Machete - a movie that is as dangerous as it is explosive upon watching it.

Danny Trejo, the craggy-faced, tough-guy character actor who has appeared in almost 200 movies and TV shows, was in the middle of an autograph session in London in 2007 with director Robert Rodriguez to promote the release of Grindhouse when he encountered an unusually devoted fan.

“This guy came up to me and lifted his shirt, and he had a huge tattoo of [me as] Machete on his back,” recalls Trejo, who usually plays a villain who gets blown away by the hero. “He asked me to autograph it and then said he was going to have my signature permanently tattooed. That’s when I turned to Robert and said `You better make this movie, and you better make it good.’ ”

At that time, Machete — the story of a Mexican Federale who fights corruption and drug dealers with the eponymous blade — wasn’t a real film. Rodriguez had directed a fake trailer for the movie that was shown during the three-hour Grindhouse, an epic homage to 1970s exploitation pictures. Grindhouse was a disappointment at the box office, grossing $25 million worldwide.

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The Avatar DVD is already out on release. However it doesn’t have any special features worthy of mention. The special edition DVD (and Blu Ray) comes out in November and will contain many extra special features that director James Cameron himself supervised.

In November, you can buy a box set with all the bells and whistles. It’s got like forty-five minutes of unfinished deleted scenes that exist in a supplement where you can just play the scenes individually.

But it’s all a big negotiation with the studios; how much money do they want to spend on these sort of revisionist versions of the movie?

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What the Venice film festival lacks in star power this year it hopes to make up for with an unusually young list of directors and the appearance of some of Hollywood’s more enigmatic figures.

With the irrepressible Quentin Tarantino heading the jury that hands out the coveted Golden Lion at the end of the September 1-11 event, it is fitting that mavericks and misfits more than movie royalty look set to steal the headlines.

“In a way Venice can still hold itself up and say ‘we’ve got the edgier American people coming, as you have Vincent Gallo and Monte Hellman, for example,” said Jay Weissberg, film critic for trade publication Variety who is based in Italy.

“It makes it look as if they are holding up the art side of cinema.”

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TAKERS

Director: John Luessenhop
Stars: Chris Brown, Hayden Christensen, Matt Dillon
Studio: Screen Gems

The Plot: A hard-boiled detective (Dillon) gets in between a group of bank robbers and their plan to make away with a $20 million bounty.

THE LAST EXORCISM

Director: Daniel Stamm
Stars: Patrick Fabian, Ashley Bell, Iris Bahr
Studio: Lionsgate

The Plot: A troubled evangelical minister (Fabian) agrees to let his last exorcism be filmed by a documentary crew, where a possessed young (Bell) brings him face to face with the devil himself.

MESRINE: KILLER INSTINCT

Director: Jean-François Richet
Stars: Vincent Cassell
Studio: Music Box Films

The Plot: Jacques Mesrine (Cassel) returns to the suburbs of Paris after serving in the Algerian War. Seduced by the allure of wealth and and mentored by a veteran criminal (Depardieu), Mesrine embarks on what will become a legendary life of international crime and fame

CENTURION

Director: Neil Marshall
Stars: Michael Fassbender, Dominic West, Olga Kurylenko
Studio: Magnet Releasing

The Plot: Roman soldiers led by Quintus Dias (Fassbender) raid an enemy camp in an effort to save a captured general (West). Soon, the Romans will find themselves hunted by a group of Picts — the Empire’s more formidable enemies — and their best shot at surviving the hunt is in the hands of a tracker (Kurylenko) bent on revenge.

The movie Takers arrives on screen this weekend. It might make a little dent on the box-office despite a stellar, all round cast to sell the movie to the public. But like any movie, the behind the scenes story toward its production took a long time before issues were resolved, among them the availability of director John Luessenhop.

So when filmmaker John Luessenhop told Screen Gems five years ago that his 4-year-old son was gravely ill and that he needed to drop everything to care for him, Luessenhop could reasonably assume that the studio would find a new director for ”Takers.” Luessenhop was about to start filming just as his son suffered a seizure and stopped breathing.

But in a town notorious for its heartlessness — Disney once fired its production head while she was in a labor and delivery room with her partner — Sony’s genre film label refused to ditch Luessenhop, and waited three years as the lawyer-turned-director cared for his son.

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Since coming on to the horror film scene fifteen years ago with “Cabin Fever,” filmmaker Eli Roth made a name for himself in the genre with the “Hostel” franchise. An occasional actor, he got a chance to shine last year as the infamous “The Bear Jew” in Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds.”

Roth sat down with Reuters to discuss his latest producing effort, “The Last Exorcism,” which opens in U.S. movie theaters on Friday. The film is about a minister who lets a documentary crew film his last exorcism. A non-believer who has swindled plenty believers in the past, he is unprepared for what he encounters.

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The new Piranha 3D movie is inspired by the classic movie from the late 70s. The style is still campy and the second Piranha movie actually gave rise to the most successful movie director of all time (aka King of the World). To understand the genesis of the new Piranha 3D movie, we must go back  in time to the original.

Following the release of Jaws, legendary exploitation-movie producer Roger Corman hired fledgling director Joe Dante to direct a rip-off movie about small, killer fish. The result was 1978?s gore-drenched, but tongue-in-cheek Piranha, which cost less than $1 million to make and grossed around $14 million in the U.S. alone. The sequel, 1981?s Piranha II: The Spawning, was directed by first-time film-maker James Cameron. The future Avatar and Titanic auteur was fired midway through the film’s shoot in Jamaica, and the movie was not a commercial success. But this disappointing experience did inspire Cameron to write his breakthrough movie, Terminator.

To say James Cameron has enjoyed more success over the past three decades than has the Piranha franchise is putting matters very mildly indeed. The only “new” Piranha movie made between 1981?s Piranha II and this week’s Piranha 3D was a Mila Kunis-starring remake of Joe Dante’s original which Roger Corman produced for cable in 1995.

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Visual effects are the bane of Hollywood movies and jobs in the industry are starting to disappear to more distant locations. As global competitors creep up on Hollywood’s expensive salaries, studios want to maximize their investments and save money. So how bad is it in the visual effects industry if you’re considering a career?

If you want to see the names driving Hollywood’s growth, you have to stay for the movie’s credits. The very end of the credits. After the actors and electricians — sometimes even after the people who serve the tacos on set — come the visual-effects artists. These are the people who make superheroes fly and cities fall into the ocean, and the effects-reliant films they work on, like Avatar and the Harry Potter franchise, are Hollywood’s biggest moneymakers. 

Their place in the credits says something about visual effects (VFX) artists’ place in the Hollywood pecking order. Ironically, just as they are peaking in creativity and propelling box-office hits, VFX companies are facing a crisis years in the making. Thanks to fierce global competition, the hangover from Hollywood labor unrest and a lack of negotiating power with studios, many VFX firms are closing up shop or outsourcing to stay afloat.

Prehistoric killer fish will get another chance to sink their teeth into audiences in an upcoming sequel to “Piranha 3D.”

Dimension Films, which released the over-the-top thriller this past weekend, announced Monday that part two is in the works.

“Piranha 3D” didn’t have a great opening, debuting in sixth place at the box office with $10.1 million. But it got an overwhelmingly strong critical reception, earning 81 percent positive reviews on the Rotten Tomatoes website.

The movie follows a pack of piranha unleashed on spring breakers partying on an Arizona lake. Mass carnage ensues. Elisabeth Shue, Ving Rhames and Jerry O’Connell star.