After keeping Christian Alvart's "Case 39" on a shelf for more than two years, Paramount will finally release the Renee Zellweger-Bradley Cooper horror film on Oct. 1 through its Paramount Vantage label, reports Variety.
Zellweger stars as a social worker who is assigned to investigate the parents of a 10-year-old girl (Jodelle Ferland, "Eclipse"). After they try to kill her, the girl comes to live with Zellweger, who soon discovers that her new houseguest may not be so innocent.
Ian McShane ("Deadwood") co-stars as a cop.
Alvart shot the movie in Vancouver in late 2006. It was originally scheduled for release in Feb. 2008 before being delayed until April 2009 and then Jan. 1 of this year.
I watched the film for free on a Delta Airlines flight to Atlanta in June and was surprised that the studio has delayed it for this long.
While "Case 39" is hardly anything special, it's a completely releasable movie that provides serviceable scares and is thoroughly watchable.
There's actually one sequence featuring Cooper trapped in a bathroom with some vicious bees that was quite effective.
The film has grossed nearly $15 million at the foreign box office including over $3 million in both Mexico and Spain, where Variety says the movie "struck a chord." As a result, Paramount's domestic marketing campaign will focus on the Hispanic market, although I'm not terribly sure why.
Anonymous Content and Misher Films produced the project, which was spearheaded by former Paramount chief Brad Weston.
Alvart is the German filmmaker who first landed on Hollywood's radar in 2005 with the serial killer thriller "Antibodies" (which is dying to be remade in the U.S.) only to squander that good will with his third film, the 2009 disasterpiece "Pandorum." His next project is the German film "8 Uhr 28."
