Movies
[San Diego Comic-Con ’12 News Bites] ‘Hellboy 3’ Chatter, The Rock For ‘Lobo’ & “Mockingbird Lane” Cast Photo!
I’m actually a bit surprised this is our first News Bites of the San Diego Comic-Con, considering there’s more news breaks than we can possibly handle (nothing like having our server crash multiple times. Sorry ’bout that!)
Anyways, here’s a few short news breaks beginning with the news confirming Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson‘s potential casting in Warner Bros. Lobo adaptation: “Rumors of me possibly playing LOBO are true. Joel Silver and Brad Peyton working on it now. That could be fun,” revealed The Rock via his official Twitter account. This would be a nice move away from playing Disney character like The Tooth Fairy. Bray Peyton is directing. Lobo is an alien that works as an interstellar mercenary and bounty hunter from DC Comics. His comics are known to be R-rated and bloody.
Via TVLine the below image displays the cast of NBC’s “Mockingbird Lane“ (Bryan Fuller‘s re-imagining of “The Munsters”) shared with Comic-Con attendees, along with the following recap: “A sizzle reel of footage from the “Mockingbird Lane” pilot, which finished shooting three days before the panel, revealed that the series has the auteur’s stamp all over it. Darkly humorous and visually distinctive, the sneak peek featured a scene of a wolfed-out Eddie terrorizing his Boy Scout friends on a camping trip, clever nods to the original series and Eddie Izzard as Grandpa chomping into a lion. Special effects to be added will also allow Lily’s outfit to form out of spiders and for Grandpa to manifest out of rats.” He adds, “The family pet, Spot, will be part of the show, as will the creation of the “Dragula.””
Lastly, Pacific Rim director Guillermo del Toro once again talks about Hellboy 3 with EW: “I can say publicly that now we are together in trying [to do Hellboy 3].” Star Ron Perlman adds, “The [first] two movies were really set up to have this unbelievable resolve…Everything that was done in both movies was leading up to this destiny, written in stone, of what Hellboy has been summoned to Earth to do. To not do it, particularly in light of the scope that Guillermo is thinking of for the resolve, would be in my mind a little bit of a shame.”
As of now nothing is official, but Del Toro says, “We’re going to make an effort to do it. I hope it happens.”
There’s been a lot of talk about how Christopher Nolan snuck in some horror elements into his epic adaptation of The Odyssey. However, even before the Cyclops began to eat Ithican soldiers and Circe subjected them to magical body-horror, cinemagoers were already witnessing supernatural terror through a certain trailer that was attached to most IMAX screenings of Nolan’s film.
It turns out that this trailer was for Rob Savage’s Other Mommy, an adaptation of Bird Box author Josh Malerman’s horror novel, Incidents Around the House. With the teaser now available online and revealing that the award-winning Jessica Chastain is playing the titular antagonist (as well as her ill-fated human counterpart), not to mention the fact that the picture is being helmed by the director of hits like Host and The Boogeyman, genre fans are understandably hyped for this upcoming thriller.
That’s why I’ve decided to take a closer look at the trailer and share four things we learned from this sneak peek at Other Mommy!
4. Rob Savage is Going Back to His Supernatural Horror Roots
I know I’m in the minority when I admit that Dashcam is my favorite Rob Savage movie, but even I understand why the filmmakers’ fans have been waiting a while for the director to get back to telling more grounded paranormal stories as he did with 2020’s Host.
Other Mommy obviously isn’t a found footage movie, but moments like the poltergeist activity on the kitchen table combined with the nature of the source material, which actually features a full-on exorcism, indicate that this adaptation is more than a simple creature feature. That’s why I think Savage is once again going to borrow from the same ghostly narratives that made his debut film such a viral hit.
3. Other Mommy is a More Convincing Doppelganger in the Adaptation
Part of the horror from Malerman’s original novel came from the fact that the entity taking on the form of Bela’s (Arabella Olivia Clark) mother wasn’t very good at passing itself off as human. This resulted in several uncanny moments where other characters began to notice that there was something visibly wrong with the family and decided to keep their distance.
Savage’s film appears to be taking a different route, with the trailer showing a version of the entity that can, at least physically, imitate Chastain’s character perfectly. This change is likely the result of the filmmakers wanting to incorporate more paranoid scenes where Bela and her father, played by Jay Duplass, are confused about which Mommy is safe to interact with.
2. The Family is Also Better Off This Time Around
Incidents Around the House featured some interesting subtext about how poverty can negatively affect American family dynamics. After all, the main characters were already feeling scared and isolated before the entity emerged from Bela’s closet and began scratching at their emotional wounds. The trailer for the movie, however, depicts the family as being relatively well off before these incidents begin to occur.
I can only imagine that this part of the story was changed so that the family’s fall from grace can be even more dramatic as the mom and dad’s pasts are revealed and Bela falls further into the clutches of the demonic antagonist.
1. Jessica Chastain is Embodying Evil Dead Rise’s Alyssa Sutherland
Mothers turning against their children is one of the most disturbing horror tropes out there (just check out classics like Hereditary and Carrie if you need proof), but it takes a remarkably skilled actress to pull off such a monstrous transformation. This is especially true when both a regular, loving mother and the Other share the screen in the same film.
That’s why I appreciate how Chastain appears to be channeling another evil redhead mother that recently traumatized audiences with her performance. It’s too early to be sure, but I’m fairly confident that Chastain’s character has at least some amount of Ellie in her cinematic DNA – Ellie being the iconic deadite brought to life by Australian actress Alyssa Sutherland in 2023’s Evil Dead Rise.
Let us know in the comments if you think we missed any important details from the trailer, and don’t forget to check out Other Mommy when it hits theaters on October 9!
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