Dark Tide

I saw Catwoman for the first time last week, and it is so horribly abysmal that Halle Berry’s performance hung over this trailer for me. Everything Halle said sounded bad to me, but that also might be because this trailer’s terrible. Is this whole movie about people going down in cages to observe sharks? How could that possibly be a compelling wide release? As best I can tell, Halle plays a famed sharkologist who is not making enough to keep her boat. Doesn’t that sort of research depend on grant money? Is she a private shark researcher, or is she actually just giving tours in shark-infested waters? Whatever the ridiculous reason, she doesn’t have enough money. Enter a wealthy crazy person who wants to swim with sharks outside the cage. Halle (and co-star and real life boyfriend Olivier Martinez, to a lesser degree) are wary of the situation but realize they need the money. This leads to everyone going out on the water in the middle of a horrible storm. Why would they lower the cage in such choppy water? None of this makes sense to me.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

Holy fuck. The only thing this trailer need to be effective is confirmation that Abraham Lincoln does indeed hunt vampires. It does so much more though. Along with a truly intense score and a handful of fantastic, period-specific fighting sequences, there are flaming train tracks WITH A TRAIN ON THEM. It doesn’t look like this movie is holding anything back. Oh, there is also a man who makes a tree explode with a single ax swing.

A couples notes:

• Mary Elizabeth Winstead is playing Mary Todd Lincoln. This may be the only instance in which there is a sexy Mrs. Lincoln.
• As a history major, I hope more than anything else that Stephen Douglass is the leader of the vampires.
• Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln will feed my superego, but this movie is going to feed my id.
• Nancy Hanks Lincoln was Abraham Lincoln’s mother, and the presence of her gravestone (er, gravewood?) suggests that she was either killed by vampires or has herself become a vampire.
• According to Wikipedia, Nancy Hanks Lincoln died of milk sickness. She is also, apparently, the third cousin four times removed of Tom Hanks. That’s enough irreverence even before the inclusion of vampires.

Intruders

Leading a trailer by highlighting that the movie was directed by the director of 28 Weeks Later is a bad start. That movie had so many irrational decisions I don’t even know where to start. Every component of the premise was flawed. That’s neither here nor there though. This trailer appears to have a girl writing a scary story that happens to be happening to her. Is she writing it as it happens? Is it happening because she’s writing it? Are we supposed to believe it’s a coincidence? Whatever the deal is, she gets scared that Hollowface is in the house and informs her father, Clive Owen. He sees this monstrosity, but for some reason no one believes him. The natural progression would be to then ask the girl what happened, but since no one does that, it’s fair to assume something happened to her. What could have happened to her to keep her from responding but to not arouse suspicion from anyone else? I am genuinely intrigued, but if the conclusion winds up being some bullshit like, “We just changed the ending to the story in her diary,” I am going to be very upset.

Dan Spritz / Cherry On Top / @DanSpritz