Diablo IV is zero for two when it comes to smooth launches. While the new expansion, Vessel of Hatred, seemed like it had all the kinks ironed out, a last-minute delay upended those plans. Worse, however, is a bizarre licensing bug that’s locking some players out of the new content, including its Spiritborn class.…
Diablo IV is zero for two when it comes to smooth launches. While the new expansion, Vessel of Hatred, seemed like it had all the kinks ironed out, a last-minute delay upended those plans. Worse, however, is a bizarre licensing bug that’s locking some players out of the new content, including its Spiritborn class.…
Netflix continues to clean house as the streamer evaluates which shows they opt to continue making. Earlier, That 90s Show fell victim to cancellation. Now, according to Deadline, Netflix has decided not to renew the Jeff Goldblum high-concept series, KAOS. It had been confirmed by one of the show’s stars, Aurora Perrineau, in a now-deleted Instagram post.
In the deleted post, Perrineau said, “Well… this one hurts. I find explaining how I’m feeling to be really difficult, but I’ll try. When I started auditioning for this show, I knew it was special, mainly due to the fact that Charlie Covell’s scripts resonated with me in a way most things hadn’t. I knew all of these people, and I loved them all — every flaw, everything.”
She would conclude by saying, “Everyone was brilliant and uniquely themselves. Every performance surprised and excited me. I can’t believe I got to do this with all of you. We made something weird, dark, hilarious, deranged and absolutely tragic – something entirely human. THIS is a feeling I plan to take with me.”
KAOS was a dark comedy series from creator Charlie Covell and writer Georgia Christou. Georgi Banks-Davis directs five episodes of KOAS, while Runyararo Mapfumo shoots the remaining three. Jeff Goldblum leads the cast, including Perrieau, Debi Mazar, Fady Elsayed, Sam Buttery, Matthew Koon, Elander Moore, Susan Wooldridge, Shila Ommi, and Amanda Douge.
Here’s the official synopsis for KAOS courtesy of Netflix:
Zeus has long enjoyed his status as King of The Gods. That is until he wakes up one morning and discovers a wrinkle on his forehead. Neurosis sets in, setting him off on a dangerous, paranoid path. Zeus becomes convinced his fall is coming – and starts to see signs of it everywhere.
Zeus’ once reliable brother, Hades, God of the Underworld, is secretly losing his grip on his dark dominion. There is a backlog of dead waiting to be processed and they are growing restless. Hera (Janet McTeer), Queen of the Gods, exercises dominion on Earth — and over Zeus — in her own unique way. But her power and freedom become threatened by Zeus’ growing paranoia, and she is forced to act, while Zeus’ rebellious son, Dionysus, (Nabhaan Rizwan), is out of control and on course for a cosmic collision with his father.
On Earth people are aching for change, however Poseidon (Cliff Curtis), God of Sea, Storms and Earthquakes (and Horses) is more concerned with the size of his super-yacht and where the next party is at. The wellbeing of mere mortals is of little interest to him. Unfortunately for the Gods some of those mortals are beginning to realise this…
These mortals – Riddy (Aurora Perrineau), Orpheus (Killian Scott), Caneus (Misia Butler) and Ari (Leila Farzad) – come from different walks of life and are all cosmically connected in the battle against Zeus. Each one has a very different role to play, any one of them may be destined to bring down the Gods.
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Back in 1980, author Philip Nicholson, writing as A. J. Quinnell, introduced the world to a man named Creasy, an American-born former French Foreign Legion soldier, in the pages of his novel Man on Fire. While Creasy would return for four more novels – The Perfect Kill (1992), The Blue Ring (1993), Black Horn (1994), and Message From Hell (1996) – it’s Man on Fire that has received the most attention over the year, being turned into a film that starred Scott Glenn in 1987 and one that starred Denzel Washington in 2004. Now, Man on Fire is serving as the basis of a Netflix TV series that’s set to star Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (Aquaman) as Creasey – and The Hollywood Reporter has broken the news that Alice Braga (Queen of the South), Scoot McNairy (Speak No Evil), and Paul Ben-Victor (Nobody Wants This) have signed on to play recurring roles on the show.
We previously heard that Bobby Cannavale, who recently starred in the hit Netflix series The Watcher, will be a guest star. Cannavale is taking on the role of Paul Rayburn, an “ex-Special Forces soldier who possesses a unique ability to read people. He is charming, nurturing, and protective of those he cares for. Despite his warm, fatherly nature, his years of service in the field have given him an acute awareness of violence and human behavior. Quick-witted and incredibly intellectual, he is likely to have all the answers, and if not, he will find them.” Also in the cast is Billie Boullet, who played Anne Frank in the recent Nat Geo limited series A Small Light. Boullet’s character here is Poe Rayburn, who has “the lanky lines of someone growing at a rapid and confusing pace and the attitude that comes with it. She is unhappy about moving to Brazil because of her parent’s decision, spending her days with her wealthy international classmates until a tragic incident changes her perspective on family and life. As the only witness to a terrifying event, Poe quickly learns that her only ally is John Creasy.“
Here’s the logline for the show: Once a high functioning and skilled Special Forces Mercenary, known for surviving even the most desolate of situations, Creasy (Mateen) is now plagued with intense PTSD. Determined to overcome his personal demons, he sets out on a path to redemption. But, before he can adjust to this new life, he finds himself back in the fire, fighting harder than ever.
Alice Braga’s character is Valeria Melo, “a professional driver with family connections to a gang that runs a favela in Brazil. Creasy hires her and quickly comes to rely on her as he tries to protect a young girl while pursuing terrorists.” Scoot McNairy will be playing Henry Tappan, “an intelligent and calculating CIA field agent stationed in Brazil.” Paul Ben-Victor is Moncrief, the director of the CIA.
Kyle Killen (Fear Street) is the writer, executive producer, and showrunner – and if you’re a Quinnell fan who has seen enough of the Man on Fire story of the years, you might be glad to hear that Killen is working elements of the novel The Perfect Kill into this eight-episode show as well.
Are you looking forward to the Man on Fire TV series? What do you think of Alice Braga, Scoot McNairy, and Paul Ben-Victor joining the cast? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
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Back in 2022, Sifu made waves for having the grit and style of a confident kung-fu revenge film. Starring a pupil who sees his master get killed by a vengeful former student called Yang, the story picks back up years after the inciting incident, as the former fights his way through the criminal underworld of their…
Back in 2022, Sifu made waves for having the grit and style of a confident kung-fu revenge film. Starring a pupil who sees his master get killed by a vengeful former student called Yang, the story picks back up years after the inciting incident, as the former fights his way through the criminal underworld of their…
The early 2000s were a bad time for Sylvester Stallone professionally. In the mid-nineties, after a short-lived resurgence of three hit movies, Cliffhanger, Demolition Man and The Specialist, Stallone’s career as a bankable action star began to sputter, with Judge Dredd, Assassins and Daylight all losing money. Copland, an indie drama directed by James Mangold, made money and earned Stallone his best reviews since the original Rocky, but his follow-up movies were disastrous. His attempt at a slasher/ horror movie, D-Tox, sat on the shelf for years, finally being released under the lame title Eye See You. His 2000 remake of Get Carter was another disaster, with critics eviscerating him for remaking the Michael Caine classic, with even a cameo from Caine himself not easing their fury. In 2001, he teamed with Cliffhanger’s Renny Harlin on a go-for-broke would-be blockbuster called Driven.
Sporting a huge budget, for the time, a lot went wrong with Driven right off the bat. Stallone had intended to make a Formula One racing epic but eventually made it about the short-lived CART open-wheel car racing organization. To put it into context, imagine Oliver Stone had made Any Given Sunday about the XFL instead of the NFL. The film flopped badly, which wasn’t helped by the fact that the originally planned 3-hour epic was cut down to two hours, with some terrible continuity errors apparent throughout the film. Indeed, the DVD has 51 minutes of deleted footage. For Stallone, it was an embarrassing failure and a movie he always says he wished he had never done.
It was at this point that Stallone’s career, for a while anyway, seemed over. He starred in the direct-to-video mafia comedy Avenging Angelo and an indie movie called Shade, which also went direct to video. His highest-profile role was as the villain in Robert Rodriguez’s Spy Kids 3D. Stallone mostly focused on TV, with a recurring role in Las Vegas opposite his old buddy James Caan and the reality TV show The Contender.
All in all, it was a bad time for Stallone’s career, and it seemed he would never recapture his former glory. But, here’s the thing – failure can sometimes be a great motivator, and as Stallone himself revealed in Rocky III, when you lose the “Eye of the Tiger”, you have to get it back. If you watch the Rocky series, it’s not hard to escape that in his later-era films, Stallone had become an Apollo Creed-esque figure. But Stallone had a plan. He put pen to paper and began planning a comeback vehicle where he’d once again play his most enduring role, Rocky. Indeed, the character had saved his career from purgatory twice before, with Rocky II his post-Paradise Alley and FIST comeback. At the same time, Rocky III put him back on top after a slew of early eighties flops.
It wouldn’t be easy, though. Stallone was no longer bankable. While all the Rocky movies (except the first) had been relatively lavish productions, Stallone would have to make do with a relatively threadbare budget this time and a shorter shooting schedule than he was used to. The consensus among studios was that, given the fact that Rocky V was a flop, the series was done.
Stallone thought differently. Rocky V had never sat well with him, nor did the idea of retiring Rocky due to a potentially fatal brain injury. After watching George Foreman become the oldest heavyweight boxing champion in history, Stallone began plotting Rocky’s return. It took years for him to refine the story, and some hard choices were made along the way. The most grave of all of these was the fate of Talia Shire’s Adrian. Shire, of course, is still alive and well and quite close with Stallone. But, as he was writing the film, he realized Rocky’s comeback would be more dramatic were he to have lost the one person who always believed in him – Adrian. As such, he killed her off, which gives the character a lot more pathos in that he no longer has her to lean on.
In Rocky Balboa, some of the events of Rocky V are ignored, with Balboa no longer as financially down and out as he was in the last film. He’s a successful restauranteur, owning an Italian eatery called Adrians, where he regales patrons with stories about the glory days and his friendship with Apollo Creed. It’s a satisfying place for the Italian Stallion to end up with his son, Robert, now played by Milo Ventimiglia, a young lawyer from whom Rocky is slightly estranged. In the movie, Sly is lured out of retirement when the current champ, Mason “The Line” Dixon, played by real-life champ Antonio Tarver, is ridiculed for never facing a true champ and is infuriated by an ESPN simulation that suggests Rocky Balboa, in his prime, would have beaten him. His managers want him to get some goodwill, so they challenge Rocky, who’s regained his boxing licence.
As far as the Rocky movies go, some great pains were taken to make this realistic. For one thing, Mason Dixon is far from a villain, with him just a perhaps slightly egotistical boxer, and the movie never pretends Rocky could defeat him in a battle due to the age difference. Still, when Mason injures his hand, the fight becomes closer than expected, with Mason finally meeting an opponent with real heart and Rocky getting to let loose some of the stuff that’s “in the basement.”
One thing that surprised viewers of Rocky Balboa in 2006 was how incredible the writing was, with some of Balboa’s dialogue becoming much meme’d in the following years. The fight scenes in the film were also stripped down compared to the bouts from the OG series, with Stallone saying they used more realistic sound fx in the fights to make them lower-key and more realistic. The film also offered the late Burt Young a great final turn as Paulie, with him showing more pathos than ever in his final entry into the series, while Geraldine Hughes delivers a great performance as Marie, the now grown version of the young woman who famously called Rocky a “creepo” in the original film.
When it came out over the 2006 Christmas holiday, Rocky Balboa, which box office forecasters predicted would flop, was a surprise hit. It grossed $70 million domestically plus another $85 million internationally on a modest $24 million budget. Even the critics who slammed the last few Rocky movies couldn’t deny that once that classic Bill Conti music started up, it was hard not to get invested again in the Italian Stallion. Most notably, it kicked off a great career resurgence for Stallone, who wound up recapturing the zeitgeist in a way his contemporaries like Arnold Schwarzenegger never quite managed. While he likely thought he was done with Rocky Balboa after delivering a satisfying end to the saga, this didn’t prove to be the case when a young director named Ryan Coogler came knocking. But that’s a story for another day, but as it is, Rocky Balboa is a strong entry into the saga and finally gave Stallone a comeback that’s worthy of him.
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It’s October, which means the season of spooks has arrived! You’re probably already seeing all kinds of creepy creatures, from black cats to ghosts, in your everyday life, and why should video games be any different? Thank goodness they’re not, especially if you’re a Final Fantasy XIV player. Square Enix’s MMO offers…
It’s October, which means the season of spooks has arrived! You’re probably already seeing all kinds of creepy creatures, from black cats to ghosts, in your everyday life, and why should video games be any different? Thank goodness they’re not, especially if you’re a Final Fantasy XIV player. Square Enix’s MMO offers…
One of the horror genre’s many low budget indie classics is the 1979 film Phantasm (watch it HERE), which was made on a budget of around $300,000 by writer/director Don Coscarelli when he was in his early twenties. Shot on weekends with rented equipment, Phantasm took almost two years to complete… and the result was a box office success that is now widely regarded as one of the greatest horror films ever made. 2024 marks the 45th anniversary of Phantasm – and it also happens to mark the 10th anniversary of author Dustin McNeill’s book Phantasm Exhumed: The Unauthorized Companion… so this seemed like the perfect time to dig up an interesting story from McNeill’s book, where he reveals that Don Coscarelli’s mom wrote a script for Phantasm II years before her son got around to working on the sequel!
Released in March of 1979, Phantasm had the following synopsis: The residents of a small town have begun dying under strange circumstances, leading young Mike to investigate. After discovering that the Tall Man, the town’s mortician, is killing and reanimating the dead as misshapen zombies, Mike seeks help from his older brother, Jody, and local ice cream man Reggie. Working together, they try to lure out and kill the Tall Man, all the while avoiding his minions and a deadly silver sphere.
Don Coscarelli would eventually go on to write and direct Phantasm II (1988), Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead (1994), and Phantasm: Oblivion (1998), and also co-wrote and produced Phantasm: Ravager (2016), which was directed by David Hartman. But when Phantasm distributor AVCO Embassy expressed interest in moving ahead with a sequel in 1979, Coscarelli was hesitant. He thought following one horror movie with another would be a bad idea, as it would get him labeled as a director of horror and nothing else. So he turned his attention to The Beastmaster – and left Phantasm II to his parents. His mother, Shirley Coscarelli, wrote the script for a sequel that would be produced by his father, D.A. Coscarelli (who had also produced the first movie).
This Phantasm II would have reportedly “offered audiences a female-friendly adventure in contrast to her son’s more masculine original. Child star Kristy McNichol was rumored to star as Mike and Jody’s cousin, newly arrived in town to investigate the incident at Morningside.“
The sequel was announced with a full-page ad in Variety in the fall of 1979, with production expected to start in January of 1980 for a 1980 release. But that didn’t happen. If the movie had been made, Angus Scrimm was on board to reprise the role of the Tall Man (which he ended up playing in all of the films), and he told McNeill, “I remember liking Shirley’s script, which had the wit and inventiveness of the bestselling novels she soon started writing. … I seem to recall it was partly set in an abandoned old movie theater. Unhappily, the financing never fell into place, but if it had, who knows what changes it would have wrought in the Phantasm story arc as we know it today?“
That’s just one of the many interesting behind-the-scenes stories McNeill dropped into Phantasm Exhumed, which contains pretty much all the information you could ever hope to learn about the making of the first four Phantasm movies. (He later covered Phantasm: Ravager with a second book, Further Exhumed.) You can pick up a copy of the book at THIS LINK.
The Phantasm II that was made and released in 1988 has the following set-up: Released after seven years in a mental hospital, Mike convinces his old pal Reggie to join forces with him to hunt down and destroy the Tall Man once and for all. Mike’s visions lead the two to a quiet little town where a horde of flying killer balls aim to slice and dice their gruesome way through everyone.
Are you a fan of the Phantasm franchise? What do you think of this information about Shirley Coscarelli’s script for Phantasm II? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
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