I figure I'm about 20 years older, at least, than the target demographic for The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2. I understand that there are some movies where I'll always feel a little old or out of touch, because they're just not made with me in mind, no matter how good or bad those movies are. Fortunately, I had no trouble empathizing with the four young women who are bound to friendship through their magical bifurcated nether garment -- more so than I did with the Sex and the City gang, who are much closer to my age.

Like Sex and the City, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 works better if you know the characters already through their previous appearances, because you're already emotionally invested in them. I hadn't read the young-adult novels by Ann Brashares, but my sister, who is a big fan, filled me in and we determined that this movie is based mostly on the fourth book in the series, with a few changes, so even if you've read the books you get some surprises.

I've got to wonder... If there is an afterlife, can those who have died see what's happening on earth? Variety has just reported that Peter Hyams is going to helm a remake of Fritz Lang's last American film -- Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. What would Lang say if he heard this his film was going to be remade by the man who brought us Running Scared, Timecop, The Relic, and End of Days? That's not to say that the man can't do it, or that great directors can't fail (as Gus Van Sant's Psycho taught us), but his track record doesn't instill much confidence.

The classic, which focuses on an ill-advised scheme to point out the flimsiness of circumstantial evidence, will get "a true 21st century spin for a new generation of cinema-goers," according to Foresight head Mark Damon. Yet again, I ask why it couldn't have just been "inspired by." The original plot: A publisher wants to make a point about how crappy circumstantial evidence is, so he talks his would-be son-in-law into planting clues suggesting he was behind a recent murder. At the last moment, they could bring out the truth and reveal the flaws in the system and death penalty. However, the guy holding that all-too-important information dies and mucks up the plan.

Anyhow, it's got an, um, interesting cast to boot -- Michael Douglas, Amber Tamblyn, and Jesse Metcalfe. They've certainly younged it up a bit -- the main players in the original, names like Dana Andrews and Joan Fontaine, were all at least in their mid-thirties. Whatever the case, we've got the King of California, plus a girl with a kick-arse 3D glasses-wearing dad and some traveling pants, and John Tucker all spun together for this century. I like most of the cast, and I still can't help but think: Why bother?

If you've seen the horror flick Hatchet, you might have preconceived notions about filmmaker Adam Green, and therefore about Spiral, which he co-directed with Joel David Moore, and which screened at Fantastic Fest a year after Hatchet played there so successfully. But you'd be wrong -- this film has very little in common with the old-school horror of Hatchet. Spiral is an odd film, a combination of indie-relationship film and thriller that stands on the precipice of gory horror and threatens to dive into a potential bloodbath.

The action -- or the hint that action might occur -- focuses around Mason (Joel David Moore), an asthmatic painter with an almost pathological lack of social skills, who appears to be harboring some dark nasty secrets. He works in a dull insurance company, where his longtime best friend Berkeley (Zachary Levi) is his boss. As Mason sits at lunch, flipping through a book of sketches of a woman who has been haunting his dreams, another woman starts a conversation with him. Amber (Amber Tamblyn) also works in his building, and slowly makes friends with Mason. She agrees to pose for paintings that he sketches out beforehand. It all seems quite sweet, the awkward guy and the cute girl ... but what happened to his previous model, and what will he decide to do about (or with) Amber?

Yep, that's right. You'll soon find a DVD on the shelves called Havoc 2: Normal Adolescent Behavior, which is not a sequel at all, really. Here's how I think it went down: Beth Schachter's Normal Adolescent Behavior played at the Tribeca Film Festival a few months back and got picked up by New Line, who then slapped the phrase "Havoc 2" in front of the title and promptly scheduled the flick for an October 16 release date. But why would you re-name a movie Havoc 2 when the first Havoc barely played in theaters?

I suspect it's because the generally chaste Anne Hathaway got extra-sexy in Havoc -- whereas Havoc 2 stars TV starlet Amber Tamblyn. And the logical assumption is that Ms. Tamblyn will also show some now-of-age skin in the new flick. According to the IMDb the "sequel" is about a (very) tight-knit group of high school friends who 'hook up' only with each other. Until, that is, one girl finds a new boy she likes ... and that's when nutty girl Billie (Kelli Garner) gets all psycho-emo. Perhaps the Havoc series will run for years; whenever another Disney-scrubbed starlet wants to shed her goody-two-shoes image and drop some threads for the camera, New Line could kick-start another Havoc flick! Put me in charge of that division!

Aha, our own report from early last year offers a quick correction: This was not a New Line pick-up, but a full-bore New Line production. But yes, in the formative stages it was known as simply Normal Adolescent Behavior and not Havoc 2. Back then the project was described as a "darkly comic look at sexual politics among precocious and privileged teenagers." Now it looks like a festival flick that's been branded with a silly name for little besides reasons of marketing. Needless to say ... I'll be renting it. (Check out the cover art over at DVDActive.com.)

The girl-empowerment flick Sisterhood of The Traveling Pants was a mild hit at the box office, pulling in $37 million and received warm reviews from some critics and from fans of the original teen novel series by Ann Brashares. The film also helped launch the career of America Ferrera (TV's Ugly Betty). Variety recently confirmed that Warner Bros. is now putting together a sequel to the 2005 film, with an early shooting date planned. The original cast (Ferrera, Amber Tamblyn, Blake Lively, and Alexis Bledel) is currently in talks to return, and set to direct is Sanaa Hamri, who is known for helming music videos by Mariah Carey and Jay-Z, among others; she also made her feature directing debut on the film Something New. The film is being penned by co-writer of the original, Elizabeth Chandler.

The story will be based on the fourth book of Brashare's series (Forever in Blue) and meets up with the four girls, now in their college years, as a pair of jeans sees them through some tough times. Since the girls are growing up, the film is planning on a PG-13 rating this time around -- while still keeping the subject matter family-friendly I'm sure. WB hopes to start shooting on location this June in locations around the world including New York, Turkey, Greece, Providence, and Vermont but WB is apparently willing to accommodate the TV shooting schedules of the principle cast. Ferrera is returning to another season of Ugly Betty, Bledel is apparently going to be coming back for another year of Gilmore Girls, and Tamblyn is working on a drama pilot for CBS. That seems like quite a few schedules to co-ordinate so it might take some time before they can finally agree on a date.

Stephanie Daley revolves around the actions of its titular character, a quiet, well-spoken sixteen-year-old girl played by Amber Tamblyn, who gets herself pregnant on the first try, carries the child to term and then delivers it in an isolated bathroom during a ski trip and suffocates it with toilet paper. Collapsing from blood loss in the snow minutes afterwards, her situation is immediately discovered and becomes a sensation for the media, which tags her with one of those disposable, insensitive monikers designed to grab a fickle audience and hold them for a few minutes: 'the ski mom.' In a neat dramatic contrivance, Daley, as preparation for her criminal trial, is ordered to be evaluated by 40-something forensic psychologist Lydie Crane (Tilda Swinton) who is heavily pregnant after a long and draining struggle to be so -- a struggle that included a prior pregnancy resulting in stillbirth. We eventually learn that, against the wishes of her now distant husband, Lydie chose to have that stillborn disposed of like medical waste rather than be given a name or a funeral service.

Tamblyn's role in Stephanie Daley's double act is largely a thankless one, since her task is to be mostly inscrutable during her interview sessions with Swinton's character, giving the audience no 'in' as to why an otherwise mannered, seemingly thoughtful girl would take such a drastic step to rid herself of a baby instead of seeking out an abortion or carrying and then giving it up for adoption. When Stephanie does speak, she often talks about being judged by God or spouts one-liners so loaded as to make the audience feel that they may be watching a character trying to make a play for an insanity defense -- at one point, she casually references a 'jinx' that hovers over her existence. Are we supposed to view Stephanie as remarkably contemplative for her age or just as a teenager who has seen enough Law & Order to know that she better come up a damn good reason for why she did what she did? That there's no clear answer is dramatically intriguing up to a point, but it's also frustrating.

What makes The Grudge 2 so bad? It goes without saying that it's a sequel, a remake and a remake of a sequel, which -- as far as Hollywood is concerned -- makes it a safe bet three times over. Probably less obvious is that the film continues an almost 30-year tradition of trying to re-create the success of John Carpenter's groundbreaking Halloween (1978), a pared-down scare flick in which the only thing that happens is a supernatural being hunting down and killing innocent characters.

But there's something else going on here. Horror movies are the ultimate in "body" cinema, or cinema that we experience physically, rather than mentally or spiritually. Because of this, nudity and sex have always gone hand-in-hand with the genre -- even before nudity could be shown. Look at Cat People (1942), in which the heroine turns into a murderous feline when sexually aroused, or the shower scene in Psycho (1960), the ultimate in vulnerability.

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Though I hardly remember exactly what happened, I've only been stuck in an elevator one time in thirty years on this planet. I was eight, we were at Macy's and just like in the movies, there was a pregnant woman trapped in there with us. And she was scared. Real scared. Pregnant women are scary as it is, but throw them in an elevator that's stuck between floors and, well, terms like 'the end of the world' immediately come to mind.

Amber Tamblyn will look to tap into that uncomfortable, claustrophobic feeling, as the actress has just signed on to star in the indie thriller Blackout. With Rigoberto Castaneda directing, pic will revolve around three people trapped in a hospital elevator for 24 hours. What's thrilling about that? Well, what if one of the three was a doctor-turned-psychopathic killer (Aidan Gillen)? Yikes. I wonder if they pitched it as Phone Booth, but in an elevator? Tamblyn will play a young woman desperate to get to her dying grandmother and the third elevator victim will be a teen who wants to run away with his girlfriend. Will they live? Will they die? And who will have to go to the bathroom first? Production is set to begin next month in Spain.

There's no moss on Amber Tamblyn. (Is that an expression, or did I just make it up?) In the roughly two years since the dearly departed Joan of Arcadia stopped filming, she's had two films released, and has another three in various stage of production, including The Grudge 2. To this point, her post-Joan output has been a canny mix of the commercial (the afore-mentioned Grudge sequel, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants) and the indie (Stephanie Daley, the forthcoming Spiral), and her latest job suggests that pattern will continue.

Tamblyn has signed on to star in Normal Adolescent Behavior, the debut feature from screenwriter Beth Schacter. A New Line production, the film is described as a "darkly comic look at sexual politics among precocious and privileged teenagers," and sounds like yet another solid choice for a (really) young woman who either has brilliant advisers or is preternaturally wise when it comes to her career -- it'll be great to see her take on what sounds like a deliciously catty, nasty role.

Stephanie Daley is the strongest proof I've seen this year that the Sundance Lab – designed to give emerging filmmakers the creative and financial support they need to raise their game – is doing something right. The film is beautifully – and by all appearances expensively – shot, and its cast (toplined by executive producer Tilda Swinton and Amber Tamblyn, whose rabid Joan of Arcadia fanbase surely helped to get this film made) is full of name actors, and from afar it has every visual marker of a high-gloss, commercial thriller. But writer-director Hilary Brougher (she was last here in 1997, with her debut, The Sticky Fingers of Time) has hardly made a Hollywood confection. Daley is essentially a non-linear case study of the psychological swirl around two parellel pregnancies: that of Lydie, a 40-ish forensic psychologist whose marriage and psyche are still recovering from a stillbirth, and the mysterious case of the title character (Tamblyn), a high schooler on trial for throwing her newborn daughter in a trash can. Right before her scheduled pregnancy leave, Lydie is asked by the prosecutor's office to conduct a series of examinations with Stephanie, who claims innocence and refuses to take a plea deal. It's Liddy's job to get Stephanie to talk, and the young girl's story, told through flashback, is woven through the older woman's trepidatious third trimester, as she worries for health, doubts her husband's fidelity, and tries to come to terms with the child she's already lost. The material, in different hands, could have easily have drifted into Lifetime movie territory, but Brougher brings a fearless spirit to the thing. There's a rawness to Stephanie Daley that we rarely see in American film – it paints slick composition and beautiful, bleeding color on the kind of story about sex and faith that no one has told well since before Lars Von Trier decided to tackle American imperialism with Brechtian critique.

Before the events in question, Stephanie's only tragedy is that she's sadly ordinary. A shy but precocious teen, she's young enough to still feel bound to her religious mother and internet-addict father, but just old enough to start pursuing an urgent curiosity about sex. One summer night, she follows "faster" friend Rhana (The Squid and the Whale's Halley Feiffer, again doing impeccably natural work) to a party. A friend of a friend of a friend's parents are out of town; an older brother has picked up a keg; and Stephanie has tarted herself up in eyeshadow and miniskirt, more to impress Rhana than any particular boy. Add in Stephanie's simultaneous desperate need to be touched, and near total sexual naivety, and it's not hard to imagine what's going to happen when the cute boy manning the keg cocks his head and asks her name. Sure enough, there's an empty master bedroom upstairs, and sure enough, young Cory wants to do more than kiss. Stephanie's deflowering comes to an end with a loud pounding on the door – another pair of young "lovers" want their turn – and with those ever-assuring three little words from the mouth of her suitor: "I didn't come." Nine months later, on a school ski trip, she's collapsed from blood loss in the snow; five months after that, she's pushed to Liddy's door.