JamieBlanks Tagged Articles at Cinematical

The master of horror is back! (The previous is said completely tongue-in-cheek.) Jamie Blanks has just signed on to direct a remake of the 30-year-old Australian suspense film, Long Weekend. You don't know who he is? Well, he's the man behind the first film I ever bought previously-viewed for a whopping $10 (and a big guilty pleasure of mine), the tepid thriller Urban Legend, and he's behind the film I wish I never spent money on -- the Denise Richards/David Boreanaz crapfest Valentine. So really, this is 50-50 between not-bad and ick, unless he hits this one out of the ballpark.

The original is an environmentally-conscious film about a couple who decide to spend on a long weekend on an isolated beach to repair their relationship. While there, they "encounter nature's revenge." Maybe they'll get pelted with tons of water bottles and buried under piles of littered garbage. The story is once again coming from the pen of Everett De Roche, who wrote the original, but there is no word on how much has been updated. This is actually the second of back-to-back films from Blanks about couples in peril in nature. He just wrapped another film called Storm Warning, where a yuppie couple get lost in a swamp and "drift off course and into a world of pain." Principal photography is set to begin in October, and the movie will probably come out in 2008. In the meantime, I'd like to start up a campaign that keeps the word "suspenser" from ever being used again.

Hit-or-miss director Jamie Blanks, mostly known for the somewhat entertaining Urban Legend and the somewhat bad Valentine, has landed a deal with Dimension Films for his latest project -- the horror/thriller Storm Warning. According to an article over at CHUD, the Weinstein-owned Dimension has taken North American, Australian and New Zealand rights to the pic with an eye to a Summer 2007 release.

Storm Warning, written by Everett De Roche and featuring a cast of lesser-knowns including the very cute Nadia Feres, Robert Taylor and Matthew Wilkinson -- who also appears in the upcoming Ghost Rider, centers on a young wealthy couple who seek refuge in an isolated farmhouse during a storm. Once there, they soon realize they're not in the house of their own free will but in reality, have been captured by a group of deranged killers. Man, won't people ever learn -- you never go into an isolated farmhouse during a storm especially with all the deranged killers lurking around.

Call me crazy, but I'm pretty sure I've seen this movie before once or twice -- or, at the very least, something pretty darn similar. Its not exactly what we in the trade would call "original." Still, Blanks has shown his directing chops before with Urban Legend and I don't really blame him all that much for Valentine -- it wasn't horrible, just not very good. It's also pretty easy to overlook a film's flaws when you're distracted by the beauty of Denise Richards, Marley Shelton and my future wife Katherine Heigl. So, let's just chalk that one up to the well-known "sophomore slump." Besides, everyone makes mistakes and deserves a second (or third) chance, right? How else can one explain Mark Steven Johnson's career? Sorry, was that cynical? I can never tell anymore.