Guess who’s not going to be starring in Wes Craven’s upcoming horror flick 25/8? It’s most likely that Pauly Shore won’t be in the film — unless there’s some sort of bizarre court ruling forcing Craven to take the weasel in. (Wasn’t that Shore’s nickname?)

Via Curbed LA, I found this news story about Pauly Shore countersuing Wes Craven over some property damage. The story states:

Craven is being countersued by Shore, who alleges his Hollywood Hills neighbor is responsible for slope failure on the comedian’s property, court papers show.

I wish news stories would get all their facts straight. Pauly Shore’s a comedian? In what universe? This is more like it:

Shore’s suit, filed Feb. 11 in Los Angeles Superior Court, comes eight months after Craven filed suit against him, making essentially the same allegations of negligence, nuisance and trespass concerning damage to his land.

Shore is totally a nuisance, so that sounds about right. Water damage has caused the slope between their homes to erode. Craven says it comes from Shore’s new pool and spa; while Shore accuses Craven of shoddy landscaping work for causing the problem. Shore also claims that Craven hasn’t stopped rodents from burrowing into the ground. (What, weasels again?)

Whatever the end result, we hope somehow Shore ending up behind bars is part of it. Hey, that could be the premise for his big comeback comedy.

There’s two ways this is going to go down. Shoving so many mutants into one film is either going to look really cool or the X-Men Origins: Wolverine is going to get too bloated. There’s been a ton of casting announcements named lately joining Hugh Jackman on-screen. They are:

Ryan Reynolds: Deadpool
Taylor Kitsch: Gambit
will.i.am: John Wraith
Liev Schreiber: Sabretooth
Danny Huston: Col. William Stryker
Lynn Collins: Silver Fox

Right now this just sounds like Wolverine hangin’ out with a slightly edgier group of mutants, but really how is this different than the X-Men movies? I thought this was a solo film, but he’s not very solo with this bunch. However, I always enjoyed the X-Men movies way more than I thought I would, yes even *shudder* Brett Ratner’s version, so maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised again.

This is the best news I’ve heard in a long time. According to Variety, David Fincher has signed on to direct an adaptation of Black Hole, the graphic novel by Charles Burns. Zodiac was my favorite film of 2007 and Black Hole was one of my favorite comic series over the 10 years it took Burns to write and draw it. I think one issue came out per year and it was such a killer book you didn’t mind the wait. It’s now been collected into a book and I highly recommend it.

Variety says that Alexandre Aja was previously attached to direct, but he’s doing Piranha 3D instead, so good riddance. The article also mentions that a script adaptation was written in 2006 by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary. That makes me worried a little bit since I didn’t like their script for Beowulf at all. Mr. Perfectionist Fincher will probably have the script reworked to his suiting. Or maybe it’s good already. Whatever, this is now the most anticipated movie at the top of my list. And given how slow Fincher works, it’ll probably be a good 10 years before it comes out.

Well, the film has wrapped shooting and as a special “thank you” to us fans who are being terribly patient, Snyder has released a still from the film of Rorschach lighting a guy on fire. It warms my heart to see this picture. Click it to embiggen:

So, we learned last week that Paramount was pushing the film back to a May 8, 2009 release date and most news reports and blog posts ran with the idea that the studio is now so impressed with how things are going with the movie that they think it’ll be better positioned as a summer blockbuster instead of a holiday film.

Ok, that may be right. Seems more “logical” to release the film in May than on Christmas, correct? However, Paramount made the announcement one day after the Writer’s Strike ended. Way back in November during the early days of the strike, screenwriter John August wrote on his blog about a conversation he had with Abrams:

J.J. was describing a scene he was shooting the day before. Midway through it, he got a great idea for a new line. Which he couldn’t write. Couldn’t shoot. Couldn’t be in his movie.

So, now that Abrams and August are freed up to write — and it was nice to hear a director being so respectful, are you listening Michael Bay? — is the movie actually being pushed back to accommodate re-shoots? Just curious.

What was interesting about this new trailer is that it totally played down the whole suicide angle. You wouldn’t even know people were committing suicide in it, except for one random scene of people falling off of a building, but it’s not clear that they’re jumping. I guess the “Hey kids, suicide is fun!” marketing plan was changed in favor for this new one.

While it’s not clear exactly what is “happening,” the trailer plays up the “it’s not nice to fool Mother Nature” aspect of the film. As people are dying, we also get a lot of trees shaking their leaves, which makes the whole thing look kind of funny. Although the embedded trailer below is the same exact one I saw in the theater, who knows if this will continue to be available or if it’ll get yanked, too.

Also, this movie had better include “Teen Suicide (Don’t Do It!)” by Big Fun on the soundtrack.

Having pushed the living dead taking over the world in each previous zombie film — Night, Dawn, Day and Land — as about as far as it could go, Romero returns back to his roots. Once again we’re in the countryside surrounding Pittsburgh and the dead are only just beginning to return to “life.” The opening sequence recalls the beginning SWAT team invasion of a housing project in Dawn of the Dead. While the ’70s film was a thrilling, action-jammed sequence of bullets and chomping teeth flying everywhere, the new flick only features two corpses walking around feasting on flesh, and while guns are fired, the main weapon of choice is a TV news camera on which the action is captured.

The conceit here is that we are told via narration that everything we are going to see is the product of student filmmakers. That TV news footage has been allegedly downloaded off the Internet and incorporated into the students’ film. Most of the plot has us hanging out with these kids. Jason (Joshua Close), the main “director,” is shooting a mummy movie in the woods with his fellow students when they learn about the growing crisis via a radio news report. So, they hop in their trailer and head back to campus to find Jason’s girlfriend, Deb (Michelle Morgan). Once they pick her up, they drive all over Pennsylvania to find their families.

Jason, we learn, actually wants to be a documentary filmmaker, so he keeps his camera running for the entire trip. Mostly, the conceit works. Jason comes across as a putz who would rather hold his camera than save his girlfriend from being eaten alive.

As the kids and one of their professors try to stay alive to reach their destinations, we’re also continuously presented with the “official” version of the dead rising via different newscasts and more downloaded Internet video. Some of this is faked by Romero and some of it is actual news stories mixed in. While the handheld camera conceit can offer easy comparisons to that other “handicam flick” Cloverfield, there’s also similarities to the recent Rambo. For that film, director Sylvester Stallone set up the backstory by using actual footage of Burmese soldiers slaughtering Karen freedom fighters. Romero, to show mass panic, confusion and devastation, clearly uses footage of the Hurricane Katrina debacle.

Through dialogue and narration, Romero keeps hammering home the point that we the people need to break though the “official” bullshit and record “the truth.” However, as the film goes on and the kids keep recording their experiences, what’s left unsaid is even more insidious: these kids are not the solution. They’re almost a worse problem.

While Jason is continually harangued by Deb and the other students for filming so much, all of them are pretty much solipsistic little twerps concerned with only their own well being. When they learn that others are in trouble, they never think to go pitch in and help out, particularly in one scene in which they hear anguished cries over a radio and they don’t even try to lend assistance. They continue on their merry way to save their own lives. The footage that Jason and the others shoot is never really going to tell “the truth.” It’s all just more noise to add to the cacophony of images. These little bastards needed a Capt. Rhodes from Day of the Dead to kick their asses into shape.

While most of the film is concerned with its message about the media, there is still some good zombie gore in the film and Romero has come up with extremely creative ways to off the living and the dead. However, most of the gross stuff is done with CGI these days. While that can free Romero up to film previously unimaginable grotesqueries, it has the effect of sanitizing the gore to a degree, so that bullets tearing through flesh, brains melting, heads splitting open heads, etc. just doesn’t have the charm of Tom Savini practical effects.

Thus, Diary of the Dead is never really that scary. This is less of an outright horror movie and more of a thematic meditation and a drama. But because of that, it’s a fresh addition to Romero’s zombie oeuvre and, in many ways, more thrilling than the over-the-top path the living series was degenerating into.

Instead, Landis will focus on when Gaines was the publisher of EC Comics back in the ’50s, which published a great line of over-the-top horror comics, most notably Tales From the Crypt. EC also published great war, science fiction and crime comics as well as a comic book version of Mad (as opposed to the magazine format we know it today). But it was the horror comics that came under the scrutiny of child psychiatrist Frederick Wertham, who claimed the comics were poisoning the minds of the youth of America. Wertham published the book Seduction of the Innocent, which led to Senate hearings on the issue on the cause of juvenile delinquency.

Gaines very famously testified to Congress on behalf of the First Amendment. However, the Senate hearings led to the creation of the self-censorship organization the Comics Code of America, which effectively put EC out of business. (It’s a little more complicated than that, but that’s the gist.) The only thing that survived was Mad and that was only because it became a magazine instead of a comic book and was thus out of the CCA’s jurisdiction. Very smart on Gaines’ part.

So, it should be a hell of a fun movie. While it’ll be interesting to see who Landis casts as Gaines, as a lifelong comics fan I can’t wait to see who’s going to play Wertham. Somebody who can really play oily and despicable yet seemingly respectable, I hope.

Oh wait, we already know what the Cloverfield monster looks like. However, Hasbro is finally selling their action figure of the beast. That there’s the picture of it from their website.

How much would you expect to pay for something like that? A hundred bucks? Well, you’d be wrong! That thing goes for $99.99 retail. And you get:

* 70 points of articulation and incredible life-like detail
* Authentic sound
* 14” tall
* 10 parasites
* Two interchangeable heads
* Statue of Liberty head accessory
* Special Cloverfield collector’s edition packaging

I like that you get the Statue of Liberty head that you can chuck at your sister’s Barbies, then have the Cloverfield monster eat them.

Now, I saw the film and basically already knew what this thing looked like, but seeing it standing still like that, I find something puzzling. Ok, I found a lot of Cloverfield puzzling, but still… Anyway, the story goes that J.J. Abrams was in a Japanese toy store, saw all the Godzilla action figures and wanted to make a cool American giant monster movie.

But one of the reasons for Godzilla’s enduring popularity is that he’s so distinctive and cool looking. That’s a giant monster with a great personality when you see him. This Cloverfield thing — in addition to not having a neat name like Godzilla or Gojira — is kind of generic looking. I mean, I liked the monster in the movie. It looked scary when it was going after the actors. But there’s really nothing memorable looking about it. The only good thing: It looks better than the faux Godzilla in that godawful American remake.

Finally, in other toy news, Toy Fair starts in Manhattan this Sunday, so expect to see lots of licensed toy pictures based on Indiana Jones, The Dark Knight, Hulk, Speed Racer, Iron Man, WALL*E, etc. next week.

That’s the first image that’s been released promoting X-Men Origins: Wolverine. I kind of make the same face when I’m sitting on the toilet, too. And that title still bugs me. I know the studio tacked on the X-Men part because they didn’t think Wolverine had enough recognition on his own to draw in an audience. I think they’re wrong and I think Jackman is big enough to draw people in on his own. Whatever.

And the photo comes from this USA Today article, which oddly leads with:

As if a guy with temper issues, iron blades for fingernails and a penchant for cage fighting needed it, Wolverine is about to get even surlier.

Those people don’t know nothin’. His claws aren’t iron, they’re adamantium. Guess now that an iron-themed superhero is coming to the big screen, any mainstream reporter who sees a superhero with metal on him, we’ll get notes on how that metal is “iron.”