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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Catch .44 is the embodiment of style over substance.

The film looks great. Writer/director Aaron Harvey clearly has a good eye. If the budget is as low as he implies in the audio commentary, Harvey needs to marry his production designer and his cinematographer. A lot of the visual effects are a little clunky (think the fight sequences in Deadliest Warrior), but good for the budget (which bodes well for the future of indie film).

The acting is also very strong, which is not unexpected given a cast that includes veterans Bruce Willis, Brad Dourif, and Oscar winner Forest Whitaker. Most of the fun that can be squeezed from watching Catch .44 is seeing the actors play.

But the twisty crime thriller genre is all about story, and there just isn’t one here. Unlike The Usual Suspects and Reservoir Dogs, to which the marketing compares the film, Catch.44 doesn’t have any surprises, any secrets, or any tension. It’s mostly just people saying they are going to shoot each other and then, in fact, shooting each other.

The characters are poorly drawn and, with the possible exception of Whitaker’s confused psycho, unmemorable. Most have no arcs to speak of. The script doesn’t even keep you entertained with clever banter or intimidating tough-guy talk, another staple of the genre. The dialogue in Catch .44 is clumsy and lacking originality.

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This week’s Monday Pick is the 1979 action thriller Mad Max, a film that lunched one of the most lucrative franchises in film history. The Mad Max trilogy has spawned many imitations over the last thirty plus years, but they fail to add up to George Miller’s fantastic vision of the ultimate dystopian future.

Mel Gibson (who was virtually unknown at the time) stars as police pursuit man Max Rockatansky. He patrols the highways of the not too distant future Australia that is on the verge of complete anarchy and lawlessness. In the first installment of the series, Miller shows the audience that in this future, resources like food, water, and gasoline are becoming scarce and society is beginning to break down. The Main Force Patrol (MFP) is the uniformed highway safety enforcement whose main purpose is to stop marauding gangs who pose a threat to the society they are desperately trying to preserve.

The first ten minutes of Mad Max are filled with some of the most impressive and dangerous stunts ever performed in any film before or since. The MFP is in pursuit of an escaped convict who calls himself the Night Rider. Along with his girlfriend, the two take off in one of the force’s fastest V-8 pursuit vehicles and are successful in evading several pursuit units.

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It’s always nice to see someone like Edgar Allan Poe get some love in a cinematic era when caped crusaders and the living dead are the hot items. That’s why we like it when someone like John Cusack and James McTeigue is getting his whack at the classic poet/writer in what is being marketed as a true crime thriller.

That’s what we’re hearing about Relativity’s The Raven, which is set to hit March 9th of next year. Here’s an in-depth synopsis of what you can expect to see in the film.

When a mother and daughter are found brutally murdered in 19th century Baltimore, Detective Emmett Fields (Luke Evans) makes a startling discovery: the crime resembles a fictional murder described in gory detail in the local newspaper–part of a collection of stories penned by struggling writer and social pariah Edgar Allan Poe. But even as Poe is questioned by police, another grisly murder occurs, also inspired by a popular Poe story. Realizing a serial killer is on the loose using Poe’s writings as the backdrop for his bloody rampage, Fields enlists the author’s help in stopping the attacks. But when it appears someone close to Poe may become the murderer’s next victim, the stakes become even higher and the inventor of the detective story calls on his own powers of deduction to try to solve the case before it’s too late.

Take a look at the brand new trailer after the jump.

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This week’s pick is the classic 1982 Ted Kotcheff war/thriller First Blood a.k.a Rambo: First Blood (1982), the first installment in the legendary Rambo series. The film stars Sylvester Stallone (John Rambo), Brian Dennehy (Sheriff Will Teasle), and Richard Crenna (Col. Sam Trautman).

First Blood was based on David Morrell’s 1972 classic novel about a Vietnam veteran trying to adapt to civilian life after his horrific experiences during the war as a member of an elite special forces unit. Kotcheff’s film serves as a study into the psyche of veterans and shows the audience the harsh realities that were still facing many vets by the turn of the 1980s.

Stallone stars as John Rambo, a man haunted by his past who is back packing through the Pacific northwest of the United States in search of an old Army buddy, Delmare Berry. Rambo arrives at his friend’s home to discover that he had been dead for over a year due to cancer as a result of Agent Orange, a defoliant used by the U.S. military in Vietnam to spot the enemy from the air (this was an issue that was just now becoming known to the public). Realizing he is the last surviving member of his unit, Rambo once again hits the open road and wanders into the town of Hope, Washington.

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This week’s pick is the HBO film By Dawn’s Early Light (1990), directed by Jack Sholder. The film stars Martin Landau, Powers Boothe, Rebecca De Mornay, James Earl Jones, Darren McGavin, Rip Torn, Jeffery DeMunn, Peter MacNicol, and Nicolas Coster.

By Dawn’s Early Light was based on the novel Trinity’s Child that depicts a full nuclear exchange between the U.S. and USSR. The film is set in 1991 as the Soviet Union is undergoing radical political change (when the film was produced, the Soviet Union was in fact beginning to collapse).

A group of Soviet brass launches a nuclear strike with a stolen missile against the Soviet city of Donetsk. U.S. forces track the trajectory of the missile from allied Turkey. This act makes the Soviet Première and Soviet forces think it was a surprise attack from the U.S. and NATO forces.  The Soviets launch a retaliatory strike which threatens U.S. land based bombers and many key points of communication such as the NORAD facility, SAC headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska, Washington D.C., and Andrews AFB in Maryland which is where the president would be evacuated from.

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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 post Cold War thriller Crimson Tide which stars Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman as U.S. Submariners who clash over their orders to launch nuclear weapons in this Tony Scott action classic. Crimson Tide begins during a period of political unrest in post Soviet Russia when military forces crush a rebellion in neighboring Chechnya.

Violence begins to spread throughout other republics and ultra nationalists headed by a man named Radchenko criticizes American, British, and French involvement which cuts off aid to Russia as a protest of its hostilities towards its neighboring country. Radchenko’s forces seize a Russian ICBM missile complex and threaten to launch nuclear weapons if either the U.S. or its allies move in to stop him.

After several years of peace, the Cold War begins to heat up once again.

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We all know how tame and watered down vampires have become these days. Sure, we’ll get some cool moments in True Blood when fangs are popped and blood is drawn, but that’s only in between the other 50 minutes of romance, sex and melodrama. And let’s not even begin to think Twilight has any kind of vampire bad ass moments.

The one constant is that the Underworld series has always looked good, and had enough guns and leather to come across as a Matrix spinoff. So why wouldn’t we get another sequel amidst the vampire/werewolf hype happening today? Good news, we do.

The premise is a bit tame, but we don’t expect much of a story when the first thing we see in the trailer is a nude Kate Beckinsale.

Kate Beckinsale, star of the first two films, returns in her lead role as the vampire warrioress Selene, who escapes imprisonment to find herself in a world where humans have discovered the existence of both Vampire and Lycan clans, and are conducting an all-out war to eradicate both immortal species.

Of course, you’ll get the expected lines like “something else escaped” and “it’s more powerful than anything we’ve ever fought”. Why? Because why not. Leather + machine guns + Vampires = a good time.

Check it all out in the trailer after the jump. See Underworld 4: Awakening 3D in theaters January 20th.

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If you’ve been the star of one of the most successful film franchises of all time and now that’s over, you might want to consider trying to go in a different direction with your career. If you’re Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe, that’s kinda what you’ve done with your upcoming film The Woman In Black.

In the film Radcliffe plays a lawyer who travels to a remote English village and discovers that the ghost of a scorned woman is terrorizing the locals. The horror thriller is a remake of a 1989 TV movie which was adapted from a play which, itself, was adapted from a novel by Susan Hill. You follow all that? Good.

We’v got a new trailer for the film to share with you today. In it, Radcliffe does his best to overcome the notion that he should just pull out his wand and blast the ghost with his magical powers. Does he succeed? You be the judge.

Check out the trailer after the jump. The Woman In Black is set to hit theaters on February 3rd of 2012.

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Let’s get this out of the way in advance: I’m a fan of actor, personality and bongo player Matthew McConaughey. Even though he’s been dipping in the romantic comedy well too much for the last several years, I’ve always thought he had an edge that needed to be explored.

Looks like I’m getting my wish with his upcoming film Killer Joe. In fact, not only does McConaughey look like he’s continuing to return to better, more challenging, roles the film also marks another directing effort for one of my favorites, William Friedkin. So, win win.

The film, written by Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award writer Tracy Letts, tells the story of a Dallas detective who is also a hired killer. Talk about conflicted. Check out the synopsis below and a cool clip for the film after the jump:

When 22 year-old drug dealer Chris (Emile Hirsch) has his stash of drugs stolen from him by his mother, he has to come up with six-thousand dollars quick, or he’s dead. Desperate, he goes to the trailer-park to see his father, Ansel (Thomas Hayden Church), and he lays out the plan. Chris’s mother, who everyone hates, has a life insurance policy that would clear up his debt and make them all rich. The problem is that Chris’ mother is very much alive.

Enter Detective “Killer” Joe Cooper, a hired hit man with the manners of a Southern gentleman, who will do the job – for an upfront fee, that Chris and Ansel can’t pay. Just as Joe is about to leave, he spots Dottie (Juno Temple), Chris’ innocent younger sister. Joe makes Chris an offer, he’ll keep Dottie as sexual collateral until the money is collected and his fee can be paid. Chris reluctantly puts his debt ahead of his sister and agrees to Joe’s demand.

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