Well, this is some fantastic news. Yes, as the headline says, genre favourite Robert Englund is j heading to the Upside Down.
As per Deadline, A Nightmare on Elm Street star Englund has joined Stranger Things to play a character called Victor Creel. Interestingly, Creel is described as “a disturbed and intimidating man who is imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital for a gruesome murder in the 1950s”.
In addition to adding Englund to its ranks, Stranger Things has also brought in Happy Potter and Fantastic Beasts star Jamie Campbell Bower to play a series regular called Peter Ballard. That character is pegged as “a caring man who works as an orderly at a psychiatric hospital. Tired of the brutality he witnesses day after day, will Peter finally take a stand?”
Elsewhere, Westworld’s Sherman Augustus, The Binge’s Eduardo Franco, Game of Thrones’ Tom Wlaschiha, Catherine the Great’s Joseph Quinn and The Goldbergs’ Mason Dye are two other names to have signed up for roles in Strangers Things’ upcoming fourth season.
At this stage, Netflix has yet to announce an official premiere date for Stranger Things’ fourth season.
In some sad news for fans of superhero TV shenanigans, Black Lightning is coming to an end.
Via EW, it’s been announced that the Cress Williams-fronted series is to conclude after its upcoming fourth season. Previously, it’s been announced that Jordan Calloway’s Painkiller is being weighed up to get his own spinoff show, with a backdoor pilot episode to be part of Black Lightning’s fourth year – much like how Arrow’s final season included a backdoor pilot for Green Arrow & The Canaries.
On the news that Black Lightning is ending showrunner Salim Akil said, “When we first started the Black Lightning journey, I knew that Jefferson Pierce and his family of powerful Black Women would be a unique addition to the superhero genre. The love that Blerds and all comic book fans around the globe have shown this series over the past three seasons proved what we imagined – Black People Want To See Themselves in all their complexities. Thank you to the phenomenal cast, writers and crew, without whom none of this would’ve been possible. I’m incredibly proud of the work we’ve been able to do and the moments we’ve been able to create in bringing DC’s first African-American family of superheroes to life for the culture.”
This news comes on the back of the announcement earlier this year that Supergirl will be concluding with its impending sixth season.
Black Lightning’s fourth season will premiere on The CW on Monday, February 8.
With Jill Gevargizian’s The Stylist having wowed earlier this year for those lucky enough to have had a chance to see it, now comes the fantastic news that the film has landed a distribution deal.
Gevargizian’s feature directing debut, The Stylist has already been seen by its Kickstarter backers and has also screened at several festivals across the globe. And now, it’s been officially announced that the ever-brilliant Arrow Films has picked up the rights to distribute The Stylist in the UK, Ireland, USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The Stylist and Arrow Films? Given how magnificent a job Arrow has done in recent years with its horror releases, this seems like an absolutely perfect fit!
Arrow’s current plan is to hopefully give The Stylist a theatrical release early next year, ahead of then taking the film to home release later in 2021.
Based on Gevargizian’s 2016 short of the same name, The Stylist centres on hair stylist Claire. A tormented soul who is forever envious of the lives of others, Claire’s obsessions often have murderous results. Picking up her role from the aforementioned short, Najarra Townsend plays Claire, while Brea Grant and Sara McGuire also star.
Having been fortunate to have watched The Stylist earlier this year, the film is an absolute triumph and hands-down one of the best horror offerings of 2020. As such, it’s extremely positive news to hear that the movie will soon be getting a widespread release.
In the meantime, be sure to check out our all-kinds-of-fun catch-up with Jill from last month.
Top UK Comedians James Acaster, Sally Phillips, Phil Wang, Lou Sanders and Paul Foxcroft are to take part in a Dungeons & Dragons live stream in order to raise funds for the charity Comic Relief.
The show will start from 7:30 PM UK time on the 4th December via online platform Tiltify.
Dungeons and Dragons producers Wizards of the Coast have teamed up with Comic Relief to bring you the event. All money raised will go towards charities in the UK and around the world.
The event will last for approximately 2-3 hours. For a minimum donation of £1, the public will also be able to have a say in the various gaming decisions, throwing all sorts of fun challenges into the mix.The game is very likely to feature an angry goose and a variety of unhelpful magic items.
If all this sounds a little familar, that’s because it is; earlier this year Comic Relief hosted another fund-raising D&D game that not only raised over £25,000 but also introduced the world to a character called Timothy Dickspanner. And got the phrase #GregDaviesDeathMask trending on social media. It was enormous fun so of course, they’re doing it again.
The session will be hosted, yet again, by professional Dungeon Master and top-flight improv comedian, Paul Foxcroft. He is best known for Questing Time, a cult comedy show that hosts some of the cream of the UK’s indie comedy circuit regularly at The Phoenix, London. The show has recently moved to Twitch following The Phoenix’s temporary closure. The regular twitch stream features Briony Redman, Matt Highton, Richard Soames and Rufus Hound as they (hilariously incompetently) embark on an epic quest.
You can find out more about Comic Relief Plays Dungeons and Dragons here.
Sally Phillips said: “I may never have played Dungeons and Dragons before but reckon I’d be better suited to life in the Forgotten Realms, as I have always felt that I might change into a woodland creature at any moment. So I can’t believe I will be anything other than epic in this game! We continue living through such strange times so I hope we can provide some entertainment and laughs for those watching the stream from home while raising funds for Comic Relief.”
James Acaster said: “I’m a huge gamer and I have no doubt this will be an EPIC game to watch. Mixed with the unknown twists and turns awaiting us from the public votes, who knows how this will turn out but I bet it will be a good laugh for those watching and will hopefully bring in lots of donations for Comic Relief.”
Dan Barrett, Senior Brand Manager at Dungeons & Dragons, comments: “We were hugely proud of the money raised during the first Comic Relief Plays D&D game earlier this year, and we’re thrilled to again bring the adventure to those safe at home as part of our Holiday Specials series. With another all-star cast, we can’t wait to see the hilarious chaos unfold and donations for a great cause come in!”
Donations can be made before or during the game, which will be live streamed on Friday 4 December from 7.30pm UK time at www.comicrelief.com/dnd. You can catch the previous show below.
The blockbuster standing on the cinematic slate in 2020, Wonder Woman 1984, will get a cinema release on December 25th in the US – December 16th here in the UK. However, the US will also have the option to watch the film on HBO Max, a premium streaming service, at no extra cost.
Director Patty Jenkins announced the move in a tweet (see below) after speculation that the film will bypass cinemas. We were expecting to see Wonder Woman 1984 earlier in the year, but the global pandemic forced its rescheduling several times. We have yet to hear any news about whether the film will have a similar screening option in the UK, and other territories where HBO Max isn’t available. We guess the UK release is all dependant on the government’s easing of lockdown rules, which doesn’t look good at the moment. Could a similar route taken with the release of The Witches be on the cards?
WarnerMedia CEO Ann Sarnoff issued a statement on the news: “As we navigate these unprecedented times, we’ve had to be innovative in keeping our businesses moving forward while continuing to super-serve our fans. This is an amazing film that really comes to life on the big screen and, working with our partners in the exhibition community, we will provide that option to consumers in the US where theatres are open. We realise that a lot of consumers can’t go back to the movies due to the pandemic, so we also want to give them the option to see Wonder Woman 1984 via our HBO Max platform.“
Given the rich potential of the Scream franchise’s core concept – genuine whodunnits are few and far between these days – there’s a real excitement growing amongst fans for the return of Ghostface. This is accentuated by the fact that filmmaking collective Radio Silence has inherited the franchise from the much-missed Master of Horror, Wes Craven – their 2019 horror-thriller Ready or Not was wonderfully received by a broad audience, and deservedly so, it was ace. It’s also very reassuring to learn that creator Kevin Williamson has been involved in the project from day dot, despite not providing the screenplay this time, sadly.
We’ve been following the production since the start, and today comes news that the fifth film in the series has miraculously now completed filming (the COVID concerns must have been eased by the fact that there’s a lot of masks in the movie!), and they’ve unveiled its official title:
Scream
Huh. Now, we’ve become accustomed to this minimalistic approach to titling in the past – most notably 2018’s Halloween – but this is usually reserved for sequels attempting some kind of reboot (that particular film discarded eight films in an attempt to clean up the canon), which for all intents and purposes this entry is very much not. As we all know, this new movie features all of our favourite (surviving) characters from the original series and sees Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, and David Arquette return to reprise their roles…
…or does it? Could this unusual approach to titling hint at something more? Could it be that this isn’t actually a continuation of the narrative we’re familiar with, and instead be some kind of meta twist, with the actors themselves being picked off by Ghostface in the ‘real’ world?
Maybe. Or it could just be a functional yet gobsmackingly unimaginative title and we’re reading way too much into it.
Time will tell. (That time being January 14th, 2022 to be precise.)
For those who haven’t read it already, here’s the official synopsis below (and note the deliberate vagueness)…
A new installment of the ‘Scream’ horror franchise will follow a woman returning to her hometown to try to find out who has been committing a series of vicious crimes.
We’ll have more details on Scream 5 – sorry – Scream, as they come…
After being lulled into a false sense of hope years early and then suffering through the ghastly cinematic war crime that was The Last Knight, devotees of the decades-old Transformers property will likely be doing cartwheels at the confirmation that Michael Bay is now officially off the live-action series…
Hasbro Studios has been seeking to give their live-action film franchise a full M.O.T. for many years now, tentatively testing the waters with the brilliant 2018 entry BumbleBee, and now, with today’s news, seemingly committing fully to a proper Bay-free reboot going forward. Huzzah. The first film in the new series is now known to be directed by Creed II’s Steven Caple Jr., who has signed with Paramount Pictures to continue to break free from his indie roots and really start to punch above his weight with a blockbuster-sized franchise-starter! No pressure. Joby Harold meanwhile will handle the screenplay duties, and he’s slowly amassing some powerful genre pedigree, with upcoming writing credits on the Obi-wan Kenobi limited series and producing gigs on the likes of Edge of Tomorrow and John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum.
Look for the first in new iteration of the Transformers series to hit screens in 2022. Let’s all pray it’s finally more than meets the eye.
For almost a decade, Quentin Tarantino has warned fans that his tenth film was going to be his last as writer/director. This unorthodox strategy is designed to secure his legacy for as many generations to come our crumbling society allows, something that can’t be said of many master filmmakers whose once-perfect IMDb pages are eventually blighted by unworthy duds such as Ready Player One, Mission to Mars, Jack, and Exodus: Gods and Kings. With last year’s award-winning Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood marking film number 9 (he counts Kill Bill as one – which is a shame that we never actually saw it released as such), fans have been steadily getting nervous as to what will be his swansong. Comfortingly, none of this means that the auteur will be giving up creating, stating several times his desire to experiment in other mediums such as TV, theatre, and literature. Which brings us to today’s news…
While we already heard a while back that he’s developing a Bounty Law series for the small screen (the fictional series at the heart of Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood), we now know of something heading our way much sooner, and it’s again related to last year’s opus. Coming in 2021 is a novelisation of the film penned by QT himself, which will expand on the adventures of Rick Dalton and his stuntman bestie, the Manson-mashing Cliff Booth. As is par for the course with the movie novelisation medium, expect lots of extra stuff we didn’t get to see on screen; and who knows, maybe it will answer one of the film’s biggest mysteries – was Brad Pitt’s dashing hero also a wife-killer? Hard not to be conflicted on that one…
Perhaps most excitingly, the book will also be available as a digital audio release, and though it’s currently unannounced, we’d wager every penny in our Bad Motherfucker wallets that Tarantino will be narrating alongside some of the film’s A-listers.
Accompanying the novelisation later that year will be Cinema Speculation, a nonfiction book on ‘70s cinema by Tarantino that will incorporate reviews, essays, and, most intriguingly, several Hollywood-style “what if” musings on the influential period in movie history.
Look for the first title in QT’s exciting new two-book with HarperCollins to arrive next Summer.
As for that 10th film… we’ve got a long while to go yet if the above is anything to go by. He was hardly the fastest writer without the distraction of having to fulfill high profile literary obligations!
If you were lucky enough to be at the STARBURST International Film Festival back in March (when we were still allowed to be in a room with people – remember that?), you may remember being shocked at the world premiere of Sam Ashurst’s A Little More Flesh. We can exclusively reveal that the film will make its streaming debut on Troma Now! on December 1st – the best place online for off-beat and transgressive movies.
The film’s synopsis is:
Stanley Durall, the notorious director of a series of intense erotic dramas, is returning to his debut movie, God’s Lonely Woman, to provide an audio commentary for the film’s first Blu-ray release since it was banned in the 1970s. It’s clear from his commentary that Stanley committed a series of transgressions against his lead actresses during production, transgressions which had serious consequences for everyone involved – everyone except him. But will he finally be punished for his past behaviour?
It’s not just the announcement of the film going to Troma Now! on December 1st, we also have the first look at the new teaser poster:
Written and directed by Sam Ashurst (Frankenstein’s Creature), and starring Elf Lyons, James Swanton, Hazel Townsend, Dane Baptiste, as well as Ashurst as the voice of director Stanley Durall, it’s a unforgettable satire of a time when values were different. We highly recommend you check it out.
A glorious (or gorious!) month of terror is planned during December on Horror Channel, including a few Christmas crackers.
Among the line-up are sci-fi shocker Skyline (2010) on December 5th, the nightmarish Sinister (2012) on December 13th, and David Tennant showing his dark side in Bad Samaritan (2018) on December 18th. Ghosts are a tradition at Christmas, so it’s apt that there’s The Woman in Black (2012) on December 20th with Daniel Radcliffe uncovering the secrets of Eel Marsh House. John Carpenter’s classic car Christine (1983) puts the scares on four wheels, while Paul Bettany plays a different comic book character in Priest (2011) on Christmas Eve. On Christmas Day, there’s the Yuletide-set P2 (2007), in which an office worker is put through hell when he car won’t start. Shivers of every kind can be expected in the Boxing Day film Wind Chill (2007).
