Arielle Kebbel Tagged Articles at Cinematical

When films turn personal, there are a myriad of ways they can turn out. One way I never thought of -- out of body experiences that need soul saving. Variety reports that Val Kilmer, Shane West, Cam Gigandet, Eric Balfour, and Arielle Kebbel have signed on for a film called Silver Cord. James Ordonez will direct the feature, which he wrote with Ken Gord, and relive some personal experiences.

As Variety describes it, the film "centers on Ordonez's brother who came back to life after being declared clinically dead on multiple occasions. The brother died in 2004." But the summary up on IMDb says a whole lot more, written by James himself: "The story of a young man who is separated from the love of his life. To find her he has an Out of Body Experience but the silver cord that connects his soul with his body breaks and he is believed to be dead. In a desperate race against time his friends have less than 24 hours to save his soul before his body is cremated."

It's not every day you get so-called true life stories about people leaving their body to find paramours and then losing their body and being declared dead. Since he'd been declared dead a number of times, I guess the dude had a penchant for out-of-body travel.

John Tucker is the kind of boy whose powers of attraction are a mystery to everyone outside his immediate presence. Not smart, blithely fake, and not particularly interesting, he coasts by with a combination of bland good looks and the mysterious draw of Popularity, a phenomenon that feeds on itself -- he's popular, and therefore people like him. Especially girls. As played by Jesse Metcalfe in Betty Thomas' new film, John Tucker Must Die, the movie's title character is nothing more than a pretty picture, almost totally lacking in personality. Much like Metcalfe himself on-screen, Tucker replaces emotions with bright smiles, and soothes all worries with a confident word.

To give the womanizing Tucker his comeuppance, Thomas and screenwriter Jeff Lowell provide a trio of exes who, during an unexpected PE volleyball game (their regular teacher had a heart attack induced by John Tucker's charms), discover that they're all dating him at the same time. Though originally mollified by his ernest insistence that each of them is, in fact, his only secret girlfriend, the three are jarred out of their Tucker-nosis by Kate (Brittany Snow), a newcomer whose mother (Jenny McCarthy) has dated a fleet of her own John Tuckers. Taking Kate on as a sort of teacher-cum-apprentice, the girls resolve to teach the lying, cheating Tucker a lesson. If they can't make him undatable (they can't), they'll break his heart instead.

One of the main reasons I love the SXSW Film Festival so much is that you can go to one of their parties as just one nerdly little movie critic -- and end up sitting down with a pair of very cool young filmmakers and getting drunk all night. One year it happened with the Dead & Breakfast gang and this past March it was the delightful Darkon crew ... but last year, Dave and Tina Payne were a whole lot of special fun. (She was Tina Illman last year, so I guess congratulations are in order!!)

I'd never met Dave and Tina prior to seeing their flick Reeker, but once I met the duo and let them know I really dug their movie -- well, let's just say we sat down and partied as only hardcore horror nerds can. That was about 14 months ago, but I've always kept an eye on Reeker, wondering when the flick would make its damn debut already. Looks like it might finally be happening, because Twitch is now presenting a pair of clips from the stink-laden horror tale -- and I think any hardcore horror fan will get a big kick out of 'em. Reeker is about a group of traveling party-goers who find themselves stuck at a dusty old rest stop where a certain smelly entity treats them to the stink of raw death before doling out some pretty nasty demises. The cast includes Devon Gummersall, Eric Mabius, Arielle Kebbel, Derek Richardson, Marcia Strassman, and Michael Ironside. Yes, I said Michael Ironside.

No concrete word yet on who'll be distributing Reeker, nor when or in what format (DTV, cable, theatrical?), but it's a title the horror geeks should definitely keep a red circle on. It's good, freaky, genre-lovin' fun.