MGM’s Mary Parent has greenlit her first movie, a sci-thriller called “The Cabin in the Woods,” from a spec script by Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard, with a fall start penciled in, and has commissioned a script for the threatened remake of “Red Dawn” from Carl Ellsworth. The latter scribe, who was 11 when the ludicrous John Milius flick about a Russian invasion hit U.S. screens, tells the Hollywood Reporter: “The tone is going to be very intense, very much keeping in mind the post-9/11 world that we’re in. As ‘Red Dawn’ scared the heck out of people in 1984, we feel that the world is kind of already filled with a lot of paranoia and unease, so why not scare the hell out of people again?” As long as MGM is on a remake binge (Darren Aronofsky is being courted for a re-do of “Robo Cop”), why stop at Al Qaeda parachuting into the Rockies? Via its ownership of the long-defunct Cannon Group, MGM also owns the rights to the Chuck Norris classic “Invasion USA,” wherein Cuban communists attack Miami Beach on Christmas Eve. Sounds like a great vehicle for Nicolas Cage! Of course, the cynics may well be right in suggesting all these announcements are merely a way of hyping the price for yet another sale of the flagging MGM, which is widely expected to part ways with its biggest supplier of movies, the faltering Weinstein Bros., in the near future. The Weinsteins are pitching other studios as potential partners for “Inglorious Bastards,” a Quentin Tarantino World War II flick they announced back in 2001 but QT has impulsively decided he wants to have finished by next year’s Cannes Film Festival. Lotsa luck.