News

This isn’t about favourite actors. Those guys surf along on a wave of goodwill and personal adoration that means you’ll pretty much watch them in anything, regardless of quality. If Wes Bentley‘s your fav, for instance, you’ll have sought out Dolan’s Cadillac and Hirokin: The Last Samurai because you love the man, but you’ll be no better off for it.

This is about a different kind of actor – not your indulged favourite, but the one who’s earned your respect. When this actor’s name appears in a cast list, you sit up and pay attention because over the years, they’ve proved that they have the taste, integrity and talent to make their IMDb credits page if not a flawless, then certainly an interesting place to be. The collaborations they’re a part of and the projects they pick are worth seeking out.

Starring Lindsay Lohan, porn star James Deen, and the great Gus Van Sant, Paul Schrader’s The Canyons is promising to be a very interesting film when it lands next year.

Written by Bret Easton Ellis, the first teaser trailer landed online last month, teasing a very indie noir/old school, and now the latest trailer has debuted online, giving us a better look at the film, and a first at some of its dialogue.

“The Canyons is a contemporary L.A. noir from director Paul Schrader, writer Bret Easton Ellis, and producer Braxton Pope about the dangers of sexual obsession and ambition, both personally and professionally, among a group of young people in their 20′s and how one chance meeting connected to the past unravels all of their lives, resulting in deceit, paranoia, cruel mind games and ultimately violence.”

Starring alongside Lohan, Deen, and Van Sant will also be...

Creating a sprawling Sci-Fi epic is a tall order even if you have a major studio standing behind you throwing cash at your project, and when you’re going it alone it’s a massive undertaking, but every now and then you get a success story like Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope. It almost makes sense then that in attempting to make his own in Hirokin: The Last Samurai, writer and director Alejo Mo-Sun channeled George Lucas’s brainchild. Unfortunately, Mo-Sun also throws in a bit of old English and acting that’s so far over the top that it makes you wonder why he bothered to cast recognizable and respectable actors at all. In the end Wes Bentley, Angus Macfadyen, Laura Ramsey, and even the ever-scenery-chewing Julian Sands feel wasted in an overlong story that achieves the quality of Saturday afternoon Sci-Fi serial at its best moments.

You can take the boys out of the movie industry, but you can't take the movie industry out of the boys.

Author Bret Easton Ellis, director Paul Schrader and producer Braxton Pope have taken it upon themselves to get their movie "The Canyons" made -- through a crowd-funding Kickstarter campaign and without help from the business.

"The Canyons" tells the story of five twenty-somethings on their "quest for power, love, sex and success in 2012 Hollywood," says the Kickstarter page.

"When Paul and Braxton and myself decided to do this film without any industry people, without dealing with a studio, without executives, opening up the internet to cast the film -- it just seemed that Kickstarter was part of this new way of making film, of making content," says Ellis in the video above.

This non-traditional, do-it-yourself mentality is no surprise coming from Hollywood non-conformists Ellis ("American Psycho" and "Less Than Zero...

Wes Bentley’s post-apocalyptic/sci-fi action flick “Hirokin” popped up on our radar more than a year ago. Directed by Alejo Mo-Sun (never heard of him either), the film looked like the bastard child of Patrick Swayze’s ’80s movie “Steel Dawn”, a personal favorite of mine, even though I readily accept that it’s pretty terrible in many ways. But hey, I’m a sucker for these kind of “lone warrior shows up and protects a bunch of farmers from bad guys” movies. As a result, I took an immediate interest in “Hirokin”. Turns out, the film has already sold to UK-based Signature Entertainment, and Amazon’s UK arm now has the flick listed as arriving on DVD and Blu-ray April 23rd, 2012. That’s tomorrow! So yeah, if you have the same affinity for “Steel Dawn” as I do, or wonder what the gamemaster from “The Hunger Games” can...

Hirokin: The Last Samurai

Stars: Wes Bentley, Jessica Szohr, Angus Macfayden, Julian Sands, Laura Ramsey | Written and Directed by Alejo Mo-Sun

If there’s one reason I love running this website it’s when I get sent movies that I’ve never heard of for review. Sometimes these films are absolutely terrible and in other cases, like with Hirokin: The Last Samurai, they are fantastic hidden gems that deserve to be brought to everyone’s attention.

Set in on a planet where humans must scavenge the post-apocalyptic barren wasteland, the eponymous Hirokin (Bentley) – a reluctant hero with a dark past – sets off on a mission to fulfill his destiny. Having fought to the death to save his wife and son from the planet’s evil dictator, Griffin (Sands), and his elite army of hunters, Hirokin is left for the dead in the desert. Saved by a follower of...

To mark the release of Hirokin: The Last Samurai on Monday, 23rd April on DVD and Blu-ray, we’ve been given 10 copies of the DVD to give away and 10 copies of the Blu-ray! Hirokin: The Last Samurai is directed by Alejo Mo-Sun and stars Wes Bentley, Jessica Szohr, Angus Macfadyen, Julian Sands and Laura Ramsey.

In a planet where humans must scavenge the post-apocalyptic barren wasteland, Hirokin – a reluctant warrior with a dark past – sets off on mission to fulfill his destiny. Having fought to the death to save his wife and son from the planets evil dictator – Griffin – and his elite army of hunters, the lone warrior is left for dead in the vast desert. Armed with his samurai blade, Hirokin is forced to choose between avenging the murder of his family and fighting for the freedom his people. In a twist of fate and with a...

We haven't talked about Alejo Mo-Sun's Hirokin in about a year. At the time, we had a making of video which suggested a seriously epic scale Pa flick starring Wes Bentley as a "reluctant hero who is marked by a dark past and who must fulfill his destiny when forced to choose between avenging the murder of his family or fighting for the freedom of a people long abused. The film also stars Angus Macfadyen (Saw III), Julian Sands ("24"), Jessica Szohr ("Gossip Girl") and Laura Ramsey (The Ruins) will star.

Well, with production wrapped and the movie in distribution mode, we've got a trailer and it's. interesting. Desert, swords, mysterious dudes in masks and spaceships. It's kind of cool looking and for some strange reason reminds me of Outlander in its strange mix of genres. I'm sure it'll be all sorts of schlocky fun and who am I kidding,...

Like our master of the obscure, Todd, I have a major love for ’80s post-apocalyptic shlock, and one of the best (in terms of action, swordplay, and yes, mullets) was Patrick Swayze’s “Steel Dawn”, a film that director Alejo Mo-Sun’s “Hirokin” could have easily been mistaken as a sequel for. Mind you, being that I have a soft spot for “Steel Dawn” and still consider it good stuff even now, this is very excellent news to me. So check out the trailer for “Steel Dawn 2″ — er, I mean, “Hirokin” below, and just maybe you, too, will rediscover your love of desert swordplay. Set in a post-apocalyptic world where Hirokin, a reluctant hero marked by a dark past, must fulfill his destiny when forced to choose between avenging the murder of his family or fighting for the freedom of a people biologically engineered and long-abused by mankind. The film...

Yo! Mayimbe here! Wes Bentley’s comeback seems to be in full effect. While he got There Be Dragons in theatres, he just got cast in Hunger Games in the pivotal role of Seneca Crane. But that’s not all. Check this out! We got your exclusive first look at Wes in the indie film Hirokin! Wes toplines the indie as Hirokin and also features Jessica Szoher, Angus Macfadyen and Julian Sands! Yes, Julian Sands! Memba’ him from back in the days as Warlock? In Hirokin, a reluctant hero marked by a dark past, must fulfill his destiny when forced to choose between avenging the murder of his family or fighting for the freedom of a people long abused. Directed by first time director Alejo Mo-Sun, Hirokin is currently in Cannes seeking distribution. So we got Wes looking like a really pissed off Jedi Knight on Tatooine, we got some...

Jessica Szohr will play the female lead in new teen comedy flick Owned.

Szohr will star as a high school student who tries to blackmail her nerdy neighbor with a compromising video when she joins a new school only for him willing to become popular as a result.

American Pie 2 helmer Jb Rogers will direct the movie from a script penned by Jim Freeman. New comedy will be co-produced by Radar Pictures and Dobre Films.

Jessica’s feature credits include Fired Up and Piranha 3D where she joined with former adult movie star Riley Steele, Kelly Brook, Jerry O’Connell, Elizabeth Shue and Richard Dreyfuss for a sexy remake of the 1978 cult film about killer fish.

Riley remembers before they’d shoot a scene:

Me and Kelly go out in a boat and basically try to get innocent Jessica to become a wild girl. So, I’m basically playing myself!

"Yes!" he shouted, as the director, Alejo Mo-Sun, strolled across the alien world, dressed casually in a white polo and jeans, aviators and a cowboy hat. "There's my soldier!" I guess when you show up to work on a set, there's really no better way to start the day than by knowing you fit the part. But all the same, I wasn't sure what to think on that hot summer's day when, for the first time in my life I spent my day on the set of a feature film working as an actor in Hirokin. To start, one has to make sense of the idea that what is real has just shifted; the sets are real, the caves are real, the swords are real--but only up to a point. More than anything else, the people are real: that doesn't just look...