Directed by Werner Herzog and produced by David Lynch, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done [I liked it better when it had a shorter title] just released its first trailer (above).  According to signonsandiego:

The project is based on the case of former University of San Diego student and Old Globe actor Mark Yavorsky, who in the late ’70s killed his mother with an antique sword in Pacific Beach, apparently acting out a role from a Greek tragedy.

That’s not a spoiler, by the way.  The movie starts with the murder and then goes into creepy flashbacks.  It’s Lynch and Herzog; would you expect anything else?  Michael Shannon plays an actor playing Orestes in a play [Confused yet?].  Orestes, as we all know, killed his mother Clytemnestra to avenge the death of his father Agamemnon. *closes wikipedia page*  After returning from a trip to Peru (interlaced with plenty of Herzog’s standard man-amongst-or-against-nature scenes), the actor experiences strange delusions that culminate in AWESOME SWORD RAMPAGE!  OO WHA AA AA A!

Also, Michael Shannon’s creepiness manages to overshadow Willem Dafoe.  Kudos, my good man.  Here, let me put that lotion in the basket for you.

~ robopanda [Thanks to theplaylist for the tip.]

If you’re anything like me, you’re really tired of vampire stories and you’re muscular yet gentle, with an iron will and the courage of an eagle.  But this isn’t your grandma’s vampire story. This one has John C. Reilly and Willem Dafoe.

Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant, based on the popular series of books by Darren Shan, is a fantasy-adventure about a teenager who unknowingly breaks a 200-year-old truce between two warring factions of vampires.
16-year-old Darren (Chris Massoglia) was like most kids in his suburban neighborhood. He hung out with his best friend, got decent grades and usually stayed out of trouble. But when he and his buddy stumble upon a traveling freak show, things begin to change inside Darren. That’s the exact moment when a vampire named Larten Crepsley (John C. Reilly) turns him into something, well, bloodthirsty. [via Cinematical]

That’s right, Crepsley turns Darren into a JEW LAWYER. Or possibly a vampire.  I don’t know, I never read the books.

The Spierig Brothers made their film debut back in 2003 with “Australian zombie horror comedy” Undead.  They’ve sinced moved on to vampires, and their latest, Daybreakers, stars Willem Dafoe, Ethan Hawke, and Sam Neill.

Edward Dalton (Hawke) is a researcher in the year 2019, in which an unknown plague has transformed the world’s population into vampires. As the human population nears extinction, vampires must capture and farm every remaining human, or find a blood substitute before time runs out. However, a covert group of vampires makes a remarkable discovery, one which has the power to save the human race. [Yahoo]

Normally I’d hear the word ‘vampire’ and start wanking dismissively out of reflex, but I’ll give them credit for a concept that sounds marginally more interesting than your usual fangy romance.  It looks like they use the premise more as a play on society and mortality than on love.  I guess what I’m saying is, I’ll bite. AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!  ‘CAUSE THEY’RE VAMPIRES, GET IT???  (*sigh*) I suck. In related news, I hear Willem Dafoe f*cks like a gargoyle. True story.

Lars von Trier’s AntiChrist has been the talk of Cannes, and not in a good way. Said Roger Ebert, “Von Trier is not so much making a film about violence as making a film to inflict violence upon us… This is the most despairing film I’ve ever have seen.”   Jeff Wells called it “a fartbomb,” and he wasn’t the only one comparing it to a fart in the first line of his review.  Some reviewers liked it, but most of their praise was along the lines of “I think I liked it,” which in movie critic parlance roughly translates to, “It really tapped into my pretentiousness and self-hate!”  Anyway, the polarized reactions led to quite the scene at the press conference.

Declaring himself “the world’s greatest director,” 53-year-old Dane Lars von Trier defended his enfant terrible title with aplomb.  It started with a shouting match between Daily Mail columnist Baz Bamigboye and other members of the press corps, with Bamigboye demanding von Trier “explain and justify” the explicit sexual gore in his film and another journo in the audience yelling “He’s an artist, you’re not. He doesn’t have to explain anything!”

Uh oh, are the film critics going to fight?  We’re gonna need a bigger inhaler…

“I don’t have to explain anything. You are all my guests here, not the other way round,” von Trier said. “Anyway, I don’t think about the audience when I make a film. I don’t care. I make films for myself.”

Von Trier did defend his use of nausea-inducing imagery — including a bloody masturbation scene and a leg-drilling sequence that could have been cribbed from the “Saw” franchise — as artistic “honesty,” saying to leave the shockers out would have been “like lying.”

He also insisted he was not playing a joke on the audience but meant everything, from the film’s talking fox to the closing dedication to Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, a dedication that drew howls of laughter at last night’s press screening, to be taken seriously. [via Hollywood Reporter]

If you skim read those last three paragraphs and sort of blur them together, you get a talking fox singing “Be Our Guest” while Lars von Trier ejaculates blood.  I’d watch that.

This is the second trailer for Antichrist, from Dogme 95/The Idiots/Dancer in the Dark filmmaker Lars Von Trier (first trailer here). The idea of a Danish director doing a movie about the antichrist is kind of terrifying.  When it comes to sacrilege, no one holds a candle to the Scandinavians. Don’t believe me? Read about Norwegian Black Metal some time you’re interested in having nightmares.  Anyway, this version of the trailer has Danish subtitles, and the second damned word in it is “sorgmønster.”  Sorgmønster!  I don’t know what it means, but it sounds like it means a big scary demon, or penis, or demon penis, or Willem Dafoe.

[via Twitch]