Horror Films

A Vietnamese court has sentenced six men to jail terms of up to six years for showing horror films, Hanoi radio said.

Poor Charlie Sheen! In the opening of "Scary Movie V," no sooner does he bed Lindsay Lohan - both barely convincing playing themselves - than a ghost kills him and kidnaps his three kids. (Legal troubles aside, Lohan is fine.) Three months later, Snoop Dogg finds the now-crabwalking moppets in a haunted cabin in Humboldt County and delivers them and their new ghost mom back to civilization. Three months is auspicious. "Scary Movie V" lifts its plot from Jessica Chastain's surprise horror hit "Mama," released in January, and if you think three months is an impossible amount of time to write and produce a feature film, well, it is. In the Oscar nominee's role is former Disney star Ashley Tisdale, here seen having her way with a microwave.

Midnight screenings of two tiny horror flicks drew some of the biggest buzz at an otherwise low-key South by Southwest film festival in Austin, Texas. One was "Cabin Fever," the subject of a bidding war at last year's Toronto International Film Festival that eventually went to Lions Gate Films for $3.5 million. The other was "The Eye," a Hong Kong film that Tom Cruise's production company already plans to remake.

The sports biopic "42" will rough up its box office rivals as it steps up to the plate this weekend. The drama about famed baseball player Jackie Robinson is poised to claim No. 1, opening with a solid $20 million, according to those who have seen pre-release audience surveys. (Warner Bros. is predicting a softer launch of around $15 million.) The weekend's other debut, the spoof "Scary Movie 5," will likely take in a respectable $17 million or so. PHOTOS: Scenes from '42' For years, Hollywood has been eager to make a movie about Robinson, the  first African American to play Major League Baseball.

THE best horror movies pick up on our shared societal dread -- fear of the unknown, fear of the other -- and serve it back to us as clear, present, conquerable dangers. A zombie, a germ, a vigilante moralist gone bananas -- whatever it is, it wreaks havoc on society until society gets it together to fight back. Until then, it's all about the flight, because any sane person knows there's just no reasoning with an airborne virus/irradiated ant/angry poltergeist/unhinged psycho.

Gregg Hoffman, producer of the recent hit film "Saw II," died early Sunday at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital, where he had been admitted overnight after complaining of neck pain, his business partners said. He was 42. Hoffman died of natural causes, according to a news release issued Monday from Lions Gate Entertainment, which distributed Hoffman's recent films. An autopsy is pending. A former Walt Disney Co.

Peggy Moran, once dubbed one of Hollywood's top "shrieking violets" for her work in the much-loved cult favorite "The Mummy's Hand" and other horror films of the early 1940s, has died. She was 84. Moran, whose meteoric career included 39 films but ended abruptly with her marriage in 1942, died Friday in Camarillo. Her son, Peter Koster of Oakland, said she died of complications from injuries suffered in an automobile accident Aug. 26.

Ed Kelleher, a writer of offbeat films, a playwright and film critic who wrote screenplays for horror movies that have become cult classics, died May 14 of a degenerative brain disorder at a nursing home in Annandale, Va. He was 61. In the 1970s and 1980s, Kelleher wrote the screenplays of four horror films considered so outlandish and amateurish that they have become favorites of aficionados.

Jack Arnold, a director and producer who specialized in such science fiction and horror films as "Creature From the Black Lagoon," "It Came From Outer Space" and "The Incredible Shrinking Man," died Tuesday in Woodland Hills of the complications of arteriosclerosis. He was 79. The Emmy-award winning director--for a 1966 Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca TV special--began in the entertainment industry as a Broadway actor in such shows as "My Sister Eileen" and "A Bell for Adano."

Adrian Weiss, 83, producer and director of such cult films as "The Bride and the Beast" written by quirky Ed Wood, died Saturday in Oxnard. Born in Brooklyn, Weiss became involved in film production as a teenager. One of his earliest efforts was the 1936 "Custer's Last Stand." But he soon settled into making horror films, many of which have become cult classics. After "The White Gorilla" and "Devil Monster" in the mid-1940s, he produced "Bride of the Gorilla," starring Raymond Burr, in 1951.

A spaceship-like, 1,000-seat theater may be the most striking feature of the Motion Picture Academy's planned film museum at LACMA, but the organization has also revealed a bevy of other details about what the six-story, 290,000-square-foot facility opening in 2017, will include. Some highlights: Ground Floor: This will consist of a public piazza, the museum lobby, a cafe and a gift store. The piazza will connect the film museum to the rest of the LACMA campus. The academy says "a majestic red carpet and Cannes-style grand staircase" will take visitors into the soaring 1,000-seat, domed "premiere theater," to be named for David Geffen, who has pledged $25 million to the $300-million museum.

There is no cabin in the woods or scary house at the end of the street in "Amour. " There is no ax-wielding Jack Nicholson running around. Yet filmmaker Michael Haneke's examination of the final days of a long life - and a long love - may be the quintessential horror film for our times. It has a remarkable ability to scare the living daylights out of audiences of any age. With five Oscar nominations - including best picture in the overall race and best foreign language film as Austria's entry - "Amour" is one of the finest relationship dramas ever made.

Horror films do not thrill me, but more elegant efforts sometimes offer an irresistible chill. Such is the case with two films decades apart in time but similarly atmospheric. The older of the two is 1932's "White Zombie," an early stab at zombie-themed material that stars Bela Lugosi in one of his first roles after the huge success of "Dracula. " This DVD/Blu-ray Kino Classics release includes a digital restoration and the original unrestored version. More contemporary is Roman Polanski's 1968 "Rosemary's Baby," taken from the Ira Levin novel and starring Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes and Ruth Gordon.

Beautifully envisioned, badly constructed, the only truly terrifying things in the new horror movie "Mama" are the fake tattoos, short black hair and black T-shirts meant to turn "Zero Dark Thirty" star Jessica Chastain into a guitar-shredding, punk rocker chick. That misfire becomes just one more bump in the road when you long for more bumps in the night. Though there are a few frights - a skittering shape that keeps showing up is the best - rather than dishing out pure scary movie chills, first-time director Andy Muschietti serves up a darkly twisted allegory about a mother's protective instincts.

When the director of "Texas Chainsaw 3D" told studio executives at Lionsgate that he wanted to cast R&B singer Trey Songz as his young leading man, they balked. "People at Lionsgate were uncertain, saying, 'We've never heard of him. We don't know who he is,'" said John Luessenhop, the filmmaker behind the horror sequel. So Tim Palen, the studio's chief marketing officer, Googled Songz, and found he was a two-time Grammy nominee with 5.6 million followers on Twitter and 14 million fans who "like" his Facebook page.

"Texas Chainsaw 3D" easily sliced through the competition at the box office this weekend - not that its rivals were particularly threatening. As the only new film to hit theaters nationwide, the reboot of the 1974 horror flick only had to contend with a handful of movies that have been out for weeks. Still, the low-budget movie did better than expected, collecting a robust $23 million during its opening weekend, according to an estimate from distributor Lionsgate. Heading into the weekend, pre-release audience polling suggested that "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" would claim No. 1 for the fourth consecutive weekend, while "Chainsaw" looked poised to finish second with around $16 million.

Max Rosenberg, a veteran movie producer best known for cult horror classics such as "Tales From the Crypt" and "Dr. Terror's House of Horrors" as well as the early rock 'n' roll movies "Jamboree" and "Rock, Rock, Rock!" has died. He was 89. Rosenberg, president of Rearguard Productions, died Monday in a Los Angeles hospital after a brief illness, said Julie Moldo, the film company's vice president.

Hazel Court, an English beauty who co-starred with the likes of Boris Karloff and Vincent Price in popular horror movies in the 1950s and '60s, has died. She was 82. Court died Tuesday at her home near Lake Tahoe from a heart attack, her daughter, Sally Walsh, said Wednesday. Although she had a substantial acting career both in England and on American television, Court was perhaps best known for her work in such films as 1963's "The Raven."

The best horror films are actually about something larger than the grim events that typically befall their characters. It's what makes Tobe Hooper's "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" films, George Romero's "Living Dead" movies or the more recent "House of the Devil" and "Let the Right One In" so powerful: They examine societal change and the fear of the other through a distorted lens. As with far too many recent horror sequels and reboots, "Texas Chainsaw 3D," the latest off-target entry in the once radically unnerving series, has little on its mind beyond good-time gore.

The film doesn't lie. When the UCLA basketball team broke down footage of its upset loss to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, "it was brutal," freshman Jordan Adams said Tuesday. "We didn't play hard," he added. "The film showed it all. " The Bruins fell, 70-68, Sunday after leading the Mustangs by 18 points in the second half. The loss dropped UCLA (4-2) out of the Associated Press poll. The Bruins had been ranked No. 11. Before the season, opponents such as San Luis Obispo would have been considered cupcake wins for a talented UCLA team that featured the nation's top recruiting class.