Midnight in Toronto

Yep, the Midnight Madness slate got announced today. And there are some doozies.

- Opening night is the Fubar sequel, cleverly titled Fubar 2. The plot? Terry and Dean head to Alberta. Good enough for me.

- Troma graduate and Slither writer/director James Gunn brings us... oh, another superhero spoof, called SUPER. Yay. On the other hand, he got Rainn Wilson to play the wannabe hero, Crimson Bolt, whose super power appears to be the ability to swing a mean monkey wrench.

- filling the "Please please please let this not suck" slot that in the last couple of years went to George Romero and Dario Argento, John Carpenter takes us to The Ward, which appears to be a smaller thriller about Amber Heard in a mental institution. It could work. Really. Carpenter's tank might not be empty yet, dammit! Just shut up!

- Saw writer/director James Wan gets Insidious, a haunted house film with Rose Byrne and Barbara Hershey. Damn. Why did it have to be Rose Byrne? I like her, ever since I saw her in Goddess of 1967.

- The Butcher, The Chef and the Swordsman is a crazy Hong Kong action/comedy about the fight to possess a meat cleaver made from the blades of five legendary swords. Oh yeah, I'm so there.

- Hong Kong writing team Laurent Courtiaud and Julien Carbon make their directorial debut with Red Nights, which on first glance appears to be kind of a distaff Maltese Falcon riff.

- Machinist director Brad Anderson tells us about Vanishing On 7th Street, an apocalyptic Twilight Zone-y thing starring Thandie Newton, Hayden Christiansen and John Leguizamo.

- Bunraku is a post-apocalyptic action film billed as 'a new style that melds east with west and old school with new.' Well, Ron Perlman's in it, so what the hell.

- Stake Land is another post-apocalyptic action film, this one with vampires and a fundamentalist cult that isn't necessarily upset about the world ending.

- Fire of Conscience is the third Hong Kong film in the MM program this year, this one a more typical cops-and-robbers-and-guns-and-explosions-and-mayhem kind of thing.

My snark aside, that does look like a pretty good lineup. Assuming the Carpenter doesn't suck, that is. Please don't suck.