Movies
[Remember This?] Oren Peli’s ‘Area 51’?
Hot off the success of Paranormal Activity, director Oren Peli embarked on his second outing behind the camera, Area 51. That was four years ago.
Isn’t it strange that the above paragraph could easily be the opening crawl for its own found footage movie? Of course, Oren Peli didn’t disappear. Paranormal Activity 2, 3 and 4 have since been released (he was involved with all of them to varying degrees). He’s had a big network TV show, “The River.” He wrote and produced The Chernobyl Diaries and he’s also a producer on Rob Zombie’s upcoming Lords Of Salem.
His producing partner on Area 51 (and the PA films), Jason Blum, recently had some massive success with Insidious and Sinister and is currently shooting Insidious: Chapter 2. Back in 2011 Blum went on record about the project and the duo’s very busy dance card seemed to be interfering a bit with its release, “Area 51′ is like ‘Paranormal Activity’. The additional photography for ‘PA’, we went back 50 times. The great thing about doing extra shooting for inexpensive movies is that the cost is low, so we screen and shoot and screen and shoot. Oren and I were pulled away from ‘Area 51′ a lot for the second ‘PA’. Once that came out, we ramped up on ‘Area 51′ again. I anticipate the movie will be mostly done in about three or four months.”
Those three or four months have come and gone. So… what do we know about the film?
Well, we know it stars Reid Warner, Darrin Bragg, and Ben Rovner. And that Peli uses the found footage conceit to tell the story of “three teens whose curiosity leads them to the notorious Area 51 portion of Nellis Air Force Base in the Nevada desert.” Apparently the film didn’t test through the roof (something Blum sort of acknowledges in the quote above), but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad. Lots of films don’t play for test audiences but wind up doing perfectly well.
Could it be that Area 51 simply shares too much narrative proximity with Peli’s own Chernobyl Diaries? After all, it is about a group of teens headed to a remote, barren environment that’s the site of some sort of government calamity. Is Paramount waiting for Chernobyl to cool to half-life before scheduling a release? Maybe.
In April of 2011 BD learned that director/actor Chris Denham (who apparently produced some documentaries on Cambodia and Thailand) had been hired by Paramount to shoot some additional footage for the film. Which means that the test screening of Area 51 that I was accidentally invited to (but did not attend) in September of 2011 would have incorporated his footage.
I haven’t heard anything out of that test screening, and quotes on the film from Peli and Blum from after that time period are hard to come by. So my honest question is, “where is it?” I think it’s important to note, again, that troubled productions aren’t necessarily bad ones. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and sometimes delays are just delays. Though, of course, it’s hard to tame suspicions when the delays and silence around it are this significant.
But that will all be settled when the film gets a proper release. I’m not out to assassinate something I haven’t been exposed to a single frame of. I’m not saying it’s good and I’m not saying it’s bad. I’m just saying I want to see it. Have any of you?
Described as “Ted meets ET,” David Mikalson’s raunchy comedy Goblin is being brought to life over at A24, and Will Forte (“The Four Seasons”) is now in talks to star.
Deadline first reported the news this afternoon.
Kenneth Branagh has been cast to voice the titular Goblin in the upcoming A24 movie, with the character said to be “green-colored” as well as “anatomically correct.”
Skyler Gisondo (Superman) is reportedly playing the Goblin’s human best friend.
The mysterious project sounds a bit like films including A Gnome Named Gnorm and more recently, Frankie Freako, though it’s important to note that it’s not billed as a horror movie.
Deadline details, “After [Mikalson] hatched the idea to make an outrageous buddy comedy about a goblin, using a practical puppet and operating outside the Hollywood system, his script quickly got him a rep team. While others might have eyed the raunchy comedy as a writing sample or planned to wait to see the micro-budget version Mikalson has been directing in Kentucky, A24 jumped all over it. The hot indie essentially has agreed to finance a full feature.”
“There was a lot of interest, but A24 came with what Mikalson really wanted, after spending all his money crafting the puppet title character: they acquired the movie and agreed to let him make it with a significantly increased budget than what he had left after creating the anatomically correct title character,” Deadline’s report goes on to explain.
What does the titular Goblin actually look like? Well, a cake that Mikalson had whipped up for his reps might give us our first look at what to expect. Deadline explains the photo you’ll see down below, “Take a look at the cake he commissioned with Marc Gravelle at Cake Art in West Hollywood, to present to his reps as thanks for making his dream come true.”
You must be logged in to post a comment.