Rob Zombie's Lords of Salem gets a terrifically operatic trailer.

There are so many major trailers being released over the last couple days that you'd swear the Super Bowl was this weekend.  But my pick for the best of the bunch is this engrossing and genuinely unnerving little tease from Rob Zombie.  In times good (The Devils Rejects), bad (Halloween), and in-between (Halloween II), Zombie has created a distinctive template and a unique voice in the horror scene, so I'm glad he's still around and I'm doubly-glad that he seems to be operating well-outside his safe zone.  This feels more like a Dario Argento picture than a traditional 'redneck rampage' Zombie picture.  And since Argento hasn't made a great picture since who-knows-when, why not let Zombie take a crack in this sandbox?  Anyway, Anchor Bay will be distributing this one sometime next year, and the visuals combined with the operatic music make this one a rather great horror teaser.  Of course, I don't know the actual budget or actual scale of this picture (it screened to mixed reviews in Toronto), but this is a genuinely successful tease and my pick for uh, best trailer of the week.

Scott Mendelson

Review: Seeking Justice (2012) evokes nostalgia for fear of street crime.

Seeking Justice

2012
105 minutes
rated R

by Scott Mendelson

The strangest thing about Nicolas Cage's Seeking Justice is how painfully old-fashioned it feels.  It is a B-movie through-and-through, yet it resembles the sort of thing that arguably would have been an A-picture just 10 years ago.  It has someone who is technically a major movie star, an up-and-coming television star as the token love interest, a prestigious 'slumming' thespian as the villain who indeed gives more credibility to the picture than it deserves, and it has just enough character actors filling in the gaps to keep us almost entertained.  Moreover, even its plot and moral philosophy feels out-of-step with today's pressing issues.  Seeking Justice literally feels like a movie that was shot and edited in 1995 and magically sent into the future for our enjoyment today.  Of course, how much enjoyment you will might get from a creaky old relic is open to debate, but it if Hobo With a Shotgun was a homage-via-recreation of 1970s grindhouse, then Seeking Justice does the same trick for the 1990s crime thriller.