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“Hi, It’s Your Mother!” Joins San Diego FilmOut Horror Block

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“I think I started off with the idea of a mother bursting in on her son having sex and not noticing,”  Daniel Sterlin-Altman told me as we chatted about his stop motion short film, “Hi It’s Your Mother!”.  The film, which will have its West Coast premiere at San Diego FilmOut film festival as part of its newly established horror block, is surprisingly light-hearted with moments of genuine comedy alongside the loss of a finger and a nervous breakdown.

The film opens with mom in the kitchen cutting up vegetables.  We see her son sneak by the door with his boyfriend, obviously up to something.  The phone rings and she tenses as her mother begins speaking over the answering machine.  It doesn’t take long to realize that this woman is “that kind” of mother.  Mom continues chopping the vegetables with a little more gusto and as the answering machine goes quiet, she cuts off her finger.

In a haze of blood loss and emotional overload, she puts the finger in the fridge and walks down the hall to her son’s room.  The two young men, who are in the middle of having sex, freeze as she bursts in, announces dinner is going to be late, and giggles as she leaves the room.

Sterlin-Altman admits he’s had people who were turned off by the onscreen gay sex, which was pretty funny to both of us because, as I remind you, these are puppets!  I can’t help but wonder if the puppets are what make it so disturbing to audiences, though.

The film was made as part of the director’s undergraduate thesis and he was happy to explain the intensive process of bringing his puppets to life.

“With this kind of film you have to create the entire environment, which in this case took about three months.  When filming began I decided to use twelve frames per second.  If I was lucky, I would shoot about 2 seconds per day.  It’s very sexy, though, to play back those two seconds after an entire day of shooting and suddenly see movement.”

In the end, “Hi, It’s Your Mother!” is a fun little romp that defies labels and the director seems comfortable with that.  He notes that while some key into the comedy, other latch on to what he hopes is a genuine sentimentality in this intergenerational story.  But don’t you worry, horror hounds, there’s plenty of blood and severed appendages to go around!

“Hi, It’s Your Mother!”  will screen as part of the FrightOut horror block of the San Diego FilmOut LGBT film festival on June 10, 2017.  The block, consisting of five short films, will begin at 10 pm.

“Hi, It’s Your Mother” – Stop Motion Short Official Trailer (2016) from Daniel Sterlin-Altman on Vimeo.

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‘Evil Dead’ Film Franchise Getting TWO New Installments

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It was a risk for Fede Alvarez to reboot Sam Raimi’s horror classic The Evil Dead in 2013, but that risk paid off and so did its spiritual sequel Evil Dead Rise in 2023. Now Deadline is reporting that the series is getting, not one, but two fresh entries.

We already knew about the Sébastien Vaniček upcoming film that delves into the Deadite universe and should be a proper sequel to the latest film, but we are broadsided that Francis Galluppi and Ghost House Pictures are doing a one-off project set in Raimi’s universe based off of an idea that Galluppi pitched to Raimi himself. That concept is being kept under wraps.

Evil Dead Rise

“Francis Galluppi is a storyteller who knows when to keep us waiting in simmering tension and when to hit us with explosive violence,” Raimi told Deadline. “He is a director that shows uncommon control in his feature debut.”

That feature is titled The Last Stop In Yuma County which will release theatrically in the United States on May 4. It follows a traveling salesman, “stranded at a rural Arizona rest stop,” and “is thrust into a dire hostage situation by the arrival of two bank robbers with no qualms about using cruelty-or cold, hard steel-to protect their bloodstained fortune.”

Galluppi is an award-winning sci-fi/horror shorts director whose acclaimed works include High Desert Hell and The Gemini Project. You can view the full edit of High Desert Hell and the teaser for Gemini below:

High Desert Hell
The Gemini Project

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‘Invisible Man 2’ Is “Closer Than Its Ever Been” to Happening

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Elisabeth Moss in a very well-thought-out statement said in an interview for Happy Sad Confused that even though there have been some logistical issues for doing Invisible Man 2 there is hope on the horizon.

Podcast host Josh Horowitz asked about the follow-up and if Moss and director Leigh Whannell were any closer to cracking a solution to getting it made. “We are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” said Moss with a huge grin. You can see her reaction at the 35:52 mark in the below video.

Happy Sad Confused

Whannell is currently in New Zealand filming another monster movie for Universal, Wolf Man, which might be the spark that ignites Universal’s troubled Dark Universe concept which hasn’t gained any momentum since Tom Cruise’s failed attempt at resurrecting The Mummy.

Also, in the podcast video, Moss says she is not in the Wolf Man film so any speculation that it’s a crossover project is left in the air.

Meanwhile, Universal Studios is in the middle of constructing a year-round haunt house in Las Vegas which will showcase some of their classic cinematic monsters. Depending on attendance, this could be the boost the studio needs to get audiences interested in their creature IPs once more and to get more films made based on them.

The Las Vegas project is set to open in 2025, coinciding with their new proper theme park in Orlando called Epic Universe.

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Jake Gyllenhaal’s Thriller ‘Presumed Innocent’ Series Gets Early Release Date

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Jake gyllenhaal presumed innocent

Jake Gyllenhaal’s limited series Presumed Innocent is dropping on AppleTV+ on June 12 instead of June 14 as originally planned. The star, whose Road House reboot has brought mixed reviews on Amazon Prime, is embracing the small screen for the first time since his appearance on Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994.

Jake Gyllenhaal’s in ‘Presumed Innocent’

Presumed Innocent is being produced by David E. Kelley, J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot, and Warner Bros. It is an adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1990 film in which Harrison Ford plays a lawyer doing double duty as an investigator looking for the murderer of his colleague.

These types of sexy thrillers were popular in the ’90s and usually contained twist endings. Here’s the trailer for the original:

According to Deadline, Presumed Innocent doesn’t stray far from the source material: “…the Presumed Innocent series will explore obsession, sex, politics and the power and limits of love as the accused fights to hold his family and marriage together.”

Up next for Gyllenhaal is the Guy Ritchie action movie titled In the Grey scheduled for release in January 2025.

Presumed Innocent is an eight-episode limited series set to stream on AppleTV+ starting June 12.

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