From the DVD cover (pic right, click to enlarge), it looks like they’re definitely sticking with the title too.

From Bloody Disgusting:

Super exciting news as Lionsgate Home Entertainment has finally announced the long-delayed Burning Bright (review) for DVD and digital download release on August 17th. From one of the producers of cult-favorite thriller Hard Candy, Lionsgate delivers the intense DVD and digital download debut of Burning Bright.

A roaring and engaging ride, the film stars Briana Evigan (Mother’s Day, Sorority Row) and Garret Dillahunt (The Last House on the Left). A thriller not for the faint at heart, the Burning Bright DVD also includes two behind-the-scenes featurettes.

Sobini Films posted the first trailer for Burning Bright on their site and the film is now expected to come out this summer. From the looks of it, it got its original name back too. There’s no mention of “Ravenous” anywhere in the trailer or on the site.

The trailer can’t be embedded so go to Sobini.com to see it.

In other news, One Night Only has been added to the Worldwide Short Film Festival lineup. The festival runs from June 1 to 6, 2010, in Toronto.

For details, keep an eye on the festival’s official site.

And this is what the Pretty Bird DVD will look like when it comes out in June (click to enlarge):

Hope everyone has a great time tonight and a fantastic year ahead.

See you in 2010!

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The year started with Terminator promo and press tours. The show returned with the last nine episodes in the Friday slot in mid-February.

Later that month, Garret was spotted filming Winter’s Bone in Missouri. The film will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in late January. If anyone plans on going, the Sundance screening schedule is here.

The Last House on the Left opened on March 13. The reviews ranged from excellent to free branding campaign and the film made it to several lists of best horrors of the year. In October, it won a Reaper Award for Best Theatrical Release in 2009.

Toward the end of the month, Garret played his fifth character on T:SCC, the Skynet virus from the future. Previous four were George Laszlo, Cromartie, the Beastwizard and John Henry.

In late March, the first pictures from Burning Bright appeared online. Burning Bright was later renamed to Ravenous and it still awaits theatrical release. In November, it was screened at the AFM. The first reviews were pretty positive.

In early April, Water Pills had its U.S. premiere at the Florida Film Festival. Jasmine Jessica Anthony walked away with a grand jury award for best performance.

Also in April, two series finales aired two days apart. Garret snuffed the TV crew and gave Damian Lewis his final headache in Life on April 8. Life season two was released on DVD on August 25.

The Terminator finale aired on April 10. Despite cancellation, the show made it to #8 on the list of  the Top 10 Most Pirated Shows in 2009. Last year, it was the only new show among the top 10, at #4.

In the meantime, Garret joined Delroy Lindo and Roslyn Ruff in Things of Dry Hours, a play by Naomi Wallace about communists in 1930s Alabama. Rehearsals started on April 21.

The first trailer for The Road hit the web on May 15.

On May 18, Fox announced that they would not be picking up Terminator for a third season. Even though there has been talk of a possible TV/DVD movie, Terminator rights are currently up for grabs and in limbo until February 2010.

On May 20, Garret appeared in the season finale of Criminal Minds.

Two days later, Things of Dry Hours went into previews at the New York Theatre Workshop. The show premiered on June 8 and ran through June 28. Critics liked the cast, but were divided on the writing.

At some point over the spring/summer, Garret was cast in Madeleine Stowe’s Unbound Captives, an independent western epic with Hugh Jackman, Rachel Weisz and Robert Pattinson. If they get financing in time, the film will go into production in March (at the earliest).

In late July and early August, Garret filmed two TV guest appearances,  on CSI and Lie to Me, and a short film, One Night Only.

The Last House on the Left was released on DVD in mid-August.

Later that month, Garret was spotted filming the season three finale of Burn Notice. The episode will air in March 2010.

The trailer for One Night Only was released on September 2.

On September 3, The Road had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. Ten days later, it was screened in Toronto.

Terminator: The Complete Season Two was released on DVD on September 22.

On September 24, the CSI season 10 premiere aired. “Family Affair” is one of the five hours of television nominated for an ASC (American Society of Cinematographers) Award this year.

Speaking of CSI, in a fine display of Terminator fanboyism, the last episode before the break, Better off Dead, had a bunch of people stealing Cromartie’s music and killing each other. Also, a killer described as a Terminator.

On October 13, Oliver Sherman, an independent drama with Molly Parker and Donal Logue, went into production in North Bay. The film will most likely premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2010, but Canadians might get an early screening in the spring.

On October 21st, Garret appeared on Lie to Me.

And two days later, on Law & Order: SVU.

The Road finally saw its U.S. premiere at AFI fest in early November. On Thanksgiving, it got a limited release. Even though the film has been vastly overlooked in the early awards season, the reviews were mostly positive and it scored a few acting nods (Viggo Mortensen, Robert Duvall, Kodi Smit-McPhee) from several critics’ societies (Broadcast Film Critics, Utah Film Critics, St. Louis Film Critics).

On November 13, Garret appeared on White Collar.

And the next day, One Night Only had its premiere in New York.

In November, Garret was cast in two new projects. The comedy pilot Keep Hope Alive, with Martha Plimpton, Cloris Leachman and Lucas Neff, was filmed earlier this month. If it gets picked up, it will be aired in the 2010/11 season.

The other project, John Sayles’ film Baryo, starts shooting in February in the Philippines. The crew is already there, building the set and preparing for the shoot. You can follow the updates on the new production blog, at johnsaylesbaryo.blogspot.com.

And that about wraps it up. If 2010 is even half as eventful, it will be another excellent year.

Snippets:

Tell us a little bit about the plot of Burning Bright…

Carlos Brooks: Burning Bright is about an incredibly HOT CHICK trapped in a house with a TIGER during a HURRICANE. We had another version that explored the latent Freudian implications of her existential dilemma in terms of various indigenous animal myths, but we were running long, and something had to go… Oh yeah, and she has to face off with her demented stepfather, played by the brilliant Garret Dillahunt [The Road, The Last House On The Left - Ed], and all the while protecting her tripped-out little brother, played by newcomer prodigy Charlie Tahan. (…)

What was your reaction when you first read the screenplay? Because ours was ‘this sounds absolutely mental’.

Carlos Brooks: My first reaction, after I got over the crazy-sounding pitch, was to the extremely well crafted screenplay – which takes you by the hand and walks you into rural Florida where you have these low-rent wild animal preserves in people’s back yards, and where houses routinely get boarded up to protect from epic hurricanes.

Throw in a homicidal circus tiger bought on the cheap and one demented stepfather, and you have a story unlike that which we’ve ever seen, all of it rooted in reality. I found myself caught up in the girl’s struggle, and in the movie she becomes much more than just “the hot chick” – she becomes a thinking hero who has to use her wits and her household surroundings to outwit a natural predator who just happens to be stalking her from kitchen to bedroom. (…)

Did you have any tiger related accidents on the set? Did it take your direction well?

Carlos Brooks: No, the tiger didn’t like my direction. You find out early on that the tiger will rewrite your script for you. You may want the tiger to peer over the kitchen island. Then when you say “Action!” you find out the tiger’s idea is to actually leap up onto the island and crash into the hanging pots. You go with the tiger’s version. There were three tigers, actually. Once or twice they got loose on the set, but the trainers were the best in the business — had to be, we were getting very aggressive behavior. Nobody got hurt. Traumatized, perhaps. No injuries. (…)

Any news on a worldwide release? Will Burning Bright be released in cinemas or on DVD/Blu-Ray?

Carlos Brooks: None yet. Theatrical is still in the offing – we’re holding out. Of course it will be available on DVD worldwide, but the movie is worth seeing in the cinema. It’s a tough market these days, but this movie was made for movie lovers who actually still go out to the cinemas. Fortunately, everybody behind it believes in it so stay tuned. [TheShiznit.co.uk]

BURNING BRIGHT

A surly stepfather (Garret Dillahunt) has had enough of his stepdaughter and autistic stepson so he does what anyone would do: Set loose a ravenous circus tiger in their home. Trapped inside during a terrible hurricane, the two step kids must find a way to survive the night before they become tiger chow.

Believe it or not, Burning Bright isn’t anywhere near as ridiculous as it sounds and actually manages to build several intense set pieces. It’s a pretty conventional entry in the survivalist/nature-run-amok subgenre but it’s well executed enough and gets major props by forgoing CGI to use a real-life tiger in the carnage scenes. [Dread Central]

The movie opens with a hilarious exchange between Howie (Meatloaf) and Johnny Gavineau (Garret Dillahunt, who you might remember from THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT), where Johnny is looking to purchase a retired tiger from Howie in order to start a local safari in a get-rich-quick scheme. After attempting to swindle Howie into cutting the price, Meatloaf delivers an epic monologue that transforms this cute circus tiger into a blood-craving monstrosity. Following a good thirty minutes of character development – Johnny steals Kelly’s (Briana Evigan from SORORITY ROW) money that was being used to send her autistic brother into care so she could go off to college – the plot thickens when Kelly awakes to discover that there’s a tiger loose in her house. To worsen the situation, Johnny has boarded up the entire house from the outside to protect it from the hurricane. (…)

Watching this movie by myself just wasn’t fair; I was having too much fun and had nobody to share it with. There were moments that had me laughing, sometimes I cheered, and then there were a few occasions where I jumped out of my seat. RAVENOUS is straight-up FUN. [Bloody Disgusting]

Word just in from the AFM is that Carlos Brooks’ Burning Bright is being sold under the new title of Ravenous. (Not to be confused with the 1999 film of the same name starring Guy Pearce, Robert Carlyle and David Arquette) [ShockTillYouDrop.com]

First up is One Night Only, a short film with Kristen Wiig, that starts shooting one of these days in New York.

The mystery project, Oliver Sherman, is a psychological thriller written by Ryan Redford that goes into production in September in Toronto. Garret will play Oliver Sherman, a “damaged soldier who seeks out an old platoon buddy and his wife and tries to put some demons to rest.” Molly Parker will also star.

The third film, still a few months away, is Unbound Captives, a western drama/romance/epic set in the 1860s, written by Madeleine Stowe, who is also attached to direct it. (Interesting story about that here.)

The film is expected to start shooting toward the end of the year on locations in New Zealand and New Mexico. The story follows a woman named May (Rachel Weisz), whose two children are kidnapped and husband killed by the Comanche. She is rescued by a frontiersman, Tom Dearborn (Hugh Jackman), who later helps her search for the kids. Garret will play Jackman’s brother Jack and Robert Pattinson (Little Ashes, Twilight) has been cast as May’s son Phineas. John Toll (Braveheart, The Thin Red Line) will be the cinematographer. Producer Ashok Amritraj recently told the Deccan Herald that they are targeting an early 2011 release date.

And, to recap, between then and now:

The Last House on the Left is out on DVD on August 18
Life season two will be released on August 25
The Road might will premiere in Venice some time in early September (TBA July 30)
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles season two comes out on DVD on September 22
The CSI season premiere airs on September 24
Lie to Me episode 2×02 airs on October 5
The Road opens wide on October 16
Burning Bright is still slated for release in 2009, but no exact date yet
Winter’s Bone might premiere at Sundance in late January, but we won’t know for sure until December, when they release the official lineup

Finally, here is some footage of Garret’s co-stars trashing equipment on the set of Burning Bright, from The Hollywood Edge:

BD: Did you add anything to the existing script?
CB: Before we started shooting we had two or three script meetings. I added some ideas, but nothing structurally significant. At least I wouldn’t call anything I added significant. All the big set pieces were already envisioned. When we started shooting we learned quickly that the tiger will rewrite your script. In one scene he was supposed to put his front paws on the kitchen island and raise himself up to peer around the room. I called action and suddenly the tiger was leaping onto the stove and crashing into the hanging pots. We went with the tiger’s version.

BD: Was it hard mixing the two elements of a hurricane and a tiger into one suspenseful film?
CB: Not once I realized the two are really the same idea — just unbridled Nature. Suddenly then you’re not talking about good and evil. It’s actually more fearsome than that. Because you can’t read it. I think that’s why the hockey mask is such a classic horror image — that total absence of emotional cues — it’s just a force coming at you with a Benihana knife. You start to sense that the hockey mask itself has an intelligence that you can’t read. And that really creeps me out. I hooked into this story when I understood that tigers and hurricanes are just masks for the same merciless Nature. When you first encounter the premise of this movie, it can seem preposterous — to be trapped in a house with a tiger during a hurricane — but the hurricane is integral to explaining how that happened. In fact, I think my job is to take your hand and lead you in and show you how it happened, how it’s real, and if I do everything right, and you say, “Okay, now I get it,” then at some point it feels real enough for me to let go, and sort of say, “Okay, you’re on your own from here on.” And at that point, as my editor Miklos Wright likes to say, the movie takes over.

BD: How was it working with the tiger? Did the tiger ever work WITH any of the actors on set?
CB: The tigers — there were three, Katie, Sheka and Kizmet — did not work with the actors, due to the aggressive nature of the performances we were trying to get. We shot on a sound stage in Florida, next to the Universal theme park. Sometimes we were shooting the tiger on green screen and the actors on the set, and sometimes it was the reverse. But never the same days. We shot on a two story house built inside a sound stage, but that’s a pretty confined place to be moving around with three very large tigers. It was a locked set and some of our crew chose to leave the building before the tigers were let onto the set for a shot, and not return until the shot was over and they were back in their enclosure. And I understood why. Others, like our camera crew, worked face-to-face with the tigers for every shot because we had to get those shots. And again, you just can’t predict what’s going to happen. The trainers always want to do the crazy aggressive stuff last (in the shoot) because once a cat gets juiced up, you can’t really work with them again for awhile. For me the scariest moment was actually hearing the tiger’s warning growl when it feels you’re about to take it’s meal — that’s its most scary sound. When you hear it your body records it forever in the balls of your feet. Thankfully nobody ever got hurt, including the tigers.

BD: How bloody and violent is it?
CB: This is a thriller — with horror underpinnings, perhaps, but it’s not a horror movie, strictly speaking — so there is some but not a lot of gore until the end. When it does happen, it’s fairly gory. We’re still not sure if the ratings board is going to let us get away with what we have. And the funny thing is, at first I thought the gore we shot was not realistic enough. But at our first test screening I couldn’t believe how virtually everybody was totally repulsed by it! They wanted it to stop. I think it’s because even though we had used prosthetics, the tiger was still — again — 100% real. And therefore what happens very much comes off as disturbing. By the time the gag happens (so to speak) you haven’t been lulled into that CG complacency. My visual effects supervisor, Dan Schmit, actually promoted the concept of shooting as much “in-camera” as we could — even though it lessened his CG work. And it benefited the movie enormously. I think that’s the mark of good VFX. While it’s surprisingly easy to use gags and gore to get people squirming, it’s much better when you get them genuinely filled with dread first.

BD: How did the test screenings go, did you have to do any additional shooting?
CB: Test screenings are very instructive. Especially at this point in my career, I become a chemistry student — I sit there and ask why is the audience reacting this way in this moment? what is that moment doing for them? what if we cut three more frames? It’s all very instructive. Our first test screening told us the audience was much more interested in the tiger’s back story than we had anticipated. So we were able to shoot a scene with Meat Loaf doing a cameo that turned out very well. That was an additional scene, but there was no reshoot of anything previously filmed. That said, I will go on record and say that reshoots ought to be line items in film budgets. In fact, for Woody Allen I think they are. But what we did to improve our odds of getting what we needed out of the gates was we did not attempt to complete the tigers during principal photography. Instead, we set aside our green screen tiger days so that we could edit the film for awhile and discover exactly what was needed to complete it. It was a very successful strategy.

BD: What’s the release plans as of right now?
CB: Lionsgate has first crack, so we’ll let you know their release plans when they see the finished film. As it happens I’m off in about fifteen minutes to lay in the final end credit design.