Smash Cut

Okay, so I know that Turkey Day hasn’t even officially hit yet, but I might as well join the Wal-K-Star-Mc-Marts of the world and start Santa-slinging before Thanksgiving indigestion has even settled in.

New York-based indie horror auteur Larry Fessenden (helmer of such acclaimed pics as the vampire allegory Habit, the criminally-underseen snowbound suspenser The Last Winter, and the coming-of-age monster movie Wendigo) is teaming up with his artist wife Beck Underwood to launch Creepy Christmas.

Creepy Christmas is a website that will present a series of short films by Fessenden and other indie fright directors like J.T. Petty and Glenn McQuaid. The shorts are supposed to be inspired by elements from the 2008 Creepy Christmas Advent Calendar, Underwood’s 12-month pastiche of surreal and wicked imagery that allows you to peer into the secret, unsettling world hidden behind the doors and windows of traditional Christmas dioramas.

The site should go live with its first film on December 1st.

You can visit the Creepy Christmas website here. Also, Fessenden’s production company Glass Eye Pix is worth a look, if you’d like to find out what he’s all about, or update yourself of his current goings-on.

I’m not talking about “lost” like “misplaced,” but gone. Zip. Erased from existence.

The Berlin-based Deutsche Kinemathek film museum has begun an ambitious undertaking: to bring back, as much as possible, untold amounts of cinematic treasures that have been lost to time and decay.

It is estimated that 80-90% of all silent films, along with a lot of movies from the age of sound, are basically non-existent, partially due to excessive mangling by censors cutting up films like crazy, or celluloid/film stock breaking down, or even movies being chucked in the trash or melted down because they were considered disposable commodities rather than “art,” or at least something worth preserving and curating.

Thus, the Deutsche Kinemathek has begun its Lost Films website — currently in beta mode — in an attempt to create a single virtual “space” in which these disappearing treasures can be brought back into the light, via surviving documents, known historical information, and, whenever possible, audio-visual material too. They’re starting with 35 German films, such as the pictured Die ewige Nacht: works that have been long sought-after and/or been considered irretrievably lost. But the film museum will surely expand its efforts to address other titles, and perhaps other cultures, after it tackles the initial batch.

Anyone who’s genuinely interested in cinema history should check the site out.

Ip Man is a new biopic that’s named after the first martial arts master to openly teach the now-famous kung fu style of Wing Chun. (Ip Man is sometimes alternately known as Yip Man.) In addition, the real-life legend is famed for being the sifu whose most famous pupil was none other than Bruce Lee.

That’s right: without Grandmaster Ip Man, we wouldn’t have footage of Lee slamming ping pong balls with nunchucks.

Anyway, this new film re-teams director Wilson Yip with his Sha Po Lang (a.k.a. Kill Zone) star, the lightning-fast martial arts actor/choreographer Donnie Yen, in the title role. Based on their gritty, no-holds-barred work in that 2005 release, I can’t wait to see their latest effort.

Check out an English-subtitled teaser over here, and a full-length, Mandarin, unsubtitled trailer as well.

That’s right, this (allegedly real) footage of the late, great, martial arts/cinema icon shows the man slamming some sets…with a pair of nunchaku.

Whoa!

Anybody who tuned in to the rare (comparably-to-now) TV broadcasts of dubbed Japanese animation during the ’70s was bound to have stumbled across Astro Boy along with Kimba the White Lion or Star Blazers.

This being the 21st Century, the age of remakes and reboots, we’re naturally being treated to a slicker, CG-animated upgrading of the super-powered boy robot. It’s already being touted for its slew of celebrity vocal talent, but I have to admit that I’m not all that cynical about this one. The candy-colored, sleek computer animation actually seems to work well for the material (even if Freddie Highmore voicing Astro Boy makes me wanna puke). The new Astro Boy adventure is slated for a 2009 release.

You can visit the film’s official website now, which happens to sport a beautiful-looking teaser after its opening animation.

Who, I hear you asking, is Coraline?

Well, she’s the protagonist of master fantasist Neil Gaiman’s inventive and thrilling novella of the same name, and now, thanks to ace stop-motion animator Henry Selick (the unsung genius behind The Nightmare Before Christmas), a feature-film adaptation is headed to our screens in February 2009. (Not 2008 like that teaser poster above suggests.)

The Coraline novella — which tells the slightly twisted tale of an adventure-hungry young girl who finds an initially-appealing parallel universe via a portal in her new house — won a slew of kudos, including the prestigious Hugo Award, and I think it’s great that a real visionary like Selick is the director behind this adaptation. To be sure, the feature film has a kind of mainstream-y downside to it — the vocal presence of stars like Dakota Fanning and Teri Hatcher certainly boost the possibility of Lameness — but I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.

Anyway, a new full-length trailer has finally come out, and you can see it here:

Hausu, also known as House here in the States (that is, if it’s even known at all, and no, I’m not talking about the 1986 U.S. release with William Katt), is one of those once-in-a-blue-moon, genuinely loopy, hallucinatory freakout kind of movies that makes you marvel that something like it could’ve ever been made. It is, at its heart, a horror movie, based on the simple narrative fact that it has a batch of schoolgirls enter a house (duh) in which all sorts of phantasmagoric, wacky, over-the-top insanities befall them.

But this 1977 film, directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi, also juggles musical segments, comedy, melodrama — just about every genre you can think of — and flamboyant switches in visual styles, while somehow deftly maintaining a sense of internal consistency. The movie is packed with some genuinely special special effects too; sure, they might seem “crude” by today’s standards, but the inventiveness and creative ideas behind them is undeniable.

If you’re a cult movie fan, a horror junkie, a foreign film buff, or just someone who wants to watch something and think afterwards, “Well, I can honestly say I’ve never seen something like that before!”, then you don’t have to look much further than your TV set. Nope, Hausu isn’t coming to a theater near you, and it’s never been available (legally) on VHS or DVD in the States.

It’s the good people at IFC who will be beaming the flick into your living rooms on November 22 — if you have cable, anyways. Go here for more details.

And if you’d like a meatier taste of Hausu, I’ve included an unsubtitled trailer below. (Don’t worry, the subs wouldn’t have made the thing make that much more sense to you.)

…and I guess it’s safe to say that Italian horror icon/director Dario Argento is continuing his creative slump. Oh well. Sucker that I am, I’m willing to bet that I’ll still shell out for this would-be thriller, which I’ve blogged about before over here.

Check out the preview:

I consider myself a pretty well-rounded cineaste, but even I have to say that I come up pretty short when Serbian movies get brought into the picture. I’ve seen some great satirical stuff by internationally-acclaimed (then-Yugoslavian) directors like Dušan Makavejev and Emir Kusturica, but not enough to consider myself “knowledgeable” or “experienced.”

Now comes Tears for Sale (a.k.a. Carlston za Ognjenku), a semi-fantastic take on epic historical dramas that’s touted as being the most expensive Serbian production of all time. It’s even got a bit of a global reach, with predictably lush and romantic music by composer Shigeru Umebayashi and a connection to French hitmaster Luc Besson via his Europa Corp releasing company.

Tears for Sale centers on post-WWI Serbia, which has been decimated by the conflict. Having lost a huge part of its male population to the bloody warfare, a village rests its hopes for the future on the shoulders of two young sisters, who take it upon themselves to set out into the world in search of men to bring home. It’s one part epic search, another part wartime tearjerker, with a bit of Amélie-esque, fairy-tale style fantasy (courtesy of some 40-odd minutes of CGI effects) weaved in for good measure.

You can visit the film’s official website, or take a look at an eye-popping (in a good way) trailer. (The trailer features English intertitles, but unfortunately no such subtitles.)

I’ve blogged before — a good few times in fact — about action auteur John Woo’s return to Chinese cinema earlier this year with Part I of his historical epic, Red Cliff. It was the first film he made in his mother country since 1992.

That initial segment broke all sorts of box-office records in Asia, and hot on the heels of the blockbuster smash comes the second installment, slated for a January 2009 release. Red Cliff is, basically, a period-piece war movie (plus tons of drama and intrigue), so you can bet that the concluding act will deliver fighting. A lot of fighting.

You check out a Vietnamese-subtitled version of the trailer here, or try to make out the teeny-tiny English ones on the trailer posted over at Twitch.