One of last year’s Midnight Madness films from the Toronto Film Festival is arriving in theaters shortly, and we were asked if we wanted to premiere an exclusive clip from the movie here at HitFix.
I definitely try to see as many of the Midnight Madness selections as I can, and part of that is because I trust the taste of Colin Geddes, programmer for the section, and part of that is because these tend to be the films that speak to my film geekiest side. They often represent unlikely collisions between different genres or different styles or unexpected partnerships. Perhaps the strangest of those this year saw the WWE producing a horror film that starred Luke Evans and was directed by Ryuhei Kitamura.
Kitamura first gained attention with the swords-and-zombies film “Versus,” and he famously struggled to get his adaptation of Clive Barker’s “The Midnight Meat Train” the theatrical release he felt like it deserved. WWE Films has been pushing into genre fare pretty much from the moment they decided to get into filmmaking, thinking much broader than just action films.
It’s got a good cast, made up of a lot of actors I like including Luke Evans, Adelaide Clemens, Lee Tergesen, and Laura Ramsey, and I’m actually surprised that I don’t recognize any wrestlers in the cast list. Normally these films are built around a wrestler, since that was the original mandate of WWE Films, but it looks like that’s not the case with this one.
Anyway… I haven’t seen the film yet, so I’m as in the dark in terms of context as you are regarding our exclusive clip this evening. Take a look at it, and in the meantime, I’ll be seeing and reviewing the film before it opens, and I’m certainly curious to see what Kitamura came up with this time around.
“No One Lives” opens in theaters May 10.