He’ll always be Kelly Leak to some of us, but in his recent comeback phase, Jackie Earle Haley has played a child molester, a violent vigilante and now…a violent child killer. And he seemed like such a nice boy. Haley will indeed assume the mantle of Freddy Krueger in a new remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street. I think every Wes Craven movie has now been remade, except that one with Meryl Streep playing the violin. “Looking at his performance in Watchmen, here’s a guy playing a character under a mask yet you feel tremendous empathy for him,” director Samuel Bayer told The Hollywood Reporter. “And in Nightmare, he is going to be under prosthetic make-up. You have to feel something for the character. The greatest villains are multi-dimensional and I think he will bring that to the character.”

“Larry Charles is set to take on geriatric sex in his next project,” Variety tells me before I’ve even had my first cup of coffee. Thanks, Variety!

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When a franchise has legs, the people who own it whip it so hard that those legs inevitably come off.  That doesn't keep them from flogging its backside, of course; there have been eleven Friday the Thirteenth movies, eight Freddy Krueger flicks, and so many James Bond movies that they're starting to use grocery lists written by Ian Fleming on the back of cocktail napkins as their source material.  The Saw franchise is already on its fifth installment, despite the fact that the first movie opened roughly three weeks ago, and I'm pretty sure they were filming the sixth and seventh movies at the craft table of the set of the fifth one.  Compared to this level of sequel overinflation, you might think that the venerable Halloween franchise is a virtual model of restraint.  That's what I thought, anyway, when I decided to watch every single one of them in a row.  Frankly, I didn't even think there was enough of it to make a Take Five; I was completely convinced that the ultra-bizarre Halloween III had killed the thing off until Rob Zombie decided to bring it back with his 2007 remake of the original.  It turns out there were five more sequels before the White Zombie frontman took a swing at reviving Michael Myers.  A chilling prospect, but lucky you:  this Halloween, you won't have to read my mini-reviews of each one.  The first five will do, but believe me:  simply living in a world that has Halloween 6:  The Curse of Michael Myers in it should scare you more than anything else about the holiday.

HALLOWEEN (1978)

Often credited as the movie that kick-started the whole slasher-film genre, Halloween doesn't really deserve that title.  For one thing, it's too good.  Tautly directed by John Carpenter, and featuring performances by genuine movie actors like Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Pleasance, Halloween was likewise a big-budget picture with a canny script, a plausible if terrifying villain, and actual production values.  The future would belong to movies like Friday the Thirteenth, which would be released a few years later and combine all the low-budget qualities of an indie production with the bloody aesthetic of Carpenter's best work, but none of the smarts or skills.  If it can't lay claim to being the progenitor of the genre, though, Halloween can at least say that it's one of the best; it still holds up years later, and makes what came after that more of a waste.

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Jason Voorhees: still not that interesting.

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It often seems as if the Morning Deal Report would be just as accurate if I had a hatful of Hollywood names and a hatful of recycled ideas, and simply drew randomly from both of them. For instance, from one hat I might produce the name "Peter Berg," most recently director of Hancock, while the other hat offers up "Hercules," yet another character no one really cares about reviving. Yet here it is in Variety: "Berg will produce and will develop to direct Hercules: The Thracian Wars, a co-production of Spyglass Entertainment, Berg’s Film 44 and Radical Pictures. Spyglass and Universal will co-finance the film. Ryan Condal will write the script, based on a five-issue comicbook series by Steve Moore that debuted in May through Radical Publishing." Of course. It goes without saying that I have a third hat, and every slip of paper in it reads "based on a comic book."

Which brings us to Capeshooters, another comic book adaptation forthcoming from Warner Bros.

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Normally, the Friday Take Five feature is built around some new release.  But this is a very special day for bottom-drawer cinephiles the world over:  today is Friday the 13th, the day commemorated in a series of eleven of the rootin'-est, tootin'-est, sexually-active-teenager-beheadin'-east movies of all time.  While there isn't a new Friday the 13th movie coming out -- unfortunately, or thankfully depending on your perspective, we'll have to wait until 2009 for the proposed remake of the first movie -- there's no reason we can't take a look back at what is, despite the universal revulsion of critics, one of the most successful franchises in motion picture history.  It's hard to believe it's been 28 years since the first Friday the 13th movie, but the mass-murderous adventures of the scrappy, plucky Jason Voorhees (and what's with all the big-screen serial killers having such WASPy names, from Voorhees to Krueger to Meyers?  Aren't there any unstoppable, inhuman psychopathic butchers named Breitkowicz or Morelli?) have manage to last longer than most marriages.  With little more than a machete, a hockey mask, and a can-do attitude, Jason has become a cultural icon, almost single-handedly birthing the lamentable teen-slasher genre so popular in the 1980s and managing to set a standard for improbable resurrections that not even superhero comics can rival. I'm not going to say that the movies below represent the best of the Friday the 13th movies; to be perfectly honest, "best" just isn't a word than any of these flicks can aspire to.  But at the very least, these are the five that represent, in some way, a hallmark acheivement for everyone's favorite reason to avoid summer camp.

FRIDAY THE 13th (1980)

It's usually claimed that the first of the venerable hack-'n'slash franchise is the best, and we can't argue with that claim.  However, while John Carpenter's Halloween was a genuinely good low-budget horror movie that spawned a ton of far inferior sequels, Sean Cunningham's Friday the 13th was pretty much a crappy exploitation movie that produced a bunch of sequels that were marginally worse.  The francise didn't have far to fall, but at the very least, if you were of a certain age in the 1980s, seeing the original Friday the 13th was something like a rite of passage.  Of mild canonical interest due to the fact that Jason Voorhees isn't the killer and doesn't even appear in the film in his familiar form, this would still just be a long-forgotten curio along the lines of Silent Night Deadly Night if it hadn't happened to catch an inexplicable fire and turn into one of the biggest indie movie hits of all time.  The sequels that it birthed are all much, much worse, don't get us wrong -- but don't go into this expecting any kind of a diamond in the rough.  It's just the least objectionable turd in a very big punchbowl.

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Are we really sure we want the writers' strike to end? For now, it's the only thing standing between us and an unending parade of sequels and reboots. Here's the latest from the Hollywood recycle bin:

Despite its second weekend plummet at the box office, Cloverfield is still a massive hit considering its $25 million dollar budget, so it's no surprise that Variety reports a follow-up in the works. Director Matt Reeves may have to delay his "Hitchcock-style thriller" The Invisible Woman, but no doubt Paramount will make it worth his while.

Vin Diesel tells MTV, "I'm a little bit slower than the average actor that just jumps into the sequel, but I think the time has come to revisit Dom Toretto." If that character name rings no bells for you, perhaps its been a while since you've seen the first installment of The Fast and the Furious.

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