Black Gate

Okay, follow me on this one for a minute…

It’s 1990 and you, along with a small group of your fellow-medical-student friends (the majority of whom are smoking hot by the way) start daring each other to prove the claims made by patients who have had near-death experiences.  You figure the best way to do this is to take turns being brought medically to the brink of death in your underwear, then being shocked and mouth-to-mouthed back into existence by your friends.

If you can now imagine that two of your friends are a pre-24, post Lost Boys Keifer Sutherland and a pre-Eat, Pray, Love, post Pretty Woman Julia Roberts, then this next bit will come as no surprise.

This week reports started springing up all over that the latest film to get laid out on the cinematic operating table and given a Hollywood defibrillation is Joel Schumacher’s 1990 supernatural horror Flatliners.

The original film followed medical students played by Keifer Sutherland, Julia Roberts, William Baldwin, Oliver Platt and Kevin Bacon, all of whom were overly interested in seeing what happens during the afterlife, but whose experimentation dragged a bunch of supernatural baggage into the here-and-now.

On the positive side, this reboot has attracted the talent of Swedish filmmaker Niels Arden Oplev (of the original, sub-titled version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo).  Oplev will be working from a script written by Ben Ripley, who is better known for his Source Code screenplay than the latter two Species sequels.

With that talent, a Flatliner remake will likely equal — if not surpass — the 1990 version.  As much as I love the original, it’s more for the abundance of eye-candy than the campy, often painful storyline and dialog.

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Earlier this week, we learned Pope Benedict XVI resigned his post, reportedly due to “advanced age.”

But could the real reason have anything to do with a misplaced video of a botched exorcism?

Okay, probably not. But as a new pope must be found, so too has a new director been recruited for a long-awaited exorcism tale from Lakeshore Entertainment.

Tuesday Lakeshore released a statement indicating Mark Neveldine, one half of the directing duo behind Gamer, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance and the two Crank films, will be at the helm of Lakeshore’s possession project, The Vatican Tapes, but without his usual co-director Brian Taylor. James Marsh (Man on a Wire) was in the director’s chair for a while, but dropped out for unknown reasons; advanced age perhaps?

It’s been nearly three years since I’ve heard anything new about the movie, but as far as I can determine the plot line remains the same. The Vatican Tapes follows a series of events depicted on a tape leaked from the Vatican displaying an exorcism that goes horribly wrong. Christopher Borrelli (Con Air, Armageddon) is scripting based on a story envisioned by he and Chris Morgan, but no cast is attached yet and IMDB still lists it as “in development.”

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And you thought your holiday travel was a nightmare…

On Tuesday of this week, “sources” from Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport reported to the Chicago Sun-Times that 18 human heads had arrived from Rome just before Christmas and were on their way to a research facility in the suburbs when they were stopped by security.

For attempting to smuggle in a wheel of pecorino cheese…?

Nope. Officials initially said it was a paperwork problem that prevented the heads from reaching their final destination, but apparently the crack reporters at the Sun-Times have just discovered the hold-up is actually connected to “an ongoing investigation at the suburban facility in question.” But before you jump to all conclusions, the investigation is “absolutely not” connected to the shipment of the heads, the source said.

Paging Dr. West… Dr. West, please pick up the nearest red courtesy phone…

The heads were unceremoniously shipped as cargo on a Lufthansa Airlines flight, but “were properly preserved and tagged as human specimens,” said Tony Brucci, chief investigator for the medical examiner’s office.

The Coalition for Airline Passengers’ Rights has filed a complaint with the FAA saying the heads were confined to the cargo hold for the 9 hour and 15 minute flight without the benefit of inflight catering or entertainment.

Okay, that’s not true.  But the rest of this is.

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