Panic Attack!

Here's a fairy tale that could only happen in the movies. Man makes YouTube video. Goes to Hollywood. Gets pots of money and a movie deal. Except this story is true.

A relatively unknown producer (and most likely Visual Effects Artist) from Uruguay, Fede Alvarez, shelled out about $300 to create a video of a robot invasion in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay. The four-minute short, "Ataque de Panico!" (Panic Attack) features ginormous weapon-wielding robots that blow stuff up (a lá The Iron Giant crossed with War of the Worlds).

He could follow in the footsteps of Neill Blomkamp, who made the South African-based alien mockumentary 'Alive In Joburg', and later went on to develop it into the full length feature that is "District 9".

Well, Alvarez' short film has already been viewed on YouTube over 3 million times. and hasn't gone unnoticed by Hollywood. He told BBC, "I uploaded 'Ataque de Panico!' on a Thursday and on Monday my inbox was totally full of emails from Hollywood studios." In the end he agreed to $30 million deal with Sam "Spiderman" Raimi's Ghost House Pictures.

The picture will be a sci-fi thriller set in Argentina and Uruguay, although it won't be a high budget remake of 'Panic Attack'. Alvarez says he will start from scratch.

Here's the amazing video that made him rich.

Collapse - its all going to go f*kin pear shaped lads

Well in fairness I, er, "acquired" this strange thing by mistake....had a creepy cover and lots of quotes by people I've never heard of saying things like "THE MOST TERRIFYING FILM OF THE YEAR!!" and "I QUITE LITERALLY SH*T MY PANTS WHILE WATCHING THIS MOVIE" Well...don't make the same mistake i did if you are looking for a scary horror flick( Unless you find old men with mustaches terrifying - and there's probably a term for that...for example, Coulrophobia - Fear of Clowns. And you thought you werent going to learn anything on the internet today!) So yeah, the movie is an hour of an old man with a moustache telling an interviewer that we're all pretty much doomed because of peak oil and natural resource depletion, and a load of other vaguely connected conspiracy theories with chucked in mysterious deaths and that to give it a proper x-files paranoid feel.


picture of an old man with weary expression cigarette and moustache here


But I'll check my cynicism...Once i got beyond the fact that I was staring at a chainsmoking old man with a moustache for an hour, some of what he says - tenous, melodramatic and slightly mental though it may seem - is f**king scary. It's just a shame that a lot of the apparent savvy he claims he possesses is not materially backed up re: ability to read market trends and such, as he lives alone with a dog and a guitar and is, according to the end credits, about to be evicted for non-payment of rent. But if only 10% of what he posits is true, then you'd better get yourself some arable farming skills and a shitload of organic seeds. Because Mad Max times are a-comin....and I've got my Humongous costume ready.

Halloween 2 - Taking the f**king michael

Where's John Carpenter when the industry needs him more than ever? Here we get Rob Zombie instead, continuing on from his unnecessary and crap 2007 "reboot" of JC's original classic. It appears to carry on directly after the conclusion of part 1....except hang on, no, it's a dream sequence, remarkably from multiple characters perpectives at once in a way that actually resembles an actual movie opening but isnt! So after about 20 minutes of this fiction-within-a-f**king-fiction we carry on with the actual story. Laurie, the main protagonist from the first movie (boot-faced raging harridan who will have you praying for her imminent demise via blunt force trauma to the head within minutes) is moping about a year after the original killings. Michael himself seems to have survived and is living as the world's biggest homeless man in redneck country. Even Dr Loomis has managed to uncrush his skull after his death in the first movie and is touring the states selling his book about the events and having no effect whatsoever on the story apart from apparently upping the movie's c**t level (which is extraordinarily high already...so many horrible, irritating characters)

Zombie continues with his process of trying to give some depth to a character whose whole point of being was that he was a machine-like void in the first place. Watching Michael Myers getting a backstory is like trying to give the shark in Jaws some kind of psycho motive involving flashbacks to its youth showing it being punched repeatedly by fishermen or being bullied by squid. Instead of the silent, lethal golem from the first franchise the boy Zombie apparently thinks a growling 7-foot WWF wrestler channeling Jeffry Dahmer is scarier. . It's really not. Now f**k off and go back to doing sub-ministry metal for kids in hoodies.

Thirst - "let us prey"

Vampire priests...? As someone who grew up avoiding the clammy hands and bulging pants of a whole army of boy-hungry christian brother paedophiles in 80s Dublin the idea of a priest that only wanted to suck my neck would seem to be fairly tame stuff in comparison. Guilt-ridden korean catholic bloodsuckers? Bah, make a movie about my old principal, Brother Kelly, that'd really s**t people up! But like a priest I believe in buggery charity and charitably...this movie...it's a mixed bag....like what you'd get if a chimp did your weekly shop in tesco (probably lots of mouldering fruit, and sweets. So you'd end up with a tooth decay-maddened ape with leaking bowels. And that's why I sleep with a mirror and a baseball bat under my bed...the mirror to temporarily confuse the mardy primate, the bat to beat it into submission) So, Thirst. Pious priest goes off to africa to volunteer for some weird medical experiment where he gets transfected by vamp blood. So he comes home, and in-between endless bouts of mahjong, starts to turn into a hedonistic bloodsucking guilt-ridden ballbag. Who seems to spend as much time getting his end away as actually procuring blood for his infernal plasma-lust.

There is some very squishy and wince-inducing blood-letting here but by hell it's long. Weird. And frequently very dull indeed. Director Park Chan-wook is highly overrated in my opinion...liked Oldboy, bored by JSA, thought the "Sympathy" movies were just odd and if you haven't seen "I'm an android but that's ok" you have by default lived a better life than me. But if its this or some teeny emo vampire bollix then for f**ks sake watch this. It's an easy movie to admire for its style and sheer balls but very, very hard to like.

'Gears of War' movie to be like 'Cloverfield'

So apparently, film producer Wyck Godfrey has been revealing details on the upcoming "Gears of War" movie. In an interview with 'MakingOf', he says the following:

"The hard part is to make it into something that doesn't feel like a world torn asunder and people just in battle. I think we really want to focus on the idea of a world that's running well and then it's Emergence Day. Kind of make it impactful and immediate and like what those 48 hours are as people survive Emergence Day," said Godfrey. "It's more like Cloverfield or something like that because trying to tell the epic story of an alien planet that's living in a horrific environment just feels like the wrong mood right now."

Godfrey confirmed that he's working on it with Underworld and Die Hard 4.0 director Len Wiseman for Legendary Pictures (300, The Dark Knight) and New Line Cinema. And Billy Ray (Breach, Shattered Glass) is currently rewriting the GoW script originally penned by Chris Morgan (Wanted).

So there is the slightest, tiniest chance that it might not completely stink up the place like a rotten foetus... but only slightly. After all, it is another videogame-to-movie adaptation, and we all know how they go. 'Super Mario Bros. The Movie' anyone? *shudders*

Tentative release date is 2010. Can't wait for those clips of beautiful families enjoying idyllic lives only to be put out by a mass uprising of ugly creatures.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

Watching the bad movies I watch is like being some kind of cinematic proctologist. You end up rummaging around in the arse end of cinema itself,  holding your breath and hoping to get out clean and educated but usually end up elbow deep in something horrible, feeling a bit sick and soberly delivering a pessimistic diagnosis. So let's run with that tenuous anal-ogy (!), glove up and part the hairless buttocks of the latest cinematic victim  patient to end up on Dr Gi-bag's table. But what's this? A clean, intelligent sphincter? Shiny, fat-free colon? And most importantly, a computer-generated prostate just throbbing with wit, good humour and wondrous animation? Er. Anyway...so "Cloudy with a chance of Meatballs". No it's not a kids movie! Well it is, but what a nice surprise it is, like climbing into bed expecting a man and finding a woman with a lovely bottom instead.

Flint the hero lives on a rather bleak grey island in the atlantic where everyone lives off sardines, the worst of all fish. Except crabs. So he, "helped" by Steve the gay monkey (who is the best thing in the movie and deserves his own trilogy) invents a machine which can transform rainwater into food...any food. It's a fairly simple "be careful what you wish for" parable with a bit of parental unit tension/reconciliation thrown in, but unlike the numerous other written-by-commitee pixar knock-offs by lesser soulless studios this one really works...it's genuinely funny and mental, the visuals are stunning (the giant computerised food actually made me extremely hungry) and after a streak of really bad movies this one gets a big fat ky-lubed thumb up.