William Goldman is rewriting the remake of 1986 Heat, a Burt Reynolds movie. The remake is for Jason Statham to star and Brian de Palma is directing. What a combination!

What is very cool is that Goldman also wrote the screenplay for the original – now he’s changed it for a more modern tone.

The story centers on a recovering gambling addict. His job is providing protection in the rough edges of the gambling world, and he refuses gunplay. Instead, he uses hand and edged weapon combat. His friend is brutally beaten by a mobster, and he helps the victim seek out revenge.

If you are not familiar with Goldman, he wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as well as other classics. He even wrote about screenwriting in Hollywood called “Nobody Knows Nothing“.

Zak Penn, who wrote The Incredible Hulk, has been hired to rewrite the untitled sequel to 2010’s box office hit The Karate Kid.

Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris were hired to write the sequel once Karate Kid remake brought in $55.6 million domestically. With China as the backdrop the movie brought in $359 million worldwide.

The story remains hush-hush with original stars Jaden Smith and Jackie Chan expected to return, though no deals are currently in place.

According to Variety, Penn should know his way around fight scenes, having written the superhero movies like X-Men: The Last Stand and The Incredible Hulk. He also co-created the Syfy series “Alphas” and wrote, directed and produced the improvisational poker comedy “The Grand.”

Of late, the writer has been busy with writing the Dirty Dozen remake, as well as an original version of the classic Argonauts tale.

Martin Scorsese’s hackery knows no bounds. Whoring himself out to any genre isn’t necessarily a bad thing (it was the norm in the 1940′s; just look at Howard Hawks’s filmography), but when he ends up making shallow dreck like The Aviator and Shutter Island, you can’t help but feel he’s be better off sticking to writing film essays and documenting rock gods like Bob Dylan. And now it seems that Scorsese, fresh from his 3D kiddie movie Hugo (out in November), is setting his sights on remaking The Gambler.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Scorsese is planning to team up with writer William Monahan and cast Leo DiCaprio as the lead. The good news is that these three collaborated on the director’s best film in 15 years, The Departed (which wasn’t astounding but certain leagues ahead of everything else he has come out with recently).

The original 1974 film involves a New York English professor (who ironically teaches the Dostoyevsky novella which the movie is an adaptation of) who has a crippling addiction to gambling. James Caan played the lead role which earned him a Golden Globe nomination. Hopefully, Scorsese and Monahan can bring something new and fresh to a story that’s over 140 years old, and not just rehash something familiar or superficially homaging a classier era.

Vampire movies have always been kind of a strange batch. We’ve had some truly great ones–Salem’s Lot (either one, really, including the sequel), John Carpenter’s Vampires, 30 Days of Night–and of course, a legion of truly lesser pieces. And sometimes, we’ve had some vampire movies that have just been indescribable. One of those titles comes to us via the IFC, who sent out a copy of Vampires.

Basically, three years before the film was released, a company was contracted to shoot a documentary about the vampire community in Belgium. Sounds bizarre on the surface, but they took the deal and dispatched a film crew. Their sound man was promptly devoured. Subsequent attempts actually went worse, if you can believe that, until they sent out just one last crew under what were called “perfectly safe conditions”. Considering that the film is actually dedicated to the film crew–as well as one crewman’s arm–the end result is going to be only marginally better than previous ventures.

Vampires is chilling for many reasons, but the biggest one is that these vampires believe that they’re performing a valuable service to the community. They genuinely believe they’re helping society by kidnapping people and draining them of their blood. Frankly, it’s enough to make you think that  vampire hunters are our greatest natural resource, if these egomaniacal amoral psychotics are actually out there.

And yet, at the same time, Vampires is a real sight to see. This is a documentary devoted to an entirely fictional community, and yet, at every length, it’s believable. This is what you’d expect a movie about vampires to look like, and that’s strange enough in its own right. I mean, seriously–when’s the last time you saw a viable documentary about vampires? And even better, a fictionalized documentary? That’s just what the IFC will put on, and that makes Vampires a really rare and unique find that’s as chilling as it is compelling. It’s even got some funny bits in it that can’t be denied.

It’s hard to believe that a believable documentary about vampires can actually exist, especially given that vampires themselves don’t actually exist. You get an incredible look at their culture, their ceremony, their rules and guidelines, everything. They even do a great follow-up piece keeping up with a vampire clan that was forced to move.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Vampires a full ten out of ten by virtue of its sheer uniqueness. There is very little, if anything, out there that’s like this. This is a beautiful little movie, and vampire fans are going to love this.

Is anything ever leaked these days, or are they actually released by studios in order to generate excitement and buzz. That was apparently the idea behind the leak of American Gangster one week before its wide release in the US. And joining the conspiracy is this leak of David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The fact that it has been around for over a day and hasn’t been taken off the Google Inc-owned Youtube speaks volumes.

Nevertheless, it gives us a glimpse into one of the most anticipated films of the year. How people could have enjoyed the rather muddled and ultimately over-rated original movie is beyond me. That said, Fincher seems to be taking the right track with changes to the script (such as not making the trilogy’s hero, Lisbeth, a sidekick in the first film’s central plot). The trailer is a slick, music video-like clip complete with dominant song (Nine Inch Nails and Karen O covering Led Zepp’s Immigrant Song). However, it’s persistant cutting to the song’s beat makes it repetitive and fails to draw you into the story, and the music choice is a little tongue-in-cheek for the tone the story is trying to achieve.

Some claim Fincher is on a high at the moment, with the critically acclaimed The Social Network and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, but if you can buy the glib and superficiality of those two movies, perhaps this will be to your taste. Then again, perhaps this may be a return to Fincher’s best work, such as Zodiac and Seven.

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.

Ah Hollywood, what is wrong? Is there truly a lack of talent out there and the millions of scripts that execs, assistants, and agents have to plough through every day are all rubbish? Or is it that the fear of risk is so great that the majority of new film are remakes or reboots? Recently there has been a spate of semi-successful foreign movies getting remade into English language films, such as Let me In and the upcoming The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. And now Timecrimes is getting an America facelift.

According to Slash Film the remake, which has been long in development and wasn’t expected to see the light of day, is now moving forward with writer Steve Zaillian working on it. The original Timecrimes was a 2007 thriller in which a man finds himself accidentally travelling back in time after an encounter with a strange man. But once our hero does leap back he realises that events have been complicated and he’s faced with some tough choices in order to maintain reality. It was a darkly entertaining Spanish film that kept you guessing.

A few years back David Cronenberg was attached to direct it, but the project never came together (due to it being a UA project, who were part of MGM who went bankrupt). Now Zaillian is rewriting previous drafts. Zaillian has been responsible for scripts such as Schindler’s List and Clear and Present Danger. Unfortunately he’s also written the ho-hum The Interpreter and American Gangster, so who knows what he’ll do with a time-travelling mystery.

The folks out at Anchor Bay sent over a copy of And Soon The Darkness, and frankly, I’m terribly happy about this because I’ve been hearing a lot about it for a long time–it’s good to finally see it land. And while there looked like there might be some problems here, in the end, it turned out surprising in more than a few points.

And Soon The Darkness takes us on a little trip with Stephanie and Ellie. They’re going down to Argentina for fun, sun, and a little of that girl’s night out kind of fun. But they get into an argument one night down in Argentina, and Stephanie goes out for a while to calm down. She returns to find Ellie missing. Terrified, she goes to the police, and discovers that there’s been a lot of this sort of thing going around lately. Stephanie sets out to find her friend, but what she discovers waiting for her is going to be a lot more terrifying than she expects.

Okay, okay…so it’s riffing way too hard on Turistas for anyone’s taste here, and for added fun, it’s throwing in a little dose of the old white slavery racket. But, give them credit–they’re playing this a whole lot like a mystery movie with a thriller edge more than a “kill everything that moves” sort of thing. It does a nice job of keeping the attention focused; took me almost two thirds of the movie to even wonder how long I’d been watching it.

Even better, there will be several healthy twists to this thing, which improves the value of the presentation and makes it even more compelling than it already was. Not only do you get the “what’s going on  now?” sense but also the “man, what are they gonna do next?” sense. That’s a huge help and it really ups the watchability here.

The ending will be a bit abrupt, but still pretty good, and about as happy as can be under the circumstances, so you’ll feel satisfied, and that’s a plus.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives the mostly well done and properly put together And Soon the Darkness from the folks out at Anchor Bay an eight out of ten–it’s not perfect, but it’s pretty close. Guys out there, take note: good date movie possibility right here, I’d say. This is what Lifetime might have done if they did, you know, good movies.

I complain a lot that The Asylum seemingly cannot be bothered to produce anything original, while they’re in the process of remaking most every big movie on the face of the earth with an occasional nod to monster-driven craptaculars geared toward endless reruns on the SyFy Channel. They sent me a copy of MILF recently to review, and as I have discovered, sometimes the old adage bears true: be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.

MILF follows a horde of oversexed and underattractive young men who have come to realize that women their own age aren’t interested in oversexed and underattractive young men. And therefore, they set their sights in a different and largely underapproached direction, the fabled MILF, or Mom I’d Like to…well…you can figure out the rest. But as our crew of misfits will discover, the older ladies have an agenda all their own, and it may be too much for them to handle.

Awkward is part and parcel of the entire package, both between our crew of nerdly cohorts and the tragic environment in which they find themselves. In fact, large quantities of MILF will be painful to watch.

When the movie is describing exactly how I feel about it in dialogue form (specifically a line early on that reads “I…I just want that out of my head…wow…no.”), I know it’s not going well.  I wished that the movie were over no less than five times in the first fifteen minutes. That’s an average of about once every three minutes.

The first half of MILF is like some kind of perplexing endurance test in which you watch graphically disastrous attempts of young men out to improve their love lives and fail, in the most horrendous of fashions, at every given opportunity. The second half doesn’t do much better, though improvements are evident, and is certainly not worth the tour of misery and disaster that it took to get there, especially when you watch one woman give one of our nerdy cohort a hernia exam in the middle of a dance club.

MILF is oddly misogynistic in its way, with the younger women portrayed almost universally as spiteful and immature, taking every opportunity to stick it to the nerdly bunch and wander off with idiot jock boyfriends whilst the older women are portrayed as almost insane in their sexual ambition, with one of our nerdly bunch ending up nearly immersed in chocolate syrup and another in a bizarre three-way with a yogi and her yoga master / husband. Give them credit for one bit of hilarity, however, as one of the nerdly lot finds himself pursued by a gaggle of children all shrieking “Are you my daddy?” following one encounter the next morning.

Give MILF some credit, it does improve in the second half, but like I said, you’re going to have to slog through hell and back to get there. The question is, are you going to want to follow along with that disaster long enough to get to the part that could be called good, which isn’t really all that good.

The Screenhead Ten Scale hands a disaster that will eventually prove mildly endearing after you choke down a horrible first half a four out of ten for being bad in the start, and improving to mediocre in the second half. Give The Asylum some credit, though, at least it’s kind of original.

Is it just me or are reboots getting closer and closer to the original? Not only do we have a Spiderman reboot only a decade after the definitive movie version first hit our screens, but now one of the most iconic TV characters of the 90′s is being revived. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the 7-season series starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, is set be remade for the big screen. Again.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Kuzui Enterprises, owners of Buffy, are developing a film of Buffy to be written by relative unknown Whit Anderson (at least it’s a she) for Warner Bros. Kuzui made the 1992 film flop of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which was not liked by creator Joss Whedon. But Whedon worked with Kuzui to resurrect the character into a TV show which followed the teen as she battled vampires and demonds through high-school and into university. The show was known for its razor-sharp wit, self-awareness, and sense of irony, appealing to both sarcastic teens and adults alike.

However, Whedon (who seems to be cursed, what with his Firefly and Dollhouse shows being cancelled too soon, not to mention the financial flop that was his film Serenity, the disaster of the binned Wonder Woman film, and now the endless delay of horror film The Cabin in the Woods) has not been asked to be involved. He wrote a letter to E Online expressing his dissatisfaction:

With reboots being the major event of this decade (as Hollywood studios get increasingly fearful of the scary notion of originality), how soon before we see a reboot of Jason Bourne, of the Twilight franchise, or even Lord of the Rings? Let’s hope this Buffy remains in the ground.