Push, which comes out Feb. 6, is a total departure for McGuigan, who's known for films that are somewhat more rooted in reality. "I've never done an action sequence before, even though people think I have," he confesses. When the studio sent him the script originally, he wasn't sure why he was chosen: "I was a bit like, 'It's so funny. Why are you sending this to me? Nobody's dead on the first page.'"

But the producers wanted McGuigan to do the film because he could bring more realism to the premise, about kids who've got mental powers (like telekinesis, clairvoyance and mind control) as a result of government experiments. Instead of relying too much on CG effects, McGuigan wanted to make the film as real and naturalistic as possible. That meant lots of wire work — when you see star Chris Evans being flung around the ceiling — he's really being tossed around — and McGuigan's trademark camera-follows-the-actors style. In the end, the film does have about 500 CG shots, but uses practical effects way more than most similar films.

(Evans did a lot of his own stunts, but his stunt double got tossed so hard a few times, McGuigan wasn't sure if the guy was going to get up. But "he's from Australia, so who cares?") Here's one of the film's standout sequences, a telekinetic gun fight:

A more realistic approach also meant treating things like telekinesis — and the ability to make people bleed out using your mind — as if they were real phenomena. It helped that McGuigan went on the internet and found tons of sites where people were talking about the reality behind mental powers. And there were plenty of conspiracy sites where people claimed the government really did experiment on people after World War II to try and create superhumans.

McGuigan has always said Wong Kar-Wai is his favorite director, so it was terrific to get to make the entire film in Hong Kong, where Chris Evans' character has to hide out from the government agents chasing him. "You can hide in Hong Kong, there's millions of people in the streets. It's hard to track one person." McGuigan drew on Wong Kar-Wai classics like Chungking Express. He also avoided using real extras as much as possible — instead he relied on Hong Kong's own bustling masses, who barely reacted when they saw a kidnap or arrest happening nearby on the street. Instead of closing the street to film, McGuigan had special "hide cameras" made, which he could put on cars and streetlights, so bystanders wouldn't know he was making a movie. Instead of getting people to sign a release form, he had a "really really small notice" that said, "You are now entering a filming zone."

Another way that McGuigan reached for realism in Push was through the actors' throw-away performances. He rants about shows like 24, which have all the actors hissing through their teeth and chewing the scenery. "I don't know if you've ever seen 24, [it's] the worst acting I've ever seen."

Star Dakota Fanning, in particular, brings the whole sense of being fourteen years old to her punky character: all her hormones are going and she's intense and obnoxious and loveable all at the same time. "She's amazing," McGuigan says of Fanning. "I don't think I could have done this movie if she'd said no. I couldn’t have seen my way around it." And she knitted the director a scarf, which never happened with previous stars Bruce Willis or Josh Hartnett.

I asked McGuigan how overt all the stuff about the government experimenting on people and trying to create superhumans is in the film, and he said it starts off with a pseudo-documentary. "We explain the timeline, that after WWII and [during] the Cold War, the government experimented on humans. We take it that it went a bit further than we know." He delves a bit into the horrors of people being tested like lab rats, with the upshot being that they may be able to move a cup with their minds, but they also may be disabled or disfigured as a result. All because the government sees that power as a potential weapon.

And McGuigan is very up front about believing that governments are utterly corrupt and "aren't to be trusted... The government is evil."

I asked him if he saw any similarities between his film and Incredible Hulk, which also had the government experimenting on people to give him superpowers, and he insisted that his film is both more realistic, and a fresh take on the genre — partly because it's not based on an existing comic book. (Push is spawning a comic-book spinoff, but has no comics source material.) "The Incredible Hulk was a piece of shit," he said. He compared the CG-heavy giant fight scene at the end to a Tom And Jerry cartoon.

Another way the film strives for realism: it establishes very clear rules about what people can do with their powers, and then sticks to them very carefully. At the start of the movie, the super-powered characters aren't very good at using their powers, but they get better as the film goes along, and that's a big part of the movie's arc. "You can't change the rules because it suits you," says McGuigan. "You just can't make them up as you go along, because people like you will fucking crucify us."

What's changed, at the start of Push, is that people like Chris Evans' character, Nick Gant, are inheriting superpowers from their parents. The film refers to Gant as a "second-generation Mover" (or telekinetic.) That poses a challenge for the mysterious government agency Division, led by Djimon Hounsou, who are tasked with keeping all the people with superpowers under government control. Meanwhile, there's a superpowered arms race: the Chinese have their own superhumans, with different abilities, like "Bleeders," who can make you bleed out.

Finally, I asked McGuigan about those internet rumors that he was working on a movie based on Deathlok, Marvel Comics' cyborg character. "It wasn't a rumor, it was true," says McGuigan. He'd been working with Marvel and writer David Self on a Deathlok movie, but then Marvel put it on the back burner. "I was really into it, but Marvel changed their mind."

McGuigan got pretty excited about working on Deathlok, and he has all of the character's back comics. The biggest challenge in doing a Deathlok film would have been the fact that the killer cyborg is always having conversations with his on-board computer. "In a way it felt like Knight Rider, where you have the machine talking to him." It would have been a challenge to make that work on screen. "The script was really good. David Self is no slouch, he's a great screenwriter. And the whole idea of nanotechnology was fasinating." The movie included a "weird professor" character, who created Deathlok because he wanted to go down in history as another Da Vinci. (And McGuigan had envisioned Robert Downey Jr. for that character, which would have been a very different role than Tony Stark.)

"It would have been a good movie," he adds. "Maybe they'll still make it with somebody else."

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• Originally titled The Wiz Kid, this 1982 movie was meant to be a parody of Carrie. They both end at a dance, although Carrie's ending was quite a bit darker.
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• The plot of Zapped! is pretty simple: Science student Barney is working on a experiment, and through a series of events that he isn't aware of, other things (like whiskey) get added to his formula, and eventually this leads to a lab explosion. However, as a result both Barney and his lab rat (who we never see again) have developed telekinesis. Barney uses his powers to make Heather Thomas' shirt pop open, helps buddy Peyton (Willie Aames) woo Heather, makes his baseball team win, and finally lands a girlfriend. However, his girlfriend doesn't think he should use his powers for "evil", and this leads to a rift between Peyton and Barney. All is patched up in the end, however, and there's a huge naked scene to top it all off, as seen above.
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• Scott Baio played the lead character Barney Springboro, although the role of the rich boy best friend Peyton was supposed to be played by Greg Bradford. The producers decided to cast Willie Aames instead, hoping for a little more star power (Aames had just come off of Eight is Enough, and was also cast in Paradise with Phoebe Cates... a sort of Blue Lagoon ripoff with more T&A and Willie's willy). Bradford apparently held a grudge against the producers for this.
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• Baio and Aames would go on to star together in Charles in Charge, and Aames would also go on to appear as... Bibleman.
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• Heather Thomas was cast as snooty cheerleader Jane Mitchell, but she was never into the nudity in the film. In fact, she had the producers put a line in the credits stating that they used a body double for her topless scenes. That wasn't enough, however, and she later sued them, stating that no one reads the credits anyway, and people would assume those were her breasts on screen. Um, duh?
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• To that end, Thomas wears a body stocking in the famous scene at the end where Baio makes her dress fly off. Thanks the the wonders of DVD (which this film just appeared on for the first time in February), you can see this pretty clearly.
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• Even more bizarre was the fact that when an advertisement came out in the Los Angeles Times, readers complained that the characters in the poster could see up the girl's skirt. Now mind you, the advertisement didn't show that, and the complaints were based on the point of view of the painted versions of Scott Baio and Willie Aames. As a result, the artist had to go back and extend the skirt, so even Baio and Aames can't quite see up it. Stupid, but true. See the main image up above for the modified artwork, then weep for humanity.
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• The film has a couple of scifi cameos, including Merrick Buttrick who went on to play Captain Kirk's son David in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and Eddie Deezen who would later be ubernerd (the only role he played) Malvin in WarGames.
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• There's also an entire Star Trek parody scene in the movie when Barney comes home after the lab explosion and his parents think he's on drugs. He gets grounded in his room, and uses his new powers to make a model spaceship fly, apparently through an aquarium, and into his dog's mouth.
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• The most bizarre role in the film probably belongs to Scatman Crothers, who had worked on The Shining just a year or two before. Imagine going from working with Stanley Kubrick to playing a pot-smoking baseball coach. There's a truly bizarre scene where he gets high and imagines he's with Albert Einstein and fleeing from his wife, who is chasing after them with a salami-firing bazooka. Strange, but true.
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• There's a whole fan club devoted to Zapped! at MSN Groups, and they feature things like in-depth analysis photos of all the different versions of the movie. Particularly whenever Jane's clothes pop open.
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• Oddly enough, Zapped! spawned a sequel in 1990, Zapped Again!. In this update, a student finds Barney's old formula hidden in a wall, and uses it to more naked abandon. Linda Blair stars as a fairly hot teacher, and the only cast member to return was was Sue Ane Langdon, who played randy teacher Rose Burnhart.
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• The Onion covered it best when they published this image from their Alternate History newspaper:

• The 1975 movie was based on the 1968 book of the same name by Alexander Key. Sadly, most of his novels, including Sprocket: A Little Robot and Bolts: A Robot Dog, are out of print. You can read and download some of these here.
• Don't let the name fool you, Escape To Witch Mountain isn't about witches at all, but about super-powered alien kids who don't know they're aliens.
• Remember the creepy and slightly spooky overture music? If not, you can hear it right here.
• In fact, want to watch the opening credit sequence? Well, here you go.
• Tony and Tia, the original Wonder Twins, both possess telekinesis, although Tony can only use it when he plays his harmonica. Tia can also telepathically speak to mammals, and to Tony. Looks like she got the lion's share of the cool stuff.
• Unlike Zan and Jayna, Tony and Tia have difficulty controlling their powers, which leads to several mishaps. Like Tia having to free every captive animal who can talk to her.
• Tony was played by Ike Eisenmann, who Trek fans will immediately recognize as Midshipman Peter Preston, who Scotty brings to the bridge of the Enterprise in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Perhaps if he'd taken the mortally wounded kid to sick bay, he might have survived.
• Kim Richards, who plays Tia, is the aunt of both Nicky and Paris Hilton, which isn't really that interesting, but more mind-boggling.
• Both Ike and Kim would be reunited as brother and sister in the extremely forgettable Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell TV movie in 1978.
• The Twins' Uncle Bene is played by Denver Pyle, better known as Uncle Jesse from The Dukes of Hazzard, which Kim Richards later appeared on as Cooter's daughter. Now that's just weird.
• They encounter Jason O'Day (Eddie Albert) who lives in a Winnebago and travels around the country. He ends up helping them out, and probably made kids everywhere think Winnebago's were cool. (I know it did for me, in fact my parents bought me a little scale model Winnie after I saw this movie).
• The bad guy in the movie, Aristotle Bolt, seems like a genial rich man who just want to save kids from the orphanage. Of course, he really wants the twins for their abilities. However, he does have a pretty cool name and lived in a replica of a Byzantine castle that was built by Templeton Crocker between 1926 and 1934 from lava rock from Mt. Vesuvius and materials gathered all over Europe.
• The twins eventually discover (via their little leather "star case") that they are actually aliens from a binary star system who fled to Earth because their own world was dying. They're reunited with others from their planet, and they fly off in their spaceship for the sanctuary of Witch Mountain, never to return.
• That is until Disney made a sequel, Return From Witch Mountain, in 1978. In this movie, Tony and Tia have been training hard to use their powers and to learn about their own kind. In fact, they've been working so hard that the elders let them have a vacation in Los Angeles. What, two superkids on a vacation in L.A.? Nothing could possibly go wrong, right?
• If you want to see a movie trailer that says 1970s as loud of possible, then you're in for a treat. This trailer for Return features Christopher Lee, Bette Davis, andthe words "far out," "molecular mobilization," and "intergalactic energization." Is it me, or does that announcer sound like the guy from the old Batman TV show?
• In the sequel, Christopher Lee plays evil mad scientist Dr. Victor Gannon, and he uses a mind-control device he's invented on Tony, eventually pitting twin against twin in a battle of telekinesis. Bette Davis plays Letha Wedge (what a name), who has been financing the bad doctor's experiments.
• Sadly, there's no Eddie Albert in the sequel. It was also Jack Soo's final film, having been best known for playing Det. Sgt. Nick Yemana on Barney Miller. It was probably the coffee.
• In 1982 Disney made a television pilot called Beyond Witch Mountain, which featured a return of Eddie Albert as Jason and his Winnebago, but they recast everyone else, from the kids all the way to down to Aristotle Bolt. This was meant to become an ongoing series with the kids and Jason finding other alien kids and helping them get back home, but it never got that far and never went to series.
• Disney remade the original film back in 1995, with some major changes to the script. The twins are now named Danny and Anna, and they are separated as infants (who have full-fledged telekinesis), but are later reunited accidentally when they're older. Land developer Edward Bolt (the always evil Robert Vaughn) finds out about their powers, and plans to use them to blow up the entrance to Witch Mountain... without explosives. Way to use that power, Edward.
• It wasn't as charming as the original movie, and wasn't nearly as well received. You can find out why by watching the first 10 minutes right here.

• Telekinesis: This power is the most common among the three. While the X-Men had "Marvel Girl" Jean Grey who could move things just by thinking about them, The 4400 have Richard Tyler and his mega-powered daughter Isabelle, both of whom share telekinesis. Of course, the first ability that Sylar ever took from anyone on Heroes was also telekinesss, which he put to extreme use by opening up people's brain cavities.
• Healing: Woverine's enviable healing ability has spawned numerous knockoffs, including both Claire and Takezo Kensei on Heroes. On The 4400, Shawn can't heal himself, but he does have the ability to heal others, and in a clever twist he can reverse this ability and injure others as well. While it doesn't have the instant pizazz that Wolverine and Claire get when they grow their own face back, it's a nice adaptation of that ability.
  
• Telepathy: The ability to read minds and project thoughts has long been a mainstay in the X-Men books, and The 4400 seem to have most of their powers stem from the mind. Last year police officer Matt Parkman on Heroes was the only person who could read minds, but this season he seems to be able to project his thoughts outwards to others as well. Isabelle on The 4400 is something of a wunderkind among the 4400, and counts telepathy as just one of her many abilities.
• Precognition: The ability to tell the future always seems to be popular, but it also always seems to come with a price. On Heroes, Isaac Mendez could paint visions of the future, but he couldn't escape his own death at Sylar's hand, which he had painted previously. The 4400's young Maia can see visions of the future, which she records in diaries. This is similar to the X-Men character called Destiny who also recorded her visions in diaries. Although she is now dead, her diaries were one of the main plot points of the 2001 — 2004 series "Xtreme X-Men."
• Creating illusions: Creating illusions and different realities for people happens in the X-Men with Psylocke, Candice does it on Heroes (until Sylar bashes her head in) as does Matt's father, and Alana on The 4400shares this trait. Matt's father can actually trap people in that reality, leaving their body in a comatose state, making him particularly nasty.

• Until Claire pops some claws out of her hands, or Isabelle starts calling herself Marvel Girl, we'll consider them more as loving tributes instead of a direct knockoff. Although The 4400 needs to stir things up a bit and start handing out some alternate powers. Heroes has them beat in that area, with new powers popping up every week. Of course, with Heroes' "Volume Two" wrapping up very soon, we'll see who survives the cut.

Sarah Jane normally has a Scooby gang of three teenagers helping her. But she lost custody of her vat-grown "son" Luke after some evil aliens went on television and pretended to be his "real" parents. And she had a fit of conscience about exposing her neighbor kid Maria to the dangers of alien fart monsters like the Slitheen. It won't last, of course. But it's nice to see Sarah Jane uncovering sinister basketball wankers on her own.