David Tennant, best known for starring in the BBC series "Doctor Who," and Christopher Mintz-Plasse are joining the cast of "Fright Night," a remake of the cult 1985 film.

Anton Yelchin stars as Charlie, a teen convinced that his new neighbor (Colin Farrell) is a vampire. Toni Collette is the teen's disbelieving mom, who falls under the vampire's spell.

Tennant will play Peter Vincent, a character who in the original movie was played by Roddy McDowall as the host of a late-night horror show. In the remake, he's a Las Vegas magician whose show revolves around horror-movie imagery. Vincent claims to be a vampire expert, but when the teen turns to him for assistance, he's less than helpful.

Mintz-Plasse is playing Evil Ed, Yelchin's friend who feels slighted that Charlie has left his nerdy past behind and thus joins the vampire's coven.

The DreamWorks movie marks the first real foray into America for Tennant. He starred in the NBC pilot "Rex Is Not Your Lawyer," but it did not get picked up.

Mintz-Plasse, meanwhile, is continuing to show that there is life after McLovin, the character he played in his acting debut in "Superbad." He recently was onscreen as the Red Mist in "Kick-Ass."

Now filming up in Toronto, Canada is Universal Pictures and Strike Entertainment's The Thing, which will serve as a prelude to John Carpenter's classic 1982 film of the same name. Starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Joel Edgerton, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Dennis Storhøi, the plot details for the Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. directed creature feature have changed over the course of different drafts by Ronald D. Moore and Eric Heisserer (A Nightmare on Elm Street), but we've now received the OFFICIAL synopsis release by Uni. Check it out below. The Thing lands on Earth April 29, 2011.

"Antarctica: an extraordinary continent of awesome beauty. It is also home to an isolated outpost where a discovery full of scientific possibility becomes a mission of survival when an alien is unearthed by a crew of international scientists. The shape-shifting creature, accidentally unleashed at this marooned colony, has the ability to turn itself into a perfect replica of any living being. It can look just like you or me, but inside, it remains inhuman. In the thriller THE THING, paranoia spreads like an epidemic among a group of researchers as they’re infected, one by one, by a mystery from another planet. Paleontologist Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) has traveled to the desolate region for the expedition of her lifetime. Joining a Norwegian scientific team that has stumbled across an extraterrestrial ship buried in the ice, she discovers an organism that seems to have died in the crash eons ago. But it is about to wake up. When a simple experiment frees the alien from its frozen prison, Kate must join the crew’s pilot, Carter (Joel Edgerton), to keep it from killing them off one at a time. And in this vast, intense land, a parasite that can mimic anything it touches will pit human against human as it tries to survive and flourish."

If you hadn't noticed... that's a woman's name... for a "prelude" of the original...which they are telling us will have two survivors or main characters by end of the film... and that the Americans/Canadians/English-speaking folk in the original were oblivious to the fact that the parasite was unleashed, even though there are obvious English-speaking prudes walking to take credit for a Norwegian find... which means this "prelude" is not a "prelude" at all since the film would have been a Norwegian-only-speaking film if based on Carpenter's film...

Keeping up with the output of Japanese director Takashi Miike can be a difficult task. He’s slowed down somewhat in recent years, with only two films this year and two in 2009. But he’s still one of the most prodigious filmmakers alive, with a habit of burning like a wildfire through one feature project after another.

Now, just after 13 Assassins (his remake of a samurai picture from 1963) played to good notice at the Venice and Toronto Film Festivals, he’s booked another remake. This time Miike will turn his attention to a new version of the 1962 samurai classic Harakiri, and it will be his first film in 3D.

Variety says that Miike has Ebizo Ichikawa set to star, and the film will shoot in October for release in 2011.

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The original Harakiri is a classic of the samurai genre, and landed in the Criterion Collection a few years back. Here’s the company’s synopsis of the film, under which you can find the trailer:

"Following the collapse of his clan, unemployed samurai Hanshiro Tsugumo (Tatsuya Nakadai) arrives at the manor of Lord Iyi, begging to commit ritual suicide on his property. Iyi’s clansmen, believing the desperate ronin is merely angling for charity, try to force him to eviscerate himself—but they have underestimated his honor and his past. Winner of the 1963 Cannes Film Festival’s Special Jury Prize, Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri is a scathing denouncement of feudal authority and hypocrisy.