During his recent visit to the set of Patrick Lussier’s Drive Angry 3-D starring Nicolas Cage, B-D reporter Chris Eggertsen was happy to find out that not only will the action/thriller/horror/road movie not be watered down to a ‘PG-13’ rating, but that we can expect the levels of 3-D gore to be up there with Lussier’s My Bloody Valentine. Read on for more.
As we chatted with director Patrick Lussier on the set of his My Bloody Valentine follow-up – the intense supernatural action/thriller Drive Angry 3-D – it became pretty apparent that fans of hard-‘R’ violence will be in for a real treat when he recounted a conversation he had with his wife over one particularly disturbing scene featuring Billy Burke’s villainous Satanic cult leader:

“I was sitting there describing a scene, one of the early scenes in the movie that involved Billy Burke’s character and described it to her in detail and she’s like just like ‘oh my God. How did you shoot that?’…it was sort of mortifying to realize, ‘oh my God this is what we’re actually doing.’ But it gives justification for Nick’s character’s journey.”

While he didn’t dish out any specific details on this particular tidbit, he did give an indication of the type of gore we could expect throughout the film, which he described as being different – if no less gruesome – than that featured in Valentine:

“It’s a little different. There’s some extreme stuff in it, you know? It’s a very different kind of story so it’s not about ripping people’s jaws off and things like that…it’s much more of an action thriller. So by virtue of that there [is] extreme violence…A lot of [it] though is gun violence and things like that. There’s a lot more of that kind of thing than some of the mayhem we got up to in ‘Valentine’.”

Todd Farmer, Lussier’s co-scripter on both Drive Angry 3-D and Valentine, also spoke a bit about the gore quotient, telling us about one specific blood-drenched shot:

“I think that it was more or less an accident but it’s the kind of thing that when you have somebody like [stereographer] Max Penner who’s here and working with [the] 3-D, he saw it and pulled in on it and so suddenly the audience is watching the drip through the back window, all around them.”

He summed it up pretty well by saying that they essentially pulled no punches with the violent content:

“It’s as violent as you can get and still get an ‘R’, I think. We start and the moment the movie opens it’s in your face. All the stuff that you guys are going to see, it’s fun.”

DRIVE ANGRY hits theaters February 11, 2011.