Movie Trivia: 25/8’s Casting Problems–Do They Still Have A Cast?
Now this is some scary news here—the cast for Wes “Nerve Gas” Craven’s upcoming self-cannibalization “25/8” is undergoing some serious shifting. Henry Lee Hopper, son of Dennis Hopper, who was one of the big draws for Craven’s newest cinematic stinkbomb in the making has bugged out, but apparently on mutually pleasant terms. Hopper, apparently, came down with a case of mono, and since an upcoming actor’s strike looks more and more likely by the day, Craven simply couldn’t wait. Which is fair enough, I suppose—God forbid we’re forced to wait until the end of an actor’s strike to see the newest waste of film from Wes Craven.
Plenty other low-rank no-names have been filtering in and out of the cast, so it seems as though “25/8” is going to be continually in flux until it hits the theatres. And all this happens before principal photography begins—it’s starting later this month.
Popularity: 12% [?]
When the trailer was first made, Robert Rodriguez admitted that it was a film he would enjoy making. He’d already accumulated 40 minutes of footage just from cutting the trailer together, so why not? He’d first started thinking about the screenplay back in 1993 after casting Trejo in Desperado: “So I wrote him this idea of a federale from Mexico who gets hired to do hatchet jobs in the U.S. I had heard sometimes FBI or DEA have a really tough job that they don’t want to get their own agents killed on, they’ll hire an agent from Mexico to come do the job for $25,000. I thought, “That’s Machete. He would come and do a really dangerous job for a lot of money to him but for everyone else over here it’s peanuts.” But I never got around to making it.”
Replacing Katie Holmes for The Dark Knight will be no small feat. In an 
Why, B-movies, of course. This year will see a new version of 1980’s Prom Night, one of the films that helped crown Jamie Lee Curtis as Scream Queen. But the people want more - so they’ll get it.
For the innocent among you, in this context, “snuff” isn’t just a cute term for chewing tobaccy. It refers to, shall we say, films (often pornographic) in which at least one participant doesn’t survive until the end. Such films have been the stuff of legends for years, and have mostly stayed there - over the years, all alleged “snuff films” have been proven to be fake or not intended for distribution. But with 8mm, Joel Schumacher creates a world in which a young aspiring actress can easily fall prey to the sort of sick men who will slay a woman for a million bucks.
Wrong Turn director Rob Schmidt isn’t exactly real well known—the biggest movie he ever did was Wrong Turn, and the only other movie he’s really known for is the upcoming Alphabet Killer—so it’ll be worth mentioning that Tiger Aspect Pictures will be producing 
And then, there’s more sequel news out from the great Mouse Empire–National Treasure, which just released a sequel, is looking at 
So I’m still pointing and laughing at the Oscars, which are well on their way to becoming culturally irrelevant, when I got more deeply interested in a viable replacement.
Sometimes, writing this, I feel like a total ninny. I just spent a post shrieking at Disney–not without good reason, of course–for their sequel mania and nigh-total lack of originality when I find out that the great Mouse Empire has a new title in mind.