ThoraBirch Tagged Articles at Cinematical

We often tie our Tuesday Cinematical Seven picks with DVD releases, and this time, I was torn. On the one side, there was the out-to-lunch Hollywood science that allowed there to be identical cousins in The Patty Duke Show. But aside from the wonder of creating a girl with a crappy computer, a barbie, and some David Lee Roth personality, there wasn't much I felt could battle with cousins who look exactly alike. But then there's also the DVD release of the first two seasons of Felicia Day's famous web series, The Guild. Sold -- The Best Big-Screen Geek Girls.

Elisabeth's Geek Beat recently discussed what it means to be geek, and for the purposes of this list: It's on-screen characters who have smarts and delight in things that usual characters don't. They might love learnin', comics, computers, geek flicks, or even following around freaky people and collecting warped memorabilia. They're a little bit different, all sorts of kickass, and all sorts of worthy for the Best Big Screen Geek Girls. Check out the rundown after the jump and weigh in with your own picks!

She might not be able to wear animated miniskirts and fly around as Tinker Bell, but Brittany Murphy is going to get the chance to have a breakdown. The Hollywood Reporter posts that Murphy is teaming up with Thora Birch, Tammy Blanchard, and Marc Blucas for a new psychological thriller helmed by Sean McConville called Deadline.

Similar to The Shining, Deadline stars Murphy as a writer who decides to go to an abandoned house to write a screenplay. But instead of serial killers who don't die or weird kids on trikes, a "bout of writer's block and other unforeseen events lead her to a psychological breakdown." I assume that the rest of the players are accompanying her to the house, or live nearby or something, unless there are flashbacks or weird apparitions.

However it's being done, it'll be great to see both Murphy and Birch get creepy again. My favorite Brittany film was Don't Say a Word, and Thora handled eerie fare well in The Hole (that British school kid movie that also starred Keira Knightley and had both of them locked in a hole in the ground). (It'll also be nice to see Birch in something again -- her last films came out in 2006, although she has a handful of projects in the works now.) And also, Blucas -- will he be good like Riley, good with a tough shell exterior like Animal in Prey for Rock & Roll, or bad, bad, bad? Shooting began Wednesday in Louisiana.

We love to do the whole "embed" thing where YouTube trailers are concerned, but since this promo clip for the upcoming horror flick Train has some harsh violence, sweaty sexuality, and two or four bare boobies, we'll just share the link -- and then offer a silly reminder that this trailer is not, as they say, work-safe. (Unless you make horror movies for a living, in which case I'd say this clip is perfectly appropriate. Invite your boss into your office to watch it.)

When we last discussed this project, we were hearing from writer/director Gideon Raff that the flick is technically not a remake of Terror Train, but just a horror flick with a pretty similar plot. I could care less, frankly, if it's a remake or not, but I can say that I'm slightly impressed with the ferocity found in the trailer. Basically it looks like Hostel on a creepy old train, and I do believe that could make for a fairly diverting way to spend 91 minutes. (Or the flick could suck raw eggs, but your recent remake alternatives include Prom Night, April Fools Day and Shutter, so maybe this one looks half-decent by default.)

The Millennium / Nu Image item stars Thora Birch, Gideon Emery and Derek Magyar. No word yet on who'll be distributing the flick, but we'll let you know new stuff when we know new stuff.

I'd just like to take a second to mourn what I thought would be a great career for Thora Birch. She went from a number of "eh" roles to a really breakout performance in American Beauty. A few years later, she starred in the ultra-quirky and likable Ghost World, which nabbed her a Golden Globe nod, and a chilling stint in the thriller The Hole with Keira Knightley. Sure, she had a bit part in Silver City, which was far from horror, but beyond that, it's like she made a pact with the devil to give up the non-ghoulish, non-dark cinema.

The latest in her ever-growing list -- she's signed on to star in Train, the remake of Terror Train, filling in the shoes of the ultimate Scream Queen, Jamie Lee Curtis. (Scott Weinberg first posted about the film back in April.) While that doesn't mean all hope is lost, since Curtis has some great films once she stopped screaming (although has tanked recently), it's not giving me much hope for the Birch future. It's too bad, especially considering all the crappy 20-something actresses who usually haunt the roles for young women.

The Bulgarian site that brings this news also has word on another film gearing up to shoot in the country -- Shark in Venice. Directed by Danny Lerner, the movie will star the born-again Stephen Baldwin and Vanessa Johansson, Scarlett's older sis. She's getting a heck of a resume lately -- she's got one film completed, and two others in post-production. Will she get as big as her little sister?

[via HorrorMovies.ca]

"The plot and the structure of it and what the meaning is and what the events are representational of. I found that to be confusing. -- Thora Birch, in a recent interview about her latest film, Dark Corners. Oh, good. So it's not just me. Something of a cross between A Nightmare on Elm Street and Drew Barrymore's Doppelganger, Dark Corners, which is being released on DVD today, asks us to follow two parallel story threads, each of which stars a Birch character. In one of the stories, we get a character that I'll call Heaven Thora, who has honey-blonde hair and a handsome husband and leaves an upscale suburban home every day to go to a comfortably boring office job, where no one presumably bothers her with questions about what she's been up to since Ghost World. In the other story, we have Hell Thora, a big-haired, sluttily-dressed mortician's assistant who is inhabiting a nightmare world with a bunch of possessed demon-people who paw at windows and swipe at you with sharp instruments if you get too close.

Each Thora exists as a recurring dream for the other Thora, and this is a big problem for Heaven Thora, because she's currently battling through a high-class problem: she is subjecting herself to IVF treatments in order to conceive a child, and a recurring nightmare in which she's a member of Vixen is not in keeping with the doctor's orders to relax. To nip this problem in the bud, Heaven Thora visits a psychotherapist, played by British actor Toby Stephens. In an awkwardly written scene, he sits her down in front of a spinning crystal, putting her to sleep so that he can hypnotically suggest that she rid herself of the "dream me." Planting this suggestion causes Hell Thora to be set upon by the demon people, who stab her to death. The hypno-therapist then happily announces that Heaven Thora is now rid of her doppelganger, to which she quips: "I thought you guys always dragged this kind of thing out, to make extra money." I'm re-hashing all of this because it's more or less the last scene I can explain.