Last Call uses a “voice recognition software” to create a choose your own adventure horror film, where an audience member can communicate with the protagonist using their cell phone. We all know how the voice recognition crap works from calling our bank or other businesses. It’s fucking annoying, so why would we want to pay $10 to do it while watching a movie? You just know this shit is lame.

The video below explains it all, and I have included the press release for the hearing Impaired… Although, why would they care? They wouldn’t be able to hear what the protagonist is saying to help them.

Last Call is the first interactive horror movie in the world where the audience is able to communicate with the protagonist. A film controlled by a member of the audience, thus blurring the boundaries between game and film. Language recognition software transforms the participant’s answers via mobile phone into specific instructions. A specially developed software then processes these commands and launches an appropriate follow-up scene. The dialogue between the movie’s main actress and an audience member leads to a different film – and outcome – every time: sometimes with a happy end, sometimes with a more gruesome one. To participate in the adventure, audience members submit their mobile phone numbers to a speed dial code when they buy their ticket. The moment the female protagonist takes out her phone to call someone who might be able to help her, the film’s controlling software contacts one of the submitted mobile phone numbers. Once the viewer picks up, he hears the actress’s voice – who tells him she would be lost without him. He has to help her escape by choosing a path through the old, rundown sanatorium. Furthermore, he also decides whether she should help other victims to flee the scene – and every single choice shapes her fate: it’s a matter of life and death.

New Daughter follows John James (Costner) as he tries to rebuild his family after a painful divorce. John has his hands full raising his youngest child, Sam (Gattlin Griffith), and especially his adolescent daughter, Louisa.

As Louisa’s troubling behavior continues, far beyond the average tween angst and frustrations, John begins doubting his parental abilities. But when events around the James household start taking on an increasingly mysterious nature, John realizes that his family may be in mortal danger.

Bella Swan is reunited with the love of her life (and vampire), Edward Cullen. Her life is back to the way it was before the Cullens’ left, except for one major thing. Before Edward left, Bella had not considered Jacob Black her best friend, and she is in vain trying to make Edward and Jacob to make peace and be friends. She is torn between the love she feels for Edward, and the strong friendship between her and Jacob. Can she make them see sense, and can they be good too each other to keep from hurting Bella? And there’s new dangers lurking around in the corners, Seattle is stalked by massmurders beyond humanity. Who’s behond this, and what connection does it have with Bella?

Follow all your favorite Twilight stars on Twitter via Tweet Soup’s Twilight Channel.

After.Life opens April 9, 2010 and stars Liam Neeson and Christina Ricci.

After a horrific car accident, Anna (Ricci) wakes up to find the local funeral director Eliot Deacon (Neeson) preparing her body for her funeral. Confused, terrified and feeling still very much alive, Anna doesn’t believe she’s dead, despite the funeral director’s reassurances that she is merely in transition to the afterlife. Eliot convinces her he has the ability to communicate with the dead and is the only one who can help her. Trapped inside the funeral home, with nobody to turn to except Eliot, Anna is forced to face her deepest fears and accept her own death. But Anna’s grief-stricken boyfriend Paul (Justin Long) still can’t shake the nagging suspicion that Eliot isn’t what he appears to be. As the funeral nears, Paul gets closer to unlocking the disturbing truth, but it could be too late; Anna may have already begun to cross over the other side.

Pierce’s low budget documentary-type horror flick, about a creature lurking in an Arkansas swam, paved the way for and influenced movies like The Blair Witch. Other horror credits include The Town That Dreaded Sundown, Boggy Creek II and the 1973 made for TV movie Killer Bees.

The full trailer is set to hit the Web at 9 a.m. Friday. Twilight mania returns on June 30, 2010 when Eclipse hits theaters everywhere.

Bella and Edward have been reunited, but their forbidden relationship is threatened to be torn apart again with an evil vampire still seeking her revenge. And Bella is forced to choose between her true love for Edward or her friendship with Jacob Black as the struggles between vampires and werewolves continues. But there is still another choice for Bella to make, mortality or immortality?

I guess Corey Feldman won’t have to worry about Corey Haim messing up his Lost Boys sequels with drugged-up hissy fits anymore.

The actor died at 3:30 a.m. Wednesday of an apparent accidental overdose, according to the LAPD’s North Hollywood Division. Haim’s mother was with him at the time.

He was 38.

Haim’s drug addiction was well documented on his TV show The Two Coreys, and on the set of Lost Boys: The Tribe. He was even engaged to scream queen Tiffany Shepis at one point, although they never officially married.

A third Lost Boys film, The Thirst, is currently in post-production. It stars Corey Feldman as “Edgar Frog.”

R.I.P. Haim!

To keep updated on all of 2010’s celebrity deaths, visit and bookmark our 2010 Celebrity Death List.

See what other celebrities are saying on Twitter about Haim’s death by visiting TweetSoup.com.

UPDATE: From ET Online:

“Ed Winter of the coroner’s office offers new details to ET.

Ed tells ET that Corey woke up somewhere between 11:30 and 11:45 p.m. complaining of flu-like symptoms. He got out of bed, feeling weak, and fell to his knees. His mother called paramedics. He was pronounced dead at the hospital at 2:15 a.m.

Ed also says that no illegal drugs were found, but some prescription drugs have been identified. Chief Winter says the coroner has Corey’s body and the investigation is ongoing.”

When presented with the idea of converting The Exorcist into 3D, William Friedkin replied it would never happen, “providing I’m still alive.” Friedkin confirmed that the Blu-ray of The Exorcist is coming out this fall.

Paramount Home Entertainment will release Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds on June 1st. Special features include:

• Revisiting the Invasion
• The H.G. Wells Legacy
• Steven Spielberg and the Original War of the Worlds
• Characters: The Family Unit
• Previsualization
• Production Diaries
• Designing the Enemy: Tripods and Aliens
• Scoring War of the Worlds
• We Are Not Alone
• Galleries
• Theatrical teaser trailer (in HD)

Anchor Bay announced plans to release Kevin Costner’s The New Daughter on Blu-ray (and hopefully DVD). No release date yet.

And…

Lionsgate Home Entertainment is releasing Daybreakers on DVD and Blu-Ray June 1st.

The extra shit you will probably never watch includes, the making of the film, audio commentary with the directors, Michael and Peter Spierig, and special effects creator Steve Boyle, a poster gallery and the theatrical trailer.

But why is he holding hands with Peaches Geldof at the Oscars!?! Gross! What was Eli thinking! I hoped he washed his hands afterwards.

If you do not know who Peaches Geldof is, Dlisted, the website where I stole these pictures from, says “just stick your finger up your b-hole, pull it out, smell it, and that pretty much sums her up.”

I couldn’t explain it any better! However, I still bet these pictures piss some horror fans off. Face it… You will never be as cool as Eli Roth!

Reeser was in Lost Boys: The Tribe and Snoop Dogg brought us the classics Hood of Horror and Bones. Banderas’ achievements in cinema is too long to list.

Meanwhile director Dario Piana (The Deaths of Ian Stone) is working on Lost Boys: The Thirst once again starring Corey Feldman as “Edgar Frog.” In The Thrist a wealthy romance novelist enlists the help of Edgar to track down a family member whose gone missing.

People not at work and over the age of 18 can see Autumn Resser uncensored here.

In an effort to age down its audience the 82nd edition of the Oscars loaded up with teen presenters, and featured tributes to John Hughes and the horror genre.

The kids from Twilight, Taylor Lautner and Kristen Stewart, introduced a short video featuring clips from various horror films including: The Shining, Jaws, The Exorcist, Psycho, Nightmare on Elm Street, Child’s Play, Scream, Saw, Interview With the Vampire, The Birds, The Ring, Hellraiser, The Leprechaun and The Blair Witch Project. The segment ended with Carrie drenched in blood and a quick shot of Quentin Tarantino sitting in the audience.

Other horror highlights included; The Hurt Locker’s Kathryn Bigelow, who also directed Near Dark, winning Best Director, Roger Corman receiving the lifetime achievement Oscar, and a Paranormal Activity spoof staring hosts Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin.

Horror Yearbook: To start of the interview, would you just introduce yourself for any of our readers who may not be familiar with your work?

My name is Peter Straub, I live in New York City and have for maybe twenty-five years. I am a native of the Midwest, however. My wife and I lived in England and Ireland for ten years during the 70s. I forget how many books exactly I’ve written, but I think it’s eighteen or nineteen novels, two collections of short stories, and one nonfiction book of critical essay and memoirs. My work has been popular enough to allow me to live off the proceeds, so I make a living by writing, which nobody seems to be able to do nowadays. The world has gotten tougher. I’ve been able to sustain myself through my work for a very long time, and that’s a privilege and an honor. It’s something that I’m very happy to be able to say. To tell you the truth, it’s exactly what I wanted, and exactly what I needed when I began.

HYB: Let’s get right into A Dark Matter, which you just completed and hit shelves about two weeks ago. I just finished reading it, and it’s seriously good. You use this reflexive technique, in which the main character is an author, investigating this terrifying occurrence from his high school years which he wasn’t directly involved with for a novel which the character is writing. Structurally, it’s like Citizen Kane. And it’s extremely creepy and effective.. so where did this story come from?

Peter Straub: My writing process isn’t always the same. Almost always, I have this sort of outline that I like to think of as a safety net. If I’m on a day where I feel sort of uninspired, I’ll have a road map of what exactly it is that I’m supposed to be doing. Sometimes I’ll depart from this map very early along in the course of a book. I’ve written outlines where I’m more or less in the middle of a book, so I’ll have some clear version as to how to get through to the end.

This time, it was particularly strange. I was going to write a novella. A book which was then called “Skylark”. It was going to be ninety pages long and have nine chapters, so each chapter would be about ten pages. The first chapter turned out to be about one hundred and fifty pages, so my novella was cooked. And I still had outlines for the other sections, but I understood that each of those sections was going to be longer than I anticipated, and the whole project was going to be much, much longer.

I passed through various illnesses while I was writing this book, so there were times I wasn’t as clear headed as I should have been and I wasn’t too sure what sections were going to be about. When I’m in a position like that, I just keep writing, hoping something will emerge out of the fog. Eventually my problems got straightened out, I was able to work better, I had more energy, and I discovered that I had been in a process of building a house around me without quite being sure if it was supposed to have three stories, or four stories; whether or not the kitchen was in the basement or in the middle of the house. It was all kind of vague. I had no choice but to proceed with the brick and the lumber that I had set in place. That’s why the book is as strange as it is. I didn’t know when I began that it was going to have that Citizen Kane-like search, with a central narrator tries to listen to other people who try to explain what they think happened and it never occurred to me that I was reinventing Rashomon, but I was reinventing Rashoman. However, once I had the book set up, I had this incident of the occurrence in the meadow, and then kind of parallel to it, a rather buried, but very hideous crime in the past: the whole matter of Keith Hayward. I had two elements that could be kept very nicely in balance, both of which seemed extremely interesting to me, and I would then have the pleasure of seeing how all these people remembered exactly what happened to them.

And I wanted to get in the dead babies, the fact that one of the characters saw a tower of dead babies. Once someone has remembered the character saying that, that’s all we need of it. I wanted his contribution to be a very strange, dislocating story that questions meaning altogether. What’s so frightening to Jason “Boats” Boatman, and should be very unsettling to us, is that in the end it seems to suggest that nothing means anything at all. Everything is reduced to a word printed on a piece of paper. Things themselves have no real meaning. In fact, things themselves barely have an existence. That’s as nihilistic as I know how to get.

That then stands in balance to what happens when The Eel finds herself climbing a stairway to heaven. Which, if you were to find yourself in such a position, is absolutely terrifying, because the deity at the top of the stairs incorporates every single aspect of every single reality we know, and therefore it incorporates violence, ugliness, and destruction, as well as beauty and music. A friend of mine said: “You have it exactly right. You can always get to the stairway to heaven after you walk through a field of dead babies.” And that, let me tell you, is more or less the truth.

HYB: And you’ve written a couple novels with Stephen King?

Peter Straub: Stephen was a friend of mine from very early on. He was just beginning to be sort of well known, but he wasn’t actually famous. The people who respected him most and knew him the best were publishers. Very early on in his career, they understood that this guy was going to do very, very well, that his instincts were fabulous, and the signs were he was going to make a ton of money. The general public didn’t have that insight yet, so the Stephen King I met was basically just another writer like me, but he was doing a little better than most. He was a very engaging guy, a lot of fun to be with, and very smart, very funny, very driven. He was really wound up with energy. We liked each other, and we spent a good deal of time together. We were both living in England at the time, he had a place way out of town. So he stayed at my place when he came to London.

One night, very late, he asked me if I knew what would be a lot of fun, and I said no, I don’t, why don’t you tell me, and he said I think we should collaborate on a book. It sounded great to me, so we decided to do it. And I think we really got somewhere with The Talisman. It was at times, very hard work. There was so much of it. When it was done, we knew that this book was filled with tenderness, it was filled with affection, which makes it kind of rare I think. I think it comes from the fact that so many people really loved that book. It took us about a year and a half, which is rather longer than Stephen’s books have generally taken. I was writing as I still do a lot slower than he does.

The next time around, which took place a long time after, we already knew that we could absolutely trust each other. We were writing something a little closer to what we normally do, it was more of a horror story than a fantasy. And the work moved very quickly, it was very enjoyable. We worked up the ground rules, the big chronology, and moments of climax in the book out in Florida where he was residing. We were settled in about ten days, and we retired to our corners. I wrote the beginning, sent it to him, he was delighted. He sent me back fifty pages, then I sent him fifty pages. We kept it up until we were sending back sets of about one hundred pages each. That book took less than a year I think to write. It was smooth sailing the whole time, Stephen wrote the ending, and the ending is gorgeous. It came out of the blue. We hadn’t planned any of that stuff, about Jack Sawyer getting shot and what happens after he’s shot. King just made it up, an invention of inspiration of the moment. It was a great experience. We’re going to do it one more time in perhaps two years.

HYB: Moving off the topic of writing; there’s been at least one film adaptation of your work, correct?

Peter Straub: There were two actually. The first one was a version of a novel called Julia. The movie wound up being called The Haunting of Julia, it starred Mia Farrow, and it was pretty good. It was made in London. The producers had very little money and that kind of showed. The screenplay is not the most articulate, or better say, not the most coherent script ever written. It’s certainly no Citizen Kane. It never gets around to departing certain bits of information that are kind of essential to the story. Those absences make the movie a little surreal, so it’s kind of enjoyable in that one peculiar way. The film does have some power, it has a beautiful ending. And Mia Farrow gives one of her better performances in the sort of injured wife role that Mia Farrow could do extremely well. Fairly similar to the injured wife in Rosemary’s Baby.

The next film was Ghost Story which had a big, big budget. This one was a studio movie. It should have been a wonderful film. The screenplay might have been a little dodgy, but what really worked against the movie is, I think, after it was shot, certain studio executives wanted to play a more creative role than they already had. So they re-edited the film in a disastrous way. Their “improvements” made half the movie make no sense at all.

HYB: So, this one is more of a question for me. I stumbled across this bit of information a couple nights ago, after viewing Richard Stanley’s Dust Devil. It seems, Stanley cites your novel Shadowland as one of his favorite books, and I read he wrote a screenplay adaptation of it.

Peter Straub: Yes, but I haven’t read it. I knew that he and his people have been taking out one option after another on Shadowland, and they felt they had a very good script and are just hoping to interest a producer or some film star so they can begin to attract the money they’ll need. I certainly wish them luck.

HYB: One more quick question, something fun to wrap up with. What is your favorite horror film?

Peter Straub: What’s my favorite horror film? That’s tough. I’m going to give a good answer. I was just thinking this morning, in fact, that probably my favorite horror film is a really crazy Japanese movie called Visitor Q by the director Takashi Miike.

HYB: Wow. I wasn’t expecting that at all.

Peter Straub: He’s a really oddball Japanese director. He makes a lot of movies. So they’re not polished in a way. And boy oh boy, are they visceral.

HYB: I’m a big fan of his!

Peter Straub: Yeah, it’s an amazing movie. Really, really weird.

HYB: Have you seen his film Gozu? That’s probably my favorite work of his. I can’t even figure out what’s going on in that.

Peter Straub: [Laughs] It’s very strange. I saw it when it first came out here in New York. It’s got a lot of surprises in it.

HYB: Well, thank you, so much for talking with me. This has been really exciting.

It’s my pleasure.

Click here to order A Dark Matter

A Dark Matter

The charismatic and cunning Spenser Mallon is a campus guru in the 1960s, attracting the devotion and demanding sexual favors of his young acolytes. After he invites his most fervent followers to attend a secret ritual in a local meadow, the only thing that remains is a gruesomely dismembered body—and the shattered souls of all who were present.

Years later, one man attempts to understand what happened to his wife and to his friends by writing a book about this horrible night, and it’s through this process that they begin to examine the unspeakable events that have bound them in ways they cannot fathom, but that have haunted every one of them through their lives. As each of the old friends tries to come to grips with the darkness of the past, they find themselves face-to-face with the evil triggered so many years earlier. Unfolding through the individual stories of the fated group’s members, A Dark Matter is an electric, chilling, and unpredictable novel that will satisfy Peter Straub’s many ardent fans, and win him legions more.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, it’s your good friend Kyle Krueger, the bastard grandson of a hundred maniacs, bringing you another discarded wonder. Today we’re looking at John Carpenter’s Body Bags.

The year is 1993. Four years after HBO began “Tales from the Crypt”, the people at Showtime wanted something terrifying to bring in viewers. Before he brought Cigarette Burns to the infamous “Masters of Horror” anthology in 2005, Showtime asked John Carpenter to shoot a pilot for a rival anthology series. He gave them Body Bags, featuring three thirty minute stories that had scares and laughs alike. Unfortunately, Showtime pulled the plug before it could ever air, so Carpenter released it as a stand alone Creepshow type film.

Our host of sorts is The Coroner (Carpenter himself), who shows us three bodies that arrive to the morgue in body bags. One by one, he tells us the story of how they died. First, we see “Gas Station”, where Anne (Alex Datcher) is working the graveyard shift at, you guessed it, a gas station. A gas station that happens to be on the outskirts of Haddonfield. While Michael Myers is not involved, it seems someone in town is following in his footsteps and he has his sights set on Anne. This particular tale I found interesting because while it wasn’t particularly scary, it held a lot of tension throughout. Carpenter’s direction is, as always, fantastic, and this is, in fact, very reminiscent of Halloween. Robert Carradine (Revenge of the Nerds) gives a great performance as Bill, and does a wonderful job with what little screen time he’s given. Also, look for cameos by Wes Craven (they say he’s there, I didn’t see him) and Sam Raimi as a dead body.

Second is “Hair” about Richard (Stacy Keach), a balding man who despite having a great life and a hot girlfriend, cannot get past his thinning hair. He’s tried everything to get it to come back, but nothing works. Until he sees a TV ad for Dr. Lock (David Warner) who claims he can make your hair regrow overnight! Soon, Richard’s long, flowing mane has returned, but at what price? This story is a nice buffer between the other two stories as “Hair” is played completely for laughs. While the twist ending is shocking, it’s more of an “OH, COME ON!” kind of twist that is ridiculous in nature, but fun all the same. Also directed by John Carpenter, this story plays to the skeptic in all of us. If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.

Lastly, we have “Eye”. This is a whole different ball game. Mark Hamill (Star Wars) is Brent, a minor league baseball player with a beautiful wife, a baby on the way, and dreams of playing in the majors. Then, tragedy strikes (no pun intended) and Brent is in a car accident where he loses his right eye. Feeling his career is ruined, he bets it all on an experimental eye transplant experiment. Thankfully, it works and Brent begins his recovery. Then he begins seeing things. And getting headaches. He finds out his new eye once belonged to a convicted murderer. Now Brent is seeing things his donor has seen. Brent also wants to start picking up his donors old habits. Does he have what it takes to fight these feelings or will his donor’s eye infect his mind? The only episode not directed by Carpenter, Tobe Hooper (Texas Chain Saw Massacre) takes the reigns on this one. The scares this time are quite effective and Hamill does a terrific job playing the victim and the antagonist.

If you find yourself with nothing to do one night and see this at your local rental store or see it on TV, give it a watch. Otherwise, this isn’t a destination type movie. Fans of anthology terror will appreciate it for what it is, but it’s not very memorable for a reason.

3 out of 5 stabs

If you have a movie you want to get rid of and be reviewed, contact freddysboy@ymail.com.