* Much anticipated by me Clive Barker adaptation The Midnight Meat Train is now headed for a July 11 release, up against Guillermo Del Toro’s sequel to his own egregious Hellboy. Bloody Disgusting’s report hints that the film may have a super-limited release.

* In a post about an unrelated project by Del Toro, Variety reports that Ian McKellen, Andy Serkis, and Viggo Mortensen have all been approached to reprise their Lord of the Rings roles in the Hobbit movies. This appears to indicate that Aragorn’s stealth adventures in Rohan, Gondor and the like will play a role in that not-as-mysterious-as-everyone’s-making-it-out-to-be second film. Kristin Thompson caught it and offers further thoughts.

* Say it ain’t so! Strange Ink’s Sean is officially hanging up his blogging spurs. Bad news for fans of strange pop-culture ephemera and/or naked ladies. (Why choose?)

* There’s an awful lot to disagree with in Ted Pigeon’s essay on Frank Darabont’s adaptation of Stephen King’s The Mist.”Sociopolitical policies” are not the “most important” aspect of adapting this story, nor is it the case that “no single image in The Mist is more frightening than the sharp blade grasped on one end by human hands plunging into the stomach of a fellow man.” Indeed I think the film’s hamfisted focus on the former and misplaced belief in the latter is part of what hurt it in the end. Face it, people like The Mist (or at least this person does) because it features giant, ugly, disturbingly unique monsters plucking people out of a grocery store and eating them, not because of anything the character of Mrs. Carmody tells us about religious fundamentalism; and to the extent that the opposite might be true, the movie version has a spotty record at best with treating such elements with the deftness they require. That being said I’m happy to have found Pigeon’s essay (courtesy of The House Next Door’s Keith Uhlich), because it’s clear he’s actually taking the film seriously on its own terms rather than as a tee of which to smack the wiffle ball of “reflectionist” pontificating. I look forward to browsing through the reviews listed in his sidebar.

* Scrubs: The New Class? No thank you. (Via Whitney Matheson.)

* Sylvester Stallone says there may be a director’s cut DVD release of Rambo down the pike, which would restore the film’s original title, John Rambo. That’s the newsworthy(ish) part of AICN’s story, but perhaps more exciting is their reposting of a YouTube clip comprising the climax of Rambo in its entirety–the most insanely violent five minutes of film you will ever see. I’m serious, this thing is completely…wow, words are literally failing me. Now I DO NOT RECOMMEND WATCHING THIS IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE WHOLE MOVIE FIRST. It’s a very unusually structured movie that kind of explodes into this climactic sequence, and seeing it by itself before you’ve seen the rest of the movie will really dilute one of the most unique action-movie-watching experiences you’re likely to have. So be warned. But if you have seen the movie, this is heaven.

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