Smash Cut

A movie mash-up that could happen, er, “Only In My Dreams” is ready to chomp up home theaters in the form of Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus. What’s it about? Read the title! Need to know more? It stars brooding, would-be tough guy Lorenzo Lamas, former pop wonder Deborah Gibson, and a slew of not-so-special-yet-thoroughly-enjoyable creature effects.

Don’t believe me? Feast on the tasty trailer below.

Neill Blomkamp. Remember that name, people. Because in a few months, you’ll probably be seeing it everywhere.

Blomkamp is a filmmaker whose style tends to blend a kind of docu-realism with sci-fi elements. His 2005 short film, Alive in Joburg, about an eerie alien encounter in Johannesburg, South Africa, caught the attention of none other than the acclaimed Lord of the Rings trilogy helmer Peter Jackson. The latter was so impressed that he tapped Blomkamp to direct a live-action feature of the video game hit Halo, a project that eventually fell through.

No matter. Blomkamp’s new feature, District 9, a politically-charged “what if” tale in which alien visitors are forced into slum-like internment camps on Earth, promises to deliver a gritty blend of social allegory and sci-fi spectacle that few talents seem capable of pulling off these days.

District 9 is slated for release this August, but you can enter the film’s densely-imagined world via the vividly rich and detailed official website created for the film. And you can watch the knockout trailer for it below.

Hey, I’m just reporting here, so don’t sue, okay? The trailer for the straight-to-video/DVD sci-fi rip-off actioner The Terminators has dropped, and while it may not have Christian Bale or a studio budget, it does have lotsa robots and big explosions!

Peep the preview below.

Ah, Twitch. You can always count on that site for the best updates, and this one’s no exception: an exclusive presentation of the first trailer for Samurai Princess.

I showed you the scorching one-sheet image above when I first  blogged about this destined-for-cult-classic-status, psychotronic Japanese actioner at the beginning of the month. The poster’s image of lead star/adult video actress Aino Kishi was probably enough to get your tongues wagging, but the preview delivers on many, many more levels, folks. We’re talking explosive breasts and scissor feet here.

Watch the trailer here on Twitch. You can visit the Official Samurai Princess Website for more details as they arrive.

“New Samurai is Born.” Indeed!

Let’s face it, very few science fiction films today are cut from the same cloth as the classics. The current offerings all seem to focus more on FX-driven eye-candy than the kind of brain-teasing “what if” scenarios that can make the genre so potent. However, director Duncan Jones — who happens to be the son of spaceman Ziggy Stardust himself, David Bowie — seems to be well on his way to give sci-fi a well-needed kick in the pants with Moon.

The film tells the story of by-the-books astronaut Sam Bell (played by the always impressive Sam Rockwell, in what seems to be a solo tour-de-force performance), who’s nearing the end of a three-year solitary stint on the moon, where he’s supervised the mining of resources to fuel Earth’s ever-escalating power-needs. His only companion is a computer named GERTY. Until, that is, he discovers someone else on the lunar surface, and begins a hallucinatory journey into identity and self-discovery that could bring some chilling ramifications along with it.

Watch the hauntingly terrific new trailer over at IGN.com. The preview offers elements that hint at influences from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, Silent Running and Solaris: all absolutely great works from which inspiration can be drawn, in my opinion. There’s also an official website, which doesn’t have anything on it so far except a classy splash page image and an announcement that Moon will open in New York and Los Angeles in limited release on June 12.

It was really only a couple of weeks ago when I first posted about the forthcoming live-action interpretation of the 2000 anime vampire/action classic, Blood: The Last Vampire.

Well, it now seems as if people are salivating for more, because the hype machine is still chugging along at full steam, with a brand-new trailer popping up online courtesy of Yahoo! Japan. It’s not subtitled, but a good amount of it is actually in English so you shouldn’t have any problems following along.

The thing is, now that I’ve actually heard the delivery of the English dialogue (particularly that of lead actress Gianna Jun), I’m toning down my expectations a bit. Some of the performances seem a bit…uh…stiff, which can (and should) be expected given the fact that English isn’t exactly the native tongue of many of the performers. But I can’t deny that the not-so-fluent passages are more than a little distracting. Nevertheless, director Chris Nahon obviously has an eye for flashy style, and the extended footage shows off the movie’s exciting sheen.

Check out the trailer here. (Click on the highlighted blue characters above the paragraph of Japanese text in order to access the preview.)

So, are you sick of reading all my continuous hype over master fantasist Kazuaki Kiriya’s latest mindblower, Goemon?

Well, too bad, ’cause I’m still jonesing over this upcoming movie, and now there’s an even newer trailer that’s gonna knock your socks off (as if the first trailer didn’t already take care of that business).

Goemon, for those of you who haven’t been paying attention, is a Japanese sci-fi/fantasy/quasi-historical riff on the old Robin Hood legend: a daring hero takes on an oppressive ruler to bring the riches of the wealthy to the poor. But, clearly, he does it with a lot of style.

You can witness the glory of the new trailer over at the film’s official website. It’s set for a May 1 unveiling in Japan.

I guess over in Hong Kong they’re sick of seeing Hollywood get all of the giant robot fun — especially when those big metallic humanoids were popular in Asia well before the States — so filmmaker Jeffrey Lau is getting in on the mecha-mayhem with his latest movie, Kung Fu Cyborg.

Lau might not be a particularly familiar name to a lot of U.S. viewers, but you may know a lot of his colleagues. Arthouse fave Wong Kar-wai was a long-time production company partner, and Wong produced some of Lau’s winning comedies like the ultra-cute (yet enjoyably so) Chinese Odyssey 2002 and the nutso martial arts freakout The Eagle Shooting Heroes. Also, Lau helmed the 1994 Monkey King-inspired fantasy A Chinese Odyssey, which starred Chinese box-office sensation Stephen Chow, the ex-director but currently-still-Kato of Seth Rogen’s vanity project, The Green Hornet.

So what’s Kung Fu Cyborg about?

Uh….Kung fu! Cyborgs! What else is there to know?

Right now, not much has come out for the movie, except for a brand-new teaser — emphasis on the “tease” part — which you can viddy-well below.

Back in November of last year, I blogged about one of unpredictable Canadian indie director Bruce McDonald’s newest efforts, a foray into horror cinema called Pontypool. The trailer I linked at the tail of that posting basically emphasized generic “horror” bump-in-the-night kinda stuff, but considering it’s Bruce McD. — a quirky filmmaker if there ever was one — I figured it was probably a tad misleading.

My gut reaction seems to have been on target as a newer preview promoting the film’s impending release seems to play up more of the “semiotic”/language-driven side of the work, though not in a pretentious or off-putting way. The movie’s take on the “zombiefication” of people — via a virus that’s seemingly spread by the English language! — carries an added punch considering that the protagonist is a yapping, Pontypool-based radio DJ covering the mass reports of escalating carnage. As a result, he is, quite possibly, spreading the “disease” simply by doing his job.

Take a look at the new theatrical trailer here. Pontypool is slated to open on March 6 in limited release.

Okay folks. So, infamous meltdown aside, is there any real season to see Terminator Salvation? Probably not.

Maybe we oughta be placing bets on director Xavier S. Puslowski (who?), since he’s slamming out a new postapocalyptic sci-fi actioner in the direct-to-DVD market, The Terminators. Yeah, that’s right! This tale of rag-tag resistance fighters duking it out with red- (And blue! Take note, James Cameron’s legal department!) eyed cyborgs that have taken over the planet might not be rolling in uniqueness but, hey, the poster art promises lotsa robots! A ginormous heavy-metal army! Along with Jeremy London and A Martinez. I dunno, I may be scoffing a bit, but Puslowski’s pic clocks in at 90 minutes, which means that, at the very least, it won’t feel bloated. (Terminator Salvation allegedly runs 130 minutes, and longer ain’t necessarily better, kids.)

If you’re dying to learn more info about The Terminators, then check out its official website courtesy of production company The Asylum, creators of another — ahem — brilliant opus, The Day the Earth Stopped. I’m sure a trailer will pop up there when one’s completed.