I've always been a sucker for killer croc movies. But, as Scott Weinberg so eloquently wrote in the recent past: "There's maybe one true 'classic' of the sub-genre (that'd be Lewis Teague's and John Sayles' Alligator, of course), and the rest of 'em are pretty much floating crap." Scott was ranting about the limited theatrical release by The Weinstein Co. (actually, their "dumping ground" subsidiary Third Rail Releasing) for Greg McLean's Rogue, which was limited to ten US cities.

So Scott (and most of you reading this) probably didn't get to see Rogue in a theater, but I did -- even if I had to drive 45 minutes to the only multiplex playing the dang thing. Me and the five (!) other people at that Friday night screening enjoyed a good old-fashioned suspense tale that played very well on the big screen. In a review I wrote for another site, I described it as "a taut and thrilling ride ... brimming with well-earned tension." Radha Mitchell stars as a tour boat captain on a river in the remote Northern Territory of Australia. She and a group of tourists end up being stalked by a killer croc "with an exaggerated sense of territorial possessiveness."

Rogue is out today in an unrated version on DVD. Dread Central got an advance peek and agrees with me that it's a good flick. The DVD includes an audio commentary by McLean, a 46-minute "making of" directed by McLean, and a gallery of mini-docs on the effects, the music, and the setting. Let's declare today "Killer Croc Day"!

If Harvey Weinstein didn't exist, someone would have to invent him. One week his garbage gets recycled into source material for The Village Voice, the next he and his brother Bob cut a 95-film, multi-year deal with Showtime and resurrect Scream. And then he gives a wide-ranging interview with The Hollywood Reporter which includes his explanation for why The Weinstein Co. created Third Rail Relasing, a new distribution label. Is it to showcase undiscovered independent gems? Introduce the world to global filmmaking talent?

No, it's for dumping the garbage. He told THR: "We should have had Third Rail two years ago, t's a good way of differentiating between what we really believe in, and what has been for ancillary value."

Third Rail recently released Death Defying Acts, with Guy Pearce and Catherine Zeta-Jones, admittedly only to fulfill a contractual obligation. Other barely there releases this year include music doc Lou Reed's Berlin, Hong Kong action flick Flash Point, and Aussic croc thriller Rogue. (I really liked the latter two, by the way.) The widest release (48 theaters, per Box Office Mojo) was George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead, which made just under one million dollars. But I guess Harvey didn't "really believe" in any of them.

Man oh man do I love a good Killer Croc flick. Problem is ... there's maybe one true "classic" of the sub-genre (that'd be Lewis Teague's and John Sayles' Alligator, of course), and the rest of 'em are pretty much floating crap. Over the past year or so we've seen a bit of a resurgence in the category: Lake Placid 2 is mindless stupidity; Stewart Raffill's Croc is slightly better than that; that Primeval one is a passable enough time-waster; and the indie Aussie import Black Water is actually quite good, although more of a slow-burn nature thriller than a chomp-'em-up horror flick -- but what of Rogue?

Yes, Rogue. Ring any bells? Sophomore effort from Wolf Creek director Greg Mclean, Rogue looks to be a standard enough Killer Croc flick that stars Michael Vartan, Radha Mitchell and Sam Worthington. The fact that the flick has been sitting on a shelf over at Weinstein Co. for over a year might seem like a red flag, but that's why the world needs horror geeks like me: So I can tell you that early reaction to the flick has been surprisingly positive! The flick came out in Australia last November, and while it didn't do a whole lot of business, I've been hearing rumblings from my horror colleagues that the movie's quite good!

I know, I know, Wes Craven's always got a few projects on the burner, right? But it looks like he's finally settled into the director's chair again -- this time on a Rogue / Universal horror (oh, sorry, thriller) flick called, strangely enough, 25/8, (I assume it's a play on the phrase "24 / 7," as in "That Weinberg dude is watching horror movies 24 / 7" -- or maybe it means August 25 in the UK. I have no idea.

According to Variety, 25/8 represents Mr. Craven's "first original horror script since 1994's New Nightmare," which is a specious way of skipping over the fact that Craven co-wrote last year's Hills Have Eyes 2 AND that atrocious Pulse remake. It will be his first directorial feature since 2005, when he gave us both Red Eye (yay) and Cursed (boo). The source indicates that "the film unveils a signature villain, a serial killer who turns up 15 years after his purported death, to kill the seven children born on that fateful night." Gee, not straying all that far from Elm Street, eh?

For his part, Mr. Craven says "It's more a thriller than slasher film, and revolves around a young kid with a very dark past involving his family and his father." Regarding those remakes, he will be involved with the Last House on the Left re-do, but not so much on Platinum Dunes' Freddy re-fit.

Oh, and in slightly-related horror news, Rogue has found a director for their remake of George Romero's The Crazies: Breck Eisner, who last gave us Sahara.

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.

Jason Statham reminds me a lot of Bruce Willis -- sometimes. No, the British bad-ass doesn't have an "everyman" sense of humor like Bruno did in the Die Hard flicks, but Statham just keeps popping up in action movies with his bald head and his gruff "likeability" ... and he just reminds me of Willis. I've been a fan of the guy since Lock, Stock -- and if I'm still a fan after sitting through Transporter 2, then I'll probably be a fan for quite some time.

And the guy seems to have settled into quite the comfortable little action niche. In his next movie Statham will play a hardcore, revenge-driven FBI agent who decides he's just got to kill an assassin called Rogue (as played by Jet Li). Up until a few weeks ago, this flick was actually called Rogue, but Lionsgate must have caught wind of that other (now missing) Rogue movie, and so now the Statham vs. Li action flick is known simply as War. Here's the trailer.

So the trailer looks suitably packed with action, and that's a good thing. Plus the supporting cast includes names like Devon Aoki, Luis Guzman and Saul Rubinek. On the other (less promising) hand, it looks like the director and both screenwriters ... are all first-timers. Guess we'll see how it all turns out on September 14.

I was poking around blog-diving (digging deep into the blogrolls of film sites I like in search of new blogs to read and perhaps link to from time to time) when I came across this excellently written piece by Adrian Martin on the poetic imagery of Terrence Malick. Whether you're a Malick connoisseur who loves to delve deep into the auteur's work over and over again, or a Malick novice just dipping your toes into the water of his films, you'll likely learn something you didn't know reading this well-researched piece.

While you're over there, check out the rest of Rogue's 10th issue, including a thoughtful review of Bosnian film Grbavica, the Golden Bear winner of the 2006 Berlinale and a transcript of a lecture by Pedro Costa (hey, it's like film school for free!). Costa says in his lecture that, "For me, the primary function of cinema is to make us feel that something isn't right. There is no difference between documentary and fiction here."

If you look at some of the better films of 2006, they fit this mold well: in Little Miss Sunshine, the "something" is the incongruity between Olive's physical features and her dream of being a beauty queen, explored within the microcosm of her bizarrely dysfunctional but loving family. In The Lives of Others, the something that isn't right is the government intruding on the privacy of its citizens, and the abuse of that power. In Pan's Labyrinth, Ofelia is forced to accompany her ailing mother to their new home at a remote military outpost, and a fantasy world that may be even more dangerous than the real one she longs to escape.

Go brew yourself a nice cup of herbal tea, and then go read to your heart's content. There are lots more goodies awaiting you in this issue.

Gotta give it up to the trailer-makers this time out. On the surface this brand-new trailer for a horror flick called Primeval looks like your typical Carnage & Chaos clip, but I think the promo does a pretty slick job of piquing the curioisity. As in ... so, like, who (or WHAT) is this legendary serial killer who's killed over 300 people while never getting caught? Who???

OK, so it's not exactly rocket science, but it's nice to see a little ambiguity and creativity in a horror flick trailer. Consider me suitably intrigued by Primeval, which stars Dominic Purcell, Brooke Langton and Orlando Jones. The director is longtime TV helmer Michael Katleman and the screenwriters are Brancato & Ferris, also known as the guys who wrote The Game, Terminator 3 and ... Catwoman.

Plus it looks like Primeval is set to become one half of a "competing projects" story, kinda like what happened with Deep Impact vs. Armageddon, Dante's Peak vs. Volcano or A Bug's Life vs. Antz. But if I told you the title of Primeval's direct competition, that would spoil the mystery laid down in the trailer! (OK fine, if you must know, click here.)

Anyway, the flick looks like it could be pretty spooky / icky / gory, so I'm down. Then again it could be Anaconda 3, right? We won't get to find out until April 13.

My earliest recollections of the Castlevania video game series are of a little guy side-scrolling through a haunted castle, stopping occasionally to whip a skeleton/ghost/vampire and climb a whole lot of staircases. I loved it. And even though I know next to nothing about the later Castlevania games (and there are several), I'm still fairly psyched for Rogue's new big-screen version to hit the scene.

What's that? Castlevania is being written and directed by Paul W.S. Anderson? The man who gave us Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil and Alien vs. Predator? And Soldier and Event Horizon? Yikes ... Hey wait, I really like Event Horizon! And Resident Evil (PART ONE!) And I certainly don't think that Anderson is as bad a filmmaker as the rantier fanboys seem to think he is. And, to his credit, Mr. Anderson is approaching this Castlevania flick with what I consider to be a very solid perspective. "You could also call this movie Dracula Begins," says Anderson as he practices his fan-friendly sound-bites and settles into direct what could be a fairly fine horror/adventure-type flick. (Just please don't go the PG-13 route. Please.)

For those who've done things other than play video games for the past 16 years, Castlevania "focuses on the duel across the centuries between Dracula and the vampire-hunting Belmont family, played out within Dracula's vast, labyrinthine castle." Yep, the Rogue folks are most definitely thinking "franchise" on this one. Fingers crossed, vamp-fans!

And yes: I called Anderson the "video game movie king." Any five random frames of Resident Evil are better than the complete and collected works of Uwe Boll -- and who else out there makes these movies?

Are you ready to check out some brand new movie pics? C'mon now, don't sound too excited. On this edition of Movie Pics, we ask you to consider some images from Christopher Guest's new film, Jet Li and Jason Statham prepare to kick your ass right out of the theater and -- wait -- so that's what Kurt Russell will be driving in Grind House. Read on my fellow picture freaks:

• This fall, Christopher Guest returns to his mockumentary ways with For Your Consideration, a film that appears to poke fun at the way certain actors handle the tremendous burden that is Oscar buzz. As far as cast goes, Guest has assembled a few of his regulars (Eugene Levy, Catherine O'Hara and Fred Willard, among others), as well as some new blood (ahem, Ricky Gervais). While I haven't been crazy about the last couple Guest flicks, the plot, the cast and these new pics have certainly kicked my anticipation meter up a few notches. [via JoBlo]
• Before he calls it quits as a martial arts action star, Jet Li will make sure he kicks as much on-screen ass as possible, what with his role as a mysterious assassin in the upcoming film Rogue. Pic revolves around an FBI agent (Jason Statham) who, after his partner and family are killed, sets out to avenge his buddy's death by targeting the man (is Jet Li a man or a machine?) responsible. Cinema Blend has the first images from Rogue, which also stars Luiz Guzmán (I take it we won't get to see a fantastic jump-kick from Mr. Guzmán) and Devon Aoki.
• Word on the street is that Quentin Tarantino has officially taken over the city of Austin (Jette, I want you on set, STAT!), while shooting Death Proof -- his half of next years double feature masterpiece, Grind House. Tarantino describes Death Proof as "sort of a slasher film, but instead of a knife, it's a car." Well, thanks to the good folks over at AICN, we now have pics of said car, which will be driven by Kurt Russell -- who I'm hoping brings a little old school awesome to the role.