Giant Freakin Robot

When done right, video games can be a perfect delivery system for terror. All the ways movies have learned to scare us over the years work just as well in the form of a game — frightening sounds, quick flashes of movement, jump scares. But a game can take things to the next level because of the medium’s inherently interactive nature. When a horror game is firing on all cylinders, you aren’t just watching scary things happen to somebody on the screen…you feel as if you’re actually there, in the middle of it. The original Dead Space is one of the most effective horror games of all time, and it turns out it counts one legendary director amongst its fans: John Carpenter.

Carpenter knows a thing or two about horror, having brought us genre classics such as The Thing, Halloween, and Escape From New York. Speaking to Game Informer, the director opened up about his love of Dead Space:

I maintain that Dead Space would just make a great movie because you have these people coming onto an abandoned, shut-down space ship and they have to start it up and something’s on board. It’s just great stuff.

I would love to make Dead Space [into a film], I’ll tell you that right now. That one is ready-made.

With just three films behind him, Jeff Nichols has cemented himself as one of the most intriguing young directors in Hollywood. Perhaps that’s because the wild-eyed thesp Michael Shannon has been an integral part of each of his features. From the intense familial drama of Shotgun Stories to the potential insanity of Take Shelter — for which Shannon won a Best Actor Saturn Award — to his detail-redacted role in the recently released fugitive thriller Mud, Shannon has been a force to be reckoned with in Nichols’ cinema.

After some Shannon-fueled rumors of another upcoming collaboration, we can now rest assured that the two will reteam for a present-day sci-fi chase thriller for Warner Bros., entitled Midnight Special. Shannon recently starred in the bicycle chase flick Premium Rush, but I’m guessing this film will get a tad more complicated. Nichols also wrote the screenplay, which Warner Bros. acquired before deciding to bring him on as a director, making it his first big studio film. Something tells me he’s more than qualified for the job.

The plotline for this film is largely unknown, so we have to look back to an interview Nichols gave to MovieMezzanine in January.

Meet George Jetson. He’s got a lot of the same things that we modern citizens have. A wife, two kids, and a dog that loves him, not to mention a job he isn’t all that fond of, and an overbearing bossman. But he also has access to loads of things that we’ll never have — a robotic maid isn’t one of them, though animated genitalia is.

We’re talking flying cars here, and Terrafugia is talking loudest. They’re the innovative smarties behind the Transition, which was more like an airplane you could drive than a car you could fly. But their next project is the TF-X, which aims for a future filled with cars that can achieve a Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL), like a helicopter, with all of the air travel of a plane and the highway driving of a hybrid vehicle that also happens to have wings and propellers attached to it.

Jonathan Liebesman’s upcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has a lot more stacked up in the negative column than in the positive, but there is an ever-present block of pessimistic hope attached to die-hard fans, while the much more realistic haters expect Michael Bay’s influence to make this a disaster in a half shell…or heroes in amassed Hell. Turtle power!

The Ninja Turtles may finally have their Shredder, as William Fichtner — one of the most recognizable character actors of the last 20 years — has been added to the cast in an unnamed role, but one that is “a lead with iconic statue in the Turtles‘s mythology.” Fichtner is already the classiest actor to join this flick, and definitely deserves such a recognizably evil role in a film. Granted, his taking over the Shredder role would completely shit all over the Japanese backstory, but Fichtner just played a character named Master Chang in Quentin Dupieux’s strange dramedy Wrong, so there’s probably no need for worry.

We only just found out today that Will Arnett’s role won’t be playing Shredder, not that anyone was really expecting that. (He’ll play Vernon Fenwick, April O’Neil’s cartoon-created Channel 6 cameraman.) And considering Danny Woodburn is in the Splinter role, one has to wonder how many more iconic characters this franchise has to offer a middle-aged man. If Fichtner had some sort of a physical deformity where his brain were on the inside of his stomach, and where the skin was clear, then maybe his role as Krang would be set in stone. But for now, we just don’t know.

You’ll see more of Fichtner in Elysium and The Lone Ranger, but you remember him from Armageddon, Prison Break and Invasion, right? What about Contact and The Dark Knight? What about as Shredder in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, to be released on June 6, 2014? Let’s hope we all remember that one.