Black Gate

Okay, follow me on this one for a minute…

It’s 1990 and you, along with a small group of your fellow-medical-student friends (the majority of whom are smoking hot by the way) start daring each other to prove the claims made by patients who have had near-death experiences.  You figure the best way to do this is to take turns being brought medically to the brink of death in your underwear, then being shocked and mouth-to-mouthed back into existence by your friends.

If you can now imagine that two of your friends are a pre-24, post Lost Boys Keifer Sutherland and a pre-Eat, Pray, Love, post Pretty Woman Julia Roberts, then this next bit will come as no surprise.

This week reports started springing up all over that the latest film to get laid out on the cinematic operating table and given a Hollywood defibrillation is Joel Schumacher’s 1990 supernatural horror Flatliners.

The original film followed medical students played by Keifer Sutherland, Julia Roberts, William Baldwin, Oliver Platt and Kevin Bacon, all of whom were overly interested in seeing what happens during the afterlife, but whose experimentation dragged a bunch of supernatural baggage into the here-and-now.

On the positive side, this reboot has attracted the talent of Swedish filmmaker Niels Arden Oplev (of the original, sub-titled version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo).  Oplev will be working from a script written by Ben Ripley, who is better known for his Source Code screenplay than the latter two Species sequels.

With that talent, a Flatliner remake will likely equal — if not surpass — the 1990 version.  As much as I love the original, it’s more for the abundance of eye-candy than the campy, often painful storyline and dialog.

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Earlier this week, we learned Pope Benedict XVI resigned his post, reportedly due to “advanced age.”

But could the real reason have anything to do with a misplaced video of a botched exorcism?

Okay, probably not. But as a new pope must be found, so too has a new director been recruited for a long-awaited exorcism tale from Lakeshore Entertainment.

Tuesday Lakeshore released a statement indicating Mark Neveldine, one half of the directing duo behind Gamer, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance and the two Crank films, will be at the helm of Lakeshore’s possession project, The Vatican Tapes, but without his usual co-director Brian Taylor. James Marsh (Man on a Wire) was in the director’s chair for a while, but dropped out for unknown reasons; advanced age perhaps?

It’s been nearly three years since I’ve heard anything new about the movie, but as far as I can determine the plot line remains the same. The Vatican Tapes follows a series of events depicted on a tape leaked from the Vatican displaying an exorcism that goes horribly wrong. Christopher Borrelli (Con Air, Armageddon) is scripting based on a story envisioned by he and Chris Morgan, but no cast is attached yet and IMDB still lists it as “in development.”

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And you thought your holiday travel was a nightmare…

On Tuesday of this week, “sources” from Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport reported to the Chicago Sun-Times that 18 human heads had arrived from Rome just before Christmas and were on their way to a research facility in the suburbs when they were stopped by security.

For attempting to smuggle in a wheel of pecorino cheese…?

Nope. Officials initially said it was a paperwork problem that prevented the heads from reaching their final destination, but apparently the crack reporters at the Sun-Times have just discovered the hold-up is actually connected to “an ongoing investigation at the suburban facility in question.” But before you jump to all conclusions, the investigation is “absolutely not” connected to the shipment of the heads, the source said.

Paging Dr. West… Dr. West, please pick up the nearest red courtesy phone…

The heads were unceremoniously shipped as cargo on a Lufthansa Airlines flight, but “were properly preserved and tagged as human specimens,” said Tony Brucci, chief investigator for the medical examiner’s office.

The Coalition for Airline Passengers’ Rights has filed a complaint with the FAA saying the heads were confined to the cargo hold for the 9 hour and 15 minute flight without the benefit of inflight catering or entertainment.

Okay, that’s not true.  But the rest of this is.

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From Shakespeare to American Werewolf in London, audiences have always appreciated a little graveyard humor.  And for those of us who thoroughly enjoy having the snot scared out of us in the theater, there’s almost nothing more sublime than the added adrenaline rush of not being able to decide whether to shriek with horror or laughter.

Therefore it was with double satisfaction that last week I got a look at the opening scene for a new flick called Warm Bodies; once because it furthers my prediction that zombies are the new vampires (following the polyester bell-bottoms that were the Twilight franchise, something had to give…) and twice because the clip was well, just so darn amusing.

Coming to theaters on February 1, just around the time when all of us in cold-weather states can relate to a zombie trapped in an airport terminal, Warm Bodies takes us into the mind of “R” the film’s protagonist zombie played by Nicholas Hoult (late of X-Men First Class and Clash of the Titans) as he tries to make sense of his current situation and potentially save mankind.  The cast is rounded out by Dave Franco as “Perry” (James’ younger bro), Teresa Palmer as “Julie” and John Malkovich as “General Grigio.”

The fact that it has John Malkovich alone would be enough to get me to Warm Bodies on opening night.

So is it a horror movie?  An action film?  A romantic comedy?

Apparently it’s a little of everything including Shakespeare.  According to IMDB:

The film is based loosely on Romeo and Juliet. “R” = “Romeo”; “Julia” = “Juliet; “Perry” = “Paris”; “M/Marcus” = “Mercutio”; “Nora” = Juliet’s “Nurse” (the character of Nora is also a nurse).

See for yourself… (embedded trailer after the jump).

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This week in 1973 a fourteen-year-old girl hurls obscenities, vomits and behaves like Satan himself.

Today this would be just another episode of an MTV reality show, but 39 years ago it was a move called The Exorcist which changed the horror genre forever.

The Exorcist was released theatrically in the United States on December 26, 1973 by Warner Bros. On April 2, 1974 the film had earned ten Academy Award nominations, winning two (Best Sound and Best Adapted Screenplay). In the years since it has been voted the Scariest Move of All Time by Entertainment Weekly, Maxim and the UK’s The Times newspaper and according to BoxOfficeMojo, has taken in around $232,906,145 at the US Box Office and $208,400,000 in foreign markets for a combined worldwide total of $441,306,145; huge numbers for a movie with a production budget of $10.5 million.

In short, the movie wasn’t just a hit – it was a global phenomenon. If adjusted for inflation, The Exorcist would be the top grossing R-rated film of all time.

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