Meagan Good Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Any movie that begins with a dog wearing a human mask is in serious trouble. If it wants to use that kind of dream snippet as a launch pad for exploring a demented and increasingly bizarre world, if it wants to embrace a loony aesthetic and milk it for all it's worth, wonderful. Deliver a solid, jolting, dazzling, surprising thriller, and all will be forgiven.

On the other hand, if it desperately wants to be taken seriously, if it proceeds in a very measured and sober manner, if it becomes increasingly sedate as it calmly plods through tedious exposition, then you have a mess on your hands.

The Unborn looks like a ghost story, feels like a ghost story, and kinda sounds like a ghost story, but it's dead on arrival. Because writer/director David S. Goyer has been associated with a host of projects with which I have a natural affinity, I was cautiously optimistic that his fourth directorial outing (after ZigZag, Blade: Trinity, and The Invisible) might reflect more of the pulpy, noirish mood and momentum that are evident in some of the best scripts for which he's been credited in part or in whole (Dark City, Blade II, Batman Begins).

Instead, all the juice has been drained from The Unborn. Not even the sight of the lovely, lean and fit Odette Yustman, whose last name became Yowza! when the trailer and pics first hit the net, can salvage the film from mediocrity.

A pal of mine passed along this new international poster for David S. Goyer's supernatural thriller, The Unborn, which Empire Magazine recently premiered. The Unborn stars Odette Yustman (Cloverfield), who finds herself haunted by one freaky little spirit if the freaky little trailer is to be believed.

In the most petty terms, I give this one the benefit of the doubt over next month's other PG-13 horror flick, The Uninvited. This one was rated PG-13 for "intense sequences of violence and terror, disturbing images, thematic material and language including some sexual references"; that one can only boast "violent and disturbing images, thematic material, sexual content, language and teen drinking". Try and tell me you wouldn't rather see the former based on that assessment alone.

Other than that, I really just wanted to share this nifty poster with you and yours this holiday season. Co-starring Gary Oldman, Cam Gigandet, and Odette Yustman's Sweet Booty (also of Cloverfield), The Unborn opens on January 9th.

The advertising promises "You won't believe how it ends," but the problem with Saw V isn't so much its ending, it's everything that comes before. Oddly toothless, the entire flick feels like it exists solely as preamble for Saw VI. The greatest tension I felt was waiting for the movie to begin. I kept waiting, and waiting, and waiting, and then the end credits began to roll and I realized the movie had, in fact, ended. As one of the characters says, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."

The last installment, Saw IV, was both an origin story and a mild-tempered reboot of the series. Writers Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton (Feast) endeavored to provide deeper motivation for the Jigsaw Killer, AKA John Kramer (Tobin Bell), by introducing his ex-wife, Jill Tuck (Betsy Russell), and explaining that it was her tragic miscarriage years in the past that eventually set him on his deadly path. Jigsaw died at the end of Saw III, so Saw IV also had to resurrect him somehow, which was achieved by making the events of Saw IV concurrent with those of Saw III and introducing a new successor, Mark Hoffman (Costas Mandylor), to carry on Jigsaw's "work."

Got that? I know, it's already way too complicated, which is one of the reasons Saw IV was such a drag; it felt like a dry police procedural interrupted by brief scenes of screaming torture. But hold on, because Saw V insists on revisiting the events of the first four films, this time inserting Jigsaw's successor as he is trained for the work ahead. I felt like I was watching Forrest Gump or Zelig, with some fictional phony inserted into historical events.

What's Halloween in the 00's without a new Saw to dissect? We've received word from Lionsgate that Meagan Good will be featured in a supporting role in the upcoming Saw V as Luba, "a city planner who comes from a very wealthy family." That is good news indeed (sorry, couldn't resist ) for fans of the very attractive Ms. Good. I noticed her when she appeared as a tattoo artist in Biker Boyz five years ago, but she first made an impression in Eve's Bayou in 1997. Recently she's had substantial parts in Waist Deep and Stomp the Yard. As far as her horror credentials, she was all too briefly in One Missed Call -- I was disappointed she didn't survive her big dramatic moment -- and was also in the little seen Venom.

Monika told us last month that Julie Benz was cast in a starring role as a proper and elegant Brit, so it sounds like Jigsaw is planning to bring justice to the upper crust in this edition. That might help answer the question: Where do you go with a horror sequel when the arch-villain has already been sliced open on an autopsy table? If you caught Saw IV, you know that screenwriters Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan came up with a solution to that quandary. I wasn't entirely convinced, and the story as a whole felt too schematic and perfunctory to be fully satisfying, but I remain eternally optimistic. David Hackl is directing from a script by Melton and Dunstan. Saw V is set to open on October 24.

Remember David Goyer's Jewish-themed thriller that Scott told us about back in February? About the dybhuk -- "an angry, undead spirit that possesses a human being?" The spin was that it would be the dybhuk of a boy who died in Auschwitz, and is now terrorizing a young woman played by Cloverfield's Odette Yustman. Gary Oldman signed on to play a "spiritual specialist" and The OC's Cam Gigandet took the role of the haunted girl's boyfriend. Now, The Hollywood Reporter posts that the film has a name -- Unborn -- and more cast -- Meagan Good (Stomp the Yard), Carla Gugino (Sin City), Jane Alexander (Fur), Idris Elba (American Gangster), and Rhys Coiro (24).

With the players in place, this is how it's breaking down -- Yustman's haunted girl is getting Good as a best friend, Coiro as a college professor, and Gugino as a mother. Meanwhile, Alexander is playing a Holocaust survivor and sister of the slain boy, and Elba will be a priest helping Rabbi Oldman with the exorcisms.

Oldman is enough to have me intrigued, but more in a Hebrew Hammer sort of way -- a down-and-dirty Rabbinical Spiritual Specialist. Dig it? Heck, I'm even itching to see Alexander as the sister. However, a serious Holocaust spook story? I'm not so sure. Eh, we'll see soon enough -- principal photography got underway today.

It seems like an odd choice to hire a Frenchman to remake a film by Japanese master Takashi Miike. I've only seen half a dozen Miike features to date, which isn't many considering that he makes at least that number in any given year. But I can say that his style ranges from utterly insane to completely cracked, and few French filmmakers -- who generally specialize in intelligence and austerity -- could match him. But director Eric Valette brings something interesting to the new remake of One Missed Call. Most horror remakes come complete with an undisguised sense of callousness, and almost flat-out disdain, for their intended customers. But One Missed Call has a kind of effective low-key tone. Perhaps it was confusion or sheer laziness, but it worked for me far better than some other junky remakes I've seen.

Sure, the story is unbelievably stupid, and the film doesn't do much to justify its silly logic. Both this and Miike's film were adapted from a novel by Yasushi Akimoto, and I'd like to believe that the novel made a far better argument for its plot. A med student, Shelley (Meagan Good), dies after receiving a mysterious phone call. After her death, her phone mysteriously dials a friend, and that friend dies. And so on. The calls come in dated and timed to some point in the near future, and the recipient of the call hears his or her own voice at the moment of their death. So they know exactly what day and time they're going to die and they know what they're going to say, but that information can't help some of the dumber characters from saving their own lives. One character sits at a café with only one minute to go to his impending death. Instead of sitting there safe one minute longer, he decides to get up and cross a busy street.

What's up with Sir Ben Kingsley as of late? First, he co-stars opposite Mary-Kate Olsen in The Wackiness, and now he's teaching Mike Myers how to wear a chastity belt in The Love Guru. Obviously, the man who won an Oscar for his portrayal of Ghandi is looking to delve into some more commercial comedic fare, and The Hollywood Reporter tells us the actor has officially signed on to the Myers comedy as "Guru Tugginmypudha, the ashram leader who teaches the title character (Myers) how to love himself and wear a chastity belt." Nice. Meagan Good and John Oliver have also joined the cast, which already includes Myers, his Shrek the Third buddy Justin Timberlake, Jessica Alba, Verne "Mini Me" Troyer and Romany Malco (who I'm really digging on Weeds).

I've been itching to see Myers take on another bizarre character that wasn't either an animated green ogre or Austin Powers, and from what I've heard his love guru shtick is pretty hilarious. Should the film be a hit, look for Myers to be well on his way toward another popular franchise. There aren't many people left who are funny enough to carry an entire movie dressed up as some lunatic, and with the exception of Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat, it appears as if those SNL skit-type flicks are fading fast. Can Myers revive them? In The Love Guru, he plays an American raised in India by gurus who returns to his homeland in an attempts to help those in need. Alba's character, who plays the manager of the Toronto Maple Leafs (if you can believe that) hires The Love Guru to help one of her players (Malco) when his girlfriend (Good) ditches him for a rival hockey player (Timberlake). And if that doesn't sound absurd enough, Troyer will be playing the Leaf's coach. Fantabulous! The film begins shooting this Friday in Toronto, and is currently scheduled to arrive in theaters on June 20.