News

Ryûhei Kitamura ("Versus", "Midnight Meat Train", "Alive", "Godzilla: Final Wars", "No One Lives", "Azumi", "Aragami") is heading to Tiff's Midnight Madness with "Downrange", a “terrifying” new thriller starring Stephanie Pearson ("Insidious: Chapter 2"), Kelly Connaire, Rod Hernandez-Farella, Anthony Kirlew, Alexa Yeames, and Jason Tobias. Produced by Kitamura and Eleven Arts' Ko Mori, the film is executive produced by Taro Maki. Screenplay is by Joey O'Bryan ("Motorway", "Fulltime Killer"), with a story by O'Bryan and Kitamura.Six college students are carpooling cross-country when one of their tires blows out on a desolate stretch of country road. Getting out to fix the flat, they quickly discover that this was no accident. The tire was shot out. With their vehicle...

South Korea’s Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival (BiFan), Asia’s largest genre film fest, has announced 21 titles from 12 countries to be presented during the Network of Asian Fantastic Films (Naff) genre film project market.

Dubbed It Project, the market has in past years showcased films such as Arvin Chen’s Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? and Lisa Takeba’s Haruko’s Paranormal Laboratory, which have screened at festivals including Tribeca, Berlin and Rotterdam.

Naff will run July 19-22 during BiFan, which will run July 16-26. Previously known as PiFan, the fest changed its name earlier this year in belated accordance with the current system of Romanizing Korean names. Thus it now uses ‘Bucheon’ instead of ‘Puchon’ to indicate the pronunciation of the name of the satellite city of Seoul that hosts this fest.

Aside from arranging business meetings, Naff will hand out post-production awards and a total of KW66m ($59,300) in cash prizes.

BiFan said this...

They Died of Boredom: Kitamura’s Second Graceless English Language Film

Japanese director Ryuhei Kitamura, of Versus (2000) fame, follows up his perplexing guilty pleasure English language debut, The Midnight Meat Train (2008) with No One Lives, a sort of torture porn meets Dexter scenario that manages to come across even more tired than its dated synopsis already sounds. While many will cite Kitamura’s assumed discomfort with the English language as the responsible factor for this atrociously silly film, the real culprit has to be the brain-dead screenplay by David Cohen (who, surprise, surprise, has no other writing credits to his name/pseudonym at the moment), which doesn’t contain one decently written line.

A half naked, terrorized female runs screaming through the woods, and she hurriedly scratches the words “Emma Alive” into the bark of a tree before she’s predictably recaptured. It turns out that Emma (Adelaide Clemens) was kidnapped quite some time ago,...

Hopefully you know the name Ryuhei Kitamura. In 2000 Kitamura released a movie best described as his Evil Dead a nifty little actionhorror flick called Versus. It featured the Yakuza zombies gunplay swords all kinds of awesomelooking imagery and action. He followed it up pretty successfully with the likes of Alive Aragami and Azumi before directing what was basically the giant monster version of The Avengers Godzilla Final Wars. Things slowed down for him after that and it was with some surprise I saw that he directed the Clive Barker adaptation Midnight Meat Train starring a preHangover Bradley Cooper. Not a classic by any means it is still a lot of fun including a wonderful cameo from Ted Raimi. It is odd that here we are again...

A mother of three made a terrible mistake when she drove into a freight train as it was crossing the tracks — her minivan was struck and two of her kids were killed.

Tara Lewman, 25 and her son, Jordan survived the terrible accident, but they were taken by helicopter to Iowa Hospitals and Clinics in Iowa City. Tara’s daughters, Erika, 4 and Kallie, 5, however, were thrown from the 2004 Dodge minivan and died.

State Patrol Explains Why The Mother Didn’t Brake

Iowa State Patrol Sgt. Scott Bright explained that Tara saw a stopped train on the tracks in front of her, so despite obeying the warning cross arms, she drove past the first train and into a different, oncoming freight train.

“She could not see because the train was blocking the view,” said Bright.

Railroad Crew Worked Hard To Revive The Girls

Batavia Fire Chief, Dave Wells, talked about the railroad...

Be a man! That's the motto of Otokojuku, the all-boys high school for those who wish to temper their inner samurai. It is also, of course, the motto of this irreverent 2008 film that seemingly reveres and at the same time parodies a genre that's unique to Japan. No, not samurai films—the juvenile delinquent genre, or whatever the hell it's called. There's a subsection of Japanese fiction that's dedicated to the conquest of high schools overrun by bad seeds, a very popular but often overused formula in Japanese comic serials. This one is based on Akira Miyashita's 1985 manga, which you can tell from the outdated "respect" attitude (something even recent Japanese gangland stories like to avoid), as well as one character's blazing pompadour, a relic of 80's Japanese culture.

Samurai School starts out as one of these stories, with the cliched premise of the freshman entering the school and, through sheer impressive fighting skills,...

Year: 2008

DVD Release date: Unknown

Director: Ryuhei Kitamura

Writers: Jeff Buhler / Clive Barker (story)

IMDb: link

Trailer: link

Review by: agentorange

Rating: 7 out of 10

As I walked out of Midnight Meat Train last night it suddenly dawned on me that even though the film was far from being perfect cinema, it somehow came close to being a perfect horror film. See, good horror isn't simple. It's not just about good people having bad things happen to them and horror films shouldn't be just about sitting back and passively watching shocking images. Good horror is about characters getting enticed to explore the darkest recesses of our world and gaining a powerful knowledge about our deeper psyche when they emerge changed on the other side. Very few authors get this like Clive Barker, which is why he's so important to the genre (and why he's so loved around here). Hellraiser in particular...

To go along with the insanely bloody pic we showed you, today we scored an exclusive new image from The Midnight Meat Train, which features star Vinnie Jones cutting up some meat. Directed by Ryuhei Kitamura (Alive, Versus), story (adapted from a Clive Barker short story) features a commuter's run-in with a New York subway serial killer and a horde of subterranean cannibals. The train arrives at the station on August 1 from Lionsgate.