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The ridiculously mixed bag of films this January has provided continues this week with three new offerings that include among them what is likely to be the strangest wide release of the year, and that's not even the one with witches.

After an almost year-long delay, Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters hits theaters, pegging the “It's Titled What?” meter at its highest levels since Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter or possibly Snakes on a Plane. At least this has the benefit of being based on a fairy tale, allowing more room for poetic license. It's MTV's first 3D film and looks every inch what you'd expect an MTV version of Hansel and Gretel to be, with a misplaced sense of edge and Baysian explosions.

Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton star as the brother and sister of the Brothers Grimm story, who survived being abandoned in the woods at a witch's cabin, and decided to turn pro at the whole witch killing thing. Instead of waiting for witches to crawl into an oven, they get a little more proactive with crossbows and shotguns, and a several-hundred years too early machine gun. Screw witches, why not invade Russia with that?

The director here is Tommy Wirkola, which appears to be Norwegian for Timur Bekmambetov. He was also responsible for the cult midnight film Dead Snow, which brought us zombie Nazis. This looks to be much in the same spirit – that is, the “can you believe this is a film?” sense that you get from most of these trailers and commercials. Completely over the top action has its place, as evidenced by the vampirey Lincoln film opening to about $16 million this past summer. Paramount is obviously hoping that the addition of Renner (and to a lesser extent Arterton) makes this a better bet, but even with his exposure this year from The Avengers and The Bourne Legacy, I don't think anyone's going to this saying “ooh, Hawkeye!” There's no notion of how good it as, as it's been held back from critics (though that's a notion in its own, isn't it?), but it does look just crazy enough to get attention in this first weekend, to the tune of about $17 million.

Also not being screened for critics this weekend is Movie 43, a film I don't think I've seen anyone successfully explain just yet. Twelve credited directors and starring...well, to save some time, I'll just say it's starring everyone, it's kind of an anthology film, sort of a sketch comedy movie, and mostly an excuse for big names to act in filthy, filthy material. It's largely the brainchild of Peter Farrelly and sort of harkens back to the days of the Zucker/Abrahams films like Kentucky Fried Movie. What's quite unusual is how many big names have gotten involved, including a number of Oscar winners like Kate Winslet and Halle Berry, and a bunch of... not Oscar winners.

It's a difficult film to sell, both because there's been very little like it in ages, and because it's hard to separate a lot of the jokes out of context from their setups. As such, it's leaned heavily on a couple of laughlines, in particular Terrence Howard's oh-so hip jokes about black people and basketball. It's a very hard-R rating, and it's certainly possible that the best jokes can't really be shown. But “trust us, it's funny” is always a hard, hard sell with comedies. The unique nature of the film should be good for some curiosity, but only to around $8 million. Thankfully for the film, it only has a $6 million budget, and should be okay with just about anything.

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