Star Trek sex symbol Jolene Blalock receives a promotion of sorts in the new DVD Premiere feature Starship Troopers 3: Marauder,due from Sony on Aug. 5. Where she played an enticingly logical Vulcan commander on TV’s Enterprise, Ms. Blalock has now graduated to the rank of captain in ST3.

“My character, Captain Lola Beck, is a pilot. She’s a rather strong female, a leader, who’s got a lot of brains and brawn,” she says of the role. The movie revolves around the efforts of Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien, back from the original 1997 film) to rescue Capt. Beck and other Troopers who have are stranded on a planet ...Read More

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A DVD Premiere sequel to the 1983 smash WarGames will be issued on July 29 from MGM/FOX. WarGames: The Dead Code doesn’t star anyone from the original cast, not surprisingly, and features an all-new, state-of-the-computer-art storyline. I haven’t seen it yet, but I have checked out the new 25th Anniversary Edition of WarGames, which proves to still be a lot of fun. Parts of it may be silly, yes, but at various times in the movie, it convincingly put over the idea that the world was on the brink of nuclear war. Not bad for a flick that clocks in at less than two hours.

An hour-p...Read More

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New York-based independent filmmaker Larry Fessenden, whose socially and environmentally horror films include No Telling (1991), Wendigo (2001) and Habit (1997) and took his filmmaking habit on the road for his most recent movie, The Last Winter (Genius/The Weinstein Company, Street: July 22). And where did that road lead him? Wouldja believe Iceland!?

“Shooting in Iceland was quite an experience,” Fessenden told us in a recent interview. “It was a 34-day shoot—and it was a tough shoot!”

Written, produced and directed by Fessenden and starring ...Read More

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Last week, I spoke with the legendarily curmudgeonly speculative fiction writer Harlan Ellison, who had a lot of nice things to say about Anchor Bay’s upcoming Masters of Science Fiction anthology (Street: Aug. 5), for which he was the co-writer of the teleplay for the episode “The Discarded.” Ellison also heaped praise on Masters producer Keith Addis (“A wonderful and intelligent man,” he said.), co-scripter Josh Olson and fellow Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award-winning sci-fi writers Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury and Frank Herbert. It’s ABC Entertainment president Steve McPherson and his treatment of the Masters s...Read More

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Sitting down to record commentaries, featurette interviews and episode introductions for the 24-installment first season of the legendary private eye detective TV series Mannix (just released on DVD by CBS/Paramount), star Mike Connors thought he was going to have “a good time”—he just didn’t know how good until he started to sink into the project.

“It was fun to work on it, very fun,” Connors—that’s right, Joe Mannix, himself--told me in a recent phone interview. “But then I sat down to do a commentary with [former Mannix co-star] Joe Campanella, and it ...Read More

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Here’s the second part of my recent talk with filmmaker Ulli Lommel!

VB: The Boogeyman’s release in 1980 was the beginning of a very prolific Hollywood output.
LOMMEL: I was very busy, yes. Then we did Brainwaves (1983) with Tony Curtis, and The Devonsville Terror (1983) with Donald Pleasence, and one movie after the other. The last few years, we’ve been doing all these Lionsgate movies. I think I must have done more than a dozen in three years.

VB: And you launched your own production company a couple of years back, Hollywood House of Ho...Read More

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Filmmaker Ulli Lommel has been making movies for nearly 40 years, first in his native Germany, then for a brief time in New York and, for the past three decades, in Hollywood. I recently spoke with the affable, L.A.-based Lommel about his latest wave of Lionsgate-distributed, low-budget movies about serial killers, and his fascinating career, which has included collaborations with Rainer Fassbinder, Andy Warhol, Richard Hell and The Voidoids and The Living Theater.

VB: You live in L.A. now, but I know you’ve spent some serous time in New York.

ULLI LOMMEL: Oh, yes, yes. When I first came to America in the late Seventies, I was there for a few years.

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In the words of its writer/director, Sex and Death 101 (available July 1 from Anchor Bay) is “a comedy and a thriller and a psychological examination; it has a one-sentence storyline, but it’s the sentence that keeps on giving.”

The writer/director is Daniel Waters, whose dry wit and caustic dialogue launched his career when he penned 1988’s Heathers. He subsequently scripted such not-nearly-as-fun film as Hudson Hawk (1991), Batman Returns (1992) and Demolition Man (1993), not to mention his first directorial effort, 2001’s Happy Campers. With Sex an...Read More

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The first time I ever heard the word “irreverent” (and was informed what it meant) was in reference to George Carlin, the great stand-up comedian and actor whose legendary “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” was embraced by everyone I ever met in summer camp while growing up in suburban New Jersey in the Seventies. Carlin died of heart failure yesterday at the age of 71.

My father was the one who described Carlin to me as irreverent—you see, he was familiar with (and quite enjoyed) Carlin's comedy of the late Fifties and Sixties. That was a time when Carlin was garbed in a traditional jacket and tie, appeared at the country’s upper-crust nightclubs and delivered relatively conventional...Read More

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Samaire Armstrong was a little leery about getting involved in the indie romantic comedy It’s A Boy Girl Thing (Anchor Bay, Street: June 17)—the story of two high school enemies (played by Samaire and Kevin Zegers) who switch bodies and then must deal with the actions and reactions of being a member of the opposite sex. She was afraid that it was going to be “another one of those body-switch movies” But the striking starlet--whose best known for her role on TV's The O.C., Entourage and, most currently, Dirty Sexy Money--found a lot to work with in Geoff Dean’s screenplay and when she began shooting, she rose to the challenge. 

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