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Once he got a taste of Die Hard, Bruce Willis was a changed man, moving from detective comedy to action hero. 21 years later, at age 54, the guy is still not stopping. In fact, he's getting offers for action gigs left, right, and center. Is this the secret for staving off age? Well, that and a face that works well with a smoothly shaved noggin?

THR's Risky Biz Blog reports that Willis is currently in talks to head three action films, although not all of them are heading down that path to success. First, there's Inventory, a thriller from NuImage/Millenium that would have the actor become a detective hunting down a murderer. Then there's Red (not to be confused with last year's Red), based on the WildStorm/DC Comic. This would have Willis playing a former black-ops agent forced out of retirement when an assassin comes after him and his girlfriend. This gig, however, could fizzle because so far, the two sides can't agree on a suitable offer. And finally, there's Scarpa, a mob biopic in the works from Antoine Fuqua, where he'd play an undercover FBI informant in New York's Columbo family. But RBB says: "the odds are growing that WIllis won't do that pic" either.

Well, he can't do every cop/law film that comes his way, even if he is the irreplacable John McClane. I can see him stepping back a little. I mean, how will he find the time? It's not like he's been lying low since Live Free or Die Hard -- he's got projects like Surrogates and A Couple of Dicks on the way. Willis might be the quintessential man of policedom, but where do you like Willis best? Do you want to see him keep fighting his way through the baddies, or are you just waiting for the next mellow Sixth Sense?

A note to anyone affiliated with a film festival that frequently employs the words scream, fear, horror, fright, dark, or creeeeepy: If you send me a press release, I'll throw you some blog-love. That's what happens when a childish genre nerd gets to work at a slick 'n' popular website like this one. Case in point: A very cool guy called Adam Lopez helps run an event called Toronto After Dark, and he asked if I wouldn't mind spreading the word on their upcoming slate. And since this is a small but reputable festival (and not to be confused with TIFF's own "Midnight Madness" line-up, which is like a mini-fest all by itself), I said "Sure, Adam!" And guess what? I'll do the same for LA Screamfest, UK Frightfest, and New Zealand Gorefest -- even though I just made that last one up.

TADFF (an acronym I also just made up) runs from October 17 to 24. The festival generally plays between 16 to 20 films, and while their final slate hasn't been decided just yet, they have snagged a few juicy titles for their first batch. The Jack Ketchum adaptation Red will be screened, as will Darren Lynn Bousman's Repo! The Genetic Opera and (of course) the stunningly wonderful Swedish import Let the RIght One In. Other titles include Bill Plympton's Idiots and Angels, the action-packed Mirageman, the self-explanatory Tokyo Gore Police, and the recent fest favorite Who is KK Downey?

For more information on Toronto After Dark, you can pick through their website right here. I'll also include a little promo video after the jump -- and here's the best part: You can get a full festival badge for around one hundred bucks Canadian! If they screen 17 movies, that equals out to about ... six bucks a flick! (Less, actually!) Stop back in a week or two and we'll have the full line-up. You Canadians get all the luck.

What with the Olympics and the Batman and the pineapple express and the pants, you might be a little overloaded with things to watch this weekend. On the other hand, maybe you've seen all that and want something different. In that case, hooray for the Indie Spotlight! It's our weekly roundup of what's opening beyond the multiplexes, designed so movie fans can keep an eye out for those less-publicized titles.

There are eight indie films for you to examine this week: Beautiful Losers, Beer for My Horses, Bottle Shock, Elegy, Hell Ride, Patti Smith: Dream of Life, Red, and What We Do Is Secret. Here's the skinny on each of them.

Bottle Shock
What it is: A fictionalized account -- very heavily fictionalized, it would seem -- about the plucky California winery that managed to beat French wines in a blind taste test in 1976.
What they're saying: The reviews at Rotten Tomatoes are almost evenly split down the middle. My own take: It's the Two Buck Chuck of wine movies.
Where it's playing: Various places throughout Northern and Southern California, Seattle, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Detroit, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston.
Official site: Take a sip.

Hell Ride
What it is: Executive-produced by Quentin Tarantino, it's Larry Bishop's homage to the sleazy biker movies of the early 1970s.
What they're saying: They're saying they hate it. Ten of the 12 reviews at Rotten Tomatoes are negative, and that includes the two from Cinematical, by James Rocchi and yours truly.
Where it's playing: Quite a few cities, actually; check out the map here.
Official site: Hop on, easy rider.

When someone who's read hundreds of horror novels says something like "Jack Ketchum is one of the best authors out there," you might want to bring up a few titles on Amazon and maybe snag a tome or two. (That's if you're looking for horror fiction in the first place, obviously.) Over the last few years, we've (finally!) seen several of the author's works transformed into indie flicks, and I'd say those filmmakers are presently three-for-three! (Those films would be The Lost, The Girl Next Door, and Red.)

So it's with no small amount of nerdly excitement that I read the following over at Dread Central: Looks like the guys behind the harrowing Girl Next Door are about to tackle Offspring, a 1991 Ketchum "crazy cannibal" novel that is actually the follow-up to the truly disturbing Off Season. (And I mean "disturbing" as a compliment.) But why would producer Andrew van den Houten start with Part 2 instead of Part 1? I assume it has something to do with rights issues -- as in "someone else probably owns the rights to Part 1" -- but Shock's Ryan Rotten very astutely makes the same point that I was going to make: That if someone did Off Season straight from the book, it'd look a whole LOT like Wrong Turn or yet another rendition of The Hills Have Eyes. Kind of a shame, really, but you can always read the book.

For more on the brutally memorable work of Jack Ketchum, check out his official site right here.

Don't mess with a man's best friend! I'm borrowing that phrase from our own Eric D. Snider, who used it to describe the plot of Red, a thriller starring the great Brian Cox as a man on a mission to avenge the death of his beloved dog at the hands of a bunch of teenage punks.

As Eric noted, Magnolia Pictures picked up distribution rights for the movie and planned a late summer release. Well, it must be later than we thought, because Dread Central now tells us that Red will be unleashed to theaters in New York and Los Angeles on Friday, August 8, followed by a "slow rollout" to more theaters nationwide.

"An emotionally gripping if slightly overwrought drama," is how Eric described Red in his review from Sundance, where the film premiered. Later he called it "a solid B-minus effort, and Cox's performance makes it eminently watchable." In addition to Cox, the cast includes Tom Sizemore as a bad father, Kim Dickens as a TV reporter, and Robert Englund and Amanda Plummer as white trash parents of one of the juvenile delinquent kids responsible for the death of the titular dog.

I've loved Brian Cox in many roles (Braveheart to Manhunter to 25th Hour to X2: X-Men United to Zodiac), so I have to believe he's a major plus for audiences looking for something a little different in August. How about you? Do you have any interest in seeing the Cox-avenging Red?

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Summit Entertainment is picking up its first comic book adaptation: Warren Ellis' Red. Erich and John Hoeber, the brothers behind Warner Bros' movie adaptation of Whiteout, will be penning the screenplay. Not only does this make the second Ellis movie in a week (Ocean is being developed by Warner Bros, read our story here), but this is the first DC title to jump the Time Warner ship.

Ellis' three issue book centers on a black-ops CIA Agent, Paul Moses, who's now living the quiet life of retirement. For years, the CIA has left him alone, but when the agency gets a new head, it is decided that Moses has to go. Action sequences and bloody carnage follow.

I told you a couple weeks ago how THINKFilm had picked up the gritty prison thriller The Escapist, and how the film, which stars Brian Cox, was the last thing I saw at Sundance this year. Well, I actually had a double helping of Cox that January night, because right before The Escapist I watched Red, another film boasting a terrific Cox performance -- and now it's headed for theaters, too.

Via The Hollywood Reporter we learn that Magnolia has picked up Red, with plans to release it late this summer. The film (which I reviewed here) is a thriller along the lines of Death Wish, only instead of avenging his wife's murder, the Cox character is going after the punks who killed his dog. (Do not mess with a man's dog!)

Consider Death Wish. In the original film, Charles Bronson sought revenge against the thugs who raped his daughter and killed his wife – heinous acts that the audience enthusiastically agrees ought to be punished, even if it requires vigilantism.

Now consider Red, also about a man seeking justice, only this time the murder victim is his beloved old dog, killed with a shotgun by juvenile delinquents. We agree that the act is monstrous, but what kind of punishment is appropriate? Even the most fervent dog-lovers don't generally believe in the death penalty for killers of canines.

That's the dilemma at the heart of Red, an emotionally gripping if slightly over-wrought drama based on a novel by Jack Ketchum. It's set in a small Western town that still has a general store and friendly neighbors, a place where just about everyone has a dog. (The only pet-free families, I note, are the bad guys.) Brian Cox plays Avery Ludlow, a widower whose boon companion is Red, his 14-year-old hound. The two are fishing on the lakeshore one afternoon when a trio of punks comes along to harass and rob him. The leader, Danny (Noel Fisher), ends the encounter by blasting Red with a shotgun.