2011
10.31

Sara Paxton Welcomes You to the Haunted Yankee Pedlar in ‘The Innkeepers’

Sara-Paxton-Inn-Keepers

An intriguingly spooky trailer for the Ti West-directed supernatural thriller The Innkeepers has hit the web. Shark Night’s Sara Paxton stars in the film as one of the last clerks working at the haunted Yankee Pedlar Inn before its scheduled demolition.

Peep it:

The official synopsis reads:

After over one hundred years of service, The Yankee Pedlar Inn is shutting its doors for good. The last remaining employees -Claire and Luke – are determined to uncover proof of what many believe to be one of New England’s most haunted hotels.

As the Inn’s final days draw near, odd guests check in as the pair of minimum wage “ghost hunters” begin to experience strange and alarming events that may ultimately cause them to be mere footnotes in the hotel’s long unexplained history.

The Inn Keepers costars Pat Healy (Rescue Dawn), George Riddle (“The Onion News Network”), and Kelly McGillis (Top Gun). It was shot in Connecticut at the actual Yankee Pedlar Inn, a hotel long believed to be truly haunted. The film arrives on VOD Dec. 30 and will play theaters on Feb. 3.

Paxton, who got her start in a string of family-friendly features, broke out of her good girl image with her starring role in 2009’s brutally violent—and so-much-better-than-the-original—remake of Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left.

Innkeepers-Poster

Paxton has since starred in this summer’s fish-&-chicks frightener Shark Night 3-D and will be seen in Indie Entertainment and Sundial Pictures’ truth-or-dare thriller Liars All, producer Jack Heller’s (Homecoming) cabin-in-the-woods set chiller Enter Nowhere, and upstart banner New Artists Alliance’s dead child ghost story Static.

You can also find Paxton on Clatto’s list of The 20 Hottest Women Working in Horror/Sci-fi Today.

2011
10.31

ABC Family Star Johanna Braddy Sets Out to Find ‘The Levenger Tapes’

Johanna-Braddy

Horror fans may want to keep an eye on former ABC Family star Johanna Braddy (“Greek”). The 24-year-old actress recently wrapped The Collection, Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton’s sequel to The Collector, and can currently be seen on the big screen in Paramount Pictures’ Paranormal Activity 3.

Braddy also toplines CastLight Pictures’ found footage thriller The Levenger Tapes. Directed by some guy named Mark Edwin Robinson, the film stars Braddy as one of three college students who go missing while trying to find a lost eight-year-old girl in the wilderness.

Peep it:

2011
10.30

Julia-Voth-Wet-Tee

Gorgeous model-turned-actress Julia Voth toplines director Sridhar Reddy’s Lilith, a modern day ode to Dante’s “Inferno.” The Canadian stunner plays Sarah Wilson, a woman who is led by the spirit of her dead sister to a seemingly abandoned building where each of its nine floors holds horrific revelations.

Peep it:

The film’s synopsis reads:

A contemporary take on Dante’s ‘Inferno,’ ‘Lilith’ is the story of Sarah Wilson, who finds herself haunted by visions of her tragically murdered younger sister, Lilith.

After a night of surreal terror, Sarah is led by her visions of her dead sister into a hellish labyrinth populated by bloodthirsty demons and bedeviled ghosts from her past.

Her journey into darkness forces Sarah to confront painful secrets and her innermost fears, and her path back to reality is one fraught with terror, sadness and deception.

Personally, I’d watch Voth pick her nose on film (well, if she did so sensually and in slo-mo), but I gotta say this looks really good and genuinely creepy. Having a girl-on-girl make-out scene between Voth and South African model Bianca Christians Beck doesn’t hurt either.

Voth made her feature film debut as a not-what-she-seems downtrodden stripper named Trixie in director Rick Jacobson (“Spartacus: Blood and Sand”) girl-powered actioner Bitch Slap, a tongue-in-cheek  homage to the sexploitation flicks of yesteryear.

She is also said to be the character model for Jill Valentine in the 2002 Resident Evil game for Nintendo’s GameCube.

Visit the Lilith FB page to stay updated and to see additional pics from the project.

2011
10.29

Molly-Ringwald-Emilo-Estevez-BC

What do you get when you put the son of a major Hollywood mogul, his daddy’s money, and the author of a quirky bestseller in a room together? If you guessed KatzSmith Productions, you’re far better at this game than me.

Founded by David Katzen (28-year-old son of Jeffrey Katzen) and novelist Seth Grahame-Smith (“Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”), the upstart studio is set up at Warner Bros. and will specialize in producing genre mash-ups. Most interesting on their list? An X-Men meets The Breakfast Club hybrid series.

Explains Grahame-Smith:

A group of kids gets detention on the same day. They have absolutely nothing to do with each other. It’s the goth, it’s the jock, it’s the this, it’s the that …

They’re in a chem lab for detention, and, in a very comic book, origin-story kind of way, something goes wrong in the lab and they all get different super powers.

All the sudden this group of total non-friends has to become a poor man’s X-Men, figure out what their powers are, and fight a growing crime menace we reveal in a Buffy-type way.

If this project, entitled ” Extra Curricular” takes a dark Chronicle type approach instead of a CW teen soap angle, I’m all in. I’d love to see what the nerd and the goth would do, and watch the John Bender-inspired rebel not get the horns for once.

KatzSmith Productions are also looking to produce Unholy Night, an action oriented retelling of The Three Wise Men Christmas story based on Grahame-Smith’s upcoming novel, and a 26-years-later Beetlejuice sequel with Michael Keaton reprising his role as the titular spook.

To read more about what the mash-up men have in store, go to EW.

2011
10.28

Hailee+Steinfeld

Hailee Steinfeld, the talented 14-year-old Academy Award nominee for last year’s True Grit redo, is set to star in Paramount Pictures adaptation of author Cat Patrick’s teen sci-fi novel “Forgotten,” published in June by Little Brown.

Scripted by Oren Uziel, the scribe behind New Line’s upcoming Mortal Kombat re-imagining, Forgotten is the story of a 16-year-old girl whose memory of the previous day is erased at 4:33 every morning. She can, however,  remember events from her future.

Wow, this is so crazy. The same exact thing happened to me hen I was 16 … except I’d start to forget things around 4:20 every afternoon.

2011
10.28

‘Strangers’ Director to Produce a ‘Grim Night’ for You All!

grim-night

Newbie screenwriters Brandon Bestenheider and Allen Bey have sold their spec script Grim Night to Universal Pictures for a reported six-or-seven figure sum. Director Bryan Bertino’s (The Strangers) production shingle Unbroken Pictures is attached to produce. No word yet on whether Bertino will direct the project as well.

Grim Night follows an American family as they attempt to survive an attack by creatures who emerge once a year to murder thousands of people around the world. A teaser for the spec depicts the monsters as Grim Reapers—hooded robes and all. But, unless cutbacks have forced the Reapers to work one day a year, I’m pretty sure they’re busy year round. Therefore, these Grims must be a whole new kind of evil.

Peep the teaser for the spec (used to aid in the sale of the project):

2011
10.28

Human Drug Lindsay Lohan Will Do Full-Frontal Nudity for Playboy!

Lindsay-Lohan-nude-playboy

Human drug and tabloid queen Lindsay Lohan will appear totally nude in an upcoming issue of Playboy. The 25-year-old stunner wrapped a four-day photo shoot for the magazine on Tuesday. According to TMZ, Lohan was paid just short of a million dollars to show her “boobs, ass, and vag.”

What? No balloon knot?

Lohan made her horror film debut in the 2007 serial-killer drama I Know Who Killed Me. She played stigmatic twins with very large breasts. Last year, she portrayed a junkie socialite with very large breasts in Robert Rodriguez’s grindhouse actioner Machete.

Lohan is (or was) also attached to star in director Ryuhei Kitamura’s (The Midnight Meat Train) new frightener Black Friday 3-D and was reported to be fancied by Stephen King for a the titular role in a rumored Carrie remake.

2011
10.26

Fashion Model Caitriona Balfe Joins Crystal Reed in Teen-Thriller ‘Crush’

Caitriona_Balfe_Crush_Undies

Irish fashion model-turned-actress Caitriona Balfe is set to join “Teen Wolf” starlet Crystal Reed in Intrepid Pictures’ upcoming psycho-bitch thriller Crush. The Malik Bader-directed film begins production this week in Los Angeles.

Written by Roommate scribe Sonny Mallhi, the film revolves around a popular high school jock who becomes an obsession for the girls around him, including an especially demented admirer. Balfe, seen briefly in this summer’s Super 8, will play the owner of the comic book store where Reed works.

Crush also stars Lucas Till (X-Men: First Class) as the jock, Sarah Bolger (“The Tudors”) as his long-time friend, Reid Ewing (”Modern Family”) as Reed’s lovesick geek, Camille Guaty (“Las Vegas”) as a sexy teacher, and Saw co-creator and actor Leigh Whannell as a local yogurt shop owner.

2011
10.25

Scarlett-Johansson-Under-Skin

Scarlett Johansson plays a horny, killer alien with magnificent breasts in director Jonathan Glazer’s (Sexy Beast) upcoming adaptation of author Michel Faber’s debut novel “Under the Skin.” Posted above is our first glimpse of the 26-year-old starlet in character.

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD.

“Under the Skin” follows sexy alien Isserley (Johansson) as she picks up big, buff, healthy-looking male hitchhikers for her species to turn into food—a delicacy called Vodsel. The novel is set in Scotland, where apparently drifters are an attractive lot, unlike North America where they look and act like this.

Plot-wise, I’m reminded of Peter Jackson’s gory 1987 horror-comedy Bad Taste, in which aliens invade a small New Zealand town to harvest its residents for their intergalactic fast food joints—which is cool. But, as far as alien femme fatales go, I’m disappointed with Isserley’s look.

I know there’s a message behind the madness, but I was hoping Johansson’s look would be more Natasha Henstridge in Species, or better yet, Mathilda May in Lifeforce. Here, she just looks like the kind of chick you’d hit up at a Journey concert.

2011
10.24

rose-mcgowan-patrick-john-flueger-tell-tale-dancing

Rose McGowan will get hearts beating as Patrick John Flueger’s (Footloose) love interest in director John La Tier’s adaptation of the 1843 Edgar Allan Poe short story “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Production on the film begins on Oct. 20 in New Orleans.

Says La Tier:

It was always our intention to stay true to Poe. We want this film to be something he would be proud of, and I believe this captivating script, combined with this cast and art direction, is going to be just that.

“The Tell-Tale Heart ” is the story of a murderer haunted by the beating heart of the old man he’s killed, dismembered, and buried underneath the floorboards of his house. There is no romance and/or love interest in the original story, though there has always been speculation that the murderer could be a woman, which would make McGowan’s role all the more interesting.

Joining McGowan and Flueger on the Popart Film Factory & Leverage Entertainment-produced project are Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show), Jacob Vargas (Devil), Damon Whitaker (The Hillside Strangler) and Kirk Fox (The Postman).

Peep some production stills: