Legendary General Cypher Raige (played by Will Smith)…

Yes, it’s an After Earth post! M. Night Shyamalan is directing this post-apocalyptic science fiction adventure starring Will Smith and Jaden Smith. Earth is in trouble, because global warming altered the core of the Earth, which altered Earth’s magnetic fields and now Earth has no protection from solar radiation. 1000 years in the future, Earth is abandoned and mankind lives on Nova Prime, because people in the future love dumb names. Speaking of dumb names, Will Smith is legendary General Cypher Raige, who is finally returning home to his family that he was too busy being a famous general to pay attention to. Jaden Smith is Kitai Raige, his 13-year-old estranged son. But an asteroid causes their ship to crash on the now abandoned Earth, Cypher is injured and Kitai must get their rescue beacon, proving he is part of the heroic family legacy.

I don’t know what he’ll find on the abandoned Earth, probably some mutant dudes and then a bunch of animal life monsters that will be impossible and just make me angry. Judging from the reasoning behind why Earth was abandoned, I’m not holding out hope for things to make a lot of sense. But I hope you like the AfterEarthSmithverse, because the studio is banking on you wanting to buy comic books, video games, and all sorts of other random crap!

A comic series called After Earth: Innocence will have some of the back story starting when Nova Prime was colonized, but even then there is backstory history all the way to 1908 and the Tunguska event. Later, the Raige family invents some stuff and becomes prominent, and then because someone writing this has a divine rights of kings fetish, thus the modern day (future) Raiges who are super generals.

Better After Earth than After Birth, I guess…

Post After Earth (after After Earth?), Will Smith is rumored to be developing a film around Cain and Abel, the biblical bros that ends in murder. Maybe this’ll answer the long-asked question as to where their wives came from! This will be Smith’s directorial debut if it goes forward.

After Earth news via Deadline and io9

After Earth jaden Smith

Sure are a lot of trees for a lifeless irradiated planet...

Janram (Review)

Janram

aka Blind Moon aka จันทร์แรม

2004
Written by Varapon H. Phadungratna
Directed by Kirati Nak-Intanond

There’s a storm coming…a BLOOD STORM!!!

Janram is a Thai film from Niepce House, which is related to Natnalin Magazine, an art magazine from Thailan named after its founder, Natnalin Noimai, a photographer. The magazine has a heavy art bent, and the related features and enterprises on the website also trend towards the art direction. It did well enough that they started up a moving picture divsion to try to cash in on the Asian Horror craze that was sweeping the world in the early 2000s. From what I can tell, they produced only two films: Janram and Secret Room No.7, both released in 2004. Janram is heavily weighted to show visuals, visuals that have the appearance of the way fine art photographs would look in an arty black and white photoshoot. This is all well and good, but moving film is a different medium than still photography, so the correlation seems odd at times. It gives Janram a more high class feel, which strikes a stark contrast with what is actually happening in the story, with lesbian vampire schoolgirls.

Janram is based on a serialized story called Janram by Poomkamol Phadungratna that was incomplete at the time of filming. As Niepce House is a company set up by artists, the few films it made were more “artistic” than anything else. But they were also horror films, mostly so they could sell them overseas. This film is packed to the gizzards with weird stylized stuff – it has a washed out appearance most of the time, allowing for when there is blood for it to be bright bright bright red and contrast sharply with the rest of the film. Beyond that, there are random odd zooms and the camera is constantly moving like the cameraman was wearing rollerblades or something. As usual, we don’t need no stinking subtitles!

The line for the midnight premiere of Twilight Breaking Dawn Part 2 started before Part 1 hit the theaters!

The best part of this film was the two trailers before the film. One was of a haunted bra film – yes, haunted bra film. You see, if you put on this haunted bra, a ghost would appear and your bra would glow all yellow and you would be possessed by a ghost. Apparently women trade bras often, so dozens of women wear the haunted bra, which hunts down the people who killed and raped it’s original owner. Oddly enough, the English name for this film is Haunted Bra.

There was also a Naked Weapon knockoff film complete with crappy version of the Sharon Stone Basic Instinct leg crossing scene. The budget was about $4, but it’s probably at least as good as the real Naked Weapon. As far as I can tell, this doesn’t have an English name, but goes by นางฟ้า ต้องประหาร. If it ever gets back in print I’ll snatch up a copy for thrill of it all. Thanks to ThaiWorldView for helping me figure out the title!

Vampires also double as photo-negative safe lights for darkrooms!

Janram (Jintana Aromyen) – Just your average lesbian vampire schoolgirl who slowly eats all her lovers to death, yet doesn’t seem to realize that she’s killing all of them and gets depressed when they keep dying. But that doesn’t stop her from hooking up again and again with a constant parade of young lasses. The upper class Janram lives with her creepy grandma who is always silently craddling a doll and her mother. Actress Jintana Aromyen is also in Gonggoi: The Beast and 2004’s Ghost Dormitory
Ming (Maethinee Suwanjinda) – Janram’s lover who dies near the beginning of the film. Like you expect from a vampire flick, she returns very hungry and very upset that Janram has moved on to a new girl. It’s going to be a chick fight tonight!
Sassy (???) – As I couldn’t figure out her name, I just called her Sassy because she’s very sassy to everyone. Sassy has always hated Ming for reasons unknown, and she has no qualms on moving in on Ming’s territory once she dies. But then Ming comes back, but Janram now likes Sassy more… I think this is actress Bussakum Apithanarak but I am not sure.
I must stay away from the audio adaptations of Warhammer novels…but Gotrek and Felix can’t be resisted!

Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse get filmified!

Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse was a cartoon series in 1960 created by Bob Kane as a parody of his earlier work on Batman and Robin. It’s often brought up because is predicts the campy aspects of the Batman franchise. And now it will be a hybrid CGI/live-action film from Evergreen Media Group! The only thing that makes me nervous is the news that there will be a “new mythology”, and that’s only because I worry they’ll try to make this all dark and gritty like it’s a cartoon Dark Knight. Which would just be freaking stupid. But hopefully it will still be wacky with evil frogs with giant cigars and other fun things. There is a DVD release of the Courageous Cat cartoons if you want to check them out.

Courageous Cat

What other great super hero animal need their franchises restarted?

Super Mouse?
Super Mouse
Super Mouse

Cosmo Cat?
Cosmo Cat

Atomic Mouse?
Atomic Mouse

Restart all these franchises now, Hollywood!!!!

Via Deadline
Cartoons via BigBlogComics

Bad Girls Doing Bad Things (Review)

Bad Girls Doing Bad Things


2003
Written by Anora Leachim
Directed by Francis Locke

Sarah’s Living Room Bookstore was soon crushed by the Barnes & Nobles opening in her bathroom…

It’s time for yet another Torchlight Pictures/Francis Locke softcore production with a ridiculous plot and overly-long sex scenes! Bad Girls Doing Bad Things is about girls that are “good” girls attempting to dirty up their image to impress some random guy. Thanks to this instructional video, we now know what “bad” girls are – girls who watch people have sex in the club. Now you know, and knowing is half the battle. So let’s get the other half going as we dive right in to Bad Girls Doing Bad Things!

If we were any badder, Michael Jackson would have sung a song about us!

Bad Girls Doing Bad Things is among the most fun of the Torchlight Pictures catalogue, largely due to the character of Keith ragging on the good girls for being so boring, and their lame attempts to be cool. It still has the Torchlight Pictures characteristics of overly-long sex scenes, minimal plot, and scenes shot in abandoned buildings or the director’s living room. Oddly enough, I didn’t spot a hotel room in the mix, unless the hallways that look like a parking garage were actually a hotel parking garage.

Besides being produced and directed by Francis Locke, Blade Simpson continues to provide music while the “written by” credits an “Anora Leachim” (obviously a real name and not someone’s name backwards!)

I’ll go ENTER in the EXIT door! It’s totally a bad girl thing to do!

Karen (August Arroya) – A good girl in a good world, but her world is shattered when Keith makes fun of her for being a dork! Can you believe it? So she decides to totally go bad, because that’s what happens in real life.
Keith Oswald (Remy)- He’s the bad guy who has come to teach these good girls how to be bad girls doing bad things. That way they can fit in with the title of the movie!
Janine (Serrano Rios) – A worker at Karen’s bookstore who is also a good girl despite evidence to the contrary. But because she’s so anal she drives men away, until she learns to be bad, which means having sex with Keith.
Rex (Scott Alexander) – The other guy in club whom you might know from Dirty Blondes. He’s just as good of an actor here as in Dirty Blondes, but at least they’re using him in a more useful way.
Scarlet (Teanna Kai) – Another Dirty Blondes alumnus, she is a bad girl. Like all bad girls, she loves the Power Glove because it is so bad. And also having sex in public.
Dawn (Jana Cova) – She’s just a random club member of Dungeon who has lesbian sex with Scarlet. Totally not a Dirty Blonde on vacation…
I object, this isn’t a bad thing at all!

Robocop remake visuals

Robocop is awesome, so it is with great wariness that we approach the remake. Though we’ve already had a fair share of awful Robocop sequels and tie-ins, so something awful with Robocop in it isn’t that much of a shock any more. But regardless, the eye is still wary. The studio has responded with viral marketing to ease the pain away and to reassure the wary public that there will be familiar elements. Thus, the OmniCorp Website is up with a slick new video featuring an all new ED-209 blowing up a tank. OmniCorp being the new version of Omni Consumer Products from the original film. ED-209 is slicker and more modern, but still features the same basic design. The faux commercial on the site touts urban pacification tools such as the police drone that looks like a stealth flyer, hinting there may be larger issues broached with the new Robocop. Hopefully so, as the classic Robocop has a lot going on under the hood.

The cast is already geeked out, with Samuel L. Jackson playing a media mogul, Gary Oldman as one of the techs behind Robocop, and Hugh Laurie as the head of OmniCorp. Alex Murphy actor Joel Kinnaman is a practical unknown compared to them. José Padilha is directing, and we will be watching. Carefully.

The site also hints to the Robocop design under the TC-2000 heading. But no big reveal…yet! It does fit in with the rumor that the suit will be more CGI than a giant metal suit, so Robocop can be more mobile.
TC-2000

The new ED-209:
New ED-209