SciFi News

Somewhere between watching the first half-hour of the new Star Trek film and, five days later, the season finale of Lost, something happened.

You know how it is when you have that second piece of dessert? It tastes great at the time. The sensory delights linger through the after-dinner drinks and through the evening ... right up to the moment when you step on the scale the next morning.

It can happen with stories, too. There are themes and high concepts you love, then you have one more than the standard adult requirement.

Matrix producer Joel Silver changed the rules of the game and made Hollywood stunt history when he traveled to China to beg reluctant action director Yuen Wo-Ping to choreograph the fighting for the film, according to an informal poll by author Kevin Conley.

Megan Fox, the hottest thing in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, is even hotter as the demon-possessed high school cheerleader of Jennifer's Body—especially when she sticks her tongue in the flame of a cigarette lighter in the new "red-band trailer" released earlier today at ShockTillYouDrop.com. (Red-band trailers can be screened in theaters only when they accompany R-rated films, since the trailers themselves may contain strong language or sexual situations.)

The teen horror flick, written by Diablo Cody, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter of Juno, won't hit theaters until Sept. 18, 2009, but you can view the new trailer after the jump.

If two hours and 42 minutes of Watchmen wasn't enough for you, you can enjoy about half an hour more on the upcoming director's cut DVD/Blu-ray, which is due this month, and director Zack Snyder promises that he'll personally guide you through the film's byzantine storyline, reveal secrets and bloopers and more.

"I think it'll really help you go, 'Wow, they meant all that,'" Snyder said in an exclusive interview with SCI FI Wire last week in Burbank, Calif. "I think a lot of people see movies and they think, 'Wow, that's random.' I think the truth is when you watch this, you realize that none of it's by accident."

When SCI FI's original series Eureka returns on Friday with a run of 10 new episodes, one will mark the directorial debut of Colin Ferguson, who stars as Sheriff Carter.

The episode was actually the first of the new episodes to be shot, but it will not be the first to air: Producers scheduled "Your Face or Mine" first, so that Ferguson could use the week prior to filming for preproduction. Were he midway through the season, he would be acting while the next episode went into prep.

After sending up the traditions of zombie movies in Shaun of the Dead and cop movies in Hot Fuzz, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are about to make use of all their sci-fi movie knowledge in Paul, an alien satire they wrote and star in.

Directed by Greg Mottola, Paul centers on their characters, two comic-book geeks who go on a road trip to visit famous sites from sci-fi lore, in the course of which they encounter co-star Jane Lynch.

As the horror/punk/metal/thrash band the Murderdolls sang, "You can knock on Ed Wood, but it won't do you no good."

What's the point of making fun of Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space? The movie about super-advanced aliens rising the dead—which features a posthumous performance by Bela Lugosi courtesy of Mrs. Wood's chiropractor acting as a body double for the late actor—is considered to be the worst and most unintentionally funny movie ever made (with no diss to the glory that is Troll 2).

And Wood is considered the worst filmmaker of all time. Plan 9 and Ed Wood's legacy have endured because they need no ribbing. The movie is the crystallized vision of Wood in all his demented glory. Plan 9 isn't fascinating just because it's bad. It's fascinating because of the mind-boggling and kind of touching sincerity that Wood brought to the material. It's great in its awfulness, and watching it is funny because it's what we now call an "epic fail," the striving for greatness totally beyond the striver's ability.

It's going to be close: Preliminary box-office estimates for the July 4 weekend show that Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs are tied for the top spot, with an estimated $42.5 million in domestic ticket sales each, the Associated Press reported.

Whether that tie will remain on Monday, when final figures are reported, remains to be seen.

Johnny Depp and Christian Bale's gangster epic Public Enemies, meanwhile, debuted in third place, with $26.2 million.

A new trailer has gone live for the upcoming animated sci-fi family comedy Planet 51, which you can view after the jump.

The long July 4th holiday weekend kicks off tomorrow, which for many of us means trips to the beach, burgers on the grill and fireworks (only where legal, of course). But it should also mean some time spent remembering those patriots who defended our liberty—both the real ones who fought for our freedoms and those fictional ones who on television and at the movies reminded us what that liberty was all about.

With that in mind, let's take a look back at our 10 favorite sci-fi examples of patriotic film and TV.

A two-minute film, "House of Imagination," has gone live to reflect SCI FI's brand evolution to Syfy on Tuesday, celebrating Syfy's unique spin on imagination.

The new film features stars from Warehouse 13, Eureka, Ghost Hunters, Caprica, Sanctuary, Stargate Universe, Destination Truth and ECW.

The Hollywood Reporter says that Universal has won a four-studio bidding war to pick up the film rights to the classic Atari video game Asteroids, for which Matthew Lopez will write the script; the game, initially released in 1979, lets a player control a triangular spaceship to shoot and destroy hulking masses of rock and the occasional flying saucer while avoiding smashing into both.
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ABC has picked up the 13-episode sci-fi series Defying Gravity, starring Ron Livingston, which is slated to air this summer, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The show stars Laura Harris, Christina Cox, Malik Yoba and Florentine Lahme and is set in the near future and revolves around a mysterious six-year mission through the solar system.
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Comic-Con can be an overwhelming four days of multimedia spectacle, and unless you can clone yourself or you have access to time travel, there's no way to attend every cool event. That's where we can help.

The schedule's not even out yet, but we've already gotten wind of dozens of must-see happenings. For those of you corporeal beings traveling to San Diego July 22-26, here are SCI FI Wire's recommendations for 11 Comic-Con events not to miss. (The movies, panelists, days and times are all tentative; check Comic-Con's official Web site closer to the convention for the full schedule.)

Dylan Walsh, who's been playing doctor on Nip/Tuck since 2003, looks like he could use a few stitches himself right about now. Fake flesh hangs from his neck, and he's a bit bloodied up. He's playing the title character in The Stepfather, the upcoming horror film that reboots a cult classic from 1987.

Much like the original (which starred Lost's Terry O'Quinn as daddy dearest—who, according to producer Mark Morgan, declined a cameo role), the new movie centers on a sociopathic killer who blends into broken families. When the new wife and kids inevitably disappoint him, he slaughters them and moves on to the next unsuspecting household.

SCI FI Wire was on set at Sony Studios in Culver City, Calif., a few weeks ago during the filming of The Stepfather for a scene in which Walsh embodies wicked wedder David Harris ... and leaves a few bodies lying around.

Lost is one of the best sci-fi shows of the last decade, but if you're a longtime viewer, it can also one of the most frustrating. After an explosive start, it struggled to find a comfortable rhythm, answering its initial mysteries at the same time as introducing new ones, abandoning plot developments and new characters even as it constructed even more mythology.

The release of The Complete First and Second Seasons on Blu-ray not only affords viewers a chance to look back at the show with superlative presentation and bonus materials, but it encourages them to revisit the beginning of the series as it—and they—discovered when and why it originally felt great to get lost.

As a buddy of mine recently observed, Lost Season One seems almost quaint in retrospect—"Oh yeah, remember when they were just hanging out on the beach, arguing about what to do?" J.J. Abrams' pilot is one of the great first episodes in television history, achieving a level of cinematic sweep that would set the stage for all that followed.

He deftly introduces a substantial ensemble—including Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Locke, Sayid, Hurley and others—while mounting a re-enactment of a destructive plane crash and keeping their initial reactions to the events distinct and specific, providing a context for their behavior even before we quite understand it.