This is the new poster for director John Favreau’s highly anticipated sequel Iron Man 2, flying into theaters on May 7, 2010. Robert Downey Jr. reprises his role as the titular hero and is once again joined by Gwyneth Paltrow as his love interest/assistant Pepper Potts. Samuel Jackson is also along for the ride as Nick Fury and Don Cheadle replaces Terance Howard as Col. James Rhodes, aka War Machine.

Heavy Metal

Mickey Rourke plays the villain Whiplash and upping the sex factor (sorry Gwyneth) is Scarlett Johansson as the Black Widow.

"Is that a iron in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?"

“Lost” begins its sixth and final season on Feb. 2, 2010. According to executive producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, ABC promos for the beloved sci-fi series will not feature any new footage of what’s to come.

I have searched high and low all month for some kind of tease, but have come up short … until now! I have smuggled a TV spot from Spain, where the show is called “Perdidos,” via mule (what? they swim) to the U.S. Okay … the clip doesn’t contain any new scenes from the upcoming season, but it is creative and features narration from some dude who kinda sounds like Antonio Banderas. Check it out:

A second trailer for Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, a re-imagining of the Lewis Carroll novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, has hit the web, courtesy of Spike TV. Watch closely and you’ll spot some new scenes.

Alice in Wonderland stars Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, Anne Hathaway as the White Queen, Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen, and Mia Wasikowska as Alice. The film has a very important date at the box office on March 5. To see more images and the original trailer, click here.

Groovy news for fans of tree rape: Grindhouse Releasing has announced nationwide dates and venues for the midnight screenings of the 1981 Sam Raimi (Drag Me to Hell, Spiderman) classic Evil Dead.

The press release reads:

HOLLYWOOD, Calif. – Grindhouse Releasing has set the first dates for its big-screen
revival of Sam Raimi’s EVIL DEAD, scheduled to begin in January.

Landmark Theatres will present the director’s 35mm print of EVIL DEAD at special midnight shows in Minneapolis, Denver, Seattle, New York, Houston, Dallas, and Los Angeles in the first quarter of 2010.

Grindhouse Releasing has created a new full-color movie poster for the theatrical reissue of the 1981 horror classic. Designed by Tad Leger, the collectible one-sheet features rare photos from
the original EVIL DEAD movie poster shoot by Mike Ditz.

“Nothing can prepare an audience for what they are about to see, because nothing punishes an audience like EVIL DEAD — especially on the big screen,” says Bruce Campbell. “I’m really glad it’s back. People are gonna be hurt.”

Endorsed by Raimi, producer Rob Tapert, and star/co-producer Bruce Campbell, Grindhouse Releasing’s reissue of EVIL DEAD will hit theaters across North America in the coming year.

“We’ve had tremendous response to our announcement that EVIL DEAD has returned,” says David Szulkin, head of theatrical bookings for Grindhouse Releasing. “We want to show it in as many cities as we can, and encourage fans to contact us and petition their local theater to screen the movie.”

Dates and venues announced are:

January 8-9: Uptown Theatre, Minneapolis

January 15-16: Esquire Theatre, Denver

January 29-30: Sunshine Cinema, New York

February 5-6: Egyptian Theatre, Seattle

February 19-20: River Oaks Theatre, Houston

February 26-27: Inwood, Dallas

March 5: Nuart Theatre, Los Angeles

May 22: Hudson Horrorshow, Poughkipsie, NY

Additional dates and locations will be announced at GrindhouseReleasing.com. For booking info, contact David Szulkin at info@grindhousereleasing.com.

Post production has begun on John Carpenter’s madhouse thriller The Ward. The film marks the 61-year-old horror legend’s return to the big screen since 2001’s Ghosts of Mars. Lookers Amber Heard (Zombieland, The Stepfather), Danielle Panabaker (The Crazies, Friday the 13th), Lyndsy Fonseca (Kick-Ass), and newbie Sali Sayer star as patients tormented in a psychiatric ward.

The synopsis reads:

Kristen, a beautiful but troubled young woman, finds herself bruised, cut, drugged, and held against her will in a remote ward of a psychiatric hospital. She is completely disoriented with no idea why she was brought to this place and no memory of her life before being admitted. All she knows is that she isn’t safe.

The other patients in the ward, four equally disturbed young women, offer no answers; and Kristen quickly realizes things are not as they seem. The air is heavy with secrets, and at night, when the hospital is dark and foreboding, she hears strange and frightening sounds. It appears they are not alone.

One-by-one the other girls begin to disappear, and Kristen must find a way out of this hellish place before she, too, becomes a victim. As she struggles to escape, she will uncover a truth far more dangerous and horrifying than anyone could have imagined.

The Ward costars Mamie Gummer, Laura-Leigh, Jillian Kramer, Mika Boorem (The Initiation of Sarah, Kiss the Girls), and Jared Harris. (Lady in the Water, Resident Evil: Apocalypse). Echo Lake Entertainment and A Bigger Boat produce.

The Descent 2 makes its way into theaters in the U.K. on Dec. 4. The sequel to the 2005 girl-power thriller is directed by Jon Harris and sees the return of original cast members Shauna MacDonald, Natalie Jackson Mendoza, and MyAnna Buring. There’s no word yet on a U.S. release date for the film, but the following clips have been circulating the web. Enjoy!

By the time you finish reading this post, Spanish filmmaker Miguel Angel Fabre will most likely have been struck by lightening, grown painful boils all over his body, or at least lost a cow or two. The director’s controversial new film The Sindone presents the second coming of Jesus with a sci-fi twist.

The story revolves around a Cardinal determined to control the second coming of Christ by utilizing DNA from the holy Shroud of Turin to clone a new Jesus. The experiment is a success and the Cardinal places the Christ child in the care of a Catholic family not privy to his plans. When Jesus performs a miracle of great significance at the age of eight, he immediately captures the interest of the public. Realizing that he must keep Jesus under wraps for the sake of his experiment, the Cardinal must attempt to abduct the boy from his family, which has taken flight.

I have to admit that I’m intrigued by this premise. BUT … I also think it would play well as a comedy. Imagine how funny it would be if instead of one Jesus being cloned, there were 5 or 6 or 20? Think Multiplicity meets The Passion of the Christ.

But, I digress.

The Sindone stars Ciro Miro as Jesus Christ, Vanesa Romero as Maria, Miguel Molina as Judas Tadeo, and Veronica Mengod as Maria Magdalena. Also making an appearance in the film is scandalous Spanish porn star and model Maria Lapiedra.

Lapiedra rose to fame in Spain shortly after a staged prank left her naked on a popular televised talk show.

Lapiedra has since gone on to perform in a hand-full of amateur porn films and has been featured in numerous men’s magazines, including Spanish FHM.

This is busty British model/actress Kelly Brook posing in an homage to Indiana Jones for Sky Movies. Brook is definitely someone horror fans should keep an eye on (which, really, shouldn’t be hard to do). The gorgeous 30-year-old costars in director Alexandre Aja’s highly anticipated creature-feature Piranha 3-D.

Noticeable talent

Brook plays a vacationing coed out for fun at an Arizona resort town. Unfortunately, the nearby lake is soon overrun by piranha. A remake of Joe Dante’s 1978 original, Piranha 3-D stars Elisabeth Shue, Ving Rhames, Christopher Lloyd, Jerry O’Connell, Richard Dreyfus, Dina Meyer, and porn performer Riley Steele. The film is said to include lots of nudity and gore.

Kelly goes motorboating with porn chick Riley Steele

Piranha 3-D is slated for an April 2010 release.

Robert Rodriguez’s Predators will be rated R says director Nimrod Antal in an exclusive interview with Coming Soon. The announcement lays to rest the rumors that the sci-fi actioner would be shot for a PG-13 rating to cash in on the kid demographic. Antal also promises that the film will not be CGI-heavy.

He says:

the original film was as good as it was because of the practical, because it was a guy in a suit, because it was the jungle, so we stay true to that. We were in Hawaii for a month in the jungle, so there’s going to be some pretty impressive locations … I think that the fans who may have been underwhelmed by the last two AVP films, I think they’re in for a very pleasant surprise …

Fans were surprised a few months ago with the casting of girly-men Adrien Brody (King Kong, The Village) and Topher Grace (Spiderman 3) in lead roles, a far cry from the buffed-out, bad-asses of 1987’s Predator, namely Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers, and Jesse “The Body” Ventura.

Antal explains:

I think when we cast Adrian, there were a lot of people going, ‘What?’ but at the same time, if we cast a Vin Diesel in that role or if we cast anyone who is Arnold-esque, we would have been attacked for doing that. So we decided early on to go in a very different direction as far as the casting process, but it turned out fantastic. He plays a mercenary in the film and if you look at the guys in Iraq and Afghanistan today, they’re not ‘yolked-out’ Schwarzenegger-looking guys. They’re all very wiry and thin guys, and I think it’s going to play well.

In all fairness, the cast does include bad motherfuckers Walton Goggins (“The Shield,” House of 1000 Corpses), Derek Mears (plays Jason in Platinum Dunes’ Friday the 13th reboot) , and Rodriguez go-to tough guy Danny Trejo (Machete, From Dusk Till Dawn).

Rodriguez’s Troublemaker Studios is producing Predators for Twentieth Century Fox. The film is slated for release on July 9, 2010.

Someone is killing your favorite Star Wars characters. No, it’s not George Lucas again. This time around, the culprit is Joe Schreiber, author of Star Wars: Death Troopers. This looks like the greatest book ever.

The synopsis reads:

When the Imperial prison barge Purge–temporary home to five hundred of the galaxy’s most ruthless killers, rebels, scoundrels, and thieves–breaks down in a distant, uninhabited part of space, its only hope appears to lie with a Star Destroyer found drifting, derelict, and seemingly abandoned. But when a boarding party from the Purge is sent to scavenge for parts, only half of them come back–bringing with them a horrific disease so lethal that within hours nearly all aboard the Purge die in ways too hideous to imagine.

And death is only the beginning.

The Purge’s half-dozen survivors–two teenage brothers, a sadistic captain of the guards, a couple of rogue smugglers, and the chief medical officer, the lone woman on board–will do whatever it takes to stay alive. But nothing can prepare them for what lies waiting aboard the Star Destroyer amid its vast creaking emptiness that isn’t really empty at all. For the dead are rising: soulless, unstoppable, and unspeakably hungry.

Schreiber is the author of the horror novels Chasing the Dark, Eat the Dark, and No Doors, No Windows.