Universal Studios closing the Jaws ride in January: Following on the heels of other classic Universal Studios Orlando rides like Back to the Future that have been closed, Jaws: The Ride is being shut down in January to make room for an “exciting NEW experience”. The Studios part of Universal has sort of become the second tier park to Islands of Adventure, especially in the wake of The Wizarding World of Harry Potter opening. The Jaws ride was a great classic boat ride, sort of a more exciting version of Jungle Cruise over at Disney. I’m wondering if they are closing it to make room for a version of the Transformers ride, the first of which just opened in the Singapore.
Rifftrax debuts the Riffplayer: This week Rifftrax debuted their revolutionary new RiffPlayer, a downloadable application that allows you to automatically sync up your Rifftrax audio files to your DVDs. You open a DVD with the RiffPlayer, open the MP3 and the application keeps them synced up and you can resync if they get out of sync. There is a list of compatible Riffs on the Rifftrax website.
Manos: The Hands of Fate coming to Blu Ray: I think Nostradamus made some kind of prediction about if Manos was ever seen in high quality, it would open a portal to hell but we’ll be tempting fate in the near future as a, possibly psychotic, individual named Ben has found the original 16mm print of Manos: The Hands of Fate, one of the most infamous MST3K episodes ever and one of the worst movies ever made. Ben has a website called www.manosinhd.com.
Steven Seagal’s “True Justice” coming to Reelz Channel: We’ve been hearing about this weird Steven Seagal, scripted TV show for a while but now we now that it is coming to Reelz Channel, who scooped up the controversial “The Kennedys” miniseries earlier this year from History Channel. True Justice stars Steven Seagal as Elijah Kane (perfect Seagal character name BTW), head of an elite Seattle police unit of undercover cops trying to take down the worst of the worst of the cities criminals. The show is scheduled to debut in March of next year.
The Raid coming to US theaters in the spring: Indonesian action movie “The Raid” made a huge splash at the Toronto International Film Festival a couple months ago and Sony quickly snapped up the rights and are planning on making a remake of it but the original should be coming to, probably limited, theaters sometime next Spring. Sony had Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda working on a new score for the movie and the best guess is that as soon as it’s done and the movie is re-edited, it will make it’s way to US theaters.
Starship Troopers remake on the way: Sony has recently tasked the screenwriters of Thor and X-Men: First Class to get started on a new version of Starship Troopers, which joins Robocop and Total Recall as remakes of Paul Verhoeven movies. The original Starship Troopers is beloved by many whether you think it’s a masterpiece of satire or just an incredibly hilarious/violent action movie. I don’t think any movie could match Verhoeven’s over the top take but they could distance themselves by hewing more toward the original Robert Heinlein novel, which was incredibly serious and dark and featured the titular troopers using mechanical power armor to fight, not just Arachnids, but various other alien species. That seems to be the route that the Total Recall remake is going and I think if they made it like an intergalactic Hurt Locker or something, it could be pretty interesting.
