Creature Features!!
Larry Clark, George Huang, Sebastian Gutierrez and Terence Gross are among the film-makers set to take part in Creature Features, an HBO series of five chillers inspired by Samuel Z Arkoff’s AIP monster classics from the Fifties. Special effects guru Stan Winston, cult starlet Colleen Camp and Lou Arkoff will produce the $3 million apiece series. Randy Quaid and Nastassja Kinski will top-line the inaugural film, The Day the World Ended, which Gross will direct from Max Enscoe and Annie DeYoung’s script.

Clark is on board to helm Teenage Cave Man, Gutierrez will direct War of the Colossal Beast, Huang is scheduled to helm How to Make a Monster – no director is attached yet for the fifth instalment, The Spider. Winston will create special effects creatures for all five films.

“Those movies back then were made for a specific fear that the country had at the time – that your next door neighbour was a communist, that the atomic bomb will go off and create mutants and that aliens would invade Earth,” Lou Arkoff said. “Today, those fears are different, so I invited five exciting film-makers to give me their personification of fear, but emulating the same sense of style and fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants creativity of the classic monster movies. I’m glad my dad is around with me to join in something that he never would have thought possible 50 years ago.”

Resident Eyeful
Milla Jovovich (star of Luc Besson’s The Messenger: Joan of Arc) and Michelle Rodriguez have landed lead roles in director Paul Anderson’s Resident Evil, based on the popular video game. Set to begin shooting in and around Berlin in early March, the $40 million-budgeted Horror-thriller centres on a special military unit that fights a powerful, out-of-control super computer. To save the world, the unit must combat hundreds of scientists who have mutated into flesh-eating creatures because of a freak laboratory accident. Jovovich will play the aptly-named Alice the Zombie Killer in the production from Event Horizon’s Jeremy Bolt.

Bits and Pieces...
Ex-Bond girl (and now X-Men icon) Famke Janssen will play a female Terminatrix in Terminator 3 starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Edward Furlong…
David Arquette will star in Arach Attack, director Ellory Elkayem’s $30 million special effects-driven comedic thriller about a toxic waste spill that causes giant spiders to go on the rampage…
Jeff Goldblum will not be joining other original Jurassic Park cast members in Jurassic Park 3 due to begin shooting early 2001. “I am not involved in the next Jurassic Park. That is official,” he has said giving no reason.