Vertigo Entertainment Tagged Articles at Cinematical

I think Sarah Michelle Gellar has a compulsion for making somewhat lame supernatural thrillers. You have to give her credit for avoiding Buffy typecasting, but she does seem to be stuck in a bit of a rut lately. Her latest, Possession has just released a new poster (you can check out the full version over at IGN). Possession is a remake of the 2002 film Jungdok (Addicted). By the looks of things, Michael Petroni's (Queen of The Damned) script might be pushing the supernatural angle just a little more than the original. The feature was directed by Swedish director Joel Bergvall, who has some experience with remakes since his original film, Den Osynlige, was reworked into the teen thriller, The Invisible.

Gellar plays Jessica, a woman who suffers the double tragedy of having her husband and her brother-in-law lapse into comas after a car accident. As if that wasn't bad enough, when her brother-in-law wakes up, he claims to be her husband. Lee Pace from TV's Pushing Daisies plays Gellar's in-law and Michael Landes (Homecoming) plays her husband Ryan. The first trailer was released back in December, and it is pretty much what you would expect. Although you have to love the visual shorthand for summing up the bad seed brother-in-law (Pace) -- he spends most of the trailer shirtless, brooding, and speeding off in a vintage car -- but hey, at least it looks like a step up from The Return. Possession is currently in post-production and is scheduled to hit theaters this March.

[via CinemaBlend]

I've come to notice a trend with the production company Vertigo Entertainment. Even more than they like to make remakes of foreign horror films (The Ring; The Grudge; The Eye), they really seem to favor the recruitment of foreign filmmakers. Here is a rundown of some of the acclaimed directors they've hired: Walter Salles, from Brazil; Alejandro Agresti, from Argentina; Oliver Hirschbiegel, from Germany; French duo David Moreau and Xavier Palud; Yann Samuel, also from France; Swedish duo Joel Bergvall and Simon Sanquist; Victor García, from Spain; Yam Laranas, from Philippines; and Takashi Shimizu, Hideo Nakata and Masayuki Ochiai, all three from Japan. I guess Jim Sheridan, from Ireland, counts too. It is weird, because sometimes a filmmaker is brought out to remake his own film, like with Shimizu and The Grudge and with Laranas and The Echo, and other times a filmmaker will be assigned the remake of someone else's film while his own original film is being remade by another acclaimed director, like with Nakata and Salles and Dark Water.

The sad thing is that many of these great directors have ended up making awful movies for Vertigo. The reason is probably coincidental, and we still have yet to see if Samuel can bring his fantastically romantic vision appropriately to a pic starring Jesse Bradford and Elisha Cuthbert or if the work Hirschbiegel did on The Invasion (before being replaced -- allegedly not fired) holds up to his Oscar-nominated breakthrough. But just in case there is a curse (how fitting) on the company to ruin these foreign filmmakers, then I am glad that the latest recruit, Spain's Daniel Calparsoso, is not actually that widely respected. Actually, I'm not familiar with him at all, but his most recent film, Ausentes, has a super-low rating of 3.9 on the IMDb. Not even The Grudge 2 rated that badly. So, he certainly can't do any worse with his film for Vertigo, a trapped-in-a-loony-bin-during-a-thunderstorm-set horror film called Incident at Sans Asylum (do asylums even exist anymore??). Another thing it has going for it: it isn't a remake. The script is an original, by chef-turned-cinematographer-turned-writer Craig Zahler, who also penned Vertigo's upcoming western The Brigands of Rattleborge. Zahler was also one of Variety's "10 Screenwriters to Watch" last year.