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If you were a sixteen-year-old girl and a rich, handsome older man promised to take you away from your boring life and jet you off to Paris, buy you expensive clothes and expose you to a sophisticated world you only dreamed of experiencing, what would you do? That’s the key question at the center of AN EDUCATION. The viewer watches the main character make all the wrong decisions, but can you blame her?

Jenny (Carey Mulligan, PRIDE & PREJUDICE) is a smart young girl working hard to get into Oxford on scholarship. Her father Jack (Alfred Molina, SPIDER-MAN 2) is an unrelenting tightwad who pushes her to succeed. Her mother Majorie (Cara Seymour, THE NOTORIOUS BETTY PAGE) just smiles and nods in the background. On a rainy day while she is waiting by the bus stop, the charming David (Peter Sarsgaard, GARDEN STATE) offers to give her a ride home in his sports car under the pretense that he’s only a music fan looking out for the cello she is carrying. Soon Jenny becomes drunk on David’s lavish world.
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In conjunction with the very good ROSE RED, Stephen King and Ridley Pearson concocted this gimmicky prequel story based on the backstory of the TV miniseries. The novel was published as “real life” diaries from Ellen Rambauer who lived in a haunted house. Two of the characters in ROSE RED are credited with editing and writing the afterward for the book. This neutered TV movie version of the diary lacks the scares of the miniseries and the sexual tension of the book.

In 1907, Ellen Gilcrest (Lisa Brenner, THE LIBRARIAN) married the charming John Rimbauer (Steven Brand, THE SCORPION KING), a wealth man who built her a mansion for their engagement gift. But as her husband, he becomes domineering, especially in the bedroom. During their honeymoon to Africa he takes other women into bed with them. On the trip, she gets very ill and is nursed back to health by Sukeena (Tsidii Leloka, ROSE RED), who becomes her best friend and travels back to the States with the Rimbauers. Back in Seattle, Ellen is plagued by deadly supernatural run-ins at the house and becomes convinced that she must keep building onto the mansion in order to beat the spirits.
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X2 writer Michael Dougherty’s anthology horror flick has been sitting on Warner Bros. shelves for years now. Through some midnight screenings, it has gained a bit of cult status. Quality is certainly not the reason why this fright fest has gone direct-to-DVD. While I have my theories on why WB was reluctant to release this chiller, they are only speculation. But keep reading and you might discern some of my thoughts about why the studio might get skittish with this horror flick despite its mild violence quotient compared to other resent gore fests.

The film tells five interlocking stories all set in one town on Halloween. Emma (Leslie Bibb, IRON MAN) is not nearly into Halloween as much as her husband Henry (Tahmoh Penikett, TV’s BATTLESTAR GALACTICA). When she blows out the candle on their jack ‘o lantern, Henry warns her that there are Halloween rules that need to be followed. Steven Wilkins (Dylan Baker, HAPPINESS) is the town principal with a persistent son named Billy (Connor Christopher Levins, EIGHT BELOW) and a secret in the backyard.
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Italian horror master Dario Argento teamed up with Lamberto Bava, the son of the Italian horror master Mario Bava, to craft what Bravo named one of the 100 scariest films of all time. With one single scary moment, this gore fest simply puts a new tag on zombies as an excuse to fill the screen with blood and neon green puss. From the first example of his work, Lamberto is not his father, who is credited as the creator of the modern slasher film.

Director Bava, producer Argento and co-writer Franco Ferrini based the film on a story by Dardano Sacchetti. As is the case with so many films, the premise had potential, but its execution ends up simply being an excuse to exploit oozing viscera. Cheryl (Natasha Hovey) is a conservative young woman who receives a ticket for a movie premiere from a guy who looks like an extra from MAD MAX. She urges her friend Kathy (Paola Cozzo, DEMONIA) to ditch class and attend the show. At the theater, they meet the cute guys George (Urbano Barberini, CASINO ROYALE) and Ken (Karl Zinny). The film they see is a gruesome tale involving a prediction from Nostradamus regarding demons taking over the world. The root of the curse lies in a mask that makes the wearer bleed and soon transform those unfortunate souls into puss-spewing demons. When the movie patrons try to flee they discover that the doors have been bricked over since they entered.
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Invictus is one of the leading contenders for an Oscar nod right now.

After a slow week last week, this week the buzz meter is at 11. First trailers for big fall releases and new trailers for hotly anticipated 2010 film make this an exciting week for getting peeks at what is to come.
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Twelve years after he made his first big screen impression in BLACKBOARD JUNGLE as a cocky student, Sidney Poitier stepped behind the teacher’s desk to educate a class full of cocky students. As he’d do many times in his career, Poitier takes good material and makes its so much better with his intense performance.

Here he plays Mark Thackeray, an engineer, who can’t find work in his field, so he takes a post as a teacher in an East end London school. His class is filled with unruly seniors who have no use for what Thackeray has to teach them. He especially has problems with Bert Denham (Christian Roberts), who simply wants to push the rookie teacher as far as he can. Eventually the teens push him too far and he snaps. He then realizes that everyone treats them like children, so he will treat them like adults. The change in approach works and he builds respect through respect. But fellow teacher Gillian Blanchard (Suzy Kendall, THUNDERBALL) warns him that he shouldn’t be in a room alone with Pamela Dare (Judy Geeson, THE PLAGUE DOGS), because she might be young, but she’s still a woman who desires Thackeray.
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This film began with a book written by French public school teacher Francois Begaudeau. He adapted the novel into the screenplay with director Laurent Cantet (TIME OUT) and writer Robin Campillo. Begaudeau even plays the teacher, Francois Marin. The children are all non-actors playing versions of themselves. For this documentary like non-fiction film, Cantet worked with the teens for a year crafting their characters. The result is a teacher film like no other you’ve ever seen. There is no trumped up drama or conflicts. The teacher isn’t some perfect inspiration to every student. It simply watches.

The teacher goes into the new year at the racial mixed urban school with good intentions. But his 15/16-year-old students have a different opinion of those intentions. Throughout the year it is a constant battle of wills between Francois and his students. He tries to adjust to the ever-changing war plan of his students; sometimes his moves work and sometimes they backfire in his face.
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With Halloween nearly upon us, I took inspiration from the Eerie Books Blog’s list of 50 Must-See French Horror Movies to dedicate This Weekend’s Film Festival to foreign language horror films. We have a French, black & white, horror classic. From Austria, we have a frighteningly real story of mental torture. We have a genre-changing Japanese fright fest that curses TV viewers. Arriving from Germany, we have a 1970s remake of a classic silent horror tale. And we close with a chiller from Italy created by one of the country’s masters.
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Hideo Nakata’s RINGU changed horror. Having been stagnant for years, the genre in Asia was electrified via this simple, creepy ghost story. This trickled over to the States. It launched the very popular curse subgenre of horror where a violent death leaves a curse on something and that curse jumps from one person to the next. While it has inspired many of these films, none have come close to equaling it.

The story begins with two teen girls — Masami (Hitomi Sato, RINGU 2) and Tomoko (Yuko Takeuchi, NIGHT OF THE SHOOTING STARS) — discussing the rumor of a cursed videotape that upon watching it, the viewers receive a phone call stating they will die within a week. Tomoko admits to having watched it with some friends. When her corpse is found in a frozen state of fear, her aunt Reiko Asakawa (Nanako Matsushima, RINGU 2), a TV journalist, decides to investigate the mysterious tape. When she finds it, the curse attaches to her. She asks her ex-husband Ryuji Takayama (Hiroyuki Sanada, THE TWILIGHT SAMURAI) to get to the bottom of the curse, fearful that she will be killed, leaving behind their young son Yoichi (Rikiya Otaka, RINGU 2). They discover that it’s connected to the psychic Shizuko Yamamura (Masako, RING 0) and her strange daughter Sadako (Rie Ino’o, RINGU 2).
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The popular ICE AGE films have fallen into a comfortable formula — mix tired SHREK pop culture references with some sitcom plot devices and add in a dash of LOONEY TUNES gaggery. Young kids might find the concoction palatable, but teens and adults who have more refined tastes will be able to call back how much better Pixar cooks up CG courses.

Speaking of eating, Diego the sabertooth tiger (Denis Leary, TV’s RESCUE ME) is tired of simply chasing gazelles around the frozen tundra and decides to leave the makeshift herd. But doesn’t he want to do that is every film? Maybe in the next film he can go into therapy for manic-depressive disorder. Anyway, he’s feeling left out because the wooly mammoths Manny (Ray Romano, TV’s EVERYONE LOVES RAYMOND) and Ellie (Queen Latifah, CHICAGO) are having a baby. Sid the sloth (John Leguizamo, SUMMER OF SAM) is also feeling left out and goes searching for his own kids to nurture. In a cave he finds three eggs, and as one can guess from the title they turn out to be tiny destructive dinos. So when their T-rex mommy comes looking for them, Sid is inadvertently dragged down into a lost world of dinosaurs under the ice. So the herd, including the annoying possums Crash (Seann William Scott, AMERICAN PIE) and Eddie (Josh Peck, TV’s DRAKE & JOSH), venture down into the cave to save their friend.
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