Just like braving the mall crowds at Christmastime, Joss Whedon unleashes some psychological horror with his genre-bending thriller The Cabin in the Woods. An extraterrestrial prison is the setting of our next clip Lockout, which stars Guy Pearce as a man sent to rescue the president’s daughter after a jailbreak. Last off on another slow week is the second trailer for Oscar hopeful Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which pretty much dares you not to cry. Nothing like openly weeping around the holidays – it’s Trailer Tracker.
New clips this week:
The Cabin in the Woods
Lockout
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
The Cabin in the Woods
I don’t want to make a habit of describing one movie as a cross between two others, but The Cabin in the Woods is pure The Evil Dead meets Lost. With director Drew Goddard (who worked closely with J.J. Abrams on that hit TV show) behind the camera and the writing talents of Joss Whedon in tow, the resulting blend is really not that surprising. Things start out very traditionally, as a group of teens head out to a cabin for a weekend of partying, cross paths with a weird gas station attendant and then things begin to go bump in the night. What makes this take on the “dead teenager” flick veer of course significantly are the odd sci-fi elements, what looks to be some sort of government conspiracy and hungry mutant attackers – only Whedon.
Thor’s
Chris Hemsworth stars alongside a group of relative unknowns as the fear-stricken
group of friends, and the great Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford also join
the cast in roles that may have ties to the aforementioned
conspiracy/experiment. The Cabin in the
Woods was scheduled for release some time ago but financial problems at MGM
delayed the project, which will now see the light of day – or would that be the
dark of night – on April 13. This tongue-in-cheek horror experiment just looks
too nifty to pass up and even if Whedon doesn’t have the best of luck keeping
his television shows running, that is by no means to say he is not a man of
many, many ideas.
Lockout
You’d better hope that
they have good health care in space, because in the trailer for Lockout, Guy Pearce gets beat around
pretty good as he is interrogated for the events of something that transpired
in “the room”. That seems to be a very small part of Lockout, written by Luc Besson, centered upon a wrongly convicted government
agent who is given a chance of reprieve if he can rescue the president’s
daughter from a maximum security space prison – now there’s a concept for ya. The
concept has been done in fare such as Escape
from New York, but Pearce has a knack for elevating material with issues. Look for Lockout on April 13, 2012.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Directed by Stephen Daldry
(The Reader) and scripted by Eric Roth (Forest Gump) a mentally different
ten-year-old looses his father in the 9/11 attacks and goes on a quest to find
the secret behind a key left behind by his late parent – some films scream Oscar
bait, this one has a bullhorn. I can’t fault this movie on the talent (which
also includes Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock) as they’ve all done fine work, but
damn this oozes an aura of manipulative schmaltz. We’ve talked about “Extremely
Loud” before on Trailer Tracker and this second clip really hasn’t swayed our
interest one way or another.