It’s not every day that I dismiss a film based on the title alone (only most days, as there are occasionally days where nothing with a bad title is announced!) but I’m going to dismiss this one anyway because it’s called Zombies vs Gladiators. Sure, Clive Barker got hired to direct and rewrite what is undoubtedly an awful script, but seriously. That title. No. Add to the fact Zombies vs Gladiators is one of 16 films upcoming from Amazon.com’s new movie division, and I’m out. Zombies are overplayed enough, I don’t need zombies meet Rome. The plot is about a shaman in the arena who casts a zombie spell before he dies, thus some gladiators have to kill zombie hordes. No word on if Zombie Caligula will show up and be less repulsive as a zombie.
Foodfight! is a name animation fans hear about once every two years, get confused about where they heard it, see and remember the images and promo trailer, and then laugh and laugh until the film news disappears for another two years. But the joke will finally be on us, as Foodfight! inches closer to getting a legitimate release. On DVD. In Europe.
For those of you who might be unfamiliar with Foodfight! (which is probably a lot of you as Foodfight! is really obscure), here is the story. In 2000, Larry Kasanoff decided he could do animated movies better than Pixar. So he got in a car with his buddy and drove around until they found an idea. I guess his wife also had him pick up some milk, because the idea turned out to be a supermarket, and all the products coming alive during the night. It was a detective story where Dex Dogtective and friends like to dance and have fun at the Copbanana club, until the mysterious Brand X moves next door. Kasanoff got a bunch of companies to pay for product placement (Charlie the Tuna, Mr. Clean, Cap’n Crunch, Chester Cheetah, Twinkie the Kid, the Energizer Bunny, the Brawny paper towel guy, and many more) and Threshold Entertainment was born! Foodfight! was targeted for a 2005 release (with distribution by Lions Gate), and Kasanoff was quoted bragging about how his animators were networked from all over the globe. There was also going to be a 3D animated prequel series called Foodfight!: The Adventures of Dex Dogtective.
But 2005 came and went with no release. 2006 came and went with no release. Fall 2007 was announced as the release time, but that also came and went with no Foodfight! In 2010, merchandise for Foodfight! was found at a store, but the film was still AWOL and no one had heard a peep since 2007. That article is also great because some of the animators show up to describe their experiences and about how little of the film was completed. According to the stories, the hard drives containing the film’s files were stolen in Christmas 2002.
So let’s quote the official site to bloat up this article even longer:
Charlie Sheen, Hilary Duff, Eva Longoria and Christopher Lloyd lend their unmistakable voices
to this computer-animated tale of a supermarket that ‘springs to life’ after the doors have been locked
and the workers have all gone home. When the lights are turned out chaos reigns for the ‘products’ in
this grocery store. The grocery store transforms into a city, and from every door of this city comes
two types of characters: well-known marketing icons and new characters…
This full-length CGI Movie features character/products including; Dex Dogtective (Charlie Sheen),
Sunshine Goodness (Hilary Duff) and Daredevil Dan (Wayne Brady). They all hang out at the Copa-
Banana in the produce section, but trouble is brewing within this bustling metropolis. When the villainous
Lady X (Eva Longoria) arrives in town with her Brand X minions, the brand-named products start to get
a little hot under the label. As sleuthing U.S.D.A. (United Supermarkets Defense Association) –
Dex Dogtective teams up with flying stunt squirrel Daredevil Dan and the beautiful Sunshine Goodness
to uncover the truth about these unmarked invaders, it begins to appear that the only way to fend off
the dreaded Brand X is to engage them in an all-out, no-holds-barred FoodFight!…
(please note that this is the second official site, as Threshold Entertainment’s original site is as dead as the dream to make Pixar 2.0 is.)
One thing that is weird is seeing who was hot way back in 2000, and knowing what their careers have done since then. Some have had almost as crazy a ride as Foodfight! I do think that Sunshine Goodness will become a cult figure among crazed furries, so they got that going for them.
The CGI flick Starship Troopers: Invasion has hit full trailer form (but only in Japan, land of Starship Trooper trailers), and it proves to both dump all prior sequels and also be a sequel, while also giving us plenty of bugs getting shot action! Stupid bugs, think they own the universe! Don’t they know that’s our job? excuse me, the relentless propaganda has cause me to become a bugophobe. I even dream about being from Buenos Aires! Jake Busey plays neon fiddles for me. It’s weird, WEIRD!
Carmen Ibanez, who flew the Rodger Young in the first movie, is now captain of the John A. Warden (the battleship I introduced in previous blogs). Carl Jenkins, now Minister of Paranormal Warfare, takes over the John A. Warden for a deep space experiment – leaving Carmen livid and ship-less. Carl brushes off her vehement objections and disappears with the ship off into the vast nebula. When Carl and the ship go radio-silent, guess who orders a rescue mission? Yep…it’s big-time general/war-hero Johnny Rico.
As our film is set almost 10 years after the first movie, the big 3 are now in their mid-30’s and have somehow kept their relationships intact despite deployments millions of miles apart. You will see their fragile yet strangely resilient relationship evolve in this movie, especially with Rico still a little soft on Carmen…and a familiar uncertainty about whether Carmen still reciprocates those feelings. We definitely paid homage to the original movie (in all sorts of ways), so we can’t wait to see how fans of the original respond to an awesome mix of nostalgia and “franchise update.”
That’s a bit more complex that the prior plot:
A distant Federation outpost Fort Casey comes under attack by bugs. The team on the fast attack ship Alesia is assigned to help the Starship John A. Warden stationed in Fort Casey evacuate along with the survivors and bring military intelligence safely back to Earth. Carl Jenkins, now ministry of Paranormal Warfare, takes the starship on a clandestine mission before its rendezvous with the Alesia and goes missing in the nebula. Now, the battle-hardened troopers are charged with a rescue mission that may lead to a much more sinister consequence than they ever could have imagined….
If you want to see what the big 3 look like now, they’re in the blog as well as the trailer above.
Shinji Aramaki directs and Edward Neumeier and Capser Van Dien are executive producing.
Notice how hard I’m trying to not do “rim job” jokes in these posts. So mockbuster masters the Asylum have announced their Pacific Rim mockbuster, and it’s Atlantic Rim. The plot seems pretty similar, just a bit lower in scope:
When giant monsters crawl out of the Atlantic Ocean and attack the Eastern Seaboard, the US Government is forced to trust A.I. robots to defend the country.
Asylum’s flicks have been getting progressively better, and hopefully Atlantic Rim will be a cheesetastic good time where giant robots fight giant monsters. Maybe one of the giant robots can transform into Titanic 2 or something.
For those of you who don’t Lego unless it is to say “Leggo my Eggo!”, Hero Factory is the Lego line created to replace Bionicle, there old cool line of Lego figures that my nephew really liked, but I guess no one else did. So instead, Hero Factory just became more blatantly alien fighting robots. There is a huge complex back story that you can waste lots of time reading about if you’re bored at work.
Far away in an entirely different galaxy than our own, there lies the surreal and high-tech Makuhero City, home to the Hero Factory, where new robotic heroes are built every day. The factory was created by the wise architect of Makuhero City, Mr. Makuro, with the intention of upholding peace and prosperity throughout the universe, fighting the worst villains and monsters from all over the galaxy. The main story revolves around the Hero Factory Alpha Team and their allied rookie heroes combating evil on several different planets.
Despite the fact several of the robots have names like XPlode, Drilldozer, Raw-Jaw, Natalie Breez, Rocka, Jawblade, and Splitface, this is not a line of porn stars. As demonstrated by Battleship’s awesome opening weekend haul, the public is really hungry for blatant Transformer ripoffs. Oh, wait, I seem to be reporting news from an alternate reality where Battleship wasn’t a giant bomb. Sorry about that.
Michael Finch and Alex Litvak are in negotiations to write, but that is it for “attached” people at the moment.
This will be completely separate from the other Lego Movie being developed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller (the 21 Jump Street directors) which is due out in 2014 and will be awesome. This one better be awesome, too, because they really should have just made a Lego Monster Fighters movie!
Dinosaurs vs. Aliens is a graphic novel from Liquid Comics, written by Grant Morrison, based on a story by Barry Sonnenfeld (director of Men in Black), and with art by Mukesh Singh. Dinosaurs vs. Aliens is also being pitched at a potential film (with Sonnenfeld directing), though the title similarity to Cowboys vs. Aliens may be a bit of a turnoff. Hopefully it ends up better than Monsters vs. Aliens, which was boring boring boring.
The plot involves aliens invading during the time of the dinosaurs, and luckily for Earth the dinosaurs are pretty smart and kick some alien butt!
