Even though Robert Rodriguez has long been touting 2009’s Machete was the beginning of a trilogy of films, it was thought to be dead in the water due to the lackluster performance of the original. Now, Deadline is reporting that Rodriguez has producer Alexander Rodnyansky on board and is ready to move forward with the sequel Machete.

The sequel, as was hinted during the first film, will be titled Machete Kills, already has a script and will start production as soon as April. The new film finds Machete recruited by the U.S. Government to take on a mission that would be too much for any normal man.

Machete must battle his way through Mexico single-handed to “take down a madman cartel leader and an eccentric billionaire arms dealer who has hatched a plan to spread war across the planet with a weapon in space.”

Back in ’07, Robert Rodriguez and Quinten Tarantino joined forces for an ambitious theatrical experiment. Grindhouse was a double feature of exploitation films that ran together on a single ticket. Holding these two films together was a series of fake trailers that completed the retro marathon’s vintage experience.

The hype for this dirty celluloid love fest rose to some pretty serious highest, prompting a contest that capitalized on the fake trailer angle. Contestants were asked to create a fake grindhouse-esque trailer in a similar style to those that were going to appear in the movie. The eventual winner of this contest was director Jason Eisener and his entry Hobo With A Shotgun.

Winning in equal parts because of the absurd simplicity of it’s premise and the skill with which the Canadian director was able to recreate the esthetic of low budget ’70s era exploitation films, Hobo With a Shotgun became an instant fan favorite and talks began to surface about expanding the trailer into a full feature. Now 4 years (and one Rutger Hauer) later Hobo With a Shotgun is a full length feature that lives up to all of the promise the original trailer hinted at.

The international uncensored grindhouse-style teaser trailer for Hobo with a Shotgun broke online over the weekend.

The film is based on a fan-made trailer by director Jason Eisener that went on to win the Robert Rodriguez Grindhouse Trailer contest at this year’s South by Southwest.  In the film, a homeless hobo vigilante cleans up the streets by blowing away crooked cops, pedophile Santas, and other scumbags with his trusty pump-action shotgun.

In the teaser trailer we see Rutger Hauer (Blade Runner) flawlessly portray a hobo chillingly explaining his ruthless actions to a nursery full of babies. We get a portrait of a dystopian society where rape, murder, corruption and drugs have taken over, which can only be cleaned up by a man with nothing to loose. In true “grindhouse” fashion, we are also treated to tons of explosive blood and gore.

Relative unknown Jason Eisener (Treevenge) is set to direct the film. This movie is set t0 hit screens in 2012. Filming for the film begins this Monday.

With the release of Machete and Hobo with a Shotgun now coming to theaters, can we expect to see more Grindhouse exploitation films on the way soon? What do you think about the new trend where films are trying to be bad on purpose? Can terrible films start throwing the grindhouse moniker in their tag lines to try and play off bad writing?

Keep it here for all your Hobo with a Shotgun news and check out the trailer after the jump.

Grindhouse is a term used to describe a movie theater that specialized in showing Exploitation movies, primarily in the 1970s.  That type of movie was often made on the cheap, and contained salicious subject matter like nudity, drugs, or taboo behavior.

In 2007, Director Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino brought us the Grindhouse double-feature, which consisted of Planet Terror and Death Proof.  The film itself was scratched up to replicate what a real grindhouse might have looked like.  The movie(s) were heavy on the gore, nudity, and camp, just like the old days.

The movie featured fake trailers for upcoming films, one of which was for a movie called Machete, featuring grizzled character actor Danny Trejo.  Rodriquez decided to flesh out the ideas behind the trailer and dusted off a script he wrote in 1993 to give the film the full feature treatment.

Machete (pronounced throughout the film as Ma-chet-ay) is the moniker given to an ex federale  from Mexico who witnessed horrible atrocities committed on his family and has become a vigilante of sorts, vowing to bring down the people responsible for killing his family.  No surprise that his weapon of choice is a newly sharpened machete, though he will use just about any implement in a pinch.

In 2007, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez brought us Grindhouse, a gritty, blood-soaked double feature that tipped its hat to the low budget exploitation movies that played during the 1970’s. The film featured some really fun trailers for fake movies.  Rob Zombie, Eli Roth, Edgar Wright, and Rodriquez were each responsible for one of the trailers.

The trailers were such a huge hit with fans that one of them has been turned into a movie. Machete (directed by Robert Rodriguez) hits theaters on September 3rd.

Now comes word that Eli Roth’s trailer for Thanksgiving will be made into a full length feature film.  Roth confirmed the news with Cinema Blend, and said that the movie is in the beginning stages.

The Thanksgiving trailer features the town of Plymouth, Massachusetts  celebrating the holiday while a serial killer dressed as a Pilgrim goes on a decapitation spree.  It is deliciously gruesome and the voice over narration is to die for (pun intended.)  This year, there will be no leftovers!

Roth has recruited friend Jeff Rendell to help pen the movie. Rendell appears in the trailer as the deranged Pilgrim. The two hope to write the story as soon as Roth finishes doing publicity for The Last Exorcism, which he produced.  That film will be released this Friday, August 27.

Check out the trailer for Thanksgiving after the jump. Warning: very NSFW.

Since Tarantino and Rodriguez reintroduced the allure of the Grind House genre to an unsuspecting worldwide audience, original films and scripts from that time have been fair game for studios to snatch up and update for the modern audience. Rogue continued that trend last year by rebooting Wes Craven’s classic Last House On The Left. It opened with moderate success, and now it’s Anchor Bay’s turn, with a reboot of 1978’s I Spit On Your Grave (also known as Day of the Woman).

For those not in the know,  this is basically the ultimate revenge flick, updated for the modern, jaded youth with ultra sex and hyper violence. Need more? Here’s the film’s full synopsis.

Writer Jennifer Hills (Sarah Butler) takes a retreat from the city to a charming cabin in the woods to start on her next book. But Jennifer’s presence in the small town attracts the attention of a few morally deprived locals who set out one night to teach this city girl a lesson. They break into her cabin to scare her. However, what starts out as terrifying acts of humiliation and intimidation, quickly and uncontrollably escalates into a night of physical abuse and torturous assault. But before they can kill her, Jennifer sacrifices her broken and beaten body to a raging river that washes her away. Against all odds, Jennifer Hills survived her ordeal. Now, with hell bent vengeance, Jennifer’s sole purpose is to turn the tables on these animals and to inflict upon them every horrifying and torturous moment they carried out on her… only much, much worse.

Just hitting the web is the trailer to this frightening remake, and we can honestly admit that this remake plans on doing the original film justice.

Check out the full trailer after the jump, and be sure to catch the full film in theaters and Unrated on October 8th. No word on how a lack of MPAA rating will effect distribution, but be sure that we’ll be the first in line when this flick hits our local theater.

While this trailer hit the web a few days ago, we’ve been sitting on it because frankly we didn’t think it was real. After a few days and nobody else seemingly raising an eyebrow about it, we’ve come to terms with the very tangible existence of Danny Trejo’s Vengeance.

Why did we think the trailer was a fake? A few reasons, actually. The film looks like it was shot with a low-rent DV camera, which doesn’t make much sense considering the talent involved. That talent? Names that range from Donal Logue to Jason Mewes to 50 Cent to pro wrestler Diamond Dallas Page and UFC fighter Rashad Evans.

Also (and this could just be the trailer, and not the film itself), this looks like a blatant copy of another Grindhouse-styled revenge story starring Trejo, ala Robert Rodriguez’s Machete.

Even with that, the film is very much real. It comes from indie filmmaker Gil Medina who originally wrote the film in 2006 about Trejo being wrongfully accused of murdering his family only to get released and exact revenge as Jack’s Law. It seems like Medina wasn’t quite done with the story, as he’s doing it all over again in Vengeance.

Check out the trailer after the jump and you’ll get what we mean when we think the film is a bit ridiculous. Be sure to keep an eye out for Danny Trejo’s Vengeance when it hits theaters on November 11th, two whole months after Machete.

Lots of people equate today with drinking Caronas, sitting outside, and celebrating a holiday nobody really understands anymore. This year, the holiday just got a little cooler, as a brand new “illegal” trailer for Machete hits the web.

When we first heard that Robert Rodriguez was going to extend his fake trailer that was attached to 2007’s Grind House, nobody really thought it would happen. Then we heard casting rumors that people like Robert De Niro, Lindsay Lohan, and Steven Seagal were attached to the film, and our belief in the film’s existence became nothing more than a “what if” situation. Until now.

The first trailer for the film, which Danny Trejo declares is in celebration of Cinco de Mayo (and for the state of Arizona) just hit the web, and is pretty much like the original trailer, until you go “Holy crap, that is De Niro, Lindsay Lohan, and Steven Seagal??”

Check the trailer out after the jump, courtesy of AICN, and be sure to keep an eye out for all things Machete as we draw closer to it’s September 3rd release date.

According to Heat Vision Blog, Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Grindhouse) and Joel Edgerton (Attack of the Clones) are set to star in the latest incarnation of The Thing, Universal’s take on “the shape-shifting alien who terrorizes a group of people in a remote facility.” Oh yeah, that one.

Winstead will play a Ph.D. candidate who joins a Norwegian research team in Antarctica after it discovers an alien ship frozen in the ice. When a trapped organism is freed and begins to kill, she is forced to team with a mercenary helicopter pilot (Edgerton) to stop the rampage. Matthijs Van Heijningen is directing the movie, which was written by Ronald D. Moore and Eric Heisserer.

Sadly, Van Heijningen has never directed a big budget feature film before, so he’s probably the best choice for this one. Yes, that was sarcasm.

The Thing has, of course, been made into a film at least twice before. The best (and best-known) of these is probably the John Carpenter version from 1982 which featured Kurt Russell as the titular “mercenary helicopter pilot.” That film was a contemporary remake of 1951’s The Thing From Another World, directed by Howard Hawks and featuring pre-Gunsmoke James Arness as the creature.

A March 15 start date in Toronto is planned with a very short theatrical run and swift trip to your local video store probably soon to follow.

Those who had the dedication to sit through nearly 4 hours of film in the theater when Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse hit cinemas worldwide are tough. Not for the four-hour film stint, but because they managed to sit through Death Proof without tearing out their eyes.

Thankfully, we all had a selection of great, fake trailers in between the films to keep us entertained. Trailers directed by names like Eli Roth, Rob Zombie, and Edgar Wright, which are all still rumored to be in the works as real films. We all know that Rodriguez’s Machete is being planned, and almost ready to start.

After seeing those trailers, it was only a matter of time before the YouTube generation got their hands on some fun footage, and made it look like a Grindhouse film. What better film than something as depressing and cheap-looking as Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler.

Check out the masterpiece after the jump. Also, be sure to check out all of our other Fan Film Friday links while you’re at it.