News

Brian Taylor Goes All In with “Mom and Dad”

Published

6 years ago

January 19, 2018

Brian Taylor, the man who brought us Gamer and Crank, has a brand new film hitting theaters and Video On Demand January 19, 2018. It’s called Mom and Dad and it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before.

The film begins on a morning just like any other morning. Brent and Kendall Ryan get their kids ready for the day and head off to work never realizing that the world is about to go insane.

For the next hour and 23 minutes, we watch as parents are overtaken by a blind rage that makes them want to kill their children. Not children in general…only their own.

The film is an action packed, darkly hilarious roller coaster ride, and I jumped at the chance to talk to writer/director Brian Taylor.

My first question? Where did this idea come from?

“Yeah, well, I’m a parent, right? So, really, it’s all there,” Taylor laughed in reply.

From the spark of that idea, Taylor was intent on telling an original story, something he’d never seen before on film.

“Sometimes, when you do that, you find out why no one has ever done it before,” he explained. “It just seemed like this was a universal theme, though. The moment you fulfill your purpose as a human being is the moment you become obsolete, and that’s something that is difficult to resolve.”

This universal theme actually helped Taylor as they were searching for filming locations for the movie. They were in a very conservative part of Kentucky, and he was afraid to tell people what the movie was about when he was asking for permission to use their homes, many of which were decorated with religious iconography.

“That moment always came, though, and I’d have to, somewhat hesitantly, tell them what we were making,” he said. “Overwhelmingly, they’d respond ‘Oh, I’d see that movie! I want to kill my kids ten times a day!'”

That was when he knew he was really onto something. Now all he needed was a stellar cast to bring it to life.

Enter Nicholas Cage and Selma Blair as Brent and Kendall, the murderous parents in question.

“Nick and Selma are punk rock, man, and they really got the satire and humor right away,” Taylor explained. “They really personalized it and brought their own anxieties and frustrations to their roles.”

Selma Blair in Mom and Dad via Momentum Pictures

Both actors played their roles to the hilt, but Blair, especially, seems to offer the audience a glimpse of internal conflict over her murderous rage, even when it is in its highest gear. She’s our broken moral compass, so to speak, and she inhabits her role beautifully.

The films two younger stars, Anne Winters and Zackary Arthur, offset their adult counterparts perfectly working together as only a brother and sister can to stay alive.

Mom and Dad is a movie that begs to be seen with a group of friends. Check out the trailer below and be sure to look for it in theaters and VOD on January 19 2018.

Featured image via Momentum Pictures

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Movies

‘Evil Dead’ Film Franchise Getting TWO New Installments

Published

2 hours ago

April 26, 2024

Timothy Rawles

It was a risk for Fede Alvarez to reboot Sam Raimi’s horror classic The Evil Dead in 2013, but that risk paid off and so did its spiritual sequel Evil Dead Rise in 2023. Now Deadline is reporting that the series is getting, not one, but two fresh entries.

We already knew about the Sébastien Vaniček upcoming film that delves into the Deadite universe and should be a proper sequel to the latest film, but we are broadsided that Francis Galluppi and Ghost House Pictures are doing a one-off project set in Raimi’s universe based off of an idea that Galluppi pitched to Raimi himself. That concept is being kept under wraps.

“Francis Galluppi is a storyteller who knows when to keep us waiting in simmering tension and when to hit us with explosive violence,” Raimi told Deadline. “He is a director that shows uncommon control in his feature debut.”

That feature is titled The Last Stop In Yuma County which will release theatrically in the United States on May 4. It follows a traveling salesman, “stranded at a rural Arizona rest stop,” and “is thrust into a dire hostage situation by the arrival of two bank robbers with no qualms about using cruelty-or cold, hard steel-to protect their bloodstained fortune.”

Galluppi is an award-winning sci-fi/horror shorts director whose acclaimed works include High Desert Hell and The Gemini Project. You can view the full edit of High Desert Hell and the teaser for Gemini below:

^{High Desert Hell}

^{The Gemini Project}

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Movies

‘Invisible Man 2’ Is “Closer Than Its Ever Been” to Happening

Published

4 hours ago

April 26, 2024

Timothy Rawles

Elisabeth Moss in a very well-thought-out statement said in an interview for Happy Sad Confused that even though there have been some logistical issues for doing Invisible Man 2 there is hope on the horizon.

Podcast host Josh Horowitz asked about the follow-up and if Moss and director Leigh Whannell were any closer to cracking a solution to getting it made. “We are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” said Moss with a huge grin. You can see her reaction at the 35:52 mark in the below video.

^{Happy Sad Confused}

Whannell is currently in New Zealand filming another monster movie for Universal, Wolf Man, which might be the spark that ignites Universal’s troubled Dark Universe concept which hasn’t gained any momentum since Tom Cruise’s failed attempt at resurrecting The Mummy.

Also, in the podcast video, Moss says she is not in the Wolf Man film so any speculation that it’s a crossover project is left in the air.

Meanwhile, Universal Studios is in the middle of constructing a year-round haunt house in Las Vegas which will showcase some of their classic cinematic monsters. Depending on attendance, this could be the boost the studio needs to get audiences interested in their creature IPs once more and to get more films made based on them.

The Las Vegas project is set to open in 2025, coinciding with their new proper theme park in Orlando called Epic Universe.

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News

Jake Gyllenhaal’s Thriller ‘Presumed Innocent’ Series Gets Early Release Date

Published

7 hours ago

April 26, 2024

Timothy Rawles

Jake Gyllenhaal’s limited series Presumed Innocent is dropping on AppleTV+ on June 12 instead of June 14 as originally planned. The star, whose Road House reboot has brought mixed reviews on Amazon Prime, is embracing the small screen for the first time since his appearance on Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994.

Jake Gyllenhaal’s in ‘Presumed Innocent’

Presumed Innocent is being produced by David E. Kelley, J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot, and Warner Bros. It is an adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1990 film in which Harrison Ford plays a lawyer doing double duty as an investigator looking for the murderer of his colleague.

These types of sexy thrillers were popular in the ’90s and usually contained twist endings. Here’s the trailer for the original:

According to Deadline, Presumed Innocent doesn’t stray far from the source material: “…the Presumed Innocent series will explore obsession, sex, politics and the power and limits of love as the accused fights to hold his family and marriage together.”

Up next for Gyllenhaal is the Guy Ritchie action movie titled In the Grey scheduled for release in January 2025.

Presumed Innocent is an eight-episode limited series set to stream on AppleTV+ starting June 12.