All right, folks, we got a real winner for you today!  In fact, you can call it an early Christmas present, because it’s in really limited release, so not very many people have access to this bad boy.

Today we’re talking about The Road, and it’s one of those movies that should probably have been better, but was still good.

In The Road, we deal with a Man and his Boy–seriously, these are the characters names, The Man and The Boy–as they make their way south toward the coast following a disaster of such impossible scale that it’s rendered all vegetation dead.  Not a leaf or a blade of grass appears to have survived, and it’s in this horror that our duo is moving toward their admittedly rather ephemeral goal of “the coast”.

On their way, they’ll run afoul of cannibals and thieves as they scavenge the incredibly depressingly rendered rubble for food and occasionally have unpleasant memories about their past.

It’s hard to get behind a movie like The Road because of its incredible implausibility.  Seriously, no human weapon can cause this kind of devastation on this grandiose a scale.  There’s not one green thing left alive anywhere in this movie and frankly I wonder how they haven’t all SUFFOCATED from lack of oxygen.  No trees, no plants, no crops.  They make it very clear they’re surviving on random crap or as cannibals throughout the movie SEVERAL times, so how are they BREATHING?

And worse yet, it’s not one of those survival kind of post-apocalypse movies, this is one of those where we wander around and get all maudlin about the past and the “crapsack world” (thank you once again TV Tropes) that we now inhabit.  Seriously, it’s like they don’t even really care about surviving–they just figure if they get to this magical fairyland called “the coast” all will be WELL.  Never mind the fact that they literally stumble onto several months’ supply of food at one point and abandon it because, one night, they HEARD A DOG OUTSIDE.

Nothing good can happen to anyone in this movie because the movie will not permit it to happen, and that’s why I call it the first ever post-apocalyptic chick flick.  Scott Adams, author of Dilbert, once described men as “pleasure seekers and discomfort avoiders” while women were the exact opposite.  Thus, according to him, sad movies were perfect for women because it allowed them to feel bad.

That’s what The Road will do. It will make you feel BAD.  For almost two hours, it will make you feel bad.  It doesn’t offer the over the top action thrills of a Mad Max installment, nor the frightening plausibility of The Trigger Effect.

What it does is it just makes you suffer.  And if you’re into that sort of thing you’re going to love this.  Thus, the Screenhead Ten Scale, which recognizes how well put together this is but also realizes that as dystopian fare this still fails miserably, gives it a six out of ten.

See this with someone you love, assuming they’re a closet masochist.

Not too long ago, my grandmother’s best friend sent me a copy of the new Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol.  Turned out she’d gotten an extra copy, so I got the spare one.  Anyway, I’m reading this, and every time I see “Robert Langdon” crop up–and he crops up a LOT–I can’t help but think of Tom Hanks.

And apparently, neither can Tom Hanks.

They haven’t even started casting for the probably inevitable conversion of Dan Brown’s newest The Lost Symbol, but already Tom Hanks has expressed interest in coming back to reprise the Langdon role.

In fact, the only real question mark right now is Ron Howard returning to handle directing duties.  But considering that Angels and Demons cleared three hundred fifty million worldwide, I think Columbia will be more than willing to sign just about any reasonable offer that comes out of Howard’s camp to get him on board.

No word about release dates–no word about START dates–so keep it here for all the latest.

Now, here’s a really interesting piece of news.  I haven’t actually gotten a copy of The Asylum’s Paranormal Entity (yet, hint hint, fellas!), but of course it’s the newest Asylumized mockbuster of Paranormal Activity.

As most of us know, because chances are, we’ve seen it--Paranormal Activity was shot with a DV camera in the same way that most of our home videos are shot.  So it plays right into The Asylum’s hands by allowing–indeed, ENCOURAGING–Paranormal Entity to be shot in a similar fashion.  I don’t know what kind of cameras they use on their stuff but I know the video quality is  seldom as good as the majors.  I’ve seen enough to know that’s the case.

So between this, and the fact that Paramount’s going to start throwing money at small-timers, does this bode well for the low budget filmmaking movement,   otherwise known, of course, as the INDIE film movement?

If budgets are dropping, and revenues are dropping thanks to things like Redbox kiosks, maybe it’s just what little studios like The Asylum were waiting for.

And the trailer for Paranormal Entity, meanwhile, is below.

Once again, Warner Brothers has brought us another choice blu-ray title, and has sent me a copy to boot.

It’s The Negotiator, featuring Kevin Spacey and Samuel L. Jackson in a thrilling mindbender as the two play police hostage negotiators.  Sam Jack, meanwhile, is playing the one who’s being accused of murder and embezzlement.  He in turn takes hostages in order to force an investigation to prove his innocence.  Kevin Spacey plays the one who comes in to try and negotiate the hostages away from Sam Jack.

There is a constant back and forth here, an undercurrent of ebb and flow as high-quality actors pound against each other, jockeying for position, in a constant and highly entertaining push toward the end.  It’s like a horse race, a magnificent cat and mouse game going on here as steadily, bits and piece of the plot are exposed in a thoroughly satisfying fashion.

Even better, there will be plenty of twists along the way, and all sorts of surprises as well as a few laughs in the early parts of the whole thing, so you should be satisfied on most every level.  If you have any fondness for thrillers or crime drama at all, then The Negotiator should do a fantastic job of making you very happy.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives this sublimely satisfying thriller an eight out of ten for being extraordinarily solid, and for presenting a nicely written plot in a great light with choice actors and excellent dialogue.

Now here’s an exciting bit of news for you, folks–one of the biggest games of the holiday season, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, was definitely one of the things that kept a LOT of people occupied lately.  Whether playing it, or just trying to find it on shelves, it was a real ride for all.

So it’s likely going to be not too much of a surprise, in retrospect, to find out that the director of that incredible game is getting a shot at the movies.

That’s right–Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 director Keith Arem is getting his shot at directing Frost Road.  Here’s what I found about it:

The project is an action-thriller about a young man who awakens from a car wreck to discover he’s one of the few survivors of a devastating outbreak which has hit a small East Coast town. He’s immune and so he sets about trying to save people and keep the contagion from spreading and wiping out humanity on a global scale.

Okay, so it’s another one of those outbreak kind of movies.  But that’s okay–if it turns out as good as the stuff in Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 did, we should be doing just fine.

The movie Exam is billed as a thriller, yet the trailer seems to be about tormenting people to self–destruction.  I am not sure I want to see a movie about a group of people who are placed in a room and get bent on tormenting each other. 

The movie trailer doesn’t explain much such as why these people want to kill each other after being in the same room for 80 minutes. Perhaps, that is why the movie hasn’t nailed down an US distributer. 

The saving grace appears to be the talent on screen. These actors are turning out some awesome performance, even in the trailer I can see that, and the director can take the credit.  Still, it’s not a story I’d find very uplifting or fun to watch.  What are your thoughts?

Just in case you were not a huge cult horror fan back in the nineties like I was, you may not immediately recognize one of Full Moon’s big titles, Demonic Toys.

But the adventures of Grizzly, Mr. Static, Jack Attack and Baby Oopsie Daisy weren’t going to go away as long as Charles Band could make a couple bucks on selling the toy versions of the toy characters, because as we’ve all known since he came out in the audio commentary of one of his DVDs and declared that Full Moon was “in the toy business”, it’s been one nonstop merchandising spree after another.

Interestingly, we have a trailer for this, and even a synopsis.  Check THIS out:

Dr. Lorca from Hideous! (Michael Citrini) is back and is continuing to collect strange odditites, along with the help of Caitlin (Alli Kinzel) and her boyfriend David (Lane Compton). Along the way, they collect the mysterious pieces of the last Demonic Toys and they continue their search at a mysterious castle in Italy, where there have been rumors of a mysterious, ancient puppet alive and walking around, which is under the control of a mysterious demon, who takes on the human form of a little woman named Lilith (Selene Luna). When not looking, the puppet brings the Demonic Toys back to life, and now… blood, terror and death counts will rise again.

To which I say, sure, why not?  Though I am a bit upset that the trailer was really, really short on the robot, while heavily featuring that stupid baby and that equally stupid jack in the box.

This one comes out on video this January.

I’ve sampled horror flicks from all around the world, and I’ve found that most of them have a pretty regional flavor to them.  The Japanese and Koreans, for example, love ghost flicks.  The Europeans favor the theme of man’s inhumanity to man.  And most horror I’ve come across from other lands is at least fairly good.  Joining the ranks of the best, however, is a little title from Poland, The 206.

It’s about a guy who wakes up in a stairwell, semi-conscious, unable to figure out what’s going on.  As he sets out to reconstruct his life, he finds out there more going on here than he realizes.

The best part about this one?  There’s NO DIALOGUE.  The story is being told entirely through the actor and through the background music, both of which are quite thoroughly awesome.  The ending, however, is somewhat unclear and can be interpreted several ways, something I never like.

However, the rest of the film is enough to wrangle a rare eight out of ten from the Screenhead Ten Scale, who was sufficiently on edge through most of it to appreciate its sheer Hitchcockian tendencies.

So Anchor Bay sent us out another in their long line of interesting titles the other day, and to that end, today we’re going to be talking The Forgotten.

Featuring Simon Baker from The Mentalist as a guy with a past revolving around some kind of bizarre Mexican death cult, he thinks he’s managed to move on…until his daughter goes missing.  And that’s when our boy finds himself neck deep in his past, going forth to attempt to find his missing daughter.

Admittedly, I found most of this movie pretty strange, and where it wasn’t strange it was just slow.  I got the feeling that I was missing large parts of it because I was completely lost by the subtext.  See, most of us really don’t know about or understand or even CARE about stuff like La Santa Muerte if it even actually exists.  But there are plenty of more subtle elements at work here–some deeper mystery aspects that make for a somewhat interesting title.

Sadly, though, there’s plenty of confusion here also, and that definitely doesn’t help things.  In fact, by the time it really gets interesting, it’s almost over. The ending is actually a pretty good twist, but it’s not really worth the trip.

The Screenhead Ten Scale looks at this slow, plodding wreck of a suspense movie, shakes its head in sorrow and hands it a five out of ten.  It’s nothing particularly bad yet it’s too dull and listless to be much of anything good, either.

Okay, on the off chance that you’re looking forward to the re-emergence of the Scream series in the form of Scream 4, then you’re not going to want to read what you’re about to read.

It’s a HUGE spoiler alert.  Huge.

Apparently, there’s at least some chance–and this comes from writer Kevin Williamson–that Sydney may not live past the end credits.  Quoth Williamson:

“The thing about ‘Scream 4′ is that there are a lot of twists and turns, so I can’t promise anything,” he told PopWrap about Sidney’s role in the fourth film now that Neve will return. “There are a lot of moving pieces, so we’ll see — but if you’re a ‘Scream’ fan, I think you’re really going to like it.”

Now, the most disconcerting part about this is that it’s so very feasible.  See, Neve Campbell was essentially the weak link in this particular chain, and for a while it was unsure that she’d even come back at all.  It’s entirely possible that, at this point, Neve agreed to come back…one more time.

And that means they’d need to get rid of her.  What better way than to write her out?  It’ll be a good long while before we find out either way, but you know we’ll fill you in when we know!