American research team (led by Kurt Russell) that is sent to investigate a Norwegian research team that was massacred by the alien. As far as we know, the origin of the alien and/or how it got to earth was never revealed. As George predicts, this prequel might show us how the alien got here and the story about the Norwegian scientists who were killed before we joined in. For reasons I can't exactly explain, this sounds pretty badass and I'll admit that I'm genuinely excited to see this movie come together in this way.

I know that The Thing is one of those classic thrillers that falls into the category of films that should never, ever be remade. And that's why this news is not only a relief but actually quite intriguing to hear about. As long as Abraham gets a strong writer and a director than can compete with John Carpenter (if that's even possible?), then we've got nothing to worry about. Maybe it'll start off with the arrival of the alien and jump ahead to the time when the 1982 film took place - which to me sounds like a perfect idea for a modern day prequel. This is the only update that Latino Review has on this remake, so for now, we'll be waiting to hear more. What do you make of this news? Does a prequel sound better than a remake?

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John Carpenter's The Thing using action figures

This is a work of genius.

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7 Cut Moments in Cult Film

In Hollywoodland, that missing scene can make the difference between PG13 and R. Between classic and hysteric...

Article by Martin Anderson @ Den of Geeks.

Having reviewed the excellent new Wings Of Desire special edition yesterday, I was shocked to find that Wim Wenders’ classic and esoteric tale of angels in Berlin was at one point set to end with a pie fight. All the footage – and I mean the footage from all four cameras covering the slapstick fight between Bruno Ganz, Otto Sander and Solveig Donmartin – is included in the 30 minutes of deleted scenes, and Wenders himself is offering a prize to whoever can edit it back into the film on Final Cut Pro (or whatever) most effectively.

Thank God, he recognises it was a mad end-of-shoot idea, and constitutes more the beginning of the wrap party for Wings Of Desire than the end of principal photography, but...blimey, he was close there, for a while.

It set me thinking of the other near-misses from cult film…

7: HOURS of incomprehensible shit - Fire Walks With Me (1992)
As a lover of Eraserhead, The Elephant Man and Dune, and a big respecter of Wild At Heart, Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, I have to date the release of FWwM as the point where the last of David Lynch’s very useful anti-psychotics left his system. I hear that drugs can be stored in body fat and release their effects in later years, when the fat becomes metabolised for sustenance; therefore a rigorous diet must have kept ‘Out To Lunch’ Lynch balanced enough to make the delightful The Straight Story (1999), before getting utterly lost again in Mulholland Drive (1992).

Anyway, this is a director who makes legendarily lengthy cuts of his movies (see Dune below), and FWwM/Peaks fans are still clamouring for the missing three hours of Lynch’s cinematic outing for his Twin Peaks retinue. ?yhW

Maybe it’s an Alien 3 deal, where the restoration of essential footage will suddenly make sense of the whole thing. But if it takes three hours extra for that to happen, it does suggest a certain want of narrative economy.

6: Jessica and Logan pose for ice-sculpture – Logan’s Run (1976) My motives for wanting to see this, though not the purest, are mixed up with annoyance at how close this scene came to being in the movie. After Roscoe Lee Brown’s robot guardian ‘Box’ has welcomed our heroes to his ice-cave, but before he lets slip the fact that he has flash-frozen all the other ‘runners’ who came there looking for Sanctuary, the eccentric cyborg asks the stunning couple if they will pose nude for an ice-sculpture. Being good guests, they agree…

That scene was refused as too provocative for the rating that Logan’s Run was going for, but annoyingly it is rendered in the Marvel comics adaptation! Arghhh. So close.

Since I can’t really put Logan’s Run in twice, I’ll have to also mention the other legendarily missing scene, which is the bawdier original cut of Michael York and Jenny Agutter’s slightly-hilarious slow-motion escape from Rihcard Jordan through the ‘Love Shop’, which is basically a cross between Starbucks and a 70s orgy. Michael Anderson’s racier edit also fell victim to the MGM blue pencil, and the director admits on the commentary that the bowdlerised version familiar to audiences is only a shadow of it.

5: Kurt Russell gets the all-clear – The Thing (1982)
John Carpenter makes clear in the extras on The Thing (R1 release) DVD that Universal wanted coverage of a happier ending to his nihilistic cult shocker. Being a practical man and not committed to using it, Carpenter quickly threw together a set-up at the end of shooting where Kurt Russell is in a hospital, having been recovered from the arctic pyrotechnics that now close the movie, and being given a test that proves he is not infected. Russell gives a sigh of relief and that’s it.

I don’t know if the test given is the rather dramatic ‘hot metal’ one that proved a hallmark of the film, but Carpenter’s decision not to include this scene in the otherwise very comprehensive extras on the laserdisc/DVD Thing was the right one, in my opinion. This was not something I needed to see, and it was never part of the reality of the film. Apparently the scene was cut into the movie at certain test screenings; since it proved to have no discernible effect on general audience reaction, Carpenter was allowed to keep the finale bleak and bereft of comfort.

4: James Remar as Hicks – Aliens (1986) Yup, Dexter’s dead dad shot a full two weeks on James Cameron’s sci-fi horror classic as Ripley’s squeeze before being replaced by stalwart Cameronite Michael Biehn. Reports at the time cited a family emergency, though Remar is said to have since admitted that it was due to his excessive drug-use at the time. In the same period Cameron was forced to replace an obstreperous director of photography, and was as plagued by British working practises as LV426 was by xenomorphs, legendarily having to stop work every three minutes for a round of bad sandwiches and greasy tea.

One shot of Remar’s work as Hicks remains in Aliens – as the camera pans down from the alien-encrusted walls to the marines approaching the reactor core, the Hicks walking away from shot is Remar. This was an early SFX shot using a hanging miniature that had just been trashed, and would have been prohibitively expensive to re-shoot. Luckily Remar looks away from camera as soon as it lights on him, and there’s really no telling anyway who is who with all that grungy military get-up.

3: Ripley slapped by Lambert – Alien (1979)
This minor deep-space cat-fight has actually surfaced in recent years, but was quite a curiosity until the Quadrilogy edition; the more so because, as with the Logan’s Run ‘box sculpture’ (see above), the scene was removed after the film had been turned into a graphic novel. So again, this was one that I got to see only in comic form.

Outraged that cool-as-ice Ripley wouldn’t let Dallas and her back on board with the infected Kane (a pretty fucking wise move foiled by the traitormatic Ash), Veronica Cartwright’s character lays into Ripley as soon as she arrives at the infirmary to see how Kane is getting on, but Parker (Yaphet Kotto) quickly intervenes.

Ridley Scott recounts on one of his several commentaries for various versions of Alien that he wasn’t getting the energy and conviction out of the conflict, and told Cartwright to really ‘go for it’ with the slap. Used to the feints, Weaver burst into tears when taking the full force of the blow and remonstrated with herself – so she recounts in Quadrilogy – because Ripley ‘would never have cried’.

Since I can’t mention Alien twice, I will also add that I would love to see more of John Finch’s takes as Kane, before John Hurt was called in to replace the very ill actor, who was subsequently diagnosed with diabetes. That said, the one shot of Finch in the role on the bridge of the Nostromo, which is available on the Quadrilogy edition, finds the actor clearly on the point of passing out. As this was one of his first shots for the film, there may be no more of Finch to see in the role.

2: The ‘star child’ blows up Earth’s nuclear arsenal – 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) The evolved Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) was originally to not merely go into orbit and gaze fawn-like at the camera but detonate the entire arsenal of Earth’s nuclear weapons. It would have been a ‘nuking from orbit’ that predated Aliens by nearly twenty years, and Kubrick is said to have avoided the idea ultimately because of its similarity to the conclusion of Doctor Strangelove. Since such an aggressive act would possibly mean the end of all life on Earth, this alternate ending paints 2001 in a shockingly different light…

Having spent millions of years growing a civilised race from a bunch of vegetarian monkeys, why punish the very war-like behaviour that you instilled in them yourself with your big black monoliths at the dawn of time? All the space-borne remnants of the human race were clearly dependent on Earth and a long way from any real colonisation, so in effect it would have been kaput for mankind. Perhaps the Star Child was intending to jettison Earth and its people like a second-stage rocket, and continue a new and better race via parthenogenesis?

Apparently special effects for the nuclear wipe-out were actually done – though not finished – by Douglas Trumbull. Again, as with Kurt’s miraculous escape in The Thing (see above), I’m not sure I ever want to really see it…

1: The ‘Little maker’ – Dune (1984) This was for a long time a mystery to all but those who watched the ‘Alan Smithee’ version on network TV in the 1980s, which – in a typical ‘network-cut’ deal with the devil – traded off censorious snips for extended and non-controversial footage that never made it into the cinematic version. One of those cut scenes was an elaborate ritual where the Fremen show Paul how spice is extracted from the baby worms. It’s pretty disgusting, actually, and is found or found absent in various of the five known versions of Dune, but the Smithee abomination – a bloat-out at 177 minutes – definitely has it, and that has been released on DVD after many years of curiosity by fans.

In a side-note, an early script treatment of the adaptation, by Rudolph Wurlitzer (a writer on Sam Peckinpah´s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid) would have had the fugitive Paul Atreides and his Bene Gesserit mum, the Lady Jessica, in an incestuous tryst after the death of husband/father Duke Leto. Ridley Scott was behind the idea during his involvement on the project before David Lynch was invited to the helm, and the oedipal strand was then firmly nixed. Ten years later, Lynch would probably have done it…

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