This week’s pick is the John Carpenter exploitation classic Assault on Precinct 13 that stars Austin Stoker, Darwin Joston, Laurie Zimmer, and Carpenter regular Charles Cyphers. Before Carpenter hit it big two years later in 1978 with the critically acclaimed financial blockbuster Halloween, his first commercial attempt came with Assault on Precinct 13.

Carpenter was a graduate of USC film school and had recently shot the now cult classic Dark Star which failed to give the young idealistic filmmaker the big break he was hoping for. Carpenter went looking for financial backers and found the CKK Corporation of Philadelphia, PA who gave Carpenter carte blanche to make whatever kind of film he wanted.

Carpenter hoped to make a Howard Hawks inspired western much like El Dorado or Rio Lobo. Due to funds in the range of only one hundred thousand dollars, Carpenter changed his mind and decided to make an action exploitation film instead.

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Texas Killing Fields is a strong, straightforward crime thriller which tells the story of three cops running the gauntlet in an attempt to solve two brutal crimes. But the film is particularly notable for its haunting tone and superlative acting.

Director Ami Canaan Mann does everything she can to give the movie an infectious gloom, an impressive imitation of the sprawling claustrophobia specific to Southern poverty. Mann, daughter of the legendary Michael Mann (who also co-produced the film), makes a lot of smart choices here, but none more crucial than the cast.

Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Sam Worthington bring their own unique intensity to their natural good cop/bad cop relationship, and a pre-Oscar nomination Jessica Chastain (The Help) brings a fiery quality to a supporting role. As usual, the 12-year-old Chloe Moretz shows remarkably advanced nuance for an actor her age.

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This week’s Monday pick is the action thriller Blue Thunder (1983) directed by John Badham (Dracula, War Games). The film stars Roy Scheider (Frank Murphy), Malcolm McDowell (Colonel Cochrane), Daniel Stern (Richard Lymangood), Candy Clark (Kate), and in his final film performance, Warren Oates (Captain Jack Braddock).

“Blue Thunder” is the codename given to an advanced new helicopter that is chosen to be deployed over Los Angeles in an attempt to quell public disorder in preparation of the upcoming Olympic games and general crowd control from the air.

Scheider stars as officer Frank Murphy, a former U.S. Army helicopter pilot who suffers from PTSD due to his combat experiences in Vietnam. Scheider is chosen to fly the five million dollar prototype that he observes at an army proving ground in the California desert. Murphy is impressed with the chopper’s capabilities such as the ability to record a whisper from two thousand feet, search targets by infrared heat signatures, travel by silent “whisper mode”, and level a city block with a six barrel 20 mm electric cannon.

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This week’s pick is the John McTiernan thriller The Hunt for Red October (1990). Sean Connery, Alec Baldwin, Scott Glenn, Sam Neill, and James Earl Jones star in this Cold War classic about a Soviet naval commander and a new invincible Soviet sub which threatens peace between the two super powers.

Set in early 1984 before Gorbachev came to power as the new Soviet premier, the new ballistic missile submarine Red October sets sail from port in the arctic and makes its way to the north Atlantic for a training exercise. Its captain, Marko Ramius (Connery) selects his officers and the crew for a daring mission that they believe will test the might of their old adversary, The United States navy.

The Red October is equipped with a new type of propulsion system, a caterpillar drive, which renders the sub virtually silent to sonar. This feature and its nuclear payload, represent a clear and present danger to U.S. policy in the north Atlantic at the height of Cold War tensions between both the U.S and Soviet Union.

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This week’s pick is the 1983 Cold War classic War Games directed by John Badham and starring Matthew Broderick (David Lightman), Dabney Coleman (Dr. John McKittrick), John Wood (Dr. Stephen Falken), Ally Sheedy (Jennifer Mack), and Barry Corbin (General Beringer).

War Games is the ultimate Cold War thriller that questions whether or not there truly is a winner in a nuclear war. Matthew Broderick stars a David Ligthman, a highschooler with a fondness for computers and getting himself way in over his head. Lightman uses his computer hacking skills to mostly hack into his school’s computer in order to alter his grades, a dream every kid with a computer would hope to do.

At the same time, officials at the NORAD missile defense complex in Colorado, are wanting to remove the human element from America’s nuclear umbrella and devise a fully automated response system that will launch nuclear missiles once approval has been given by the president of the United States.

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A couple years ago I named Christopher Young’s Drag Me To Hell as my favorite score of the year. It had all of the big, bold, bombastic sounds you think of with true gothic horror. What raised that score above its genre and made it stand alone as the best was its sense of fun. It very well could have been the theme music for the tea cups ride at Inferno-Disney.

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is a new horror film with a strong pedigree. It takes its cues from a more classical age of horror movies and the film’s score follow suite. The music sounds like it’s from another time and shares many of the trademarks of Young’s score. This is particularly evident with the opening title, which actually made me look at my iTunes to confirm I wasn’t listening to Drag Me To Hell.

Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders have put together a very consistent sounding soundtrack for this throwback horror flick, in fact I often went ten minutes without realizing the track had changed. This ends up being a double edged sword for the album, on one hand I like what the music is giving me, so consistency means it is all gravy.

However, after the strong opening, the album never really hooks you again. You pretty much have heard everything dynamic this score has to offer in the first few tracks.

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This week’s pick is director John Sturges’s classic World War II thriller The Eagle Has Landed. The film stars some of Hollywood’s best talent: Michael Caine (Col. Kurt Steiner), Donald Sutherland (Liam Devlin), Donald Pleasence (Heinrich Himmler), Robert Duvall (Col. Max Radl) Jenny Agutter (Molly), Anthony Quayle (Adm. Canaris), Jean Marsh (Mrs. Grey), Treat Williams (Capt. Clark), and Larry Hagman (Col. Pitts).

The Eagle Has Landed supposes the theory that a team of German commandos clandestinely enters England and kidnaps Prime Minister Winston Churchill (the least heavily guarded world leader) and hold him for ransom in order to make the British sue for peace, thus allowing the Germans to continue on as the masters of Europe.

Amazed by the rescue mission to free Italian dictator Benito Mussolini from his mountain prison, Hitler proposes the idea to kidnap Churchill. The high command brings in architect colonel Radl (Duvall) to devise the plan in how to kidnap Churchill. Radl settles on Col. Kurt Steiner (Caine) a decorated paratrooper whose anti-Nazi reputation and crack unit are just the ones to pull off a mission considered too risky.

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This week’s pick is the 1980 release of William Peter Blatty’s The Ninth Configuration which is a Gothic, thriller, comedic, war picture.  The film stars Stacy Keach (Col. Hudson Kane), Scott Wilson (Capt. Billy Cutshaw), Jason Miller (Lt. Frankie Reno), Ed Flanders (Col. Richard Fell), Neville Brand (Maj. Marvin Groper), George DiCenzo (Capt. Fairbanks), Moses Gunn (Maj. Nammack), Robert Loggia (Capt. Bennish), Joe Spinell (Lt. Spinell), Tom Atkins (Sgt. Krebs), Steve Sandor (Stanley), and veteran actor Richard Lynch (Richard).

The Ninth Configuration is a film unlike any other.  It’s a film which blends many different genres together and delivers a truly comedic and frightening film at times.  The film’s protagonist is that of Capt. Cutshaw (Wilson), an astronaut who aborted his space launch out of fear of dying.  Cutshaw is remanded to a secret government facility housed in an old castle in the Pacific northwest region of the United States during the tail end of the Vietnam War.  The purpose of the facility was to see if certain individuals were faking psychosis in order to avoid combat duty in Vietnam.

The arrival of a new commanding officer is played by Stacy Keach (Col. Hudson Kane).  Maj. Groper (Brand) assembles the group of patient misfits to greet the new shrink and welcome him to the facility.  The inmates amuse themselves by reciting famous lines from famous movies like Victor McLaglen in The Informer or one of the bandits from Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Col. Kane is greeted by one man who refers to himself as Dr. Frome  (Blatty) and is grateful for any help a psychologist can bring.  Groper sounds off a role call and asks where Frome is.

Two Marine guards escort Frome back inside and the real doctor, Col. Fell (Flanders) introduces himself.  Kane looks at Fell with curiosity and believes that the two have met someplace before.  Fell says that he has no recollection of ever meeting Col. Kane before.

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While there were plenty of large Summer blockbusters to preview this week, they all seemed to fall short on originality and just show us the same overdone action styles that have become popular over the past few years (Conan the Barbarian).  Instead, I thought it was the perfect time to do a spotlight on some of the more obscure independent films coming up, right in the middle of this year’s Sundance hits finding distributers and buzz beginning to form around the film showing at Cannes.

This week we have two breakout hits from Sundance, one disturbing foreign thriller premiering at Cannes, and a documentary that is food for your soul.

Martha Marcy May Marlene

Click to see the trailer

Yes!  There is a third Olsen sister and she can act!  While this is only Elizabeth Olsen’s second feature since appearing that in Mary-Kate & Ashley videos as a kid, this film could definitely be a break-out role for her.

The other performance to watch in this trailer is from John Hawkes, an underrated but diverse actor that always delivers solid work in some great projects.  You may know him from his comedic role on HBO’s Eastbound and Down, or from his Oscar nominated role as Teardrop in Winter’s Bone last year.  This lesser-known cast could be set to become of the strongest ensemble performances of the year.

This film is going to be a hard one to miss, combining strong storytelling with powerful performances.  LA Weekly describes the film as “a triller that shifts nearly imperceptibly between dream, memory, and reality.”  The subtle psychological element of this trailer is sure to make for an intriguing film.

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M. Night Shyamalan gets a bad rep sometimes. He’s an excellent storyteller who’s been known to go off of the deep end when it comes to getting his films made, most notably with Lady in the Water, which was basically just a love letter to his kids. We won’t address The Happening.

He seemed to go a bit more mainstream with the upcoming The Last Airbender, but now it seems the writer/director is getting back to his mysterious roots with his newest film. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the film’s premise, and even the title, is a mystery. Nothing has been revealed about the plot or the genre. What we do know is that Shyamalan has apparently already locked in three big actors for the film.

No details are known about the project, but it comes with some major acting talent: We’ve learned that Bradley Cooper, Gwyneth Paltrow and Bruce Willis are loosely attached to star in the film.

Shyamalan is famously secretive, and this project is no exception: Only top studio execs have read the script, and they were required to allow a Shyamalan assistant to supervise the process. When the execs finished reading, the assistant took the script back and left.

This project could be just what Night needs to get back to where he was circa 1997 with the success of The Sixth Sense. He’s got a pretty good track record with Willis, as he was in both Sense and Unbreakable.

Not sure where he could possibly go with this film, as he’s already touched on fairy tales, aliens, ghosts, and evil trees. We’ll be sure to keep a close eye on news from this upcoming project.

We’re all pretty big fans of the horror genre here in The Flickcast. We’ve had many a heated debate about the popularity of Paranormal Activity and lack of popularity of Cloverfield. Basically, the new concept of “first-person horrors” has us intrigued, along with the rest of the country. In picking up on that trend, producer Eli Roth has released the first trailer for his newest film, The Last Exorcism.

The film follows in the trend of a Cloverfiled or Paranormal in the sense that it’s a documentary (mockumentary?) about uncovering some mysterious things that took place to a family in the Midwest. Things get even weirder when the documentarian comes to discover that the daughter of the family is actually possessed.

There are some neat horror devices that we can see in the trailer, some interesting first-person camera tricks, but it looks like it could be an entertaining film, to say the least. Between the poster and the first promotional image we got, the filmmaker seems to be smitten with the shot of actress Ashley Bell bent over backwards.

With this technique turning plenty of heads in Hollywood, it’s possible that we can see more and more genres adopting this style for use on a spec script (see something like District 9).

Check out the trailer after the jump (preferably with the lights on) and be sure to keep an eye out for The Last Exorcism when it hits theaters on August 27th.

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For those of you who watched last night’s 2 and a half hour Lost finale, you know that these things happened (spoiler free): We get some kind of finality for some of the characters, but we still have plenty of unanswered questions about the mysteries of the island.

It turns out that even though writer/creators Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse still got 2.5 hours (not to mention two hours of recap and a special farewell episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live), they still had more story to tell. In fact, they have roughly 20 minutes more. And no, as funny as they are, those Jimmy Kimmel alternate endings don’t count.

In an attempt to keep you invested even longer, Lindelof and Cuse are giving you the answers you’ve waited 6 years for. To get them, you only have to wait 3 more months.

Said to be attached to the upcoming DVD and Blu-Ray release of the complete series is an additional 20 or so minutes of content that didn’t make it into the series finale. This will allegedly give us answers to questions about the light in the tunnel, as well as finally give us the name of the Man in Black.

Be sure to keep your eyes out for marketing, as Lost: The Complete Collection comes out on DVD and Blu-Ray on August 25th.