Rocker Rob Zombie's third movie, a remake of John Carpenter's horror classic Halloween (Dimension Films) will probably attract the biggest audience of young guys and girls, not to mention the franchise's diehard fans, who may be interested in seeing how it's resuscitated by a filmmaker respected among horror circles like Zombie. It's been five years since Halloween: Resurrection, the last movie in the franchise which didn't do nearly as well as Halloween: H20 four years earlier, but Zombie's movie, which acts as much as a prequel as a remake, will be getting the widest release of the "Halloween" franchise into just over 3,300 theatres as it tries to top the current Labor Day opening record. (See above.) The only things working against it completely slamming the current Labor Day opening record is the fact that it's a remake in a long line of them, it's trying to revive a franchise that some might have been glad to see dead, and some people might be left scratching their heads why Dimension didn't save it for October or for Halloween proper. (Halloween falls on a Wednesday this year, six full days after the release of Saw IV, and surely it would have been a first choice that would have helped it much like The Omen remake was helped on June 6, 2006.) The other last-minute stumbling block may be the fact that a workprint of the film was leaked online, much like with Eli Roth's Hostel: Part II and Michael Moore's Sicko, but that might not hurt a movie that has so much going for it already.

Opening on Wednesday is Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant's sports comedy Balls of Fury (Rogue Pictures) which hopes to do for ping pong (known as table tennis in polite society) what Dodgeball did for… well, you know. It doesn't have quite as strong a cast with newcomer Dan Fogler in the lead as a ping pong champ on the comeback trail against the evil Master Feng, played by Chrstopher Walken, with George Lopez and the luscious Maggie Q (from Live Free or Die Hard and MI:III) rounding out the cast. Lennon and Garant are best known for their work on Comedy Central's "Reno 911!" and the recent movie based on it, though they'll be bringing a bit more of their mainstream non-R-rated sensibilities from movies like Night at the Museum to this one in hopes of finding a larger audience of comedy fans. While its PG-13 rating will certainly help it this weekend—especially among the younger teens looking to sneak into Halloween--opening on Wednesday could potentially take away from its weekend business, and they'll be competing against Sony's popular R-rated Superbad for second place. Even so, look for this to wind up in third place with the strongest opening for a Rogue Pictures film. (To date, they've had the best success with the Jet Li movies Unleashed and Fearless though both opened in a thousand fewer theatres than this.)

Kevin Bacon stars in the revenge thriller Death Sentence (Fox Atomic), the second movie of the year from Saw director/co-creator James Wan. Despite a solid premise and cast, this looks like it might be one of the young filmmaker's stronger films, but it doesn't look like it has anything to entice younger males away from the other two movies, making it a second choice at best. Kevin Bacon isn't exactly going to draw them into theatres, having made the switch to smaller indie films a few years back, and though it might be a solid addition to the revenge thriller genre, older folks might be looking forward more to Jodie Foster's turn in The Brave One, which opens in a few weeks, leaving this to find more of an audience on DVD. (Incidentally, trivia buffs might be interested in knowing that this and Balls of Fury have two things in common… anyone want to guess what they are?)

Universal would be nuts not to expand Rowan Atkinson's Mr. Bean's Holiday into more theatres after its breakout success last weekend, especially because Labor Day is a great time for movies geared towards families and kids. Being the only PG movie that parents can take their younger kids to see will help this do better over the four-day weekend than it did in its opening week, but it will be fighting for placement against Universal's other late summer smash The Bourne Ultimatum.

Lionsgate releases the Mexican heist flick Ladron Que Roba A Ladron into over 250 theatres on Friday, although it's not really getting any sort of promotional push, so it's likely to end up with less than a million over the four days. (See the limited releases section below for more info.) Lionsgate will also be sneak-previewing James Mangold's Western remake 3:10 to Yuma in a number of theatres on Sunday night at 7:30 PM.

Last Labor Day, Lionsgate (them again!) tried capitalizing on the success of Jason Statham's record-setting 2005 action movie by releasing the R-rated Crank, and it was able to make $13 million over the four-day holiday weekend. Warner Bros. had their own horror remake in The Wicker Man starring Nicholas Cage, and that wound up just short of Crank with $11.7 million. A late summer sleeper came in the form of Neil Burger's The Illusionist, starring Edward Norton, which the Yari Film Group expanded into 970 theatres over Labor Day weekend where it grossed $8. Anthony Mackie starred in the basketball drama Crossover (Screen Gems), but it opened outside the Top 10 with $4.2 million. The top 10 grossed $89 million, which again should be topped by this weekend's offerings, continuing this summer's trend.

Projections: $21 to 24 million over the four-day weekend but less than $50 million total.
COMPARISONS

Interview with Rob Zombie

Review

Balls of Fury (Rogue Pictures)
Starring Christopher Walken, Dan Fogler, George Lopez, Maggie Q, Robert Patrick, Thomas Lennon, Aisha Tyler
Directed by Robert Ben Garant (Reno 911!: Miami); Written by Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon (The Pacifier, Night at the Museum, Taxi, Let's Go To Prison, Herbie: Fully Loaded)
Genre: Comedy, Sports
Rated PG-13
Tagline: "A huge comedy with tiny balls."
Plot Summary: Ping pong champion Randy Daytona (Dan Fogler), who hadn't played in 19 years after an embarrassment at the 1988 Olympics, is coerced to return when an FBI Agent (George Lopez) hires him for a secret mission to infiltrate the lair of the nefarious Master Feng (Christopher Walken), the man responsible for killing Daytona's father.
Why I Should See It: Garant and Lennon have proven themselves to be strong comedic contenders with their previous comedies... but more importantly.. Maggie Q is in it!
Why Not: If I wanted to watch 90 minutes of ping pong, I'd go down to the basement and play with my Uncle Bo.

Projections: $4 to 6 million on Weds/Thurs, $11 to 13 million over the four-day weekend and roughly $30 million total.
COMPARISONS

Review

Interview with Dan Fogler

Death Sentence (Fox Atomic)
Starring Kevin Bacon, Kelly Preston, Garrett Hedlun, John Goodman, Aisha Tyler, Jordan Garrett, Leigh Whannell, Matt O'Leary, Yorgo Constantine
Directed by James Wan (Saw, Dead Silence); Written by Ian Jeffers
Genre: Crime, Drama, Thriller
Rated R
Tagline: "Protect What's Yours"
Plot Summary: After watching the murder of his son by a gang of thieves, a mild-mannered family man (Kevin Bacon) decides to take matters in his own hand when the law doesn't provide justice, starting a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with the gang that killed his son.
Why I Should See It: It's been a long time since there's been a strong revenge thriller.
Why Not: This month we're already getting potentially two.

Projections: $6 to 7 million over the four-day weekend but less than $15 million total.
COMPARISONS

Interview with James Wan

Next week, the Fall season officially kicks off with two testosterone-driven action flicks, one being James Mangold's Western remake 3:10 to Yuma, which pits Christian Bale against Russell Crowe, and the other being Michael Davis' no-holds-barred Shoot ‘Em Up, which has Clive Owen facing Paul Giamatti. The two of them will be facing off much like the characters in the movies, which leaves the comedy The Brothers Solomon to show a bit of brotherly love as Wills Forte and Arnett try to get women pregnant.

The Chosen One: The Nines (Newmarket)
Starring Ryan Reynolds, Melissa McCarthy, Hope Davis, Elle Fanning
Written and directed by John August (writer of Charlie's Angels, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory)
Genre: Drama, Thriller
Rated R
Plot Summary: Ryan Reynolds, Melissa McCarthy, Hope Davis and Elle Fanning star in three interlinked stories, one about a troubled TV star (Reynolds) placed under house arrest, convinced that his publicist (McCarthy) and neighbor (Davis) are out to get him. The second involves a trio putting together a network television drama in the second segment, while in the third, a video game designer and his wife (Reynolds, McCarthy) experience car troubles in the woods that only their daughter (Fanning) seems to know anything about.
Tagline: "Y9u never kn9w when y9ur number is up"

Usually, I'd be going with the Johnnie To movie 'cause that would be a no-brainer for any Hong Kong fan, but oddly, after almost a year of trying to catch it, I was slightly unimpressed. (See my Mini-Review below.) Instead, we're going with something a bit more off the beaten track. It's been many months since I first saw John August's odd indie anthology film, and if I hadn't rewatched it recently, I honestly don't know if I could talk about it intelligently, because it's one of those movies that seems fairly straight-forward at first, but it slowly turns into a real mindf*ck of a movie as the three separate stories are brought together in an existential twist ending. Granted, this is not going to be everyone's cup of hot cocoa, but it is a movie that will entertain you firstly and make you think for a long time about what you just watched afterwards. The reason the movie works so well is that Ryan Reynolds is great in all three parts he plays, as is Melissa McCarthy, a personal friend of August's who gives three breakthrough performances, a comedic one as the publicist of a troubled star and a more dramatic one as the overweight actress friend of a TV writer/producer who learns that he's being forced to replace her on his new show. And then of course, there's Hope Davis who hits a home run no matter what she does, though she's really playing third fiddle to the other two a lot of the time. This is very much the kind of movie that only a screenwriter trying to do something different outside the Hollywood system could come up with, because the three segments are so different in tone and feel that you might think they were written and/or directed by different people. Maybe August can relate to the schizophrenic nature of Reynold's three characters, but it does show that he has a lot of interesting and original ideas beyond his studio fare. August's directorial debut opens in New York and L.A. on Friday.

My Thoughts from Sundance

Interview with John August

Also in Limited Release:

The Monastery: Mr. Vig & The Nun (Koch Lorber Films) - Pernille Rose Grønkjær's documentary about an eccentric 82-year-old Danish man who wants to donate his ramshackled castle to the Russian Orthodox Church for a monastery, but winds up butting heads with the attractive young nun who shows up to help whip the place into shape. Although it sounds like the makings of a romantic comedy (pay attention Hollywood!), it actually is a documentary based on a true story, which opens at New York's Film Forum on Wednesday.

Exiled (Magnolia Pictures) - Johnnie To's 2006 crime drama follow-up to his Election blockbusters finally gets released in the States after months of delays. It reunites To with many of his previous cast including Anthony Wong and Francis Ng in a story about two hit men from Hong Kong sent to take out a renegade member trying to start a new life in the changing landscape of Macau. It opens Friday at the Angelika and Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in New York City.

Mini-Review (Coming Soon!)

Freshman Orientation (Regency Releasing) - Ryan Shiraki's comedy about an 18-year-old freshman from the Midwest ("Superman Returns'" Jimmy Olsen, Sam Huntington) who decides to get into the life of the girl of his dreams (Kaitlin Doubleday) by pretending to be gay, landing in the middle of a campus-wide controversy. This long-delayed movie which also stars Heather Matarazzo and John Goodman opens in L.A. at the Regent Showcase Theatre on Friday and in New York next month.

Ladron Que Roba A Ladron (Lionsgate) - Ocean's 13 and The Italian Job haven't cornered the market on heist movies, as we see in this Mexican crime-comedy by Joe Menendez about two crack thieves who reunite to rob a TV informercial tycoon, going undercover as day laborers with a team of actual day laborers to pull the seemingly impossible job. It opens in 250 theatres this weekend, presumably targeting the same theatres that played Illegal Tender last week.

Self-Medicated (THINKFilm) - 24-year-old Monty Lapica wrote, directed and stars in this drama about his own troubles with alcohol and drugs as a teenager growing up in Las Vegas that ultimately had his mother having him kidnapped and locked-up in Utah's Brightway Adolescent Hospital. The winner of many film festival awards, it opens in select cities on Friday

Mini-Review: When you look at how many awards this movie has won at fringe film festivals like the "Cosmos International Film Festival" or the "Lake Arrowhead Film Festival" or dozens of others, you might be optimistic that Monty Lapica's autobiographical vanity film might be okay. After watching it, you might start to wonder how bad the other movies must have been at those festivals. Granted, this is a young filmmaker telling a story from his own past, but casting himself in the role of himself 7 years prior might be the first mistake—Lapica could have learned from Kevin Spacey on that one, because he doesn't look 17--in what ends up being a depressingly bad movie that falls somewhere between an MTV realidrama and "The O.C." only set in Las Vegas. Lapica is not a very good actor and only barely competent as a director, as he has created a film full of overly-melodramatic performances. It does get slightly better once "Andrew" escapes from Brightway, but even if this story were 100% true, it's exceedingly hard to believe. If Brightway's main contribution to Lapica's life was to convince him to take up filmmaking, they deserved to be shut down by the government. Rating: 3/10