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Peter Jackson Returns To His Gory Roots
Once upon a time, Peter Jackson was a backyard horror filmmaker in New Zealand. Now one of the most commercially-successful filmmakers in the world, Jackson has decided to revisit the early splatter phase of his career.
Jackson is planning to use the prodigious resources of his VFX company, Weta Digitial, to restore and revitalize Jackson’s 1987 feature film debut, Bad Taste, along with 1989’s Meet the Feebles and 1992’s Braindead. Bad Taste, which was filmed over the course of four years, only cost $25,000 to make.
The announcement arrives in tandem with the release of Jackson’s latest film, They Shall Not Grow Old, a World War I documentary assembled from more than 600 hours of archival footage, which Jackson restored and upgraded. Through Jackson’s pioneering digital wizardry, long-dead soldiers appear to be telling the story of World War I in the film, in their own words.
Talking to the Hollywood Reporter, Jackson says that he’s applying the same digital and editing techniques to his early films. “I’ve decided to go back and do this to my old films,” says Jackson. “I’ve done some tests on Braindead, where we took the 16mm negative and put it through our World War I restoration pipeline. It looks fantastic!”
Of all of his early films, Jackson says that his first feature, Bad Taste, is the film that’s most in need of repair. During the film’s lengthy production process, Jackson stored the negative under his bed. “I didn’t have anywhere to put it, so I shoved it under my bed” says Jackson. “When I finally got the funding to do the finished Bad Taste film, there was damp mold and mildew all through the bloody negative, and you can sort of see it in some shots. I’m looking forward to tidying that up.”
Jackson also promises that these rereleases will include plentiful behind-the-scenes supplements. “I’ve always had video diaries being shot,” says Jackson. “I’ve got about an hour or two of us shooting Bad Taste, seven or eight hours of us shooting Feebles, and fifty to sixty hours of us filming Braindead.”
Jackson still carries a fond sense of nostalgia for his early films. “There was a degree of freedom that we used to have in those days that you lose to some degree,” says Jackson. “Our only philosophy was that we were going to be as disgusting as we possibly could.”
While Jackson has yet to strike a distribution deal for the rereleases, Jackson expects the restored versions of the films to be released via online streaming. “It’ll be online streaming, iTunes, all that sort of stuff,” says Jackson. “The good thing about owning a facility like Weta is that I can just restore my old films, and I don’t have to worry about it.”
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Movies
‘Evil Dead’ Film Franchise Getting TWO New Installments
It was a risk for Fede Alvarez to reboot Sam Raimi’s horror classic The Evil Dead in 2013, but that risk paid off and so did its spiritual sequel Evil Dead Rise in 2023. Now Deadline is reporting that the series is getting, not one, but two fresh entries.
We already knew about the Sébastien Vaniček upcoming film that delves into the Deadite universe and should be a proper sequel to the latest film, but we are broadsided that Francis Galluppi and Ghost House Pictures are doing a one-off project set in Raimi’s universe based off of an idea that Galluppi pitched to Raimi himself. That concept is being kept under wraps.
“Francis Galluppi is a storyteller who knows when to keep us waiting in simmering tension and when to hit us with explosive violence,” Raimi told Deadline. “He is a director that shows uncommon control in his feature debut.”
That feature is titled The Last Stop In Yuma County which will release theatrically in the United States on May 4. It follows a traveling salesman, “stranded at a rural Arizona rest stop,” and “is thrust into a dire hostage situation by the arrival of two bank robbers with no qualms about using cruelty-or cold, hard steel-to protect their bloodstained fortune.”
Galluppi is an award-winning sci-fi/horror shorts director whose acclaimed works include High Desert Hell and The Gemini Project. You can view the full edit of High Desert Hell and the teaser for Gemini below:
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‘Invisible Man 2’ Is “Closer Than Its Ever Been” to Happening
Elisabeth Moss in a very well-thought-out statement said in an interview for Happy Sad Confused that even though there have been some logistical issues for doing Invisible Man 2 there is hope on the horizon.
Podcast host Josh Horowitz asked about the follow-up and if Moss and director Leigh Whannell were any closer to cracking a solution to getting it made. “We are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” said Moss with a huge grin. You can see her reaction at the 35:52 mark in the below video.
Whannell is currently in New Zealand filming another monster movie for Universal, Wolf Man, which might be the spark that ignites Universal’s troubled Dark Universe concept which hasn’t gained any momentum since Tom Cruise’s failed attempt at resurrecting The Mummy.
Also, in the podcast video, Moss says she is not in the Wolf Man film so any speculation that it’s a crossover project is left in the air.
Meanwhile, Universal Studios is in the middle of constructing a year-round haunt house in Las Vegas which will showcase some of their classic cinematic monsters. Depending on attendance, this could be the boost the studio needs to get audiences interested in their creature IPs once more and to get more films made based on them.
The Las Vegas project is set to open in 2025, coinciding with their new proper theme park in Orlando called Epic Universe.
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Jake Gyllenhaal’s Thriller ‘Presumed Innocent’ Series Gets Early Release Date
Jake Gyllenhaal’s limited series Presumed Innocent is dropping on AppleTV+ on June 12 instead of June 14 as originally planned. The star, whose Road House reboot has brought mixed reviews on Amazon Prime, is embracing the small screen for the first time since his appearance on Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994.
Presumed Innocent is being produced by David E. Kelley, J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot, and Warner Bros. It is an adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1990 film in which Harrison Ford plays a lawyer doing double duty as an investigator looking for the murderer of his colleague.
These types of sexy thrillers were popular in the ’90s and usually contained twist endings. Here’s the trailer for the original:
According to Deadline, Presumed Innocent doesn’t stray far from the source material: “…the Presumed Innocent series will explore obsession, sex, politics and the power and limits of love as the accused fights to hold his family and marriage together.”
Up next for Gyllenhaal is the Guy Ritchie action movie titled In the Grey scheduled for release in January 2025.
Presumed Innocent is an eight-episode limited series set to stream on AppleTV+ starting June 12.
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