Fresh off a return in last year’s slasher sequel Scream VI, Deadline reports today that Hayden Panettiere will be leading the cast of Lionsgate’s upcoming thriller Amber Alert.

Hayden Panettiere stars alongside Tyler James Williams (Abbott Elementary).

Ambert Alert is actually in post-production at this time, Deadline notes.

In the thriller, “an ordinary ride share becomes a high-stakes game of cat and mouse. The story will follow Jaq (Hayden Panettiere) who is eager to get to her first day at a new job, and her driver, Shane (Tyler James Williams), who is just trying to earn a little extra at his side hustle. An alert of a child abduction on their phones will change all that when they discover they are behind a car that matches the description of the kidnapper’s. Unable to let a possible child trafficker escape, they begin a pursuit that will put their own lives at risk.”

Kerry Bellessa directs the film, written by Kerry Bellessa and Joshua Oram.

Producers are Joseph Restaino and Tony Stopperan through their Hungry Bull Productions banner, Summer and Kerry Bellessa through Bluefields Entertainment, and Leal Naim.

No word yet on a release date. Stay tuned for more.

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An unpublished story from author Joe Hill (The Black Phone, “Locke & Key”), the mysterious Ushers has been picked up for feature film adaptation by Sony Screen Gems this week.

Deadline reports that Gary Dauberman (Salem’s Lot) will produce the film.

The website reports, “Under his first look deal with the studio, Gary Dauberman and his team at Coin Operated will develop and produce with Zak Olkewicz set to write the script. Coin Operated’s President, Mia Maniscalco, will also be a producer.”

Zak Olkewicz recently wrote Fear Street: Part Two and The Last Voyage of the Demeter.

At this time, the plot is being kept under wraps. Does Joe Hill’s Ushers have something to do with the Edgar Allan Poe tale The Fall of the House of Usher, which served as the backbone for Mike Flanagan’s same-titled Netflix horror series? Is it even a horror story at all?

Stay tuned for more…

Joe Hill is of course the son of prolific (and still very much active) horror legend Stephen King.

The post Mysterious Unpublished Joe Hill Short Story ‘Ushers’ Getting a Film Adaptation from Screen Gems appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Whether you consider The Crow: City of Angels cursed or simply made in bad taste by a studio (Dimension Films) that couldn’t care less, a rewatch more than twenty years later is a real eye-opener in terms of the film as a standalone experience.

I remember being a kid who thought Brandon Lee as The Crow was one of the coolest things I’d ever witnessed in my life. For the record, I still feel that way. For years we donned black and white face makeup on Halloween night. Hell, the wrestler Sting is still doing it. I don’t know how adults reacted to The Crow at the time but I know us eleven-year-olds were rocked by it.

I bring this up because two years later I would leave the theater immensely bummed out after witnessing The Crow: City of Angels.

I remember hating the movie and vowing never to waste my time with it again. There was something about it that just felt cheap and wrong. I don’t think I realized it at the time but that disappointment wasn’t actually due to the quality of the film. Rather… you could just sniff a sense of dishonor about it all.

In some ways this was true, in others it was unfair. Some information I didn’t learn until researching for this very article was that there was a major effort from writer David S. Goyer and director Tim Pope to not disrespect the legacy of Brandon Lee or the original film. They went out of their way to structure City of Angels in a way that didn’t feel like a sequel to the film Lee gave his life making. Enter Dimension Films, who took over after filming was complete and had everything completely restructured to more closely resemble the original. They took the entire narrative and re-assembled it, even turning important story points into flashbacks so that they would remind the viewer of director Alex Proyas and Brandon Lee’s original film.

It feels important to note that while there are moments of tacky studio decision-making that can be sniffed out, those who were boots on the ground making the film seemed to have nothing but the best intent. And so, I feel comfortable saying that I was completely wrong about this movie and more than twenty-five years later, have found it to be both underrated and underappreciated.

One of the things City of Angels had right from the get-go and something a lot of fans (including myself) wish future iterations would honor is that the film did not re-cast someone else to play Eric Draven but rather told the story of a new tortured soul brought back for revenge. As Tim Pope told Cinefantastique back in 1996, “What we suggest at the beginning of this movie is that this has been happening all the way throughout history, so that there have been hundreds if not thousands of people brought back before Eric Draven and there will be more afterward. That person could be a man; that person could be a woman; that person could be a child.”

Enter Ashe Corven. Along with his young son, Ashe is murdered by a gang after witnessing them attacking someone else.

Vincent Perez (Queen Margot) had the unenviable task of following the footsteps of Brandon Lee as the next Crow. Though they were thankfully different characters, not a soul in the cinema wasn’t comparing the two whether intentionally or subconsciously. It felt “off” at the time for this reason, but watching Perez play the character today is a revelation. Using strange movements and spastic physical reactions, Perez did a great job physically communicating the unknowable feeling of fitting back into your body post-death. It didn’t feel like an imitation of Lee, but there was something about the way Lee had played the Crowe that Perez seemed to understand.

Nobody may want to admit it because of the serious emotional baggage the character and story walk around with but the Crow has to be fucking cool, too. Perez had all the “goth dude who will beat your ass and then cry on a rooftop afterward but still look badass doing it” ambiance one could ask for. Not a soul in this world has the voice of a Brandon Lee but Perez was able to capture the violent yet broken cadence of a dead man with a broken heart who’s ready to do violence with pizazz. He’ll likely never get his due for the performance due to all the external factors surrounding the film and that’s a damn shame. Nobody will ever top Brandon Lee, but any future iterations of The Crow will have to do a hell of a job to compete with Perez’s work here.

Though the overall similarities between the villains of City of Angels and the original are overbearing, it’s no fault of the actors who played them. Iggy Pop had maybe the most natural performance I’ve ever seen from a musician as one of the main gangbangers, Curve. The great Thomas Jane had the thankless role of being the bad guy who dies pleasuring himself in a peep show booth when the stripper is hilariously replaced with Ashe. You might assume this to be awkward for an actor but Jane goes for it as if there were an Academy Award on the line, and the results are electric. Long Live Thomas Jane.

The soundtrack featuring PJ Harvey, Seven Marty Three, Iggy Pop himself, Korn, Bush, Filter, The Toadies, and The Deftones (who are awkwardly in the film) pairs amazingly with the all-timer soundtrack of the first film and ignites the mood for some awesome revenge murder to occur; and occur it does. Apart from the aforementioned peep show booth scene that ends with Thomas Jane dead with a blow-up doll between his legs and a paper mache crow stuffed in his mouth, there’s a moment that the warehouse scene in Batman Begins (also written by Goyer) no doubt owes inspirational credit to. In the scene, Ashe taunts his first victim (Spider-Monkey) by stalking him around the dark corners of a drug warehouse bellowing “I am all your nightmares rolled into one!” before blowing up the entire warehouse and walking away as palm trees burst into flames while a crow flies past them. It’s a lot. It’s intense. And I love it.

Ashe will go on to have a full-blown karate fight with Thuy Trang’s Kali prefaced with a dialogue exchange that shouldn’t work but somehow does due to the way the actors sell it when ”Do you know how to fight??” is answered with, “Do you know how to die?” Ashe eventually sings to her “Hush little baby, don’t say a word. Daddy’s gonna buy you a big BLACK BIRD!”… before yeeting her out of a window to her death. Later, Curve reports the death of Spider-Monkey to the lead bad guy, Judah (Richard Brooks), with the diction of someone getting a pack of smokes and a lottery ticket from a gas station attendant: “Spider-Monkey’s a fuckin’ crispy critter.” Scenes that seemed so terrible so many years ago have a strange charm to them now.

Finally, Ashe makes his way to Judah. Though Judah is fantastically creepy and makes for a daunting bad guy, this is where the film unfortunately falls apart. His big plan is to capture the literal crow and drink its blood. He does so and this not only gives him Ashe’s power but also takes it from Ashe because… science? Meanwhile, as Ashe loses his power, an entire Day of the Dead festival decides to kick the shit out of him for some reason. Probably just because it looked cool for the scene. The ’90s were wild, man.

When Judah comes down to face Ashe, he has absorbed all of his power and beats him up for a while, even stringing him up and hitting him with a whip. A grown-up Sarah (Mia Kirshner) from the first film then runs up and temporarily saves the day, stabbing Judah in the face. Sarah is a super moody character who really adds to the whole goth vibe of the film as a tattoo artist used by the forces at hand to help and guide Ashe. You almost wish this anti-climactic moment would have kept Judah down because what’s next is a bummer.

[Related] ‘The Crow’ Reboot Starring Bill Skarsgård Will Release in June 2024!

As Judah does the bad guy thing and waxes poetically about how he’s defeated Ashe, Ashe inexplicably summons a murder of crows to fly through Judah, killing him. I mean, we could have just had a cool fight scene here, guys. That’s kind of what everything was building to.

In the end, Ashe returns to the afterlife to be with his son and his new love Sarah, whom Judah killed in the fracas, and we’re left with the happiest ending a Crow movie can really offer. With our characters at peace. The Crow: City of Angels is in no way perfect but it certainly has a lot more to offer than many will ever accept. I’m glad to have resurrected it all these years later and maybe you will be too. Don’t go any further into the sequels, though. Trust me on this one.

The post Why ‘The Crow: City of Angels’ Is Worth Bringing Back from the Dead appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Juan Piquer Simón’s exploitation slasher Pieces (1982) has a bonkers reputation that precedes it, delivering one of horror’s most entertaining audience experiences of all time. The tagline, “It’s exactly what you think it is!” only scratches the surface of the weirdness within. Sure, you get exactly what you expect in terms of gore in this tale of a jigsaw puzzle-obsessed killer with a chainsaw, but the execution is so over the top there’s nothing that really prepares you for the unique brand of madness.

Simon was initially approached to helm a sequel to Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left, but passed because the script he was offered seemed too boring. Then he was offered a 30-page treatment for Pieces, then titled Jigsaw, intended at the time to be a made-for-TV movie. It was so insane that not only was he intrigued, he was determined to make the script believable.

Which makes me wonder just how insane this synopsis actually was on paper, because the final film is far from believable…

Opening with a 10-year old Timmy assembling a jigsaw puzzle of a nude woman, his mother walks in and yells at him about it. In response, he grabs an axe and hacks her to bits. The police find him in a closet, covered in his mother’s blood, and he blames some mysterious intruder for the murder. Cut to 40 years later. An unseen Timmy unboxes that same puzzle, and a wave of murders at a college campus begins anew, with the police stumped by the grisly murders.

On paper, that sounds normal enough, but what transpires is anything but normal.

Pieces puts together a whodunnit type slasher where the story doesn’t really seem interested in the mystery. The red herring is arrested immediately, without even giving much reason as to why they were a suspect in the first place. You get so caught up in the violent dismemberments that you forget you’re supposed to wonder who’s behind The Shadow inspired disguise. There’s also one of horror’s most infamous scenes randomly injected in the film; a kung fu instructor battling an undercover cop in the middle of the night for no reason at all. Story goes that producer/co-writer Dick Randall happened to be producing many Bruce Lee type martial arts films at the time and Simón wanted to pad out the runtime. Insert random nonsense. Cut and print.

Most surprising of all, though, is that for how gory the film is, the body count in Pieces is surprisingly low. Including the opening scene, Timmy racks up a kill count of 7 dismembered victims, a few less than the original Friday the 13th a couple years prior; on that note, keep your eyes peeled for an original Friday the 13th one sheet hidden in this very movie. But every single murder amasses a ton of blood and gore, as taking chainsaws to limbs is apt to do, and most of the gore effects involved actual pig carcasses and real slaughterhouse blood and organs.

There’s been a long-standing rumor that part of why Pieces is so over the top gory is because one of the writers is Joe D’Amato, of Anthropophagus infamy. It’s an unsubstantiated rumor, with Juan Piquer Simón confirming in multiple interviews that D’Amato hadn’t been involved in the film at all. Dick Randall did co-write with Roberto Loyola, however, an Italian producer, writer, and director with a talent for casting Giallo films. That influence is very much felt here.

Pieces has everything you could ever hope for in exploitation slasher cinema. Gratuitous nudity (both male and female), insane carnage, goofy dialogue, and an overall sense of gleeful reckless abandon makes for a film that’s one of the goriest slashers of the ‘80s, and still a perfect crowd pleaser over 40 years later.

Just wait until you see the insane final shot, which led to Eli Roth calling the bonkers and totally unexpected finale of 1982’s Pieces “the greatest ending in horror history.”

Pieces is now streaming on SCREAMBOX, Shudder, Tubi, Peacock and AMC+.

The post The Best Gore Movies You Need to See: ‘Pieces’ (1982) Delivers a Real Chainsaw Massacre appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

The Sam Raimi-produced dystopian action thriller Boy Kills World is set to unleash pure mayhem this Spring. Today, Roadside Attractions debuts the brand new trailer to help us prepare for the bone-crunching madness ahead. Watch the Boy Kills World trailer below.

Roadside Attractions and Lionsgate will release Boy Kills World wide in theaters on April 26, 2024.

Bill Skarsgård leads the stacked cast that includes Happy Death Day star Jessica Rothe, Yayan Ruhian (John Wick 3, The Raid: Redemption), Andrew Koji (Warrior, Snake Eyes), Isaiah Mustafa (It: Chapter Two), Famke Janssen (The Postcard Killings), Sharlto Copley (District 9), Michelle Dockery (“Downton Abbey”), Brett Gelman (Stranger Things), Quinn Copeland (Peacock’s Punky Brewster), and twins Cameron and Nicholas Crovetti (Big Little Lies).

Boy Kills World follows “‘Boy’ who vows revenge after his family is murdered by Hilda Van Der Koy (Janssen), the deranged matriarch of a corrupt post-apocalyptic dynasty that left the boy orphaned, deaf and voiceless. Driven by his inner voice, one which he co-opted from his favorite childhood video game, Boy trains with a mysterious shaman (Ruhian) to become an instrument of death and is set loose on the eve of the annual culling of dissidents. Bedlam ensues as Boy commits bloody martial arts mayhem, inciting a wrath of carnage and blood-letting. As he tries to get his bearings in this delirious realm, Boy soon falls in with a desperate resistance group, all the while bickering with the apparent ghost of his rebellious little sister.”

Moritz Mohr directed Boy Kills World, which was written by Arend Remmers (Sløborn) and Tyler Burton Smith (Kung Fury: The Movie).

Boy Kills World is a gonzo actioner that plays like a video game. I wrote in my review out of TIFF last year that “the manic B-movie energy combined with frenetic, gory action infuses a familiar conceit with a sense of video game fun.”

For even more teases on what to expect from Boy Kills World, stunt extraordinaire, second unit director, fight coordinator, and action designer Dawid Szatarski (Wonder Woman, Kingsman: The Secret Service, Ong Bak 3) previously spoke with Bloody Disgusting about the film’s action and unique camerawork.

The infectious brawler was produced by Sam Raimi, Roy Lee, Simon Swart, Alex Lebovici, Stuart Manashil, Wayne Fitzjohn, Zainab, Azizi, Dan Kagan.

The post ‘Boy Kills World’ Trailer – Bill Skarsgård and Jessica Rothe Brawl in Bloody Actioner appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.