“HAHA, hey, everyone, get a load of this lame ass loser, with her pillow-soft lips and perfect bone structure!”

Carrie is a Stephen King story about the weird girl in school who gets teased and tormented mercilessly until her period unleashes the telekinetic power within, basically your typical uterine-sloughings-as-mind-bullets narrative. I sort of question the timing of remaking a bullied-kid-gets-revenge story, but then maybe revenge of the bullied is just one of those cathartic tropes that humans will always be attracted to. In any case, the 2013 remake of the 1976 film based on the 1974 novel, directed by Kimberly Pierce (Stop Loss, Boys Don’t Cry), is one of those hilarious examples of Hollywood Ugly, with Chloe Moretz playing Carrie and Julianne Moore as her weird mom. Ew, oh my God, they’ve got… braids, and they’re wearing… shawls! Haha, gross! Aren’t they just hideous??

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Brian DePalma’s 1982 version of Scarface was a remake of the 1932 Howard Hawks film, updating the original Italian gangster based on Al Capone to a Cuban drug lord in Miami, to properly reflect the specific ethnic menaces of their respective times. Now Donnie Brasco writer Paul Attanasio is doing another remake for Universal (rewriting an earlier draft by David Ayer), and while the original report said the plot was under wraps, Latino Review quotes a source close to the project saying the new Tony Montana will be Mexican. (*throws out black beans, buys pinto beans*)

[quoting the original Deadline scoop] “Scarface was first done in 1932 and then turned into the iconic 1983 film that starred Al Pacino as Cuban gangster Tony Montana. The film is not intended to be a remake or a sequel. It will take the common elements of the first two films: An outsider, an immigrant, barges his way into the criminal establishment in pursuit of a twisted version of the American dream, becoming a kingpin through a campaign of ruthlessness and violent ambition. The studio is keeping the specifics of where the new Tony character comes from under wraps at the moment, but ethnicity and geography were important in the first two versions.”

Keeping the specifics of where the new Tony character comes from under wraps at the moment?  Why so secretive?  What is the big deal?

Well, according to sources, we have discovered that the new Tony Montana is actually Mexican and the remake takes place in the world of drug cartels. [LatinoReview]

I’m not convinced the most overrated movie of our times really needs a remake, but if they are going to do it, I’d like to see an extremely outdated and borderline racist caricature of a Mexican out of a Looney Tunes cartoon, where Tony’s big drug dealer chair is now a saguaro cactus, and his big pile of cocaine is an empty tequila bottle, and when the FBI shows up to beat down his door, he just sings a sad ranchero song and falls asleep.

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I posted the leaked New York comic-con footage from the Evil Dead remake last week and it caused quite a stir, judging by the nearly 4,000 Facebook shares, despite the crappy bootleg-quality video. Like I said at the time, two things it has going for it are that the project reportedly has original Evil Dead director Sam Raimi’s blessing, and director Fede Alvarez says he shot it entirely without CGI. He also says that the raping tree is “way more terrible than the original,” for what that’s worth.

Fede Alvarez: We didn’t do any CGI in the movie. There’s no CGI in the movie. Everything you will see is real, which was really demanding. This was a very long shoot, 70 days of shooting at night. There’s a reason people use CGI it’s cheaper and faster, I hate that. We researched a lot of magic tricks and illusion tricks. [Like] how you would make someone’s arm disappear.

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"I know I left my keys in here somewhere."

Last we checked in on David Cronenberg – or Bronenberg, as I call him at our weekly poker games – he was taking a big, stinky dump on Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy and the people who love those movies because we’re stupid for liking comic books, or something to that effect. Meanwhile, his new film Cosmopolis started opening on a platform release last Friday, which means that you’ll be able to see it in your city by November. Hopefully those two things have kept him distracted from the fact that his 1983 science fiction thriller Videodrome is being remade.

Universal Pictures already brought in Ehren Kruger to pen the new version, and that’s exciting, because his writing credits include Reindeer Games and the last two Transformers films. You should see the size of the vein building in my forehead right now. And to top it all off, a director has been chosen in Adam Berg, who makes commercials.

Berg won the Film Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival for his Carousel ad for Philips, and has helmed numerous other commercials and short films.

When Kruger and [producer Daniel] Bobker set it up at Universal, they planned to modernize the concept, infusing it with the possibilities of nano-technology and blow it up into a large-scale sci-fi action thriller. (Via Deadline)

To recap: the guy who wrote the horrendous Reindeer Games is teaming up with his co-producer from the universally-loathed Dream House, and they hired the guy who made this Philips commercial to direct…

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At long last, we have the trailer for MGM’s remake of Red Dawn (directed by Bourne stunt coordinator Dan Bradley and actually shot in 2009), in which we reinvent a tiny hermit nation of starving Stalinists with a persecution complex as a massive invading force to avoid offending the Chinese (who, ironically for a Communist superpower, have too much money to risk alienating). The whole thing is in such wildly poor taste that I don’t know whether to be nauseated or impressed. All I know is that if they make it through the entire movie without calling anyone “gook” they’re full of sh*t. What’s he saying in the banner pic? “Piece of a sh*t?” Haha, okay, sure, buddy, whatever you say.

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