The art of the horror comedy is in danger of becoming extinct these days, if not for the zombie genre’s resurrection (pun not intended) with hits like Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland. Now, rising star in the horror genre Adam Green (Hatchet, Frozen) is taking a whack at it with his new film Killer Pizza, which just got picked up by MGM.

From Deadline:

MGM is in talks to acquire Killer Pizza, an Adam Green-scripted adaptation of the Greg Taylor book about a 14-year old boy who lands a summer job at a pizza joint that is actually a front for a monster hunting enterprise.

Rafaella De Laurentiis is producing with 1492 Pictures and CJ Entertainment. 1492 Entertainment’s Chris Columbus brought it to MGM after meeting with the brass there and sensing the studio’s appetite for Gremlins and Goonies-type fare, and Killer Pizza fit that bill.

The film is said to have a very Joe Dante-esque feel taking tonal cues from Gremlins and Matinee. Can newcomer Adam Green join in the ranks of Dante and Landis in bringing these two genres to a happy medium? We’ll have to find out when MGM brings Pizza into production in the next year.

If you’re a fan of J.J. Abrams Clovefield, can’t wait for Super 8 and loved Shaun of the Dead, chances are you will also enjoy director Joe Cornish’s Attack the Block. Fortunately, you will soon get a chance to prove that theory as the film has been picked up for distribution by Sony through its Screen Gems division.

The film, which won the Midnight Feature Audience Award at SXSW, tells the story of a gang of tough inner-city kids in London who battle a bunch of invading aliens. Sounds cool, right?

Said Screen Gems president Clint Culpepper: “Steve Bersch screened this film for me and I fell completely in love with it. The film is, at once, charming, scary, funny, hip, clever and completely hits its mark. I hope this is the beginning of a long relationship with these incredibly talented filmmakers.”

Click through to check out the trailer if you haven’t already seen it. Even if you have, it’s worth another look. As for the film, it features Nick Frost and kids beating the crap out of invading aliens. How can it not be good?

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Zombies are hot right now–strike that, warm. Zombies are warm right now.

At least, that’s what Summit Entertainment believes, as they’re adapting the very recent book by Isaac Marion titled Warm Bodies, a romantic zombie thriller. The studio is so keen on the idea, that they’re about half way done with the lead casting. From THR:

Teresa Palmer, who received a lot of notice for her breakout work in I Am Number Four, is in talks to star opposite Nicholas Hoult in Summit’s zombie love story Warm Bodies.

Jonathan Levine is directing the project, which, in a tone described as Twilight meets Shaun of the Dead, follows an existentially tormented zombie named R that begins an unlikely friendship with the human girlfriend (Palmer) of one of his victims. The blossoming relationship starts a chain reaction that will transform him, his fellow zombies and maybe the whole lifeless world.

Summit seems to know their romanticized monsters, as they’ve gotten the whole Twilight world locked down inside of two films. What’s next? Werewolves in heat? Only time will tell.

Bradley Cooper’s mind twisting thriller Limitless outperformed box office predictions and handily won the weekend box office with $19M. It also was a hit with audiences, earning a B+ cinemascore.

This is Cooper’s first true starring vehicle, and with a budget of around $27M, it should easily prove profitable. With The Hangover 2 right around the corner, Cooper will surely confirm his status as an A-list talent.

Johnny Depp helped propel Rango to number two with $15.2M.  It dropped a respectable 32% from last weekend, bringing its three week total to $92.6M.

Battle: Los Angeles took quite a tumble; dropping off 59% from its opening weekend. It managed to make $14.6M over the weekend.

Matthew McConaughey scored fourth place with his Lincoln Lawyer debut. The film made $13.4m and was well received by audiences.  Entertainment Weekly reports that this is the first film to join forces with Groupon.  The popular daily coupon site sold discounted tickets to the movie for $6.  They sold almost 200,000 tickets.  It will be interesting to see if this model will be adapted by future films.

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While here in the states, we’ll be fighting off the alien threat out of Hollywood in Battle:LA, they’ve got a less conventional way of taking down evil extraterrestrials overseas. What happens when aliens are met with a bunch of street-savvy hoodrats from South London? Nothing good.

Here’s the official synopsis.

From the producers of SHAUN OF THE DEAD and SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD comes ATTACK THE BLOCK, a fast funny, frightening action adventure movie that pits a teen gang against an invasion of savage alien monsters. It turns a London tower block into a fortress under siege, and a weapon wielding teenage thugs into heroes. It’s inner city versus outer space.

Because Paul just wasn’t enough of an alien encounter, Nick Frost steps into this film as well, as the only well-known comedic figure in the film. Overall, an interesting take on a classic story, played to today’s social culture.

Check out the full trailer for Attack the Block after the jump, and the film hits UK screens on May 13th, so you can expect it to hit the states sometime shortly after.

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While Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are off discovering aliens named Paul in the desert, and Edgar Wright allegedly helps the Marvel Universe get an Ant Man, fans of Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead everywhere are pacing back and forth for the next time the three will do another film together. Well, you may not have to wait forever, just until the end of the world.

In a recent chat with io9, Wright explained that he’s taking some time off from the easy genre-spoofing and work on a really meaty project. One about the end of the world.

“You start to think that people assume you have a blindfold and a dart board, and oh, okay, kung fu, let’s do that. I think what I would like to do now is to make stories that appeal to me.”

“Maybe [the title is The World’s End]. I don’t know. I think so. We liked that idea. It had a sort of resonance in a different way. It might be that we continue with that idea, or it might be that we start all over again. […] We never said it was post-apocalyptic movie, though. To be honest, in a weird way, I regret saying anything at all because then people start speculating. It’s more we probably shouldn’t have said anything at all. I’ve found that I regret speaking too soon about stuff. Because you end up sounding like the boy who cried wolf.”

Pegg and Frost’s Paul can be seen in theaters on March 18th and Wright’s Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World is currently available on Blu-Ray and DVD everywhere.

Nerds everywhere have been hearing more and more about the next big Simon Pegg & Nick Frost (stars of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz) film called Paul. All we really knew was that it starred our favorite English duo plus Bill Hader, Jason Bateman, Sigourney Weaver, Kristin Wiig, and Seth Rogen. That is until a little show called San Diego Comic-Con happened, and now all we want is more from the film.

The premise of the film has Pegg and Frost as two Brits traveling across the country on their way to Comic-Con. Along the way they come across a rogue alien escaping from Area 51. Rogen lends his voice as the titular Paul, the alien, with Bateman and Hader as the Men in Black-style FBI agents who are sent to retrieve him.

From what we hear, the footage they showed during the Comic-Con panel did the film more justice, but this will appeal to the mass audience. Expect to see plenty of fan service throughout the film, as just about everyone involved in it has some bit of geek cred to their name.

Check out the first trailer for the film after the jump. Catch Pegg and Frost in Paul on March 18th of next year.

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So we’ve seen Comic-cons, Dragon-cons, Famous Monsters-cons and a myriad of other cons become a permanent fixture on the pop culture landscape, particularly in the last decade.  Now ZomBcon will descend on Seattle, Washington during  Halloween Weekend, October 29-31 at the Seattle Center.

ZomBcon will be the first international zombie culture event. The show marks the 25th anniversary of Day of the Dead, which will have a special screening at the event, and director George A. Romero will be honored. There will be over 100 panels and events celebrating all things Zombie. Celebrity guests will include Bruce Campbell, Max Brooks, Malcolm McDowell, and Chuck Palahniuk.

Seattle has previously been home to the largest Zombie Walk ever recorded, and hosts a an annual Red, White and Dead Zombie Walk, making it a natural breeding ground for the new Zombie convention.

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This year isn’t all that heavy with comic book movies. While we have films like The Losers and Jonah Hex, they don’t really compare to the anticipation by both comic fans and video game fans alike for Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World.

The film comes from Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright, who already gained Whedon-esque geek credibility with international audiences. In both of his previous films, he turned a genre like “zombie films” or “80s action films” into his own parody, and he’s doing it all over again with video games in Pilgrim.

In the movie, based on the series of comics by Bryan Lee O’Malley, Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) falls in love with a pink-haired girl named Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). They start to date and everything seems swell, until Scott is told that in order to date Ramona, he has to defeat her 7 evil ex boyfriends.

It all plays out as ridiculous as it sounds, with some pretty amazing visuals, and intense fight sequences from the ex’s (played by Jason Schwartzman, Chris Evans, Brandon Routh, and more).

Check out the first full trailer after the jump, and be sure to catch Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World in theaters August 13th.

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Any real fans of the Simon Pegg/Nick Frost/Edgar Wright trio know that they all didn’t meet on the set of Shaun of the Dead. In fact, the reason they got the chance to do Shaun was due to the success of a 1999 BBC TV series they all created called Spaced.

The show, starring Pegg, Frost, and Jessica Hynes, was about a comic book artist who has to fake a marriage with a complete stranger in order to stay in an apartment made for “professional couples.” The show was quirky and funny, and developed a huge cult following on DVD. It also seemed to turn the heads of a few US producers, including McG and now producer of Chuck and Human Target, Peter Johnson.

The U.S. version of the show was a failure, to say the least, and never made it past the pilot stage. None of the original creative team were involved, or even brought into the loop that the show existed, until recently. Simon Pegg twittered a clip from the failed pilot, starring Sara Rue (Less Than Perfect), Josh Lawson, and Will Sasso (MadTV).

Take a look at the clip after the jump, and you’ll understand why the show never made it past the unaired pilot. The only thing worth mentioning is that Will Sasso truly is the US version of Nick Frost. Outside of that, there isn’t much going for this half-assed clone of a show.

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Here’s a list of some of the new movie and TV shows coming to DVD and Blu-ray this week that we’re looking forward to seeing. Also, there’s some classic, and not-so-classic, movies hitting Blu-ray for the first time this week as well.

Of all the new releases, we’re particularly interested in the Blu-ray versions of movies and TV shows like Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Shaun of the Dead, Observe and Report, Castle: The Complete First Season and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles — which we are reviewing for next Tuesday’s DVD Review.

Check them out.

Movies

Battle for Terra ~ David Cross, Danny Glover Mark Hamill (DVD)

Clive Barker’s Book of Blood ~ Sophie Ward, Jonas Armstrong (DVD)

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past ~ Matthew McConaughey (DVD)

Gojira ~ Akihiko Hirata, Momoko Kochi (Blu-ray)

Observe and Report ~ Seth Rogen (DVD and Blu-ray)

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We can all face it, the world of zombie movies isn’t what it used to be. The living dead have gone from being feared in such films like George A. Romero’s original Dawn of the Dead to things like Shaun of the Dead and Fido. The concept of slow-moving, groaning zombies doesn’t scare a modern audience anymore, so why not embrace the camp and make it a comedy? Zombieland seems to be doing that.

Written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, (who’s claim-to-fame is creating the reality-tv parody The Joe Shmoe Show) and directed by Ruben Fleischer (who directed 3 episodes of The Jimmy Kimmel Show), the film focuses on two men who have found a way to survive a world overrun by zombies. Jesse Eisenberg (Adventureland) is Columbus, the big coward of the group – but when you’re afraid of being eaten by the walking dead, fear can keep you alive.

Woody Harrelson is Tallahassee, the quintessential bad ass hero whose single determination is to get the last Twinkie on earth. They join forces with Emma Stone’s (Superbad) Wichita and Abigail Breslin’s (Little Miss Sunshine) Little Rock, who have also found unique ways to survive the zombie mayhem. The film looks to be a good amount of fun at the expense of the zombie nation, while possibly having some room for horror as well.

Unfortunately, you shouldn’t expect this movie to break the box office, as it opens in October, which is the worst time of the year for films. Either way, it should be a bloody good time. Check out the trailer after the jump.

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