mark wheaton Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Her last horror outing, of 10 biblical plagues and The Reaping, wasn't the most loved piece of scary cinema to hit the screens, but the 2-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank is trying again. I'm not sure what has brought about her recent attraction to fantastical horror, but Variety reports that Swank will star in an upcoming adaptation of John Marks' recent novel, Fangland -- a project that she will produce with Das Films and Blumhouse Productions. Mark Wheaton, scribe of The Messengers, handed in the project's first draft just before the strike -- and he's the same guy whose Unfinished Country script just got Samuel L. Jackson to take the lead.

John Marks is a former producer of 60 Minutes, and Fangland merges Bram Stoker's legend of Dracula with his experience on the news show. Yes, that means Hilary is heading back to the vamps, but with a little more drama than her role on Buffy. Evangeline Harker (Swank) is a producer for a television news show who takes an assignment to go into Romania and investigate a criminal legend, Ion Torgu, to get him on camera. This will put Swank face to face with more stories about crazy plagues, first, because one can't get enough of terrible disease. Soon, Torgu accosts her, impersonating Dracula. Like Stoker's tale, Harker finds herself held for months, before she pops up in a Transylvanian monastery as this Torgu Dracula gets introduced to New York City. Since only the first draft has been completed, this production will, most likely, be in the works for a while yet. I wonder... will Swank get accosted by the same, lustful vixen vamps? If you've read it, or would just like to comment on Swank taking on Dracula, please chime in!

You know, you just can't trust the youth. They get all these lofty ideas about things and want to go changing all that you have carefully set up and organized, as if they know best. Samuel L. Jackson will be the latest to deal with meddlesome new ideas in a film that sounds like it could be some solid, serious work for the actor. The Hollywood Reporter has posted that Jackson has signed on to star in a fact-based film, being described as a Training Day-style thriller, called Unfinished Country -- penned by The Messengers scribe Mark Wheaton.

Jackson will play a man named Elton, who works as the chief administrator in the overcrowded, largest hospital in the world -- Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital, which is located in South Africa's violent Soweto ghettos. (And the people in Grey's Anatomy think they've got it bad.) "Elton's methods of treating patients are put into question when a young U.S. medical student arrives to do his residency, and the hospital gets caught in the crossfire of local gang warfare." The project will head to South Africa for filming, but first they've got to find a director and the young medical student, as neither were listed in the news piece. For now, you can check Jackson out in The Cleaner, a thriller that stars Jackson as a former cop who becomes a crime scene cleaner -- the film opens on the 14th.

Following the Labor Day success of Rob Zombie's re-invented Halloween, we knew it wouldn't be long before our old pal Jason Voorhees popped back up on the big screen. Like folks are just going to sit around and let Michael Myers soak up that box office cha-ching all by himself. No. Not a chance. There have been rumors circling around a new Friday the 13th flick for awhile now, with some saying they'd do a franchise re-boot (a la Halloween), though I have a feeling the peeps over at Platinum Dunes were waiting to see how well Myers was received in his return. And now that they've seen him rake in the dollars, they've apparently decided to fast-track the flick and place it on their pre-strike roster, replacing Roger Clemens: Will The Man Ever Retire???? (Not a real title, but a film someone should probably make -- after all, the dude seems to have more lives than Freddy, Jason and Myers)

According to ShockTillYouDrop, who've heard from a source that is "100%, solid gold, baby," Dunes has just brought writers Damian Shannon and Mark Swift on to pen a draft of the new Friday the 13th. For those that don't remember, Shannon and Swift were also the guys who brought us Freddy vs. Jason -- a film I still have not seen in its entirety, though I've heard fans enjoyed it. Shock also gives us a little backstory on the current film, recalling how early drafts from Mark Wheaton (The Messengers) were shelved, and that Jonathan Liebesman was attached as director. There's currently no word on whether Liebesman is still onboard, or what direction they'll be taking the franchise, but there's now a pretty good chance we'll see that freaky hockey mask guy wreak havoc at some point within the next year.

Today we read from the Horror Movie Bible, chapter 13, verse 666: "When there are no Asian horror movies left to remake, Asian filmmakers will alight to Hollywood and create Americanized versions of The Ring, The Grudge and Dark Water and lo the PG-13 rating will be applied -- and it will be not good." But since The Messengers was written by a really cool horror geek named Mark Wheaton, I walked into an opening day matinee screening of the flick with some high hopes. Despite everything the TV spots, the trailers and the pre-release buzz had been telling me, I was actively intent on trying to enjoy The Messengers. Sorry to say that my pilot light of enthusiasm was snuffed out after less than twelve minutes of on-screen activity. This is a stunningly inert, painfully derivative, shamelessly cheap and aggressively dull ghost story that delivers nothing you haven't seen before. About 43 times.

Clocking in at a scant 84 minutes (and that's including a tiresome prologue and a lengthy opening credits sequence), The Messengers is The Grudge on a farm (The Grarm!) -- and it's about as thrilling as that description implies. It's about a family of four (Mom, Dad, Teenage Daughter, Mute Boy Toddler) who bail on Chicago in favor of Nowheresville, North Dakota. (Dad's got a bee in his bonnet about becoming a sunflower farmer, darnit, and nothing's gonna get in the way of that dream!) While Mom, Dad and Mute Toddler go about settling into their new home, teenage daughter has a problem; basically, she sees shadows, visions, apparitions, etc. -- and of course nobody believes her. (There's a ridiculously prolonged backstory about why Mom and Dad don't completely trust Teenage Daughter, but it's much too silly to get into at this point.)

What do you do when there are no more Asian horror flicks left to rip off remake? Well, you hire some of the finest Asian filmmakers, fly 'em over here, and hire them to churn out American horror movies, of course! After having Takashi Shimizu remake his own The Grudge for American audiences (and to much profit, of course), Sony tapped the vaunted Pang Brothers (The Eye) to helm something kinda similar to the most popular Asian horrorshows ... but not really. This explains why this new trailer for The Messengers looks a whole lot like just another haunted house piece, only with pale phantom limbs where they shouldn't be and those creepy twisted bodies that twitch around in icky fashion. (Call it The Amityville Horror meets The Grudge, as if there's much difference in the first place.)

Written by Mark Wheaton (Firestorm: Last Stand at Yellowstone) from a story by Todd Farmer (Jason X), The Messengers seems to be about a teenage girl who sees spooky spirits after her family moves into a dusty old house. Imagine that.

If there's a saving grace here (aside from it being a horror movie and therefore something I must see eventually) it could be the cast: Kristen Stewart, Penelope Ann Miller, Dylan McDermott and John Corbett can usually contribute enough for a half-decent 90-some minutes. Either way, you can expect a PG-13 all the way from The Messengers, as it hails from Sam Raimi's Ghost House Pictures, the diet-horror production shingle that gave you Boogeyman and The Grudge 2. Let's just hope the movie's a lot better than the trailer. The Messengers opens on February 9.

The last time we had some news about The Messengers, Scott Weinberg let us in on word of delays and re-shoots, neither of which seemed to bode well for the US debut of the Pang Brothers. Well, it looks like Sony is ready to go ahead with the horror-thriller and released the usual trinity of movie marketing, a web site, a trailer, and now the poster.

JoBlo.com has a first look at the one-sheet for the film starring Dylan McDermott, Penelope Ann Miller, and Kristen Stewart. The story takes place on a sunflower farm, (sunflower farm? Um, ok...) where a family turns on one another as the result of some "supernatural" influences. Thai directors Danny and Oxide Pang (The Eye) are helming the script for the horror written by Mark Wheaton and Todd Farmer. Wheaton, who you might know as Smilin' Jack Ruby from CHUD and Ain't It Cool News, has made the leap from writing about the movies to getting a feature film with a major studio. The bad news though, is that both the trailer and the poster only look so-so. Plus, I think they should have really thought twice about that tagline.

If all of that hasn't managed to cool your jets then you won't be waiting long, The Messengers hits theaters February, 2007.