Looks like television star Eva Longoria-Parker is getting a little desperate to kick-start her film career. After appearing in string of rom-com flops, the “Desperate Housewives” player is shifting gears to headline writer/director Franc Reyes’ (Illegal Tender) upcoming supernatural thriller The Tenement.

Set in New York, The Tenement follows five potential property buyers who get a raw deal when they attend an open house in a haunted tenement building in the Bronx.

Reyes describes his film as a mix of The Exorcist, The Amityville Horror, and Rosemary’s Baby. Shooting is set to begin next month in New York.

Longoria-Parker’s previous horror creds include The Dead Will Tell and the truly horrific Over Her Dead Body.

Disney has cast 23-year-old French actress Astrid Berges-Frisbey as the mermaid Syrena for their upcoming sequel Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. Frisbey joins Penelope Cruz and Ian McShane as the franchise’s new faces.

Stranger Tides marks Frisbey’s first American production. The actress made her feature film debut in the French pic Un Barrage Contre Le Pacifique (The Sea Wall).

In a casting-sheet leaked last month, it was discovered that Disney would only hire actresses with natural breasts for roles in the film (a jiggle test would be required during auditions). Looks like Frisbey easily fit that bill:

It's always creepier when the casting agent is wearing mouse ears.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides finds Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) mixing things up with the notorious pirate Blackbeard (McShane) while on a quest to find the Fountain of Youth. The film is directed by Rob Marshall, the man behind such lavish productions as Memoirs of a Geisha, Nine, and the Oscar-winning musical Chicago.

Shooting begins in June.

(Update: See more pics of Astrid here).

(UPDATE: IS MERMAID ANTOINETTE NIKPRELAJ HOTTER THAN ASTRID?)

Scarlett Johansson (Iron Man 2) and Sam Rockwell (Moon) are reportedly set to star in Lunatic at Large, a long-lost Stanley Kubrick (The Shining) project based on a 1950’s treatment from “The Killer Inside Me” author Jim Thompson.

(Breaking News: Nude pics of Johansson have been leaked)

Discovered after Kubrick’s death in 1999 by his son-in-law Philip Hobbs, the Lunatic at Large treatment was adapted by screenwriter Stephen R. Clarke in 2006.

That year, Clarke leaked the following script details to the New York Times:

Set in New York in 1956, it tells the story of Johnnie Sheppard, an ex-carnival worker with serious anger-management issues, and Joyce, a nervous, attractive barfly he picks up in a Hopperesque tavern scene.

There’s a newsboy who flashes a portentous headline, a car chase over a railroad crossing with a train bearing down, and a romantic interlude in a spooky, deserted mountain lodge.

The great set piece is a nighttime carnival sequence in which Joyce, lost and afraid, wanders among the tents and encounters a sideshow’s worth of familiar carnie types: the Alligator Man, the Mule-Faced Woman, the Midget Monkey Girl, the Human Blockhead, with the inevitable noggin full of nails.

Johansson will most likely play Joyce the barfly. No word yet on whether she gets punched in the face.

It’s also unclear if Clarke will remain on board as screenwriter now that the project is moving forward.