manhunt Tagged Articles at Cinematical

We're four weeks into 2009's summer movie season. X-Men Origins: Wolverine got things off to a soggy start and was eclipsed by Star Trek as a popular favorite. Not many were impressed by Angels & Demons (though it did big business overseas), leading into this long weekend with Terminator Salvation and Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian doing battle (and a little Dance Flick on the side).

So what are your general impressions so far? I was disappointed by Wolverine and loved Star Trek. My ambitious weekend viewing plans began with a viewing of Terminator Salvation, which satisfied the 12-year-old boy in me, but left the adult me sorely hungry for more substantial entertainment. So I watched two DVDs that came out last Tuesday. Fritz Lang's Man Hunt (1941) stars Walter Pidgeon as a British big game hunter whose "sporting stalk" of Hitler ends up with the hunter becoming the hunted. Lang is an elegant, efficient storyteller; Man Hunt is intelligent and thoughtful. Peter Yates' The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) features Robert Mitchum (pictured) as the weary, wary "Eddie Fingers," a loyal, long-term, low-level Boston hood. Really, though, the story revolves around his "friends" -- criminal colleagues and law enforcement officers, people who don't really care about Eddie. Even with bank robberies and intense stake-outs and stand-offs, the real impact comes from the characters and what happens to them.

What did you watch over the Memorial Day weekend? Feel free to elaborate in the comments section.

I know, it's been a while since I've written one of these gore-soaked missives, but the upside to that is ... we have a lot to talk about! And since I wrote this during a lazy Sunday (happy belated holidays, btw) I figure it's time to break out the candy-coated bullet points! Let's start out with a freaky fistful of upcoming DVD releases:

Currently strewn across shelves are Donkey Punch and Vinyan, two festival-heavy horror films that couldn't possibly be more different. One's about venal young jerks, and the other is about heartbroken (but stupid) parents. Really bad things happen to all of them.

This Tuesday we're getting the old-school-style monster movie Splinter, which is really quite good. If you like prickly monsters, that is. On the same day ... whoa. It looks like someone actually bothered to exhume flicks like Repossessed, Slaughter High, and My Best Friend Is a Vampire. That sound you just heard was my Netflix queue getting fatter.

Come the 21st we get J.T. Petty's The Burrowers, which played (and played well) at last year's Fantastic Fest, and Robert Hall's Laid to Rest, which is sort of like a non-snarky slasher throwback with a hint of Phantasm-style weirdness. Couldn't find a stranger double feature than these two, believe me.

And mark your calendars, gore-lovers, for April 28, because that's when Martyrs finally hits R1 DVD. According to the UK poster, Scoot Weinberg says it "makes Saw look like Sesame Street," which is one of the most shameless blurbs I've ever heard. Even if the guy is correct, brilliant, and really handsome. (Trust me, this is one rough horror movie.) Also on this Tuesday we'll get the unofficial Donnie Darko sequel, and a movie starring Amber Benson called One-Eyed Monster. I leave the jokes to you fine folks.

By the time this whole Indy 4 nonsense is all said and done, I think I'm going to compile a list of all quotes spoken by Harrison Ford, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Frank Marshall. Once I have them all laid out on some industrial role of construction paper, I believe I will travel to a wide open field and burn them...while laughing maniacally towards the moon and screaming, "Damn you Indiana Jones!"

Okay, now that I've exposed my troubled side, Harrison Ford recently spoke with Moviehole and divulged more information regarding some of his upcoming projects. First off, how about the stuff he's not working on? According to Ford,  “Godspeed is gone, that was a space project with James Cameron." The ambitious sci-fi pic was to tell of an evil that invades a space station and threatens to kill everything. Next up for Ford was supposed to be Manhunt, a story about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Ford says, "That would seem to be next”.  “[There’s] a bunch of other things that have come to fruition...recently." Hmm, sounds to me like someone is unofficially telling us that Indy 4 is heating up.

On another Indy note, Steven Spielberg finally went on record the other day by telling someone in Israel that he's "about to make Indiana Jones 4, which is, as far as I am concerned, the sweet dessert I could give those who had to chow down on the bitter herbs that I've used in Munich. There you have it - Indy 4 is officially still kind of officially happening soon...we think.