Sometimes it's the all-star casts that get curiosity brewing. And sometimes, it's just an interesting collection that you might not have thought of. The Hollywood Reporter has posted that Eric Balfour, Joe Mantegna, and Armand Assante have signed on, and James Van Der Beek is in final negotions, for an indie feature called The Fifth Mafia.

The flick is being directed by Vito J. Giambalvo. His name might not sound familiar, although he's directed episodes of Girlfriends, and helmed the indie flick Let Me Count the Ways in 2006, but you're definitely familiar with some of his older-school work -- he was a cameraman for All in the Family, The Facts of Life, and One Day at a Time. Okay -- you're familiar with the work if you were born before 1980, or watch a lot of old-school reruns.

The drama will focus on the "son (Balfour) of a murdered Mafioso. The son, who never had any involvement in the family business, seeks revenge on his corrupt Uncle Dominic (Assante) for the murder of his parents. Eventually, his quest sends him on a collision course with the FBI after he ruins the life of one of the bureau's agents (Van Der Beek)." This is why revenge doesn't work -- it's never clean and often, you can become what you're fighting against. Mantegna, meanwhile, will play a guy named Mario, who is part of Assante's crime family.

Man, Jesse and Dawson have come a long way.

If you're anything like me (lord held you), then you just can't resist a movie in which an inordinately large and aggravated animal decides to chew on a bunch of random stupid people. Doesn't matter how many "OMG it's hilarious!" comments I may see on the IMDb boards, nor does it deter me if every genre-friendly film critic stands up and screams "Dude, it's crap!"

If it's a movie about pissed-off animals eating dumb people, I've got 87 minutes to spare.

So a few months back I noticed a strange little label on a few of the more recent "nature sprinting amok" flicks: It was a little black and red skull logo with the phrase "Maneater Series" stuck on there. Oooh, a mystery! What's this "maneater series" of which this DVD case speaks? Where do they come from? Are there other films in the series? Does anyone besides me actually care?

OK, so as far as a very small amount of IMDb / Google research indicates, it looks like there are to be six Maneater Series titles in total. (Or maybe seven.) The suspects? Production company RHI Entertainment, cable network The Sci-Fi Channel, and DVD distributor Genius Products. Let's examine the flicks...

Actress Rhona Mitra is definitely no stranger to the ways of the law. She spent a good deal of time on The Practice, and then jumped ship for the ultra-wacky law show Boston Legal. Since then, well, she's not only got nipped and tucked, but she's taken some time for Skinwalkers, the flop that is The Number 23, and Shooter. Now The Hollywood Reporter has posted that she's going to co-star in a new indie thriller called The Boy in the Box -- written by actor Glenn Taranto and helmed by Anders Anderson.

No, this is not a retro celebrity biopic about Corey Hart. Rather, it's about a "small-town police chief (Jon Hamm, We Were Soldiers ) determined to discover the truth behind the mummified remains of a boy who was murdered a half-century earlier." Mummification -- that's not something that pops up in a thriller every day. Or in life for that matter. Anyway, Mitra will play "the police chief's wife, who is trying to move on after the disappearance of their own son eight years earlier." No wonder he's obsessed.

But there's even more cast on this sucker. The film is re-teaming Mitra with Sweet Home Alabama co-star Josh Lucas, who will play the slain child's dad. I imagine that means flashbacks -- since Lucas sure as hell isn't old enough to have a son who has been dead for 50 years. Wrapping things up, there's Dawson Leary / James Van Der Beek, Marcus Thomas (You Kill Me), the young tyke Jimmy Bennett (Evan Almighty) -- who I imagine will play the slain kid, and Jessica Chastain (Law and Order). I'll just go out on a limb and say Dawson did it! He's got a good creepy look to him when he wants to. As for you Buffy and Grey's fans out there, Box also has the vengeance demon/overachieving doctor Kali Rocha.

It'll be a little while before this film gets up and running. Having tackled the skinwalkers, Mitra is about to head for New Zealand and face lycans in Underworld: Rise of the Lycans.

According to Production Weekly, James Van Der Beek, wanna-be filmmaker Dawson Leery from TV's Dawson's Creek and the films Varsity Blues and the upcoming Punchy, is still trying to find his way post-Dawson into more adult roles. To help facilitate this transition, Van Der Beek has agreed to star as a soldier in Finnish director Marko Makilaakso's latest film Stone's War.

The film, formally known as War of the Dead and also written by Makilaakso, follows Van Der Beek's Captain Martin Stone as he leads an elite group of American and Finnish soldiers in an attack against a secluded enemy bunker deep in Russia. Unfortunately, the soldiers underestimate the strength of their enemy and soon are forced to retreat deeper into the forest surrounding the bunker to seek shelter and regroup before the next attack. Then, during the next attack, the soldiers are confronted with a new horror and discover a dark secret forcing them to question the very nature of life itself.

You might be able to guess from the description that the soldiers Van Der Beek's team is fighting might turn out to be the kind that don't really stay dead when you kill them. They could be zombies or maybe some sort of other creature that likes to eat human flesh. And as fun as zombie movies can be, I feel like I've seen this film somewhere before -- maybe a few dozen other times. Still, familiarity isn't necessarily a bad thing and perhaps this time Van Der Beek will be able to pull off the adult role he's been searching for and finally put Dawson behind him. Principal photography on Stone's War begins April 2nd in Lithuania.

I guess that with the exception of Michelle Williams, none of the Dawson's Creek alum really managed to make a big splash in the movies. Joshua Jackson kind of dropped off the radar, but he seems to be in the midst of an upswing with roles in Bobby and Battle in Seattle. And, I think we all know what happened to Kate Holmes. Then there was Dawson himself, James Van Der Beek. Van Der Beek had a few film roles during the Dawson years -- Varsity Blues had an All The Right Moves charm to it in a way, and I thought he was pretty good in Rules of Attraction, but since the end of the show, Van Der Beek had kept a low profile.

ComingSoon.net has reported that principal photography has finished on Punchy with Van Der Beek in the starring role. Punchy follows a screenwriter (who's hopefully not a Spielberg fan) who comes up with the idea that if he locks himself away in his apartment for a month, he'll be able to finish a screenplay that's rapidly approaching the "drop dead" date. Things turn sour when his isolation brings on the worst kind of cabin fever. Jonathan Duech is directing the Darryn Lucie script with Peace Arch Entertainment Group Inc. holding the worldwide distribution rights. There isn't any word on a release date yet, but since principal photography has only just finished, I would think it could be a while.