Once again, Mondo Macabro gives us a taste of what they call "the wild side of world cinema" with this Indonesian scare-fest from 1979 that streets on May 27.

The wedding of a town leader's son in Indonesia is marred by what is believed to be black magic. The bride is overcome by nightmarish visions of skeletons, snakes and walking corpses and falls into a fevered state of dementia. Kohar, the groom, suspects that a woman named Murny is responsible, claiming that she loved him but he had no interest in her. What Kohar does not tell the angry mob is that he had seduced Murny, taking her virginity and promising to marry her, only to wed another. While Murny certainly has motive, she knows nothing of black magic -- but Kohar and the mob burn her house down and throw her off a cliff just the same. Her life is saved by an old hermit who encourages her to take revenge on those who tried to murder her. Since they accused her of black magic, the hermit figures "let's be all ironic and stuff" and trains Murny in the dark arts.

Before we Bronte devotees could really whine and cry about the casting (there's still Ellen Page in Jane Eyre for that), it ceases to be. According to Variety, Natalie Portman has dropped out of the upcoming Wuthering Heights, leaving the film rather lost without a Cathy Earnshaw. According to Portman's publicist, the actress had a scheduling conflict with another project, which has not yet been announced.

So now, Ecross executives and director John Maybury are on the hunt for a new Cathy. As of yet, there are no contenders to the role, so now is our chance! Speak up, Cinematical readers, and let us flood the Internet with suggestions. Personally, I want to go back in time and import teenage Kate Winslet, Helena Bonham Carter, Kate Beckinsale or Lena Headey. As I cannot, I'm at a bit of a loss. Keira Knightley merits exclusion because of having played Elizabeth Bennett, and I think there's a rule that you can only play one standard of English Literature. I'm being rather stuffy in looking only to the UK, but nothing could ruin this movie faster than a wonky accent.

Interestingly, we finally have a name for Heathcliff. According to the Variety article, Michael Fassbender is in advanced talks to play the famous heinous, yet oh-so-sexy hero. I have only seen him as Stelios in 300, but he's getting good buzz for Hunger. Count me in the "intrigued, and not opposed" category, I guess, until further notice. His casting will mean my sister will be first in line for a ticket, that's for sure.

We can still whine and cry about the casting, though. It is our right as Internet film geeks, and ones with Gothic tastes. Oh heck, let's just gush about the book! We'll have our own Bronte Day here.

It sounds like a prank. We would all like it to be one. But it seems to be legit.

The story comes from Screen Daily, who reports that S. Darko is being shopped around, with Fox already picking up the North American distribution rights. Touted as the sequel to the 2001 cult hit, the story picks up seven years after Donnie Darko left off. The youngest Darko, Samantha, is now 18 and abandoning her commitment to Sparkle Motion. She heads to Las Vegas with her best friend Corey, but the two are plagued with bizarre visions. I imagine they will involve a rabbit.

Richard Kelly, the original director, is in no way involved. Chris Fincher Fisher* will direct instead. Daveigh Chase, who played Samantha in the original, will reprise her role. It looks like she is the only one. The movie also stars Ed Westwick, Briana Evigan, and Justin Chatwin.

As to the big looming question of why, oh God, why, Simon Crowe of UK sales company Velvet Octopus says they're thinking of the children. "I think there is a new generation of cinema-goers who will be very excited to see this film."
Which generation came of age between 2001 and 2008? Why haven't they rented Donnie Darko? I am afraid these are questions to which Crowe has no answers. But he did quip, "Donnie's not in [the new film] but there are meteorites and rabbits."

Nothing is safe from the all mighty dollar, my friends. Nothing. Even when there is a pretty conclusive ending, there can always be a sequel. I'll leave you to think about that as I go pen my script for No Country for Old Men 2.

[via Empire]

*Very kind thanks to astute reader toad_stone for pointing out our egregious misspelling of director Chris Fisher's last name. Correction made, with our apologies. - Ed.

Welcome to another nutritious edition of The (Mostly) Indie Film Calendar, a weekly roundup of what's happening beyond the multiplexes in this great land of ours. If you know of something cool going on where you live -- a small film festival, retrospective, midnight movies, etc. -- let me know! You can find me at Eric.Snider (at) Weblogsinc (dot) com.

INDIE THEATRICAL RELEASES

• Frontiere(s) is a French horror flick whose history is almost as torturous as its content. It was supposed to be part of the After Dark series last fall, but its NC-17 rating made that impossible due to the contract that the After Dark people had with the theatrical venues. So now it's basically going straight to DVD -- but first it's being deposited in a handful of theaters today in New York, L.A., Denver, Seattle, Philly, Austin, and maybe a few other places. Cinematical's Scott Weinberg gave it a mixed review at Toronto last year.

• The Fall: Remember The Cell, that freaky Jennifer Lopez movie from 2000? I know I do! (I never forget a movie with a vivisected horse.) The director, Tarsem Singh, is back now with The Fall, a visually stunning fable where a man in a hospital tells a little girl a story, and that story is craaaazy. Opens in New York and L.A. today.

More indie releases and a city-by-city list of cool events after the jump....

I don't think it will be quite like the clip above, but we're about to get a new serving of William Tell. Variety reports that producers Fred Caruso and D. Constantine Conte are bringing Tell's story to the big screen in The Adventures of William Tell. Stunt coordinator and second AD Ian Quinn is going to make his directorial debut with the $60 million production, which was adapted from Friedrich von Schiller's play by Cornelius Schregle.

But here's the kicker, aside from probably hearing that super-speedy overture in a non-Lone Ranger setting -- it will star Charlie Chaplin's granddaughter, Kiera Chaplin. She will play Tell's wife in the film, although there's no word on who will play Tell himself. Now, we all know the music, but do you know the story? It's about the 14th century legend of a man who was forced to shoot an apple off of his son's head to win his freedom from some jerky Austrian occupiers. "The event is said to have triggered a rebellion by the Swiss against their Austrian rules and transformed Tell into a mythical freedom fighter." (... as well as one very sneaky and insidious song.) Production will start on the film this fall, with a release schedule for 2010.

You know, they say that you shouldn't go into business with family and friends. Yet many people still do, and many people also begin to take the advice to heart sooner or later. But what about people you meet in a support group? That sounds totally rational, doesn't it? Let's take it a bit further -- imagine you go into business with strangers you know all have anger issues. It sounds like hell in real life, but may make for a funny film on the big screen.

Variety reports that Heather Graham, Jennifer Coolidge, Matthew Settle (the cool art dad from Gossip Girl), and Amber Heard have signed on to star in a new black dramedy called Ex-terminators, which was written by Suzanne Weinert, and will be the feature directorial debut for Scrubs helmer John Inwood. So yes, this film will focus on "three women who meet in an anger-management therapy group and decide to form a traditional business using very untraditional methods."

This is feeling like one of those projects that could very easily be good, and just as easily be stereotypical and over-the-top bad. Whichever it ends up being, I imagine it will have a healthy dose of quirk involved, considering all the time Inwood has spent on Scrubs. Production began last week in Austin.

With five nominations, it looks like Superbad will be the star of the 2008 MTV Movie Awards, and its three jubilant male leads -- Michael Cera, Jonah Hill, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse -- deserve the kudos. But one major talent behind the whole affair has stayed relatively anonymous while these young up-and-comers bathe in the spotlight: Director Greg Mottola. The erstwhile independent filmmaker, responsible for some of the best installments of Arrested Developed and Undeclared, launched his career a solid decade before the rise of Judd Apatow with a charming little low budget comedy called The Daytrippers. Starring Stanley Tucci, Hope Davis, Liev Schreiber, Parker Posey and a host of other fantastic character actors, the film follows a wildly dysfunctional family over the course of a single day, as Davis, playing a worrisome housewife, tries to track down her unfaithful husband (Tucci).

Mixing warm humanity with pitch-perfect screwball timing, Daytrippers marked the sort of debut that told you a filmmaker had a big career ahead of him. After a modest premiere at the Slamdance Film Festival, it landed at Cannes, barely got a theatrical release and promptly vanished thereafter. Mottola turned to TV work, and slipped out of the film scene for a good ten years. These days, it's no easy task to track down Daytrippers on DVD -- you can nab second-hand copies on Amazon for decent rates, but not a single retail outlet carries it. Aside from the occasionally airings on cable, the movie has vanished.

Oh, Hellboy, Vincent, or whatever character you prefer Ron Perlman has. The man has done about a billion different shows, movies, and parts, and if you look at his IMDb page, there's a sea of upcoming production red -- a whopping 17 gigs coming our way. I can't complain -- I really dig the man. And now, we're getting more; he's adding an indie film to make it 18.

The Hollywood Reporter posts that Perlman is teaming up with Taryn Manning, Joe Pantoliano, and Patrick Flueger to bring Shem Bitterman's 1998 play, The Job, to the big screen. The dark comedy focuses on "a hapless man named Bubba (Flueger) who is desperate to find a job and marry the woman he loves (Manning). A drifter (Perlman) hooks him up with a slick employment agent (Pantoliano), but after agreeing to the job, Bubba finds that he is in over his head."

That sounds like a crappy employment agent to me -- or, is this over-the-head gig something more unsavory, rather than just difficult? Production on the indie has started today in Detroit, so we should be able to see it soon enough. Have any of you out there ever seen the play? Do you think it's movie-worthy?

Those lovable Twitch boys love their foreign genre fare a whole lot, but when they get THIS enthusiastic about an upcoming project, that's usually enough to get me salivating like a movie-nerd version of Pavlov's dogs. What's the movie that has the Twitch boys extra-twitchy today? It looks to be a VERY enticing flick called Iron Sky, which is a Finnish sci-fi comedy noir (I think) about the Nazis who colonized the moon in 1945 and are due for a return to Earth in 2018.

Yeah, feel free to read that description a second time -- and then click here to visit Twitch and enjoy the very cool promotional teaser for the flick. I know nothing about the movie aside from Todd Brown's basic description and what's offered in the promo clip -- but hot damn I sure hope this movie ends up at one of the genre festivals I'm covering later this year. This is a seriously impressive little mini-movie, from the noirish visual style and the haunting song to the sci-fi slickness and the (very amusing) final shot of the statue... If the movie's only half as cool as Twitch hopes it will be, it will still be pretty damn neat. (For more info, bookmark Twitchfilm and then check out the official Iron Sky website.)

On Drainiac's audio commentary, writer/director Brett Piper explains that the original 2000 DVD release of this film was essentially unfinished. This new version, which arrives on DVD from Shock-o-Rama on June 24, is newly derived from the original negatives (yes, this baby was shot on 16 millimeter film) with sound and special effects enhancement. Since so much effort went into making this nearly unwatchable revised version, I have to suspect that viewing original imperfect release might very well be lethal.

One of the first clues to the disaster that is Drainiac is the box cover. It's a pretty cool illustration of a slimy creature crawling out of a sink drain and reaching for the viewer, though it's obviously not a photo and doesn't represent anything actually seen in the film. Furthermore if you've ever seen any other movie from the Shock-o-Rama catalog (like Piper's other flick Bacterium, which I reviewed here), you know darn well they could never afford to do this kind of creature effectively.

Iron Man is hitting screens this weekend, leaving a trail of positive reviews in its wake. Check out James' and Scott's reviews, and if you need even more iron in your diet, head on over here. With that in mind, this week's Trailer Park is all about the heroes.

Batman: Gotham Knight
Returning as the voice of the caped crusader is Kevin Conroy, who lent his voice to The Bat in Batman: The Animated Series, Batman Beyond, and Justice League. This new version, however, doesn't look like any previous animated version of the character. Going straight to DVD shortly before The Dark Knight hits theaters, this feature offers six different visual interpretations of Batman from six celebrated anime artists. The approach is similar to The Animatrix, which gave an anime take on the universe of The Matrix films. The trailer looks amazing with striking interpretations of not just Batman, but also of the urban sprawl of Gotham City.

Hancock
I mentioned the teaser for this one in a previous Trailer Park, but now we've got a full length preview to ogle. Will Smith plays Hancock, a hero with super strength, the ability to fly and the power to piss off just about everybody (you don't get that from your average Kryptonian). His hard drinking ways have damaged his public persona seemingly beyond repair, but a PR agent played by Jason Bateman sets out to heal Hancock's relationship with the people. The humor is still there, but the new preview plays up the action, and I've got to say I'm dying to see this. While I'm not as down on Rob Zombie's Halloween remake as some, that film's detractors will probably get a kick out of the scene where Hancock tosses Daeg Faerch, the actor who played the young Michael Meyers, almost into orbit.

If you're anywhere near New York City this weekend, you simply must check out the work of this great new filmmaker named Harmony Korine, whose strangely fantastical movie, Mister Lonely, opened yesterday at the IFC Center (it hits Los Angeles on May 9). Some readers may confuse this Korine for the angry young radical who wrote Larry Clark's teen sex drama Kids when he was 19 and later directed the startling divisive, sharply confrontational films Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy.

I assure you that the 1990's-era Korine is long gone -- or, rather, has morphed into an agreeably warmer artist. Mister Lonely, which stars Diego Luna as a Michael Jackson impersonator and New German Cinema legend Werner Herzog as an eccentric priest, doesn't always make sense, but that's precisely what Korine was going for. "I've always been interested in making a perfect nonsense," he told a crowd at the Apple store in lower Manhattan Thursday night. "I never really cared much about plot. I wanted to make movies about moments that went through you, that were experiential."

Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden's Sugar, the follow-up to their critically acclaimed Half Nelson, has finally been picked up for distribution. Variety's Mike Jones reports the film has been acquired for theatrical distribution by Sony Pictures Classics, which seems like a good fit for the film. HBO Films, which financed the film, retains television rights.

Sugar, which premiered at Sundance earlier this year, felt at the time like a tough sell after Half Nelson; it still does. The film, which is subtitled, tells the tale of a young baseball star from the Dominican Republic who crashes after getting moved up to the big leagues. It's really very much a coming-of-age kind of tale about this young boy who grew up poor but talented, always believing baseball to be his one ticket out.

(As Son of Rambow opens today, here's Cinematical's review from the 2007 Sundance Film Festival ...)

After a week of high-power documentaries and wrenching dramas at Sundance, there's a strong chance I may have been extra-susceptible to the charm and sheer exuberance of Son of Rambow, the newest film from director Garth Jennings and the production team known as Hammer and Tongs. But I don't think so; the giddy, goofy and heartfelt creativity of Son of Rambow would stand out regardless of where, or when, one had the good fortune to see it. In 1980's Britain, young Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner) is a good-hearted, slightly burdened young boy, grieving his lost father, constrained and supported by the humble Christian community his mother finds solace in. The group shuns television and films; they live with simplicity, piety and grace. None of which, it seems, can compete with Sylvester Stallone....

After a spot of bother at school, Will winds up not-quite-friends with troublemaker Carter (Will Poulter), a scamp with slight troubles. In the storage shed at Will's family's business, Will is exposed to a pirated VHS copy of First Blood. Will's never seen a movie, or heard a story not taken directly from The Bible. It is, to him, a revelation of the highest order and leads to Will and Carter collaborating on a camcorder epic, Son of Rambow. The fact that Will seems to be working out some issues with his absent father is fairly obvious, as is the tension between Will's sacred teachings and his more secular desire to run through the English countryside pretending to commit acts of derring-do.