To mark the release of The Cape on DVD 26th September, Universal Playback have given us five copies of the movie to give away.

Lose yourself in the criminal underbelly of California, as The Cape attempts to rid the streets of the ultra violent gang who rule the streets. Featuring a stellar cast of the screen’s top talent, the Emmy nominated series is yours to own on DVD from 26^th September 2011, courtesy of UNIVERSAL PLAYBACK.

Framed for murder and left for dead by one of the meanest bosses of the criminal underworld, forcing him into hiding and estranging him from his family, ex-cop Vince Faraday (David Lyons – ER & Eat Pray Love) takes the law into his own hands. The gangsters of California were fools to think Vince would stand by and let this happen. Named after his son’s beloved comic-book hero, Faraday becomes The Cape, a cloaked vigilante on a voracious hunt for the crime lord that set him up.

Ably supported by investigative blogger Orwell (Summer Glau – The Sarah Connor Chronicles), Faraday pits himself up against ultra-violent villain Chess (James Frain – True Blood & Flashforward) in his aim to defeat Chess and eradicate his various henchmen – including A-Lister Vinnie Jones (X-Men, Smokin’ Aces, Lock Stock and Two Smokin’ Barrels).

For your chance to win simply answer this question using the form below:

Who plays the character ‘Orwell in the movie, The Cape?

COMPETITION NOW CLOSED

The small print:

• Open to UK residents only
• Only one entry per household will be counted
• The competition will close 3rd October at 23.59 GMT
• The winner will be picked at random from entries received
• No cash alternative is available

The usual T&Cs can be found here. Good Luck!

More hilarity from Comic-Con as Joe Lynch’s Knights of Badassdom brings its LARPing fun to San Diego and here’s what the gathering army of fans have been waiting for as the first trailer for the film has been unveiled.

Peter Dinklage, Ryan Kwanten, Steve Zahn and Summer Glau lead the field in this tale of role players who unleash a furious demon and have to send back to hell. A Comic-Con audience is the perfect place to showcase the first trailer of Lynch’s geek infused fantasy film and Lynch’s heavy metal horror film looks to have made good on its promise.

Here’s the trailer, which pretty much sells me on the film.

Yet more images from the gift that keeps on giving as Entertainment Weekly publish one of the few pictures we’ve seen for Joe Lynch’s Knights of Badassdom and here we get our chance to see Firefly favourite Summer Glau stand up with True Blood’s Ryan Kwanten, and there’s also a bonus image of Peter Dinklage.

Last September Craig posted 5 Reasons to be excited about Knights of Badassdom, and it’s recommended reading if you’re not sure what the fuss is about. Director Joe Lynch has talked about his influences for the film (An American Werewolf in London among them) and the cast he has assembled, including Steve Zahn and Sorkin favourite Joshua Malina, promise much.

The film’s Facebook page gave this one up and keep an eye as they have been known to release things on their page first. Click to make it go big.

Slowly but surely the Badsassdom bandwagon is hitting its stride with the second official image from the film released today.

Spitting the pics as their Facebook ‘army’ lunges past numerical milestones, the Knights who say ‘Larp’ gifted us this delightful image of Peter Dinklage about to lay waste to Ryan Kwanten’s larynx. In the background is a van, which may as well have a supporting actor credit given the amount of attention it has garnered online – it certainly seems that Joe Lynch and his team have done their research.

If you missed the first image from the film click ye here, and if you’re into the whole Facebooking thing check them out here.

Crane open those eyelids and feast visually on this, then click on it to make your delight bigger,

Keep abreast of the badassery on  Twitter or the official site

The answer is clearly yes, yes you do.

With the film’s official Facebook page reaching the requisite fan count of a thousand souls the team have released the first official image from the film showing off the brooding eyes of Lord Peter Dinklage* as Sir Hung. Dinklage stars alongside Ryan Kwanten, Steve Zahn, Summer Glau, and Margarita Levieva.

Joe Lynch’s film takes the premise of live action role players who summon a demon and take on their assumed roles to fight it back to Hell or wherever. In order to enthuse you further, or convince you of the many reasons why you should be looking forward to this one I can do no better than Craig Skinner who posted his 5 Reasons to be Excited about Knights of Badassdom – it’s well worth a read.

Follow along on Twitter or the official site as more is promised to be revealed soon, and if the title Knights of Badassdom doesn’t get you interested well… you’re already dead.

Click it to get it big and show to your friends,

*Not officially a Lord, but the title seemed to suit the name.

Way back at Frightfest 2009 news broke that Joe Lynch was going to be working on a new film, incredibly entitled Knights of Badassdom.

It was John Landis who ‘announced’ it on stage and explained how the script had originally been brought to him but deciding it wasn’t right for him, he recommended Lynch.

Lynch actually described the tone of Knights of Badassdom as “very much, An American Werewolf in London”.

A year has passed since then and this summer Lynch shot the film in Spokane and is currently immersed in editing it.

Although there have been no posters or trailers yet (the kind of things that normally get people excited) anticipation is beginning to build around this film and potentially rightly so as this really could be great and here are five reasons why.

1. Joe Lynch

Lynch has actually only directed one feature length film and it was Wrong Turn 2: Dead End, a straight to video sequel to a pretty terrible film. What was so surprising about Wrong Turn 2 though was that what looked on paper to be destined for mediocrity turned out to be a darn sight better than anyone was expecting. With a hit and miss script and a spirited but slightly lacking cast Joe Lynch managed to pull something quite remarkable out of it. His enthusiasm and love for genre cinema is apparent in the film and it is these qualities that could help make Knights of Badassdom a really enjoyable film.

2. The premise

Knights of Badassdom is written by Matt Wall and Kevin Dreyfuss and Lynch describes the film as a “heavy metal horror adventure”. The film involves live action role playing that gets very real.

Here’s a breakdown of the plot (Supplied by Matt Wall via AllianceLarp)

STORY LINE: A huge group of dedicated, costumed LARPers (Live Action Role Players), dressed like knights, elves and various characters, give up their cell phones and take to the woods for the Central New Jersey Knights of Badassdom Adventure Society, where they are set to re-enact a dungeons and dragons scenario right out of the mythical Middle Ages. After being dumped by his sexy girlfriend Beth, Joe reluctantly decides to join Eric and his Larping friends in the woods rather than stay behind and feel sorry for his newly single status. There he meets hot, ass-kicking, intimidating huntress LARPer Gwen, and finds himself a surreal adventure wilder than he ever imagined when a make-believe wizard casts an all-too-real spell from an ancient book he bought on Ebay, releasing an actual demon with a taste for human blood — and souls — that starts systematically decimating the players in this suddenly deadly “game.” Will our guys become the heroes they have been pretending to be before time runs out?…

3. The gore/special effects

With special effects supplied by Spectral Motion (who have worked on the Hellboy films amongst other things) combined with large swords and Joe Lynch’s love of inventive kills, Knights of Badassdom is sure to splatterific (if that’s not a word it should be) and contain some pretty great practical effects and a lot of fake blood. Coming via Joe Lynch’s blog the below image gives us an idea of what we might be in store for.

4. The cast

Lynch has assembled a great cast for Knights of Badassdom, with Summer Glau, Steve Zahn, Ryan Kwanten and Peter Dinklage all confirmed. You can see Miss Glau pictured above holding a really big sword (lets be honest, for a lot of us that picture alone sells the film). Although there’s no information on the roles that each actor has in the film the list of actors is a pretty interesting selection.

Steve Zahn has had a recent peak in his career thanks to appearing as a recurring character in David Simon’s Treme and is a really solid and likeable actor.

Ryan Kwanten seems to be destined to be a star with his popular performance in TV series True Blood and his fantastic performance in Red Hill and after the latter in particular I’m really looking forward to seeing what Kwanten does next.

Peter Dinklage is an intelligent actor who seems to have a great eye for picking interesting films and this could be one of them.

5. The music

Bear McCreary (who is probably best known for scoring Battlestar Galactica) is scoring Knights of Badassdom and with Lynch’s affection for metal and the description “heavy metal horror adventure” I think we can expect something loud and heavy with shredding and some nice drop D power chords.

We will of course be bringing you all the news on the film as soon we have more.

Let us know in the comments if you’re excited about Knights of Badassdom.

Photo source : Joe Lynch’s blog. Lynch with swords photo taken by Matt Wall.

With the explosive end to the first season of T:TSSC all we were left with, excepting a charred robot corpse, were questions, and given the seemingly constant threat of cancellation most US TV shows seem to live with it’s gratifying that giving T:TSSC a second series allowed the creators to delve further into the Terminator mythology and spend more time in industrial labyrinths and watching things get blown up. And it looks beautiful in Blu-ray.

What I enjoyed most about the first series was the glimpses of the future world, so evocatively rendered in the first two Terminator films, and how the present is informed by our knowledge of the future world, and how the extended Connor family survive under the weight of the expectation that knowledge bought. Now with Cameron, the friendly Terminator, fizzing and popping a spark or two and her possibly sinister agenda is given more air to breathe, further soldiers from the future sent back to help, or hinder, Sarah Connor and her son John becoming the future leader of the resistance, and the formative years of Skynet and Cyberdyne and their AI experiments, the second series of T:TSSC is an improvement on the first in every way.

There is no better way to discover a new series than on a DVD box set, and if you’ve not yet caught up with this show I’d recommend it, particularly if Terminator: Salvation left you colder than a red-eyed exoskeleton. The trials and tribulations of the present and future John Connor are enhanced greatly by the luxury of time a 22 episode run allows, and the more we learn of the birth of the software and systems which become the murderous Terminator AI and the ethical questions it poses adds considerable depth to the original Terminator films.

Though they cannot compete on an action level, and often lapse (but never dally for too long) into family soap opera territory, each episode is a self contained part of the Terminator puzzle, and this series becomes more about the machines than the humans. And – yes, there is the patented Terminator hunt with stone faced chases and shotguns taking chunks out of everything and lots of staring at computer screens and talk of destiny and fate, but it works, and you’ll find yourself sucked in.

The sad news is that this series was canceled after this season, and would have benefited from another season or a final mini series. While not many people mourned its, seemingly inevitable, fall from the network’s graces it is far less trivial and ephemeral than much that survived on the TV schedules. Don’t mistake me – this is not The Wire, nor does it do too well in the comparisons with the recent Battlestar Galactica series (which it shares themes of paranoia and conflict between man and machine), but it is a solid world and asks interesting questions and has a lot to say about the themes of the Terminator series.

It’s worth your time, and worth seeking out on Blu-ray. You’ll get 22 episodes of which only a few are throwaway, characters that may take their time in settling down but by the end they are comfortable in their skin and the writers allow them to drive the story, making for an enjoyable watch. And casting Garbage diva Shirley Manson may seem an odd choice but it works.

There are the obligatory gag reels, deleted scenes and commentaries on the discs, and it’s well presented and strong enough to make it worthwhile watch. We’ve got a couple of clips below and the Blu-ray and DVDs are out now.