In a move that leaves me somewhat unsettled, the upcoming Clock Tower movie is getting a fresh director in. Martin Weisz, who had a hand in The Hills Have Eyes 2, will be helming the project following the departure of three other candidates, dismissed for largely unknown reasons, including visions not meshing well twixt the director and the studio.

And so they bring in the guy who gave us the truly craptacular sequel to the truly craptacular remake of a truly craptacular film…and expect us to be squealing with joy? I’m astonished beyond all reckoning. In fact, I’m having an increasingly hard time seeing how this can be any good. How? How can it? I mean, granted, the Clock Tower series was a freaky set of games, and Scissorman practically made for a horror franchise, but can the strength of the script unaided by any kind of directorial skill still be good?

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This…this is just great news, right here. The single biggest horror bomb on the face of the earth, Fear Itself, has been delayed. Pushed back one week to a premiere date of Thursday, June 5 on NBC, this move shouldn’t really come as a surprise.

I’m on record several times: I think this show is a gargantuan mistake that will hemorrhage cash, frighten small children (only), and bruise fruit. We’re doomed. It rained cheese last night…the Black Squirrel has been seen as far afield as Luton…dogs and cats, living together…real “end of the world” type stuff.

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At this point, I’m really rather confused. The Sarah Connor Chronicles, yet another knee-jerk sci-fi show from Fox that’ll be lucky to last three seasons, has been renewed for a second season. By all accounts, the best people can say about this show is that it’s action-packed; reading several reviews has shown that’s the nicest (and most repeated) thing that can be said for it. Meanwhile, detractors are quick to point out the new Terminator’s frequent propensity for wisecracks (did Skynet install a classic action hero mode while we were away?) and relative lack of substance.

Oh, and let’s not forget the season one finale—several audience members are STILL moaning over that train wreck. But let’s be honest. Broadcast TV has been steadily crumbling for years. Aside from a handful of bright spots, most shows that debut on television will be gone in a year or less. I’ve seen some shows that can’t last more than four episodes before getting the axe. Several die after the pilot!

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Well, kids…bad news coming out our way from Grudge 3 director Toby Wilkins, who gives us a serious bummer. Apparently, early reports that Judd Nelson and William Devane will be involved in Grudge 3 have been greatly exaggerated. Indeed, they will have absolutely nothing to do with it.

But there is some good news—Wilkins and company are taking the canon of the Grudge series very, very seriously by the look of it and are picking up almost exactly where the second one left off. Grudge 3, you see, will be about a Japanese woman with the secret to ending Kayako’s two-film reign of terror, and wiping her freaky ghosty self off the face of the earth forever. Thus, she goes to a haunted apartment building in Chicago—EXACTLY where the second one ended!—to finish the job.

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It may come as a surprise to some of you out there that Cameron Romero, son of legendary zombie horror overlord George Romero, is a filmmaker just like his father. Of course, when I say “just like his father” I mean that “he also makes films”. It’s too bad that Cameron’s don’t look to be anywhere near the caliber of his father’s.

His upcoming film, Staunton Hill, features—and stop me if you’ve heard this one—a group of hikers in the 1960s that runs afoul of the evil Staunton family in the hills of Virginia. Okay, you probably should stop me by now, because you’ve heard this one already, haven’t you? I can practically hear your enraged nodding from here as you wonder how—HOW!—a Romero can be so desperate as to do a knockoff of House of 1000 Corpses.

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Terminator 4 canceled?? Whoa! When did that happen?! Wasn’t this sucker chugging along, with cast announcements on a regular basis and everybody and his mother saying this was going to be great? Now where does word come down that this is going to be canceled?

An unnamed crew member, already a pretty fair sign that this rumor is just that, a rumor, told UGO sometime last week that Terminator 4 was being shut down. Never mind that the film had a serious cast and a solid release date (May 22, 2008), but that was the word out of Terminator 4. Of course, it didn’t look good for this rumor when, merely two days later, Moon BloodGood was announced as cast in Terminator 4. So how can a movie be dead when they’re ADDING to the cast?

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So recently, horror-movies.ca took on a list of the ten best horror-themed anthology TV shows. This is probably a decent idea as there were plenty of them, and some much better than others. In fact, the only real problem anyone can have with the list was that The Twilight Zone was not included due to it being mostly science fiction with a smidge of supernatural goings-on thrown in for variety. Ostensibly, this is also why similar show The Outer Limits was not included.

And of course, there will be plenty that disagree with the ordering. Putting Tales From the Darkside, George Romero’s classic series of horror TV ahead of longtime fan favorite Tales From The Crypt is a ballsy move to say the least. Putting Masters of Horror at number six was probably not a bad idea given that only the first season was any good.

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And so the great Saw Engine descends into its own little valley of madness—the question is, does anyone want to follow this thing down?

Frankly, I do. It looks like it’s going to be a spectacular train wreck, and I can hardly wait to see the fallout!

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I’m really rather baffled about how this actually came to pass. Howie Mandel, whom you’ll likely not remember at all before he shaved his head and took over a game show, is executive producing a project called “Kill Switch”. It’s about a woman who can transfer her consciousness into the bodies of people about to be murdered.

If this sounds somewhat familiar, it should, and with good reason. Much the same as “Child’s Play”, the franchise-starting classic about a serial killer who, through voodoo capabilities and the nigh-constant invocation of the voodoo god Damballa, managed to transfer his soul around from body to body to doll and then failed to move to another body. Oh…and guess who’s writing the script for “Kill Switch”? Who else?—“Child’s Play” writer Don Mancini.

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Milla Jovovich, longtime actress and all-around horror movie sensation, will be starring in an upcoming murder mystery that will feature a government cover up as a plot point. Called The 4th Kind—as in Close Encounters of?—it won’t start filming until late June of this year, so we’ll have a long wait until we actually get to see this.

Perhaps most interesting is that this is already being described as a “fact-based thriller” about a town with an unusually high number of unexplained disappearances in the last forty years.

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