Well folks, we just slogged our way through the godawful lump of horror that was the remake, and thanks to the crew out at Anchor Bay, we’re going to do it all over again with the original, a copy of which they sent out.

The plots are pretty similar, as once again, Jennifer Hills goes off into the wilds of the middle of nowhere to work on her novel (this time, only her first novel, as opposed to the remake where she’d done some before), and of course, she’ll be assaulted by a horde of horny drunken rednecks. But she’s not going to be taking said assault lightly, and will be coming back for revenge against her tormentors, in the most vicious fashions imaginable…in the seventies.

It’s a bad sign when your lead-off box quote is Roger Ebert’s legendary excoriation in which he calls it “sick, reprehensible and contemptible”.

And indeed, we’re in for another massive romp of rape and horror–though admittedly, this one is a bit on the tamer side than its progeny. You’ll see more than a few differences here, but most of these are cosmetic in nature. It’s really much the same movie as the remake: boring startup, horrendous and overlong period of rape / assault, wrapped up with horrible, horrible revenge.

But at the same time, this version is a whole lot more surrealist–the castration, for example. In the remake, it’s pretty standard horror fare, but in the original, it’s actually scarier as it’s so patently lunatic. And frankly, remember how I said that Sarah Butler was an incredibly chilling figure as Jennifer Hills? Camille Keaton is light years beyond Sarah Butler.

And in this case, the ending is a lot more abrupt, almost oddly so, just sort of cropping up once the business is done. The remake stretched out the ending quite a bit.

Trying to choose between the remake and the original is much like having your choice of being hit in the left knee with a sledgehammer or the right knee.  Neither choice is good–the end result is certainly the same–and whatever route you go you’ll be left disappointed. That having been said, the original is slightly better, if for no other reason than it gets a little scarier thanks to Camille Keaton.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives the original I Spit On Your Grave a four out of ten for doing its job just a little bit better than its progeny, but certainly not anything worth watching in its own right.

This is the story of what may well be one of the most insane housing markets on Earth, and a study in just how far people will go for that perfect place to call home. It’s Dream Home, and the folks out at IFC sent out a copy ahead of its release.

Dream Home follows Cheng Lai-Sheung, a Hong Kong native who longs to get a piece of property of her own out in Hong Kong’s beautiful–and deeply expensive–Victoria Harbor. A harbor view apartment in Hong Kong goes for a lot of cash, and so Cheng saves her money and works several jobs to save the dough. And after a whole lot of scrimping, saving, and patience, she’s finally got the deposit together…until the owners suddenly hike the price. Her dream now destroyed through no fault of her own, this sends Cheng over the edge into a frenzy of murder, with her weapon of choice being home construction items.

Sadly, this is nowhere near as much fun as the plot description suggests. Yes, Cheng’s killings will be downright brutal and nasty, to paraphrase Hobbes, but they will also be short. The first half of Dream Home is mostly dull, and only occasionally punctuated by Cheng’s vicious home improvement murders.

Clearly, the Hong Kong film market is out of practice in horror; last I knew, horror movies were illegal in China to begin with, though Hong Kong, thanks to its former territorial status, has some special rules. The situation is complex to say the least and I am so not a lawyer. Anyway, the first half of Dream Home is dull, as I said, but the second half gets cranked up pretty nicely–maybe even a little too nicely. The second half of Dream Home is jammed full of physical impossibility killing.  And when I say “physical impossibility killing”, I mean things that seem like they shouldn’t be possible, like a smallish Chinese woman managing to ram a screwdriver into the back of a person’s skull and going out through the eye socket.  Or said smallish Chinese woman managing to use a human skull to shatter a toilet bowl in one strike.

A bit outlandish, sometimes boring, Dream Home isn’t half bad in terms of slasher fare, and if they could have done something a bit more interesting with the first half, they really would have had a winner here. The last fifteen minutes alone are a masterful series of twists.

But as is so often the case, the Screenhead Ten Scale looks at half a great movie and half a dull one and gives the whole thing a six out of ten for doing a pretty decent overall job.

I know this is last minute, but it’s worth a shot to promote on Screenhead; particularly, since James Cameron is a key player in the new 3-D thrill Sanctum. There will be an exclusive live streaming event featuring Academy Award-winning Director James Cameron.

James Cameron is the executive producer of a new 3-D thriller called Sanctum and will be doing a live underwater Q&A session at the Long Beach Aquarium Thursday, February 3, 2011 at 9:00AM (PST).

This live event and its archive will be available exclusively from the Virgin Mobile LIVE Facebook page. Viewers can submit questions to James Cameron via Twitter using the hashtag #virginmobilelive.

The Q&A session offers you an opportunity to send in questions for Mr. Cameron, which will be pre-selected. For the questions that are ultimately chosen and responded to they will send autographed prizing and tickets to see Sanctum.

I am really excited about this unique experience for moviegoers. I hope your questions get picked and you win some awesome prizes.

Sanctum opens February 4, 2011.

The folks out at Anchor Bay sent over a copy of the remake version of I Spit On Your Grave, and this is one that I’ve been alternately dreading and anticipating for some time now.

I Spit On Your Grave follows a writer, Jennifer Hills, who’s gone into the wilds of nowhere in a bid to finish writing her newest novel. But what she finds instead will be some amorous locals, who decide that they’re going to get better acquainted with Jennifer, whether she likes it or not. After a night of horror, the bunch leaves her, thinking they’ve done sufficient damage to remove her as a witness, but she’s not nearly as dead as they think she is…or that they wish she was. Or, for that matter, as they will be. Jennifer goes out to find her attackers, gets them alone, and proceeds to do nightmarish things to them that even they wouldn’t have thought to do to anyone.

Leave it to a writer to know how to get creative vengeance….

The original, you understand, was the object of mixed feelings in the horror community. This kind of thing was torture porn before torture porn was torture porn. So to remake what was regarded by many, even in the horror community, as one of the most reprehensible piles of garbage ever made? Well, that struck a lot of people the wrong way.

And indeed, I Spit On Your Grave is about as reprehensible as it ever was. The “bad” guys all drunken country white boys–as though absolutely no one else tries to do this sort of thing–the woman the poor innocent victim who’s justified in doing horrible, horrible things to other people by virtue of the fact that someone else started it.

Remember when we did Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left? Remember how upset we all were about the rape scene? Picture that for about forty-odd minutes.

Thankfully, the second half–or as I’m growing to think of it, the non-rapey half–is a significant improvement over the first half. The second half, you see, is a downright wildfire of scares and thoroughly potent horror movie imagery. If the first half had been more like the second, I’d be downright astonished. But the first half is a stain so large on the whole thing that it just brings the overall quality crashing through the floor.

Oh, and special note: Sarah Butler is downright freaky. She does this amazing job of delivering nonchalant sadism to her tormentors, so much so that it’s hard to tell which half of the movie is harder to watch: the part where it’s half a dozen guys taking on one woman…or one woman taking on half a dozen guys.

So be duly warned, I Spit On Your Grave is an utter disaster of filmmaking, hard to watch, and possibly one of the most intense and gratuitously violent horrorshows I’ve seen in quite some time. I don’t recommend it, frankly, as anything more than a test of endurance.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, meanwhile, expects better out of Anchor Bay than this, and gives the I Spit On Your Grave remake a three out of ten for putting out some creepy imagery, but having to drag the audience through hell and back to get to them.

Alister Grierson’s upcoming action-thriller Sanctum, based on explorer and producer Andrew Wight’s own diving expedition to uncharted cave systems beneath Australia’s Nullarbor Plain.

With that said, Screenhead is hosting a Sanctum Giveaway that includes a poster!

Sanctum opens February 4, 2011 in RealD 3D and IMAX 3D. The movie is rated-R and is being billed as an action-thriller. The cast includes Richard Roxburgh, Rhys Wakefield, Ioan Gruffudd, Alice Parkinson and Dan Wyllie. James Cameron is one of the producers.

The 3D action-thriller follows a team of underwater cave divers on a treacherous expedition to the largest, most beautiful and least accessible cave system on Earth. When a tropical storm forces them deep into the caverns, they must fight raging water, deadly terrain and creeping panic as they search for an unknown escape route to the sea.

Master diver Frank McGuire (Richard Roxburgh) has explored the South Pacific’s Esa-ala Caves for months. But when his exit is cut off in a flash flood, Frank’s team-including 17-year-old son Josh (Rhys Wakefield) and financier Carl Hurley (Ioan Gruffudd)-are forced to radically alter plans. With dwindling supplies, the crew must navigate an underwater labyrinth to make it out. Soon, they are confronted with the unavoidable question: Can they survive, or will they be trapped forever?

Shot on location off the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia, Sanctum employs 3-D photography techniques Cameron developed to lens Avatar. Designed to operate in extreme environments, the technology used to shoot the action-thriller will bring audiences on a breathless journey across plunging cliffs and into the furthest reaches of our subterranean world.

To enter the giveaway post your name and we will pick the winner February 14, 2011.

Sanctum Giveaway Prizing

One (1) SANCTUM poster

One (1) Sanctum Baseball Cap

One (1) Sanctum T-Shirt

One (1) Sanctum Mini Penlight

Focus Features released the brand new poster for their upcoming film Hanna. The poster looks awesome with Hanna’s silver-blue eyes dominating the poster as she aims her arrow.

The movie is directed by award-winner Joe Wright (Atonement, Pride & Prejudice), who creates a boldly original suspense thriller, starring Academy Award nominee Saoirse Ronan (The Lovely Bones, Atonement) in the title role.

Raised by her father, an ex-CIA man, in the wilds of Finland, Hanna’s upbringing and training have been one and the same, all geared to making her the perfect assassin. The turning point in her adolescence is a sharp one when she sent into the world by her father on a mission.

Hanna journeys stealthily across Europe while eluding agents dispatched after her by a ruthless intelligence operative with secrets of her own. As she nears her ultimate target, Hanna faces startling revelations about her existence and unexpected questions about her humanity.

Hanna also stars Eric Bana, Cate Blanchett, Tom Hollander, Olivia Williams and Jason Flemyng.

The movie opens in theaters April 8, 2011.

That is right. You can count them: 3 TV Spots for Warner Bros. Pictures new thriller Unknown. The movie stars Liam Neeson, January Jones, Diane Kruger, Bruno Ganz, Frank Langella, and Aidan Quinn, a great cast of talented actors.

The story follows Dr. Martin Harris (Neeson) who awakens after a car accident in Berlin to discover that his wife (Jones) suddenly doesn’t recognize him and another man (Quinn) has assumed his identity. Ignored by disbelieving authorities and hunted by mysterious assassins, he finds himself alone, tired, and on the run.

Aided by an unlikely ally (Kruger), Martin plunges headlong into a deadly mystery that will force him to question his sanity, his identity, and just how far he’s willing to go to uncover the truth.

The movie opens in theaters February 18, 2011.

I am delighted to share these exciting new photos from Taylor Lautner’s upcoming action thriller Abduction on behalf of Lionsgate!

The film is guaranteed to keep you on the edge of your seat, and also stars The Blind Side’s Lily Collins, Avatar’s Sigourney Weaver, and Spiderman 2′s Alfred Molina. The movie hits theaters on September 23, 2011!

What is really fantastic about these photos is that one of the three pictures is a behind the scenes shot of the crew running with Lautner to create the “feel” of living on the edge of our seat when we see the movie. You can see how hard the crew is working.

Lionsgate is calling the movie a thriller directed by John Singleton and written by Shawn Christensen and Jeffrey Nachmanoff.  The thriller follows Lautner’s character.  He discovers the parents who raised him aren’t his real folks, a revelation that triggers events and leaves him running for his life.

Director Quentin Dupieux brings us Rubber starring Stephen Spinella, Roxane Mesquida, Jack Plotnick and Wings Hauser.

The story is about Robert, an inanimate tire that has been abandoned in the desert, that suddenly and inexplicably comes to life. As Robert roams the bleak landscape, he discovers that he possesses terrifying telepathic powers that give him the ability to destroy anything he wishes without having to move.

At first content to prey on small desert creatures and various discarded objects, his attention soon turns to humans, especially a beautiful and mysterious woman who crosses his path.

Leaving a swath of destruction across the desert landscape, Robert becomes a chaotic force to be reckoned with, and truly a movie villain for the ages.

This trailer has some funny visuals, and I will never look at my tires the same, again. Enjoy!

Appropriately, the movie opens in theaters April 1, 2011 as a limited release.

The folks out at Lions Gate sent over a copy of Virus-X, and I’d been looking forward to getting my hands on a copy of this since I’d first heard about it, because it looked like a good zombie movie, and there’s nothing like a good zombie movie. But would this one be anything like a good zombie movie? Only one way to find out, and so that’s what I did, though you won’t be able to until February 1st.

Virus-X follows a group of scientists who find themselves sealed in their lab following an accident involving a really hopped up form of Bird Flu (H1N1). In fact, it’s so hopped up, they only have about three days to live. And so they turn their attention to finding a cure, or at least, escape, but what they’ll actually find is going to be a whole lot deeper than anyone expected.

Sadly, this won’t be any kind of zombie movie at all, which is a crying shame because it sure looked like one from everything I’d heard. The end result, though, is more suspense than horror, with a whole lot of medical drama built in. And the worst part of it is that it’s actually pretty boring.

Weird, how watching a bunch of people get their innards liquified from a strain of flu that’s best described as “hellish” can really best be described itself as “a total raging snoozefest”, but Virus-X oddly qualifies. This thing is a sludgy disaster. It moves along at a good clip, but it’s still just so dull to watch. The story is weak at best, and by the time you get to the end of it, it’s just so meaningless. Sure, there’s a nice twist at the end that gives a horrible woman her ultimate comeuppance, but even this minor satisfaction is so little against the gore-soaked ordeal you’ll have to endure to get there.

The end result is a thoroughly dissatisfying presentation of what should have been a shocking suspense thriller, that turned into a weak, predictable mound of goo instead. There are high points here, make no mistake there, but these high points are largely lost against the substantial amount of problems this thing’s dealing with.

The Screenhead Ten Scale hands this disappointment of a medical thriller known as Virus-X a four out of ten–it had a pretty nice ending, but the long road to reach said ending, and the satisfaction it would provide, just plain old wasn’t worth it.