Noticias

The living dead are ready to make a big return next year.

Living Dead Media has revealed that a new Return of the Living Dead film is due in 2025, a year that marks the milestone 40th anniversary of the 1985 horror cult classic. In doing so, the company and its CEO Steve Wolsh have confirmed details about the project and teased it with a holiday-themed trailer. The clip, which dropped today, not coincidentally on Friday the 13th, features the franchise’s spooky Tarman emerging in a snow covered cemetery dragging a Christmas tree across the landscape as a rendition of “Silent Night” helps set the mood. The teaser does its job by announcing a Christmas 2025 planned releases.

Per a press release obtained by The Hollywood Reporter, Living Dead Media confirms that the project won’t be a reboot of the original but a new installment in the beloved horror-comedy franchise. It...

Scarlett Johansson’s spider-infested horror movie Eight Legged Freaks was met with negative reviews on its initial release in 2002, but it remains an underrated gem. These days, Johansson is known for starring in giant blockbusters like Avengers: Endgame and Oscar-winning dramas like Marriage Story and Jojo Rabbit. But early in her career, she appeared in a wider range of projects — and that includes some of Johansson’s best movies. She appeared in critical darlings like Lost in Translation and Vicky Cristina Barcelona, but she also starred in her share of B-movies.

Johansson co-starred with Ewan McGregor in Michael Bay’s sci-fi thriller The Island, she played Alex Pruitt’s older sister in Home Alone 3, and she played the sheriff’s daughter in Ellory Elkayem’s horror comedy Eight Legged Freaks. This movie sees a swarm of spiders getting exposed to mutagenic toxic waste, growing to kaiju size, and attacking a small mining town.

After centuries of fearing creatures based on myth and folklore, the atomic age introduced humanity to a brand-new breed of monster. With man-made extinction becoming a terrifying real-world possibility, it only made sense for our narrative fears to become bigger and badder in order to adapt to jaded audiences – and that’s why radioactive mutants were inevitable.

And nearly 80 years after the end of the Manhattan Project, genre fiction still exists in the radioactive shadow of the atom even as our modern fears evolve to include global pandemics and climate collapse. With that in mind, we’ve decided to come up with a list celebrating six memorable radioactive movie monsters.

And in the interest of keeping things a little less obvious, we won’t be including the king of radioactive monsters himself, Godzilla, on this list, as everyone and their mother is already aware of the atomic-powered dinosaur.

With that out of the way,...

The late 1990s and early 2000s were a weird era for films. There is definitely an influence from Y2K, and it seemed like there was an attitude that anything goes from some and a tightening of the belt from others. The world was in an odd place, and this influenced everything in culture like music, television, and films. 2002 gave us a wide variety of horror, like Queen of the Damned, Fear Dot Com, Cabin Fever, Bubba Ho-Tep, Dog Soldiers, and Bloody Mallory. This was the end of an era and the start of another for David Arquette it seemed. A time when he tested the “leading man” waters. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite go as planned as box office bomb after box office bomb came. Films like Ravenous, Ready to Rumble, 3000 Miles to Graceland, See Spot Run, and The Grey Zone all featured Arquette in some form but...

While it’s true that insects thrive in warmer climates, They Nest dreamed up a species that can withstand the cold, not to mention turn humans into walking roach motels. Despite its dead-of-winter setting, USA Network aired the debut of New Zealand filmmaker Ellory Elkayem — later retitled Creepy Crawlers on home video — in late July of 2000. By then, the cable channel had unleashed several other “when animals attack” telefilms; feral cats (Strays), displaced serpents (Rattled) and one radioactive pooch (Atomic Dog) all took a bite out of mankind. Their next creature-feature, however, would be the first to truly get under people’s skin.

Former Melrose Place stud Thomas Calabro played yet another troubled doctor in They Nest. Infidelity was among Michael Mancini’s most glaring personal issues, but Ben Cahill is simply recovering from his recent divorce and a drinking problem. After freezing up in the ER and being placed on a forced vacation,...

Spiders are disgusting. No matter their size, shape, or genre —sometimes they're tiny and realistic. Other times, they're large and anthropomorphic. Regardless of their type, spiders have been a fixture of genre cinema since its beginning. In 1957's "The Incredible Shrinking Man," the titular shrinking man (Grant Williams) battled a giant spider while adjusting to dime-sized life. Early roots of folktales and mythology abound with symbolic spiders. Arachne, a Greek weaver, defeated the Goddess Athena in a weaving contest, subsequently condemning herself to a life of eternal weaving as Athena transformed her into a spider. There are arachnid roots and depictions throughout history, most benevolent, though all deeply meaningful.

In contemporary canon, spiders have become more menacing, threatening, and squirm-in-your-chair disgusting. Likely rooted in the quotidian experience of arachnophobia, filmmakers have wasted no time exploiting the basest of fears to make their projects even more frightening. Most spiders are relatively harmless.

Hey, kid! Wanna buy a zombie movie? Shock stumbled upon this interesting Ebay auction in which the producers of the 5th (and arguably worst) Return Of The Living Dead sequel, Ellory Elkayem’s 2005 thingie Return Of The Living Dead: Rave To The Grave, are selling off the entire cannibalistic kit and caboodle. That’s right, according…

The post Wanna Own All Rights and Elements For Return Of The Living Dead 5? appeared first on Shock Till You Drop.

Killer bug and insect invasion films are some of the most challenging to really nail in a memorable manner. I honestly believe that’s why so few directors and production companies will even entertain the idea of approaching the critters.

They’re typically goofy flicks, and most who would consider themselves “serious” filmmakers (whatever that is) probably wouldn’t waste a scoff at the thought of creating one. But every once in a while something special arrives and leaves its mark on our psyche.

Perhaps it’s an over-the-top exploitation piece that happens to piece the puzzle together properly. Maybe it’s a film so astonishingly complex and multi-layered that one cannot avoid the intrigue of a grand mind fuck. It doesn’t matter why bug flicks work or how bug flicks work. What matters is that when the truly innovative minds out there set out to make a film of this nature,...

Stars: Patrick Muldoon, Christa Campbell, William Hope, Shelly Varod, Pete Lee-Wilson, Jon Mack, Sydney Sweeney | Written by Joseph Farrugia | Directed by Tibor Takacs

I love a good (or so bad its good) monster movie – as you can probably tell by the number of them I’ve reviewed here at Nerdly. So when a new one comes along I’m always excited to see what “delights” they will bring. Will they do something original? Or be completely off the wall? Recently the monster movie has seen a resurgence of the “nature gone wild” format – in particular the killer shark movie. But sharks are not only mans greatest enemy, well not if low-budget horror and sci-fi are to be believed, we also have to fear spiders… Giant spiders!

From the black and white terror of Tarantula in the Fifties to the hilarious comedy horror of Eight Legged Freaks, giant spiders (and spiders...

Alright guys, I’ll level with you – I hate spiders. Everyone has that one creepy, crawly thing that grosses them out to no end, and the thought of a little fat fuzzy black arachnid scurrying by my toes gives me instantaneous chills. Just one of those things that isn’t for me, yeah? But don’t think I hide my eyes when they’re around or anything, as I love catching Eight Legged Freaks whenever it’s running on syndication, so I took Tibor Takács’ Spiders 3D as a welcome festival opener.

A throwback to the B-Movie creature features of old, undoubtably having scientists meddle with something small, growing it to gargantuan sizes only to cause destruction? Sounds like a good time to me, especially since Tibor is a veteren of these types of flicks, such as Ice Spiders, Mega Snake, Kraken: Tentacles Of The Deep, Sabrina The Teenage Witch…...

Monsters are a dime a dozen and have been throughout history. There’s the Vampire; the Werewolf; the Centaur; the Fish Man; the Fly Man; the Ghost and the Goblin. And it doesn’t end there, the list goes on and on into the shadows but it only needs to be observed to realise that we love a good miscreation more than we possibly should.

But let’s examine the word itself – Monster. It’s derived from the Latin word monstrare which is ‘to show, point out or reveal’ (also intrinsic in the etymology of the word ‘demonstrate’). In order to truly terrify, a monster must reveal to us something in ourselves – something we may not necessarily want to acknowledge. This is why the Zombie endures even as other monsters are committed to history – our survival instinct forces us to fear our mortality and so most of us refuse to truly recognize it.

CANNES -- Anatoly Fradis' Los Angeles-based Aurora Entertainment Corp. is set to start back-to-back shooting from June 7 in Romania on the fourth and fifth sequels to the Return of the Living Dead series of films, with Ellory Elkayem attached to direct and Peter Coyote headlining. Both films have been fully financed by a $35 million equity fund that Fradis (Eight Legged Freaks) set up last year. The fund is based in America but backed by a group of private Eastern European and Russian investors. They set the scene for plans to make six or seven films a year in the $6 million-$10 million budget range through the fund, Fradis said. Titled Return of the Living Dead 4: Necropolis and Return of the Living Dead 5: Rave From the Grave, the films were written by William Butler and Aaron Strongoni and feature a relatively unknown cast drawn from TV. Special effects will be done by Optic Nerve Studios.

"Eight Legged Freaks", a tongue-in-cheek homage to the giant bug sci-fi movies of the '50s, is fun while it lasts. The trouble is, its filmmakers run out of clever ideas and visual gags about halfway through. The movie, shepherded to the screen by movie-buff filmmakers Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin, should open strong, but the drop-off could be steep. However, "Freaks" is campy enough to turn into a top rental video.

Interestingly, its New Zealand co-writer/director Ellory Elkayem came to the Telluride Film Festival four years ago with a 13-minute black-and-white short, "Larger Than Life", about a single giant spider, that was both hilarious and scary. But Elkayem is not nearly as sure-footed in this overscaled Hollywood production, which misses his short's sneaky charm and stylish nuances.

The movie's best moments are crammed into the sections leading up to the invasion of a small Arizona town by an army of huge spiders. You can sense Elkayem's giddy joy in ransacking the various plot elements that went into old B movies. There's toxic waste dumped into a water system, and a crazy desert coot feeds the creatures that consume this waste to his collection of spiders. Naturally, they grow, then escape. And soon farm animals and pets get yanked from the screen to ghastly fates.

There's a small boy (Scott Terra) who quickly guesses what's going on, but no one listens to him because he's a kid. Then his older sister (Scarlett Johansson) experiments with her sexuality despite warnings by her been-there-done-that mom (Kari Wuhrer), who happens to be the town's sheriff.

Throw in a paranoid local radio announcer (Doug E. Doug) and an abandoned gold mine that a crooked mayor wants to turn into a nuclear dump and everything seems primed for an arachnophobia freakout. But it never happens. Once the invasion gets under way, satirical elements fall away and Elkayem fails to make most subplots pay off.

The film's two leads are David Arquette, the son of the mine's late owner, who returns to his hometown after a 10-year absence, and Wuhrer, the woman he left behind, only she never knew it. The two are perfectly cast. Both are likable but with an edge. He is hard-headed and impulsive yet terrifically tongue-tied in her presence. She is a far cry from the scream-and-faint heroines of most '50s sci-fi flicks: As a gun-totting sheriff, she resolutely takes her stand against an invading army.

But the computer-generated spiders are, frankly, bores. They're much creepier when small. Similarly, in a large cast of characters, each one gets introduced with a quirky comic personality, but most are abandoned in the ensuing commotion.

The movie comes loaded with references to other scare movies. The major one is the climax itself, which takes place in a shopping mall, mimicking the zombie invasion in George A. Romero's 1979 "Dawn of the Dead". But where Romero turned the mall into a satire of American consumerism, Elkayem uses his mall as a mere location without exploiting its many comic opportunities.

All below-the-line crews did their jobs well. Yet none of this prevents "Freaks" from falling flat in both the scare and laughter categories.

EIGHT LEGGED FREAKS

Warner Bros. Pictures

In association with Village Roadshow Pictures and NPV Entertainment presents an Electric Entertainment production

Credits:

Director: Ellory Elkayem

Screenwriters: Jesse Alexander, Ellory Elkayem

Story by: Jesse Alexander, Ellory Elkayem

Producers: Dean Devlin, Bruce Berman

Executive producers: Roland Emmerich, Peter Winther, William Fay

Director of photography: John Bartlet

Production designer: Charles Breen

Music: John Ottman

Co-producer: Kelly Van Horn

Costume designer: Alix Friedberg

Editor: David J. Siegel

Visual effects supervisors: Karen E. Goulekas, Thomas Dadras

Cast:

Chris: David Arquette

Sam: Kari Wuhrer

Mike: Scott Terra

Ashley: Scarlett Johansson

Harlan: Doug E. Doug

Deputy Pete: Rick Overton

Running time -- 99 minutes

MPAA rating PG-13...