Behind his sweet Hobbit facade, Elijah Wood may just be a nasty little gremlin. The affable 4-foot star (just a guess) of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and upcoming Hobbit films has officially signed on to star as sadistic serial killer Frank Zito in the Alexandre Aja-produced remake of the 1980 slasher Maniac.

Directed by Franck Khalfoun (P2), the redo finds antique mannequin salesman and deranged murderer Frank Zito (Wood) seeking women online to kill and scalp as revenge against his abusive mother whom he’s still haunted by in disturbing hallucinations.

The role is Wood’s second as a vicious serial killer. He played Kevin, an eerily quick-moving cannibalistic killer, in Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City (pictured above). BD, who first broke this story, also reports that French actress Nora Arnezeder (Safe House) will costar as journalist Anna D’Antoni, Frank’s love interest.

Gotta Love Them Old Romantic Comedies!

William Lustig’s original Maniac got feminist panties in a bunch when it was first released in 1980. Movie critics, including Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, were disturbed by the film’s violence against women and  called for its boycott at theaters.

To see a trailer and/or pick up a copy of Blue Underground’s 30th Anniversary Edition of Maniac on DVD and Blu-ray, go here.

Radha Mitchell has said I do to playing Nicolas Cage’s wife in writer/director Scott Walker’s feature film debut Frozen Ground, the true story of Robert Hansen, an Anchorage-based serial killer who murdered 24 women over a 12 year span by hunting them down like game in the Alaskan wilderness.

Mitchell joins a cast that includes John Cusack as Hansen, Cage as the detective who brings him to justice, and Vanessa Hudgens as the teen prostitute who managed to escape from Hansen after being abducted, raped, and sexually assaulted with a hammer.

Mitchell, who made her genre debut in the 2000 Vin Diesel sci-fi actioner Pitch Black, and is best known for 2006’s Silent Hill, has starred in Richard Franklin’s Visitors, Greg Mclean’s Rogue, the Bruce Willis toplined Surrogates, and last year’s stellar remake of George Romero’s The Crazies.

The sexy Australian stunner will next be seen in 4th Kind director Olatunde Osunsanmi’s new found-footage thriller Evidence, Julie Delpy’s The Countess—an arthouse take on the Erzsebet Bathory story—and the eagerly anticipated sequel Silent Hill: Revelation.

Writer/director George Gallo (Middle Men) has assembled an impressive cast of actors for his new psych-thriller Columbus Circle. Selma Blair stars as Abagail Clayton, an agoraphobic young heiress tormented by the mysterious couple (Amy Smart, Jason Lee) living next door to her New York penthouse apartment.

The Lightning Entertainment film also stars Kevin Pollak as the building’s concierge, Beau Bridges as Dr. Raymond Fontaine (Abagail’s sole confidant) and Giovanni Ribisi as Frank Giardello the homicide detective investigating the death of an elderly neighbor.

Columbus Circle will hold its premiere at this week’s American Film Market in Santa Monica, CA. Posted above is the first image from the film, which doesn’t really hint at any turmoil between Blair and Smart’s characters, but does give hope for a weepy lesbian sex scene.

Australian model-turned-actress Nicky Whelan will cause quite a bit of turbulence in moviegoers’ pants next summer when she stars in Japanese director Takashi Shimizu’s (The Grudge) supernatural in-flight frightener 7500.

The CBS Films production—set to shoot later this month—follows a group of passengers terrorized by a supernatural force after the mysterious death of a passenger on Vista Pacific Flight 7500. Whelan will play a bitchy newlywed with control issues.

Joining the gorgeous 30-year-old sheila are fellow babes Amy Smart (Mirrors), Leslie Bibb (Midnight Meat Train), Scout Taylor-Compton (Halloween), and Ryan Kwanten (“True Blood”). 7500 is slated for release on Aug. 31, 2012.

Australian for "See My Movie"

Whelan has appeared in Rob Zombie’s Halloween II, starred in the ninth and final season of “Scrubs,” and played Jason Sudeikis’ spectacularly topless fuck-fantasy in the criminally underrated Farrelly brothers’ comedy Hall Pass.