creature feature

If you've stopped peeing your pants with excitement over Roger Corman's upcoming Sharktopus -- set to premiere on Syfy later this year, then take a gander at some of the other nighttime creature features Syfy has in store. Their Original Movies lineup stars the likes of Hill Harper (CSI NY), Eric Roberts (The Dark Knight), Sean Bean (Lord of the Rings), Lauren Holly (NCIS), Colin Ferguson (Eureka), Isabella Rossellini (Blue Velvet), Jewel Staite (Stargate Atlantis), Alan Cumming (Tin Man), Felicia Day (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Ryan Carnes (Desperate Housewives), Lance Henriksen (Aliens) and Barry Williams (The Brady Bunch).

In other Syfy news, two gigundo features (4 hours long) on tap are Riverworld, which aired on the original Sci-Fi Channel in 2003 as a pilot episode based on the saga by Philip José Farmer -- but nothing further came to light. In Riverworld, an American war zone reporter and his fiancé are killed by a suicide bomber but awaken separated in a mysterious world where they seem to have been reborn along the banks of a seemingly endless river. A samurai warrior and an American novelist (Sam "Mark Twain" Clemens) join forces with Matt to locate his lost love. The show premieres Sunday, April 18, from 7-11PM (ET/PT).

The Phantom and his alter ego, Chris Walker, have been re-imagined for Syfy, based on the original comic and set in the present day. This hero relies on his wits, physical strength and skill with weapons instead of superhuman powers. Isabella Rossellini guest stars as the villainous Lithia, the head of an experimental mind control program. The four hour show premieres in June.

Hit the jump for all the creature feature details and visit Syfy's website for more info.

Hello and welcome to Terror Tapes! This is the Horror Squad weekly feature fully endorsed by Vestron Video and the Cannon Group...in my head at least. Each week I pillage the film archives that are Austin's local videostores and bring you dusty old relics of a lost era. Turns out the horror genre has one of the biggest back-log of titles that were tragically abandoned on the doorstep of the video orphanage. Well, actually if you've been following this feature you'll know that most of these films are better off sheltered from the cruel, discriminating world of DVD. Nevertheless, like Daddy Warbucks I will continue to adopt these titles, at least for a weekend, in an ongoing effort to find a few that can thaw my icy, Blu-ray-loving heart. I have an abundance of optimism about today's title: Blood Beach. Let's see if we hit it off and foster a bond through the magic of montage!

James Turner over at Forbes.com has an interesting piece up examining the relationship between countries and their favorite brand of movie monsters. Godzilla, he posits, was born directly of Japan's post World War II paranoia that, in dropping nuclear bombs on their nation, scientists had irresponsibly forged a new kind of monster out of man's meddling with technologies beyond their control. Though the giant, irradiated mutant is still iconic today, Godzilla's relevancy has taken a bit of a dive in recent years, but for decades the monster reigned as Japan's reminder that man's carelessness with awe-inspiring technology has consequences that are literally too large to ignore.

However, America never developed the allegorical infatuation with Godzilla that Japan did. Half-way around the world, Godzilla was little more than an entertaining man in a suit stomping around meticulously designed sets and wrestling with other men in rubber suits. But that's not to say that the US of A lacks its own personification of science gone wrong. Ours, Turner counters, is merely a fear of endless hordes of friends, families and neighbors transformed into mindless cannibals.

Ever since Romero gifted the world with Night of the Living Dead, America has had a fascination with scientific fumbles that bring about the undead apocalypse. Crashing satellites, bungled lab work, mutated viruses, escaped experiments -- these are all our Godzilla. That said, though, Turner does point out a crucial distinction between America's brain-eaters and Japan's city-destroyer:

Don't get me wrong, I thought that the first trailer for the Joe Johnston directed remake of The Wolfman was an excellent debut that helped dispel some of the fears that built up during the troubled production and subsequent release date shuffling, but this new trailer...this one has me scrambling to somehow invent a time machine so I can travel to 02/10/2010 just to lay eyes on the full film. This new trailer, nestled lower down in this post, has a decidedly more modern feel to it, despite it's Victorian setting, thanks entirely to the same instrumental rock variant to Marilyn Manson's "If I was Your Vampire" that was used in the Max Payne trailer.

Yet those Max Payne rock cues do little to betray the fact that The Wolfman looks like an absolutely amazing creature feature. Sure, purists can complain, perhaps rightly so, that there is an over use of CGI and that Rick Baker should have been more involved in creating practical, on-set transformation effects. But I think there is little denying that this looks like a total, maniacal blast. We now have more of a glimpse at Benecio del Toro's ravaged soul, as well as a few key glimpses into the lives of those around him.

Perhaps my favorite shot of the trailer isn't even of the Wolfman, rather of Hugo Weaving with a fistful of non-silver bullets; a sure sign of the skin-ripping mayhem Universal is going to be offering up in February.

No, Jeepers Creepers writer/director/creator Victor Salva has not officially titled the third entry to his franchise about a highway-side flesh-loving creature Jeepers Threepers, but he has told Dread Central that's what those who are trying to pull the film together lovingly call it. The actual title of the film is currently set as Jeepers Creepers 3: Cathedral and Salva tells Dread that financing is now beginning to materialize, with pre-production ideally not far off.

As for what Cathedral would entail, Salva had this to share, "Breck will of course don his wings once again as our favorite flying man-eater, though we have decided, after much fan feedback, to give him his truck back for the new film. Gina Phillips will be back in Jeepers Threepers (as we like to call it) playing Trisha Jenner, 23 years later, a successful business woman who has her own teenage son, Darry, named after her long lost brother."

He also made clear that the monstrous Breck would likely be terrorizing a new stretch of the highway in their fictitious state, which should swap out the previous southern farmland settings for a story largely set in the desert. Personally, I hope Salva does get the funds to do a part three. The first two films may not be great, but they're certainly out of the vein of what studios tend to invest their time in.

What say you? Any interest in a Jeepers Creepers 3? Or would you be more enticed to see Salva get the opportunity to develop one of the other four or five hypothetical projects he mentions to Dread? I'm game for part 3, but I'm hoping his "ghost story about Alcatraz" finds footing sooner rather than later.

Written by Jodie Kearns

Solipsistic slacker Cooper (Christopher Marquette) is on the verge of being fired when a strange sound phenomenon causes him to pass out. He wakes up to find himself wrapped in webbing, and after freeing himself discovers that everyone is similarly cocooned. He manages to unwrap a few people who band together to make their way to a safe haven, while trying to figure out how to fight off the full scale infestation of insectoid monsters.

Infestation, written and directed by Kyle Rankin, is a lighthearted, B-movie style action-packed creature feature with endearing characters and dialogue that sparkles. The plot is fairly straightforward and uncomplicated but is bolstered by the ragtag bunch of interesting and quirky people who've been thrown together.

The Wolf Man has had a spot or two of trouble finding its way back to the big screen. First One Hour Photo director Mark Romanek, who got the remake off the ground in the first place, dropped off the project citing creative differences. Joe Johnston stepped in to fill his shoes and it seemed the wait wouldn't be long before we'd all be reveling in Benicio Del Toro's blood-curdling howls at the moon. Then woe-of-woes struck: the dreaded release date shuffle.

Universal Studios had originally carved out November of '08 to unleash The Wolf Man. Then late winter/early spring of '09. Now we're stuck wait until February 10, 2010. Universal insisted their trepidation to actually put the creature feature in theaters was not out of a lack of confidence, but a stalwart patience for finalized special effects work. And now that the first trailer for Joe Johnston's stab at the classic monster is up on Yahoo I only have one reaction and it's right up there in the title.

The Wolf Man looks stunning. You could never even gleam from the trailer (embedded below) that the production has had such a bumpy ride to fruition. The script, aided by Se7en screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, seems peppered with chewy bits of quotable goodness. Emily Blunt is a knockout in a corset, Anthony Hopkins feels right at home in a castle and the pain behind Benicio del Toro's eyes looks positively ravaged.

February 10th suddenly feels decades away.