VictorGarcia Tagged Articles at Cinematical

It's time to give up your dreams of Dominique Swain and snuff films -- The Hollywood Reporter has posted the cast list of the upcoming horror film Slaughter, and Ms. Swain is no longer in the picture. They say she's having scheduling conflicts, which I presume is due to her role in another heart-warming tale called Trance. Instead, Erica Leerhsen (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) has taken over her role, and will be joined by Shawnee Smith (Amanda from the Saw series), AnnaLynne McCord (Day of the Dead), Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa (Elektra), Eugenia Yuan (The Eye 2), Karl Yune (Memoirs of a Geisha), and Jonathon Trent (Alone with Her).

Basically, these girls (Smith, Leerhsen, McCord) are aspiring actresses who land some Japanese work. Instead of traversing the ocean to get one step closer to superstardom, they find themselves cast in a snuff film. I wonder if they realize this from the get-go, or are running around, thinking that all of their dangerous props are fake until one of them slices and dices? Tagawa is playing the director, Yuan is playing the producer, Yune is the male co-star, and Trent is playing the boyfriend of McCord's character. The film is based on a Slamdance Horror Screenplay Competition script by Nathan Brookes and Bobby Lee Darby, with Víctor García taking up the directorial duties. IMDb says production has already started, and I would hope so, it they want to keep their January 20 release date. Talk about a quick turn-around!

Rogue

I don't care how many times they push it back, or how much potential for hackneyed disaster there is in a film about a killer crocodile -- I'm looking forward to Rogue, mostly because there was a lot that impressed me about Greg Mclean's debut film, 2005's Wolf Creek. For one thing, it was bold enough to defy several horror cliches, such as foreshadowing dread in the early scenes -- the first thirty minutes of Wolf Creek could be part of an Aussie road drip dramedy, with three aimless kids taking their rickety car way too far into unsafe areas of the Outback. It's also a film that's completely unrelenting in the psychic trauma it wants to inflict on the audience. By the time the slaughtering starts, we know these characters -- we care about them. Frankly, Mclean seems like he'd be completely bored with making a standard slasher/monster film with paper-thin characters. Therefore, I'm going to be first in line for his killer croc movie, and wait for my enthusiasm to blow up in my face.

Friday the 13th

I have no idea if this will get to theaters by late 2008, but I know that Platinum Dunes does have the gears grinding, so it's a possibility. In fact, a little birdie recently told me something hilarious -- Corey Feldman went in and pitched himself as the star of this thing. For those who don't remember, Feldman played Vorhees foe Tommy Jarvis in two installments of the original series, and he apparently had designs on making the Friday remake his newest comeback vehicle. There's really nothing you can do with Jason at this point other than remake him, but how? Word is that PD wants the remake to feature both Jason and his trademark mask -- two elements that didn't congeal until Part III of the original series, so I'm imagining a smelting together of the first three films, set in modern day and with a lot of in-jokes. I guess it will be a film about a little boy who drowns in a lake and immediately morphs into an overgrown, lumbering killer with a machete. Sounds intriguing.

Rogue Pictures, Focus Features' genre arm, is putting together a very creepy-sounding movie with producer Amy Kaufman (once a Focus exec) and director Victor García. The film, which will focus on "a girl who wakes up from a 15-year coma and finds herself in a haunted hospital ward," is based on a pitch by Garcia himself and will be written by Craig Gerber. (According to Google, that's a haunted hospital right over there. Who am I to argue?)

Garcia, who was born in Barcelona, has directed only a few shorts, but one of them -- a nine-minute Spanish-language horror film called El Ciclo -- was a festival success, and brought him to Hollywood's attention. The short is available at Atom Films, and has a pretty good rating, but since the categories are "extreme" and "violent," I'm afraid to watch it. If the brave among you have a few minutes, check it out and let us know how it is. Though the IMDb lists another horror feature (entitled Smoke, about an abused woman experiencing premonitions) in preproduction, Variety insists that the untitled Rogue film will be Garcia's first full-length effort.