Film at Eleven

The British Independent Film Awards - which were created in 1998 to celebrate merit and achievement in independently funded British filmmaking, to honour new talent, and to promote British films and filmmaking to a wider public - have announced the nominees for Bifa 2006.

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According to ComicBookMovie (via), Neil Gaiman’s next foray into film will be an adaptation of Stardust, a prose fantasy tale with illustrations by frequent collaborator Charles Vess. The story was serialised by DC Comics’ Vertigo imprint before being collected and reprinted in various formats, including one without illustrations that helped bring Gaiman over to a non-comics reading audience.

The story involves a man on a romantic quest to find a fallen star for his love in a fantastic land on the border of his home town called Faerie. The film, directed by Matthew Vaughn will star Charlie Cox, Claire Danes, Robert DeNiro and Michelle Pfeiffer and is due to be released on March 17th, 2007.

Shots of Stardust have recently appeared in a Spanish magazine as well as PfeifferTheFace.

This month’s Big Sky Film Series presents film, fire and Portland indie rock under a single roof in Burn to Shine, including performances by The Decemberists, Sleater-Kinney and The Shins.

“Burn to Shine” is a film series produced by Fugazi’s Brendan Canty and directed by filmmaker Christoph Green. Brendan and Christoph travel from city to city with a posse of shooters and a van full of recording gear to film bands performing in houses that are about to be demolished or burned to the ground. They document the doomed house,_the bands, and the demolition, and put it together in a 55 minute film. Each film has a different curator who is entrenched in the respective music scene. This allows the bands chosen to be put in a particular time and place. The bands set up in the living room, playing just one song each for the cameras alone, allowing the viewer to experience them in an intimate setting.

The city of Portland, Oregon sets the stage for the third installment of Burn to Shine. Chris Funk of The Decmberists brings together 12 of his favorite Portland bands to perform in a house that is about to be burned to the ground. A cross section of Portland’s vital music scene is captured in a single day, celebrating a moment in time and place. Featuring performances by The Thermals, Quasi, The Planet The, The Wet Confetti, Lifesavas, Tom Heinl, Mirah, The Decemberists, The Shins, The Gossip, The Ready, Sleater-Kinney.

The Big Sky Film Series is a periodic monthly screening series highlighting traditional and innovative nonfiction film and video. It is held the first Friday of the month as part of downtown Missoula, Montana’s “First Friday.” All screenings are held in the Historic Wilma Theater (Wilma 3 downstairs) and are free and open to the public. The series is curated by the programming staff of the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. This month’s series is sponsored in part by Ear Candy Music.

Screening times are 7 p.m. and 9 p.m on November 3rd

The second season of Masters of Horror started on Friday on Showtime with The Damned Thing. If you missed that, and you live in the US, despair not as there are another twelve one-hour films, every Friday until February.

There looks to be an excellent stack of directors involved as well, including Dario Argento, John Carpenter, Joe Dante, Stuart Gordon (who is re-united with Jeffrey Combs in The Black Cat) and John Landis.

The confirmed air dates are

October

27th Masters Of Horror: The Damned Thing (Dir. Tobe Hooper)

November

3rd Masters Of Horror: Family (Dir. John Landis)
10th Masters Of Horror: The V Word (Dir. Ernest Dickerson)
17th Masters Of Horror: Sounds Like (Dir. Brad Anderson)
24th Masters Of Horror: Pro-Life (Dir. John Carpenter)

December

1st Masters Of Horror: Pelts (Dir. Dario Argento)
8th Masters Of Horror: Screwfly Solution (Dir. Joe Dante)
29th Masters Of Horror: Valerie On The Stairs (Dir. Mick Garris)

January

5th Masters Of Horror: #209
12th Masters Of Horror: #210
19th Masters Of Horror: #211
26th Masters Of Horror: #212

February

2nd Masters Of Horror: #213

I’ve already mentioned Simon Cathcart’s comedy/horror Stagknight a couple of times and now I’m mentioning it again because I’ve just seen the rather excellent poster for the film.

And, if you head over to the film’s official site and click on the TV, you can watch the all new full length trailer.

Some time ago, actress, musician and producer Jennifer Rouse spoke to Dale Pierce about - among other things - The Death of Poe, a cinematic chronicle of the great writer’s final journey into madness and fear directed by Mark Redfield.

And we’re rather pleased, therefore, to be able to announce that the film will debut on DVD in a deluxe 3 disc edition from Alpha New Cinema on November 21, 2006 and can be pre-ordered now from oldies.com.

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Freak Out, Christian James‘ camp vegetarian serial killer film was released in the UK back in May. Now, thanks to Anchor Bay, American audiences will also have a chance to laugh themselves to death.

Turning the great horror movie clichés on their severed ears, Freak Out opens like all great slasher films — with a flashback of an incidental character. Young Cliff is being dropped off at school by his alcoholic mother, only to be tormented by his teacher and peers. Thirteen years later, Cliff escapes from a mental institution to find that the school that he vowed revenge on is no longer standing. Disappointed and with nowhere to go, Cliff wanders onto the doorstep of horror film addicts Merv and his best friend Onkey. With visions of slashers and maniacs and box-office grosses (oh my!) dancing in their heads, wannabe schlock kings Merv and Onkey fit Cliff with a potato sack on his head and cover his face with a hockey mask, transforming him into the ultimate homicidal filmaniac. Things soon take a turn for the worst after the killer “finds his groove,” dispatching shoppers and employees alike in a supermarket. With their Frankenstein officially out of control – killing everyone in sight — Marv and Onkey start to have second thoughts. Can they stop their own creation or are they – and the town — doomed?

Freak Out has already created a buzz among comedy and horror aficionados. The film has been critically acclaimed by Rue Morgue, calling Freak Out “one of the finest indie horror-comedies of the year,” All Things Zombie who raved “a winner, destined to be a fan favorite,” and Arrow-in-the-Head who dubbed the film “A high-rolling, non-stop laugh fest.”

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Hellraiser creator, Clive Barker, has accepted an offer from the the Weinstein brothers to remake his iconic 1987 horror film. There will be a much bigger budget this time around, but Barker has accepted on the basis that if he doesn’t do it, it will be done by someone else in a way that he probably won’t like.

It’s only that one that I really, really, really care about in terms of its remake value - and it’ll be kind of fun to have the extra money to do the effects and all that cool stuff.

So it puts me in the situation of writing both the beginning and the end of Pinhead at the same time – ‘In my end is my beginning…’ I’m not in the middle, as it were, I’m leaving out his middle age, I’m just dealing with his beginning and his end.

I’m excited about it - actually it’ll be kinda cool to revisit it once and see if there are things we can do to it which will make it significantly better.

This time around, Barker will write the script and co-produce the film, but he isn’t planning to direct.

This cropped up in the comments, but is worth mentioning for the benefit of anyone who finds themselves in Toronto in the run up to Halloween.

Zombie Night 2: The Awakening will be playing at the Bloor Cinema on Saturday October 28th at 8:00pm. This will be followed at 11:30pm wuth a showing of the ever reliable Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Variety, by way of Fangoria, reports that Pete Tombs of Mondo Macabro has co-produced Pakistani horror film Zibahkhana (Hell’s Ground) in conjunction with that country’s Bubonic Films.

It’s about a group of teenagers who are diverted on their way to a rock concert by protestors demonstrating against polluted water; forced to take a back road, they soon encounter both a family of deranged murderers and rampaging undead ghouls. Hell’s Ground marks the directorial debut of Omar Ali Khan, a film historian and ice-cream chain owner (!), who shot the movie on hi-def video this past summer.

According to Khan: “They are definitely the first Muslim zombies. We don’t have songs or comedy sequences, none of the prerequisites of the South Asian film. It’s a complete ripping up of what’s expected from local productions.”

The film has already been invited to Sundance, who were so keen that they waived the entry fee.