Two years have gone by since we heard that director Steven C. Miller (Silent Night) was heading into production on a werewolf horror film that, at the time, was going by the title Year 2. That movie is now set to make its way out into the world under the title Werewolves, with Briarcliff Entertainment and The Solution Entertainment Group teaming up to give it a wide theatrical release in the United States on December 6th – and with that release date swiftly approaching, a trailer for the movie has now made its way online! You can check it out in the embed above.
Our friends at Bloody Disgusting got the first look at this trailer and also unveiled a poster, which can be seen at the bottom of this article. The poster is a Creepy Duck Design creation.
Starring Frank Grillo of the Purge and Captain America franchises, Werewolves will show us that a supermoon event triggered a latent gene in every human on the planet, turning anyone who entered the moonlight into a werewolf for that one night. Chaos ensued and close to a billion people died. Now, a year later, the Supermoon is back.
Grillo is joined in the cast by Katrina Law (NCIS), Ilfenesh Hadera (Godfather Of Harlem), James Michael Cummings (City On The Hill) and Lou Diamond Phillips (Young Guns). Miller directed from a screenplay by Matthew Kennedy (Inheritance).
Miller also produced Werewolves with Myles Nestel, The Solution’s Craig Chapman, Monty the Dog’s James Michael Cummings and Jim Cardwell, Pimiente Films’ Luillo Ruiz, and Sevier Crespo. Grillo serves as executive producer alongside Tom Ortenberg, The Solution’s Lisa Wilson, Rainmaker Films’ Clay Pecorin and Russell Geyser, Burke Management’s Victor Burke and Vanzil Burke, and Sherborne Media’s Gary Raskin and Alastair Burlingham.
Nestel, who is co-CEO of The Solution, provided the following statement: “We are super excited to be releasing Werewolves later this year, exclusively in theatres. Our cast is incredible, from the amazing Frank Grillo to powerhouse performances from Katrina Law and Ilfenesh Hadera. The use of practical werewolves designed and built by Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr (known from the Alien and Predator series) takes the genre back to its roots in a fresh and exciting way. We hope audiences will have as much fun experiencing the film in theatres as we had making it!“
Werewolves has secured an R rating for violence, some gore, and language.
What did you think of the Werewolves trailer? Are you looking forward to seeing this movie in December? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
Last year, when Damien Leone made the announcement that Art the Clown would be getting a Christmas-themed sequel releasing October 2024, I’m not sure any of us expected it to dethrone the Clown Prince of Crime at the box office. But that’s exactly what happened and now the franchise seems to be positioned to give horror fans everything they’ve ever wanted. By avoiding studio dollars, Leone’s vision is uncompromising. This means gore, gore, gore! But it also means a relationship built with fans where, by giving them something truly shocking, Terrifier is in a place that no horror film has been in decades: one of complete creative freedom. Which makes the future of the series more tantalizing than ever.
When I spoke to Damien last year for the Terrifier 2, he was antsy about a certain kill in 3. So now that we’re speaking again, I made sure to ask the Terrifier 3 director about which kill that happened to be. And it may surprise you. But it wasn’t just the writer/director I was lucky enough to speak to as Chris Jericho also joined in on the fun. As shown by his appearance at the end of 2, any expectation of a lengthy role would be a mistake. We got into just how last-minute Jericho’s scene happened as well as the process of getting prosthetics for his face made. I can only imagine how happy both are now that Terrifier 3 is the number-one film in the country. Terrifier fans should get a kick out of this behind-the-scenes insight on the third entry.
TERRIFIER 3 plot synopsis:
Art the Clown is set to unleash chaos on the unsuspecting residents of Miles County as they peacefully drift off to sleep on Christmas Eve.
It’s always cool when we have the chance to watch action heroes venture into horror territory. We’ve seen Arnold Schwarzenegger take on the Predator, battle Satan (in End of Days), and raise a zombie daughter (in Maggie). Sylvester Stallone has taken on psycho killers in Cobra and Eye See You (and we’re still waiting for him to get around to making that creature feature Hunter, which he once considered turning into a Rambo sequel). Charles Bronson tracked a serial killer in 10 to Midnight. Dolph Lundgren faced off with an alien drug dealer in I Come in Peace. Jean-Claude Van Damme played both a serial killer and the killer’s heroic clone in Replicant. Steven Seagal killed vampires in Against the Dark. The list goes on… but two separate action horror projects we tragically missed out on would have given us the sight of both Van Damme and Seagal fighting Yetis, a.k.a. Abominable Snowmen!
Back in 1995, Universal Pictures purchased a screenplay by Troy Neighbors and Steven Fienberg that told the story of a United Nations task force investigating the mysterious disappearance of Red Cross workers in the Himalayas. Needless to say, they encounter more than soldiers from the People’s Republic of China. Titled Abominable, this project was described as “Predator in the snow” and was going to be produced by Moshe Diamant. Peter Hyams, who worked with Van Damme on Timecop and Sudden Death, was considered for the directing job, and so was Cliffhanger’s Renny Harlin. Van Damme was on board to play a UN task force member who would end up having to fight a Yeti, or Yetis. Unfortunately, he had other projects to get to before production could start on Abominable, and eventually Universal lost interest in making a Van Damme vs. the Abombinable Snowman movie. The fools.
Seagal’s own Yeti project, titled Snow Blind, was set up at Warner Bros. Speaking on a podcast, screenwriter Ethan Dettenmaier recently revealed exactly how Snow Blind came about. Dettenmaier went to Seagal’s house to meet with him about a different project that Seagal ended up turning down because “some people he knew in the black ops community” would be upset with him if he made the movie. Instead, he wanted to make a horror movie and told Dettenmaier, “If you can write like I write, then you should have a script to me in about 24 hours.”
On the podcast, Dettenmaier says Seagal “got wind that we knew some of the members of the group En Vogue and he really wanted to rope them into some kind of co-starring role, which was really awkward. I go, ‘I’m not getting you a script in 24 hours, but I’ll get you some ideas.’ Two or three days later, he calls me and goes, ‘So what do you have for me?’ And I go down this list of ideas, start with the strong ones, they’re all horror-based ideas, Corman-esque. I get to the last one, and it’s probably the weakest. When you’re trying to round out a list of content, you’re gonna have the powerful ones up front and you’re gonna want to sound extensive, so you start getting weaker and weaker and weaker as the list progresses. I get to the last, item number 25: Diplomatic flight in the Himalayas goes down, Empire Strikes Back type Yeti comes up, pops in and out of the frame like Jaws, tears it apart, you’re the Special Forces guy that’s gotta go in, and we’ll call it Snow Blind. ‘That’s the one we’ll do!’ And he goes like this, ‘Those creatures do exist and the reason nobody sees them is because they have the ability to transcend dimensions.’”
So, for a while, Seagal was on board to fight dimension-transcending Yetis in Snow Blind. But, like Universal with Abominable, Warner Bros. did not end up sending the project into production.
How do Abominable and Snow Blind sound to you? Do you wish we had gotten these Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal vs. Yetis movies? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
Every now and then a company makes a figure that is meant to depict an iconic moment in a piece of media, and usually I look at these and go “cool,” before moving on. But this $300 statue of fan-favorite mercenary Rebecca from the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners anime made my jaw drop because it was, as one succinct X…
Every now and then a company makes a figure that is meant to depict an iconic moment in a piece of media, and usually I look at these and go “cool,” before moving on. But this $300 statue of fan-favorite mercenary Rebecca from the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners anime made my jaw drop because it was, as one succinct X…
Life imitates art as the location used for the Temple of the Holy Grail in the 1989 Steven Spielberg film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, starring Harrison Ford, has an amazing secret that’s been recently uncovered. The location of the fictional temple is a stunning building that is carved into a sandstone cliff called The Treasury, which is located in Petra, Jordan. Archeologists have long attempted to find a conclusive answer of what the building was used for. However, a popular theory is that it was a mausoleum that was built for the final resting place of an important ruler during its era.
According to The Washington Post, a group of researchers had recently discovered “a chamber buried underneath the Treasury, also known as al-Khazneh, that contains the remains of 12 people and other items they say could finally reveal the structure’s secrets and shed some light on the origins of Petra.” Back in 1985, this location had been designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. The leader of the dig, Pearce Paul Creasman, executive director of the American Center of Research, would state, “This work will shed light on The Treasury itself, particularly its construction and date. The material recovered from our excavation has great potential to inform us about the early history of Petra and, possibly, the origins of the Nabataeans, too.”
Josh Gates, the host of the Warner Bros. television series Expedition Unknown, would cover the story of this discovery in a two-part episode last week. Gates said in a statement, “We were absolutely stunned by the revelation of this hidden chamber. Since nearly all of the tombs at Petra have been found empty, this is perhaps the most significant tomb ever found at Petra and a discovery of historic proportions. The breakthrough could not only reveal the secrets of The Treasury above, it could also offer an extraordinary glimpse into the lives of the early Nabataeans who built Petra.” Creasman is confident this opens up opportunities of learning about how the citizens of Petra lived and thrived in this geographical area, “Today, Petra, the Rose City, is parched, but it was once a comparatively lush place. I am hopeful we can learn from the past and use it to improve our collective future.”
Plot: Skilled in the art of killing, a young assassin defies her mentor to save a boy from a ruthless crime syndicate — and she’ll destroy anyone in her path.
Review: Indonesia has long had a strong film industry that has gotten more and more global exposure thanks to streaming and the success of Gareth Evans’ 2011 film The Raid. In the years since, we have seen many impressive action and horror films from Southeast Asia, many of them by director Timo Tjahjanto. Whether as a solo writer-director or part of the duo known as The Mo Brothers, Tjahjanto is known for his complex action choreography and brutally violent gore. Today sees the release of the director’s latest movie, the epic The Shadow Strays. Clocking in at two-and-a-half hours, The Shadow Strays is big in every way. From the numerous action set-pieces across Asia, the film is an impressive feast for genre fans as Tjahjanto raises the bar on how creative he can kill thugs and mercenaries. With a lot of time to fill, The Shadow Strays works more than it doesn’t but still suffers from an imbalance in the non-action sequences.
Combining the excess of John Woo’s heyday with buckets of blood usually reserved for horror films, The Shadow Strays looks and feels like a big-budget studio action movie, albeit one with very over-the-top histrionic exposition. Opening with a sequence set in Japan, we are introduced to the concept of “Shadows,” assassins trained for anonymity. During a brutal massacre of a Yakuza clan, a Shadow trainee code-named 13 (Aurora Ribero) is chastised by her teacher, Umbra (Hana Malasan), after she loses focus when a civilian is caught in her crossfire. Relegated to the bench where she must continue taking emotion-regulating medication, 13 returns home to Jakarta and stumbles across a young boy named Monji (Sebastian Sero), whose mother is killed by a gang, leaving him an orphan. Feeling parallels to her own past, 13 takes Monji under her wing. When he is kidnapped by the criminals who killed his mother, 13 seeks to rescue him and takes down every person in her path.
A lot is going on in The Shadow Strays, much of which does not make much sense. There is an attempt by Tjahjanto to make the Shadows a blend of super-soldiers and righteous warriors, but we spend so little time seeing them on mission that it feels unnecessary. The bulk of the story centers on 13 using her training to exact merciless vengeance upon the criminals who kidnap Monji, and that is more than enough for this movie to make sense. Equally, the villains spend a lot of time monologuing about their dastardly plans, which include rape, murder, and political ambition. The crooked cops and gangsters are working together to rule Jakarta, but 13 and Monji are in their way. There is a subplot halfway through The Shadow Strays that tries to shift the focus and give 13 a detour, but it mostly adds another substantial action sequence to the already overlong running time. Because The Shadow Strays is deliberately melodramatic, the exposition scenes border on comical, which some viewers may find detracts from the pacing of the film, delaying us from getting to more bone-crushing violence.
While some elements of The Shadow Strays feel a bit outdated, namely the fact that a female assassin shocks some of the male characters, most of it is grisly, over-the-top fun. From the first scene, the CGI blood pours in abundance, with every weapon you can think of being used, from guns, knives, swords, and household objects. When weapons don’t do it, teeth and fingers rip at flesh as the bodies hit the floor. Aurora Ribero and Hana Malasan are excellent as they blend the mentor/mentee relationship with an understated familial bond that never slides into anything formulaic. The majority of the weakness in this movie falls to the villains. Every bad guy in this movie is a stereotype from a Jean Claude Van Damme or Steven Seagal movie. Yes, it is fun to watch them die, but when they try to wax philosophical, it just drags down the pacing of the entire film.
Timo Tjahjanto has proven his style relies on going up to the line and sometimes crossing it spectacularly. As a director, he has given us some truly scary moments, notably in The ABCs of Death and both V/H/S/2 and V/H/S/94, but his work on May The Devil Take You and as part of The Mo Brothers with Headshot, Tjahjanto feels both like an inspiration for the trend of John Wick-inspired films. That is likely why Tjahjanto recently wrapped production Nobody 2 with Bob Odenkirk, which will hopefully boast some of this signature violence. Tjahjanto is a filmmaker who feels destined for Hollywood greatness if he had come in twenty years ago when studios were more willing to grant budget dollars to R-rated fare. This is a solid production from a logistical and creative standpoint, even if the script suffers from cliche dialogue and overwrought dramatics.
The Shadow Strays is brutal, bloody, and badass as an action film, with over an hour of running time easily wasted. I found myself almost fast-forwarding through dialogue to get back to the action, something I am sure most audiences will be tempted to do. You can easily skip to the fights and still understand most of what is going on, which is the biggest problem with The Shadow Strays as a movie. Netflix is notorious for having films that overstay their welcome a bit too much. Still, this movie is so good in the action department that you will not want to risk missing a single roundhouse kick or decapitation. The Shadow Strays is one of the better action movies to come out this year and will have your jaw repeatedly dropping as each sequence outdoes the previous one.
There are more games coming out every day than ever before, but the total number of people playing them hasn’t seemed to grow by nearly the same amount. Former SIE Worldwide Studios Chairman Shawn Layden says that mismatch can’t be fixed just by churning out endless big-budget sequels and more powerful hardware.
There are more games coming out every day than ever before, but the total number of people playing them hasn’t seemed to grow by nearly the same amount. Former SIE Worldwide Studios Chairman Shawn Layden says that mismatch can’t be fixed just by churning out endless big-budget sequels and more powerful hardware.
Back in 1987, writer/director Rick Roessler and producer Jerry Encoe teamed up to bring the world the slasher film Slaughterhouse (watch it HERE) – a movie that has been a favorite of mine ever since I rented it on VHS at a very young age. Roessler always had thoughts of making a sequel, but the project never made it into production… Until earlier this year. Slaughterhouse 2: Death Metal was filmed in and around the Motor Transport Museum and old feldspar mill in Campo, California, and now it’s ready to have its world theatrical premiere as part of the Popcorn Reef screening series at the Regal Mira Mesa theatre in San Diego, California. The premiere is scheduled to take place on October 23rd, and with that date swiftly approaching, we’re proud to feature an EXCLUSIVE look at the film’s trailer! You can check it out in the embed above.
Roessler was inspired to finally get Slaughterhouse 2 rolling after Quentin Tarantino held a screening of the first film at his New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles and the screening drew in a full house. The original Slaughterhouse starred Don Barrett and Joe Barton as Lester Bacon and his pig-like son Buddy, who turn to murder in an effort to save their family slaughterhouse. The sequel has the following synopsis: 37 years later, the original team behind the cult classic Slaughterhouse are back to serve you a second helping of special surprises. Slaughterhouse 2: Death Metal centers on Les Bacon’s third son, Cleavon, who left the pig farm for a better life and was merely hinted at in the first movie. Like his father, Cleavon has a mute son, RemDog, who produces “Wonder Jerky” to sell around town. Wonder Jerky has a little extra something in it that you should already be able to figure out. Pt. Loma-OB Monthly adds that the father and son team make beef jerky inside the Motor Transport Museum, an old feldspar mill surrounded by hundreds of decaying trucks. That’s where they add the secret ingredient: human flesh.
As mentioned, Cleavon’s son is named RemDog, and he uses a flamethrower to dry out the meat for their Wonder Jerky. Wonder Jerky sales help pay the museum’s bills, with the people who buy and eat the jerky having no idea that they’re consuming treats made from the ground-up body parts of ill-fated hikers who are snatched from the Pacific Crest Trail.
Slaughterhouse 2: Death Metal was made on a budget of $250,000. Motor Transport Museum owner Bryan Butler stars as Cleavon, with local high schooler Remington Tully playing Rem Dog. Another local high schooler, Mary Grondona, plays a character named Ashley, and Lance Garmo – who runs the general store The Green Store – appears as the town storekeeper. The metal band Hemlock also makes an appearance. Returning from the first film is Sherry Leigh, who played heroine / sheriff’s daughter Liz Borden. Now the character has grown up to become the sheriff herself. Leigh’s husband Jim Larimore plays a “rich developer who covets the transport museum land.” The Hemlock track “Nobody Knows What a Killer Looks Like” serves as the title song for the film.
Slaughterhouse 2: Death Metal doesn’t have a release date just yet, but hopefully we’ll have more information on that soon after the premiere. In the meantime, take a look at the trailer, then let us know if you’re a Slaughterhouse fan by leaving a comment below. It’s a shame Buddy Bacon never got to come back for a sequel (Barton passed away in 2010), but I’m glad Roessler and Encoe are finally taking us back to the world of Slaughterhouse.
