Screenhead has two winners for the psychological thriller Addicted to Her Love. They are Breville and April V. Congratulations!

The story focuses on Jonah Brand, a new student at an exclusive private school, whose social clumsiness is especially troubling given his infatuation with Sara, a popular girl who travels in an elite social circle.  

Sara takes a shine to Jonah despite his geeky attitude, but her pals – sometime boyfriend Troy, spoiled Erin and emotionally abusive Lucas – make it clear they have no use for him.  That all changes, when they learn Jonah has a part-time job at a pharmacy and realize he could get them a variety of under-the-counter medications … luring him down a dark path of lies, deceit and murder.

Screenhead has five copies of Addicted to Her Love to give away. To enter, post your name and we will pick the winners October 1, 2010.
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The folks out at Lions Gate shipped me out a copy of Burning Bright to review, and frankly, I was starting to get worried about Lions Gate for a while there.  Their entries in the direct to video horror market had been falling like a brick for months, but then they reminded me that, sometimes, quality beats quantity. And with Burning Bright, I got a great look at that.

Burning Bright follows college-age Kelly, who’s looking at a scholarship to go to college. But she’s got a problem–her mother recently committed suicide on a series of pills. And now, she’s got a twelve year old autistic little brother to keep an eye on, because she’s also got an irresponsible flake of a stepfather.  Think a malignant Matthew McConaughey, and you’ve got a good idea of Kelly’s stepdad. Kelly’s stepdad also just spent the last of Kelly’s college money to buy a tiger for his safari park, which he’s planning to put in the backyard. This would be bad enough, except for the fact that Hurricane Isobel is bearing down on Kelly’s house. Hand it to Kelly’s stepdad–he’s just boarded the place up nicely against hurricanes. But the bad news is, somehow, the tiger found its way inside. And it’s in a mood for meat.

Burning Bright is simple, and yet, effective–it’s taking place almost entirely inside one house, and yet it’s putting out a whole lot of suspense and thrills. It’s a combination of claustrophobic and adrenaline-boosting, and it’s downright welcome.

Here’s the real kicker, though–there will even be some extra twists in here. Sure, in retrospect they’ll be a little obvious, but they’ll be welcome.  It’ll go from tiger-fighting to being a bit more complex, and the added note of complexity is welcome.

It’ll get a little outlandish, and a little nonsensical toward the end, but it’ll still do a decent job and will look great in the process.

The Screenhead Ten Scale hands Burning Bright, the great little dose of suspense / horror, an eight out of ten. It’s not perfect, and I’ll never say it is. But it will do a nice job overall, and the score should reflect that.

For those of you looking forward to Unstoppable, and it’s hard not to be looking forward to a movie involving a massive train going barreling along without any brakes.

And as such, if you’ll refer to the bottom of this post, we have placed a pair of new posters for the upcoming Chris Pine / Denzel Washington disaster epic.

They’re looking pretty sweet–you’ll remember my cohort Kenna’s earlier appraisal that a movie about a train disaster in the making really should have, you know, some trains involved with the poster.  Well, apparently people take Kenna’s words here extremely seriously, because these two are nothing but trains. Sure, one includes the floating disembodied heads of Chris Pine and Denzel Washington, but the other is all train, all the time.

You’ll be able to catch this one in theaters in just a matter of weeks, this November.

The folks out at Cinepop managed to find and post the first ever hi-res image from Scream 4 (though Entertainment Weekly managed to make it on set first, which sort of colors the achievement a bit) and it’s raising a couple questions

What is Gale Weathers doing out in a barn?  Why does it look like she’s holding a Ghostface mask?  And is she going to get killed early on or more toward the end of the movie? From the look of that shot, it’s likely going to be sooner than we think.

However, we’ll all have a good long wait before we find out just how long she has to live, as this doesn’t come out until Tax Day next year–April 15th.

Nothing gets my hackles up faster, at least in the horror movie circuit, than someone saying “based on a true story”.  Those five words engender my interest and my skepticism faster than just about anything. So when I saw the poster for Fair Game, I was plenty surprised.

Fair Game follows the story of Valerie Plame, the CIA agent outed back in the day by a fair number of people, none of whom received jail time or anything like that over it. Anyway, Plame worked in the CIA’s Counter-Proliferation Division, and she was leading an investigation on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Her husband was sent to Niger on a related fact-finding mission, and the facts he found weren’t good. Thus began a long and winding odyssey of betrayal and government chicanery.

Sounds like State of Play on steroids, and a great comedown for the Halloween horror season. You can catch this one in theaters November 5th.

Most of us who recognize the name Leighton Meester remember her from her earlier movies (The Haunting of Sorority Row or Drive Thru, among others) or from her role as Blair Waldorf on Gossip Girl. But she’ll be making her way into the suspense-thriller pretty soon with her appearance in The Roommate.

We’ve got the trailer below, and it follows one of the great old fears of the first-time college student: the random roommate system. We all know there’s a chance some random psycho will slip through the system and manage to land in the bed right next to (or on top of or beneath depending on how your college’s beds worked–mine was a bunk bed), and that’s exactly what happens to Sara when she meets Rebecca.  Oh, sure, things go great at first, with lots of clothes exchanges and club hopping, but the last thing you want to hear if you meet your roommate’s mother is: “And she’s taking her medication?”

That’s probably the sign to pack up and move out. Sara does not. Bloodshed ensues.  Dig the trailer. The Roommate, meanwhile, is set to hit theaters February 4th, 2011.

Daniel Radcliffe, the star of Harry Potter movies, is in front of the camera for a suspense-thriller. He has taken on the lead role in The Woman in Black, based on the novel of the same name by Susan Hill. James Watkins, who directed Eden Lake, is behind the camera.  The photo shows that filming has started, and Radcliffe does not looking like Harry. 

The story was written for the screen by Jane Goldman and it follows Arthur Kipps (Radcliffe) who’s ordered to travel to a remote corner of the UK and sort out a recently deceased client’s papers. He works alone in an old and isolated house, and he begins to uncover its tragic secrets. He grows unease when he finds out that the local village is held hostage by the ghost of a scorned woman set on vengeance.

As I have mentioned before, I am looking forward to seeing Radcliffe broaden his craft due to the fact that he is also attached to All Quite on the Western Front.

What better way to help kick off the greatest month for horror in the whole year than a sweet sixty second dose of the great claustrophobic thriller, Buried?

Featuring Ryan Reynolds as a military contractor who’s been taken hostage, Buried puts said contractor several feet underground in a small wooden box–almost a coffin more than anything else–with a lighter, a knife, a cell phone, and a mission: raise one million dollars before his air runs out.

I’ve loved Ryan Reynolds’ previous work, and I really think he can pull off most of a movie all by himself. We’ll get to find out one way or another, though, when Buried finally lands in theaters October 8th. But until then, though, you’ll have to content yourself with a little of that sweet clip action, and we’ve got one of the latest directly below.

I am very excited to announce that two new interactive games are bringing the bone-chilling terror of Let Me In.  The haunting and provocative thriller based on the best-selling Swedish novel Låt den Rätte Komma In (Let The Right One In), to life for iPhone and Facebook users before the movie comes to the big screen on October 1, 2010. 

The games use actual footage from the film to immerse players in the dark world of Abby, a 12-year old vampire responsible for a series of grisly murders in a wintry New Mexico town.  

I love this idea as pranks at Facebook. For as little as one friend a day, Facebook users can feed a little girl and help her live for another hundred years with the “Feed a Friend” game for Facebook. But when they sign into Facebook Connect and select one of their friends, their seemingly good deed quickly turns deadly and they are shown a series of newspaper stories featuring their friend’s face and chronicling their demise.

In the “Let Me In” mobile game for iPhone/iPod, players are in a race against the clock as they solve a collection of word scrambler puzzles.  If time elapses before they correctly identify all of the words, they’re treated to a first-hand view of what it’s like to become one of Abby’s victims.  Footage from the film lends to a very realistic- and very creepy- atmosphere in both games. Perfect for Halloween fun!

The “Let Me In” mobile game is a free application available in the iTunes App Store HERE and is compatible with both the iPhone and iPod Touch.  The “Feed a Friend” Facebook game is available at HERE.

All influential artworks end up having a lot to answer for. Their influence tends to inspire other greatness, but more often than not we see far too many desperate fans trying to recreate the original and only doing so on a surface level. The HBO’s series The Wire was a brilliantly authentic show about crime in Baltimore, and no doubt it will last in the minds of this generation. Sadly, we’re starting to see the poor imitators of the show, and Ben Affleck’s latest movie The Town is a perfect (and deflating) example.

Adapted from a Chuck Hogan novel, The Town is a thriller set in the crime ridden area of Charlestown in north Boston. Doug MacRay is a bank robber who falls for Claire, one of the staff-members of the last bank Doug’s team robbed. Doug tries to maintain this relationship without his crew finding out, especially the hot-headed Jem, while also hoping to do one last job and flee from the city he grew up in.

You can’t get any more generic than that, and Affleck’s film fails to add anything to the usual clichés of crime cinema: Thieves with good hearts trying to get out of the game; Unreliable side-kicks; Seedy and dangerous crime bosses working in inappropriately effeminate places (although The Town does add to this by having it bizarrely guarded by a single heavy). And so on. The film will no doubt receive plenty of positive reviews due to the perceived grittiness of its setting and direction. But this supposed influence from The Wire only emerges in Affleck’s uninspiring TV-style direction and the occasional cutaway to pedestrians on grimy streets. The true quality of The Wire was its ability to focus on character more than plot and watch Baltimore’s inhabitants develop over the series. The characters of The Town are never given a true context. Take Claire, for example (played by Rebecca Hall). She is a “toonie”, a yuppie who works in a bank and helps out in the projects. Her attraction to Doug is never given enough time to excuse. Perhaps it’s some sort of unconscious Stockholm Syndrome (she isn’t aware of Doug’s identity at first), but the film jumps from the horror of her realization to her sympathy in an instant. What could have been a complex portrayal of attraction between classes is tossed aside in order to facilitate some action and another predictable twist in a preposterous plot. Affleck did the exact same in his previous film, Gone Baby Gone. READ ON »