Live Wire

Stephen Lang,the veteran actor who played villanous Col Miles Quaritch in the international blockbuster Avatar,is now back in another militaristic character of possibly dubious distinction,on the small screen in Fox’s wildly ambitious,very expensive Terra/Nova,a sci-fi/action/family-drama mash-up-produced by,among others,Steven Spielberg and Star Trek mastermind Brannon Braga—that will debut next week. Terra Nova opens in 2149 on a nearly uninhabitable Earth. To seek at least a shot at a better life,some people embark on one-way journeys-so-called “pilgrimages”-85 million years into the past. There,at a compound called Terra Nova,the residents work,live and struggle to avoid both ravenous dinosaurs and rogue pilgrims referred to as Sixers. Lang plays Commander Nathaniel Taylor,the no-nonsense leader of Terra Nova.

The Human Centipede,a 2010 horror movie directed by Dutch filmmaker Tom Six,has become a cult sensation as a video-on-demand offering and has been referred to on mainstream shows like South Park because of its simple,memorable and thoroughly unnerving premise: a mad doctor who surgically combines three human captives into a single organism by stitching them together,mouth to anus. Now its sequel,The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) about an obsessed Human Centipede fan,Martin,who tries to recreate the original movie’s “experiment” in a dingy London warehouse has run into trouble before its screening. When it was presented to the British Board of Film Classification ,the board refused to give it any rating at all meaning that the movie cannot be shown or sold legally in that country.

Taylor Lautner,the 19-year-old actor who is a big part of the Twilight mix,but plays second fiddle to Robert Pattinson’s Edward and Kristen Stewart’s Bella,is now the undisputed star,playing Nathan,a young man trying to track down himself in his new thriller Abduction. After three Twilight films,and with two more in the offing,he was happy to be playing a human being vying with other human beings. No werewolves nor vampires need apply.”It’s important for me to try something different and change it up,” Lautner says. “This was nothing like what I had done in the past. I play this high-school senior who finds a picture of himself on a missing-persons Web site,” he continues. “He discovers that his entire life has been a lie. I was super-excited to do this film,because the story keeps you on the edge of your seat.”