Movies
[BD Selects] See The Action-Styled Action In ‘Hellacious Acres’ on DVD April 3
Arriving on DVD and VOD April 3 as part of the Bloody Disgusting Selects series is the post-apocalyptic comedy Hellacious Acres: The Case of John Glass.
Montreal-based director Pat Tremblay wrote, directed and played the titular character in Hellacious along with editing, co-scoring and creating most of the visual effects. Cast includes Navin Pratap, Jamie Abrams, Paula J. Davis, Laurent Lecompte and Francis Dubois.
“The story centers on a man suffering from amnesia who wakes up inside a cryogenic freezer as a robotic voice bombards him with information about World War III.”
Inside you’ll find what is easily one of my favorite trailers of last year. Get ready for “action-styled action” and a whole lotta walking…
Tremblay’s most recent films Heads of Control: The Gorul Baheu Brain Expedition and Truck Lover screened as part of Montreal’s Festival du Nouveau Cinema.
Hellacious Acres was acquired out of its North American premiere as an official selection of the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal.
Remember the Jim Carrey movie The Mask back in the 1990s? The film ended up being a family friendly affair, but did you know that it began its life as a New Line horror project?!
Chuck Russell (A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, The Blob) directed the 1994 movie starring Jim Carrey, which was based on the comic series from Dark Horse Comics. The darker, more violent comics ultimately became a family friendly slapstick comedy, but New Line actually originally hoped to use the property to create their next Freddy Krueger.
As Russell himself explained way back in 2017, “It’s a great example of really fighting for your vision in a film. We changed it from a horror film into a comedy. It was originally conceived as being a horror film. That was a real battle. New Line wanted a new kind of Freddy movie.”
“I had seen the same original Mask comic they ended up buying, and I thought, ‘That’s really cool, but it’s too derivative of Freddy Krueger.’ He would put on the mask and kill people. And have one-liners. It was a really cool, splatterpunk, black and white comic,” Russell continued. “They’ve redone the comics to be more like my movie, but the original comics were really cool, dark and scary. But I knew, as a film, it would be very reminiscent of Freddy Krueger.”
Could The Mask someday return to the screen with a darker adaptation more in line with the original comic books? One filmmaker who has thrown his hat into that race is Sébastien Vaniček, who follows up his spider horror movie Infested with the now-in-theaters Evil Dead Burn. In a Reddit AMA this week, the French filmmaker floated the idea in a response to a fan.
When asked which intellectual property he’d be interested in getting his hands on next, Vaniček replied: “I think I would dig into The Mask, but make it closer to the comic books.”
He added, “The comic books are actually very, very violent and dark.”
What would 1994’s The Mask look like as a horror movie? Find out below!