“Mad Men” star Christina Hendricks is set to star in How to Catch a Monster, a sci-fi thriller written and directed by actor Ryan Gosling (Drive), who also co-produces through his Phantasma Films with Marc Platt Productions. Production is slated for Spring 2013.
Described as a modern day fairy tale with elements of “fantasy noir and suspense,” How to Catch a Monster finds Hendricks playing a single mother of two who follows her teen son to a secret under water city where women only wear bikinis (I lie because I wanna make you happy).
Hendricks and Gosling last worked together on director Nicolas Winding Refn’s stylish 2011 actioner Drive, about a getaway driver-for-hire who gets into trouble when he decides to take a risky job to help a mother and her young son. Hendricks played double-crosser Blanche.
Image Works Entertainment has released a trailer for Swedish director Daniel Fridell’s upcoming 3-D remake of Ataru Oikawa’s creepy J-Horror frightener Apartment 1303. The film stars Mischa Barton (“The O.C.”), Rebecca De Mornay (Mother’s Day), and Julianne Michelle (Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps).
Apartment 1303 follows a young woman, who while investigating the mysterious suicide of her sister, discovers a malevolent force that may have caused her sibling—and many women before her—to jump to their deaths from the room’s 13-story balcony.
Cinetel has tapped SAW IV and Chain Letter scribe Thomas Fenton to write the sequel to Steven R. Monroe’s I Spit On Your Grave, a 2010 remake of Meir Zarchi’s controversial 1978 rape-revenge thriller. No word on whether Monroe will return to helm the project, Bloody-Disgusting reports.
Monroe’ I Spit On Your Grave starred newcomer Sarah Butler as Jennifer Hill, a young novelist on a mission to maim, dismember, and murder the men who brutally and repeatedly raped her while on holiday in the woods. The film made Clatto’s list of 2010’s Sexiest Horror Films (yeah, we’re bad people).
In an interview with Dread Central, Butler expressed interest in reprising her role in the sequel and revealed that the remake’s script included unshot scenes that found her character back in the city taking meetings with her literary agent and torturing a new male victim.
The very last little bit was Jennifer walking into her apartment, and in the manuscript it was completely covered in white plastic from floor to ceiling and there was a man tied up and hanging from the ceiling, and Jennifer said something like, ‘Honey, I’m home.
Of course, Fenton could also find inspiration for the sequel by watching I Will Dance On Your Grave: Savage Vengeance, an unofficial 1993 sequel to Zarchi’s I Spit On Your Grave that finds Jennifer Hill heading back to the woods with a girlfriend. Gang rape and murder quickly ensues.
British actress Julia Ormond (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) is set to topline “Witches of East End,” a Lifetime pilot based on the 2011 Melissa de la Cruz bestseller about a family of witches. If picked up, the series will be Ormond’s first.
Deadline reports that Ormond will play Joanna Beauchamp, a small-town art teacher who when faced with a dangerous threat to her family reveals to her two adult daughters that they were born witches and that they must embrace their powers.
Ormond’s genre creds include the Lindsay Lohan thriller I Know Who Killed Me and Jennifer Lynch’s twisted serial killer drama Surveillance. She will next be seen in Lynch’s Chained as the mother of a boy who is abducted by a homicidal maniac who forces him to keep his murder house tidy.
