The final poster for Haywire has just been released by Relativity Media for the upcoming action-thriller, directed by Oscar winner Steven Soderbergh.
The cast of Haywire is very impressive. Channing Tatum, Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, Antonio Banderas, Bill Paxton, Michael Douglas, Michael Angarano and mixed martial arts superstar Gina Carano star in the film.

From looking at the new trailer, the movie is a dynamic action-thriller with Carano performing her own high-adrenaline stunts. The trailer doesn’t really tell us much about the movie. But what is clear is that Carano kicks some serious butts. Those butts belong to men. Go Girl!

Carano plays Mallory Kane, a highly trained operative who works for a government security contractor in the dirtiest, most dangerous corners of the world. After successfully freeing a Chinese journalist held hostage, she is double crossed and left for dead by someone close to her in her own agency. Now she is the target of skilled assassins who know her every move, Mallory must find the truth in order to stay alive.

Using her black-ops military training, she devises an ingenious—and dangerous—trap. But when things go haywire, Mallory realizes she’ll be killed in the blink of an eye unless she finds a way to turn the tables on her ruthless adversary.

The movie opens January 20, 2011.

The folks out at Lions Gate sent out another three choice titles for us to review, and as such, we’re going to catch up with a set of three from them: Life Is Beautiful, 40 Days and 40 Nights, and The Conversation.

Life Is Beautiful sets out as anything but, with a Jewish waiter in Italy named Guido, whose imaginative nature lets him pursue and win the heart of a local school teacher. The two marry and have a son, but that doesn’t last long. See, they got married somewhere around 1937. History buffs will know what happens next. But Guido’s imagination is about to make something of a difference, even while father and son alike are in the middle of a concentration camp.

See, the thing about Life Is Beautiful is that it’s actually super duper depressing. Some will find a stark beauty here, much in the same way that a field of snow does, but the beauty is cold and sorrowful at best. And considering that most regular people watch movies to be entertained, this one’s not going to be for most people. The question here is whether or not you’ll have sufficient tolerance for the sheer depressing nature of a waiter and his son living in the same concentration camp to see the up side of it, such as it is.

40 Days and 40 Nights, our next title, follows a young man who’s just had a major breakup with his former girlfriend just ahead of the pre-Easter time known as Lent. In the midst of Lent, some people give things up for the interval, and in our young man’s case, he’s given up sex. All sex. But when he meets someone who seems pretty special in the interval, his forty days and nights are about to seem a whole lot longer than he expected, maybe a bit too long.

This is your typical romantic comedy right here, with a few good laughs tossed into an unlikely storyline for variety. Basically, if you’re not into romantic comedies, there’s not going to really be anything here that’s going to change your mind. But the up shot here is that, should you decide to carry on with this one, you’ll likely be happy here as it sticks to most of the conventions and won’t do anything terribly tragic to throw you off.

Lastly, we’ve got The Conversation, a Francis Ford Coppola thriller that sends a security professional out on what should be a basic wiretapping job. But his surveillance quickly picks up something it shouldn’t have, and the implications of his find are going to be downright profound. So profound, in fact, that his acquisition of said unexpected surveillance is going to put him right in the middle of a conspiracy much bigger than any he’d imagined previously.

This one is some pretty good stuff, actually. Slower in some spots than others, but with a certain menace that’s downright hard to shake. It’s pretty good stuff, especially if you watched the last two and want something to shake the boredom and depression out.

So there you have it, another sweet slate of pieces thanks to the folks at Lions Gate!

It’s a dark sign when a movie’s heroine is unsympathetic, and that’s just what we’re going to get with Vlog. But the dark sign will prove overwhelmed by some truly impressive twists and turns. Plus, Vlog is so new you won’t even be able to find it in video stores until next Tuesday, so brace yourselves, because this is going to be interesting. The folks out at Anchor Bay sent a copy over for us ahead of release, and the end result is going to be interesting to say the least.

Vlog follows Brooke Marks, video blogger–or vlogger, if you prefer–who’s got a pretty nasty stalker problem. See, Brooke’s made a lot of enemies with her vlog–she sort of got into this “queen of mean” vibe and never let it go. And as a result, someone significantly worse that Brooke decided he was going to go on a rampage, targeting five people who showed up on her various vlogs. But there’s more going on here than you might initially think.

See, the weird part is, I mean that. This movie has a run time of around seventy minutes. It’s going to be quick and very, very dirty. In, out, blam. And that means that not a single minute can be wasted. Thankfully, not a single minute is. It’s a little rough, so for those of you who don’t like the gore, you may want to stay away. There will be a lot of splatter going on here, but most of it is quite relevant to the plot. Plot-relevant splatter is about the same as plot-relevant nudity; not just some titillation, but a genuine component of story telling.

The last ten minutes will have about three or four different twists to them that should really catch you by surprise. And what’s really great about this movie is that you go in thinking its some kind of “message movie” like Megan Is Missing was. Great, somebody with a soapbox wants to tell the kids at home not to put up personal information online. But then what you’ve got turns out to be significantly more than that, and the surprise alone makes Vlog well worth the watching.

Granted, repeat viewings may not work out too well here, given that once you know the twist there’s not much more of a surprise to it, but still, that first watch should be pretty awesome in its own right.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Vlog a full ten out of ten for putting on a short sharp shocker of a production and doing a whole lot with very little.

We’ve got another one the folks out at Anchor Bay sent over, and it’s so new you’re not going to find it in stores until you get up tomorrow morning. It’s called A Horrible Way To Die, and it’s going to put a lot out there. But can it live up to its vicious little title? We’re going to have a look and see if this is one for you to check out, or pass up.

A Horrible Way To Die follows a murderer who’s just broken out of prison with plans to resume the killing spree that landed him in prison in the first place. His first stop, though, is at his former girlfriend’s house. A recovering alcoholic trying to get her life back in order, complete with a new town and a new boyfriend, the last thing she needs is having the past dredged up, especially when that particular dose of past is a homicidal lunatic of an ex-boyfriend. And it only gets worse when said homicidal lunatic launches off on a new, little killing spree in a bid to find her.

Kind of the worst nightmare for every woman on Earth sort of scenario, isn’t it, folks?

The thing about A Horrible Way To Die is that there really won’t be a whole lot of people doing just that: dying. Oh, there will be a couple deaths, of course, and they won’t be pretty. But A Horrible Way To Die will be jam-packed with foreboding. This thing makes chilling seem like an understatement, an understatement so gross that it’s almost an insult. It’s a bit slow, though you might do better to call it deliberate, in its pacing, but even that just adds to the general sense of foreboding that’s shot through this thing like no tomorrow.

Oh, and by the end of the whole thing, you’re going to get treated to this rather big surprise, that it turns out they’ll be alluding to throughout the whole movie. That may be the best part: when you can look back on the whole thing and see this much larger plot, that was carefully hidden until the very last moments of the movie when it all comes together, well, that’s a reward. And not many movies reward the viewer the way this one does.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives this one a full ten out of ten and says it’s well worth a buy. A Horrible Way To Die is not just a good watch, it’s a good watch a couple times just to make sure you caught everything.

We have a winner for this awesome, wild giveaway package for Shark Night 3D.

The winner is Sam Armstrong, who says, “future winner?”  I guess so.  Relativity’s upcoming film Shark Night 3D, which is directed by David R. Ellis (Snakes on a Plane), and stars Sara Paxton (Superhero Movie, Last House on the Left), Dustin Milligan (“90210,” Slither), Chris Carmack (“The O.C.”), Joel David Moore (Avatar) and Katharine McPhee (The House Bunny).

In celebration of the release of Shark Night 3D, this is what Sam Armstrong won:

• $25.00 iTunes Gift Card
• Shark Fin Ice Tray
• Shark Night 3D Keychain
• Shark Night 3D Pint Glass
• Shark Night 3D T-Shirt
• Shark Night 3D Water Gun

Did anyone see the movie this weekend? What did you think?

READ ON »

The crew out at Anchor Bay sent out a little something new, folks–so new you won’t even find it in stores until tomorrow–and it’s called The Entitled, an exciting little piece that promises interesting things. Can the product live up to the promise? The answer is surprisingly emphatic.

The Entitled follows a bicycle courier who’s seen better days, and can’t seem to land a new job to help himself get ahead. So he hatches a plan: to kidnap the young adult children of three wealthy and powerful men, and then hold them hostage until a ransom of one million dollars per child is paid up. But as it turns out, the idea of rich people forking over seven figure sums to get their kids back isn’t as easy as the bicycle courier thought, as the fathers have a few secrets of their own. And when the night turns violent–and bloody--the kids may get out alive, but how will the courier fare?

If you were wondering why more movies dong focus on the recession, it’s because of this. It turns out that such titles are spectacularly depressing, and there’s often precious little in the way of encouraging resolution. You want to hate the rich kids who spend all their time partying while the poor bastard bicycle messenger is selling his graduation watch to buy his mom’s medicine, but then you wonder why. Yeah, they’re rich and didn’t do anything more to earn it than get born into the right family, but still–is that a reason to kidnap, threaten, and almost kill them? This in turn has you looking back at the kidnapper, but considering he’s doing the kidnapping for money for his desperately poor family, you really can’t fault him either. So what direction do you put your support? Behind the clearly wronged rich kids who just got kidnapped because their dads had money? Or the poor kid who did the kidnapping because his mom can’t buy medicine? There’s no clear winner or loser here, at least not in the beginning. It actually gets worse the farther in you go, and the waters get significantly muddier with every passing minute. In fact, by the end, the whole affair is going to be an incredible mess jammed through the gills with twists. The last fifteen minutes will be absolutely laden with them. If you like a good crime drama with a few thriller elements, then you’ll be abundantly happy with this one.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, meanwhile, gives The Entitled a full ten out of ten, and wholeheartedly recommends it. This is some fantastically screwed-up crime drama that may start out a bit sludgy in the motivation department, but at the end will leave you breathless and cheering due to the sheer intricacy of the plot.

Anyone else remember the Turbulence series? They made three of them, though the latter part of the series went direct to video. And when the crew out at Anchor Bay sent out a copy of Turbulent Skies for me to review, I thought they were getting into the remake game. What I found, though, was something of a different color entirely.

Turbulent Skies joins Devain Industries, who have just created a plane that’s impervious to pilot error. But when the Devain family decides to pack said plane with a pack of VIPs for a celebratory maiden flight, they discover that just because a computer’s doing the piloting, it’s not really that impervious to pilot error after all. Now, with a pack of VIPs on board and the Pentagon planning to shoot first, it’s up to a regular old human pilot to execute a daring mid-air transfer in a bid to save them all.

See what I mean? Almost nothing to do with the original Turbulence series.

It has the feel of a SyFy original movie, though with the key caveat that this is actually pretty good, something that most SyFy original movies can’t quite claim. They do a nice job of building suspense, and the whole thing is actually pretty believable as far as science fiction goes. Science fiction often suffers from believability issues, and this is something that’s downright plausible compared to most anything we see.

Admittedly, there are problems here. There’s a bit too much of a propensity for dramatics here–sometimes, it reminds me of old Simpsons episodes, where someone, usually a general or the like, would glare into the camera and grate out “Get me Jack Killington,” or something like that. Turbulent Skies is way too much like that for its own good. Plus, a good chunk of this is going to look remarkably familiar--just watch for the plane to get all Skynet after a while and you’ll see exactly what I mean.

Still though, leave aside the scenery chewing and the familiarity, and what you’ve got is a good, if clearly low-budget, romp that has a decent idea of what it’s doing, and does so reasonably well. This isn’t one for someone looking for a deep and complex title, but for a lazy Saturday afternoon or a popcorn-muncher with friends, well, Turbulent Skies will fill the bill nicely.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Turbulent Skies a seven out of ten. Although it’s got plenty of missteps and other errors in it, it does do a reasonably good job of what it set out to do. It’s not the best thing you’ll see, but it’s certainly a worthwhile effort from Anchor Bay.

We’ve seen a lot of different monster movies over the last few weeks, some a lot less plausible than others. But this one gets a little extra boost from an old friend, the “based on true events” concept. It’s called The Reef, and the crew out at Image Entertainment sent out a copy for us to review.

The Reef follows a group of friends who’ve been tasked to make a yacht delivery to a wealthy client somewhere near the Great Barrier Reef. After they tear open a hefty hole in the bottom, they’re left with a stark and downright horrifying choice: do they stay with the boat, which is slowly sinking, and hope for rescue? Or do they swim for land…land which is fully twelve miles from their current position. Oh, one further chunk of bad news: the stretch of ocean between them and land is full of a lot of life. Including, of course, sharks. And plenty of them.

For those thinking that this is little more than a recasting of Open Water, well, you’re not at all alone. At least, that’s what I thought when I went in on this one. Turns out it’s not so much Open Water as it is Open Water Moving In A Relatively Northern Direction.

The Reef is something of a strange animal, as it spends plenty of time being sinister. Vague hints of things lurking off in the distance is what we spend much our time looking at here. And this is something of a problem; as we discover in a lot of Japanese horror titles , when you spend a lot of time building tension without doing much to release it, the end result is that the tension you do build boils off into a sort of empty cloud, an empty cloud of dissatisfaction.

Thankfully, the time spent on unresolved tension is kept relatively low, so you won’t spend a whole lot of time being disappointed by The Reef.

However, you can’t get around the fact that the ending on this one is something of a downer. The Reef’s last ten minutes or so will leave you so patently depressed that you’ll probably regret watching it. That really isn’t the movie’s fault, though; rather, it’s a victim of its own true-story nature. The actual story is every bit as depressing as the movie.

So if you don’t mind a depressing, occasionally disappointing, monster movie, then The Reef is going to serve you reasonably well.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, meanwhile, gives The Reef a seven out of ten, because it’s reasonably good, if a bit depressing, and just a bit disappointing. Monster movie fans, here’s the real deal for you.

Chances are you’re already familiar with Dog The Bounty Hunter, whether from our previous coverage of it or you watch it on television. And the folks out at A&E sent over a little chunk of Dog The Bounty Hunter history for us to review in the form of Dog The Bounty Hunter: This Family Means Business.

Dog The Bounty Hunter: This Family Means Business takes us back to Hawaii and beyond where the Chapman clan is once again engaged in bounty hunting. This time, we go after a variety of cases, including one that makes history. This particular DVD contains the two hundredth episode of Dog The Bounty Hunter, as well as a collection of others including a special retrospective.

This particular set of Dog The Bounty Hunter episodes is unusually preachy, I found; they spent a whole lot of time preaching to their targets about the evils of drug use. One particularly awkward moment featured the ladies of the Chapman clan going after a mother on what I’m guessing was crystal meth (they called it ice, as I recall, which I believe is another name for crystal meth), and then, once they got her, they said they were there for a “mom’s intervention”, being as they were all apparently mothers. I found that spectacularly disingenuous; we all know full well they’re not there on some kind of charity case. They’re there because they were paid to be there, not because they wanted to help. To suggest otherwise is ludicrous, to actually say otherwise is either preposterous ignorance or an outright lie.

Still, it’s interesting enough, all things considered. There’s a note of predictability here; you have a good idea what the Chapman crew will be doing at any given time, but every time the circumstances will be different. It’s a different target most every time, but the end result will generally be the same. If you’re already a fan of the show, then you’ll enjoy the interplay and the various idiosyncrasies between cases. Each one is a little bit different, if very similar at the roots, but still most of the time there will be differences to appreciate.

If you already like it, you’ll enjoy your time here. If you don’t like the show, then this will waste a little over three hours of your time.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives the preachy, vaguely familiar joy that is Dog The Bounty Hunter: This Family Means Business a seven out of ten. It’s great if you like this kind of thing, but don’t look for it to win many converts.

We got a real doozy from the folks out at Warner Brothers, who sent over a copy of Unknown for us to review. I was glad to get this one in as it came out around the same time as something else–just what I don’t remember–so I definitely wanted the opportunity to catch this one.

Unknown follows Dr. Martin Harris, played here by Liam Neeson, who’s been doing a surprisingly able job as an action hero pretty much since his Fallout 3 voice work.  Anyway, Doc Harris got in a car accident out in Berlin, but it’s having a surprising effect. Not on Harris so much as everyone around him…who for some reason seems to have no idea who he is. But worse, he’s now being trailed by assassins, which means he’s got to not only run for his life, but at the same time figure out just what exactly happened to him in that car accident, what caused it, and how he can get his life back from it.

This is a Dark Castle picture, interestingly enough, which has given me some horror flicks that I’m personally very fond of, stuff like Ghost Ship, Orphan, and the House on Haunted Hill remake. So it’s certainly a surprise to see them engaging in more of a suspense / thriller sort of concept. I certainly wondered how they would fare in executing what was, for them, a somewhat divergent course of movie action.

And indeed, in the early going, they do a nice job of building tension. Something is very clearly going on here and it’s a definite mystery. They keep showing things in bits and pieces, which clearly fits with the overall theme of poor Martin trying to piece together just what exactly is going on. We’re just as much in the dark as he is, and that’s disturbing, but also quite clever.

And by the end of it, we’re going to find out something impressively sinister about the whole thing, and of course I’m not going to spoiler it for you. But believe me, it’s going to be quite worth the watching. A surprise it may well have been, but a welcome surprise, make no mistake about that.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives this welcome surprise a full ten out of ten for putting up an incredible show, and for showing that there’s more to Dark Castle than just horror flicks. I’m really rather impressed with this, and seeing Liam Neeson’s career noticeably expand is a welcome sight.