The
Dead Walk (Again)
After years of false starts, broken promises and missed opportunities, the
dead are back from the grave: George A Romero is gearing up to start shooting
the fourth film in his zombie, "trilogy" of Night, Dawn, and Day of the Dead.
The latest film, entitled Land of the Dead, is set years after the zombie
apocalypse and follows a small band of survivors holed up inside a walled
outpost. With Universal set to distribute and production scheduled to start
shooting in Toronto on 11 October, it seems you can't keep a good zombie
filmmaker down.
Fade Out/Fade
In
Zombie lover Milla Jovovich (Resident Evil) is leaving the ghouls behind and
stepping into the shoes of Brit actress Kate Beckinsale for Fade Out, a
Hitchcockian psycho thriller. She'll be starring alongside Billy Bob Thornton
as the wife of a man who's undergoing a mental breakdown. Convinced that his
spouse is cheating on him, Billy Bob begins to write a screenplay about their
relationship but then loses all sense of where real life ends and fiction
begins. Jovovich nabbed the role after Beckinsale dropped out due to
scheduling conflicts. It all sounds very intriguing - assuming you haven't
already seen the Johnny Depp/Maria Bello nut job writer tale, Secret Window.
No
More War
Anti-war director David O Russell (Three Kings) has finally solved the
problem of how to get people to see his 35-minute documentary about the war in
Iraq. As previously reported in High Noon, Russell's film was supposed to be
an extra on the Three Kings Special Edition DVD, but was ditched after Warner
Bros. realised quite what an incendiary piece of filmmaking it was. Now the
leftfield doc about the effect of the war on those on the front line -
entitled Soldiers' Pay - is going to be released in the US on a double bill
with Robert Greenwald's investigative film Uncovered: The War In Iraq. A joint
DVD release for both movies is also being planned for the near future.
Uncovered: The War In Iraq opens (sadly on its own) in the UK on 29th October.
No More Meyer
Veteran cult filmmaker Russ Meyer has died at his Hollywood home at the age of
82. The controversial adult director, whose mammary-fixated movies Faster,
Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls and Beneath The Valley
Of The Ultra Vixens brought him both applause and condemnation, had been
suffering from dementia and pneumonia. Famed for unleashing a bevy of
bra-busting buxom actresses on the world, Meyer's erotic but far from graphic
films have gone down in cult cinema history as the movies that helped
kick-start the modern pornography industry.-Jamie Rusell.