Movies
New Line’s 1997 Sales Trailer for ‘Freddy vs. Jason’ Has Surfaced!
The showdown of the millennium.
It didn’t actually come to fruition until 2003, but most fans of the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises know that New Line had been trying to get Freddy vs. Jason off the ground for many years by that point.
As teased at the end of Jason Goes to Hell, Freddy and Jason were supposed to clash in the 90s, and various writing/directing teams were brought on board to crack the mash-up. We’ve talked extensively about all that in the past, but one thing we haven’t mentioned is that makeup master Rob Bottin was at one point attached to direct!
Bottin, the man responsible for the insane effects in John Carpenter’s The Thing, was announced as the director of Freddy vs. Jason in the summer of 1997, and it would’ve marked Bottin’s debut as a director. Bottin had this to say about the project when it was announced, which we dug up from Variety‘s archives…
“Rather than revisit old territory, my intention is to celebrate these characters by way of re-invention — elevating them both to a completely new level of horror, using state-of-the-art techniques. They will be reborn in a bigger-than-life way.”
Of course, the Bottin-directed iteration of the project never came to be, but what we did recently discover is that a short promo teaser for the film was shown off to exhibitors at the 1997 ShoWest trade convention. “It received wild applause and howling,” Variety noted in the aforementioned article.
Guess what? That 1997 promo trailer for Rob Bottin’s Freddy vs. Jason just surfaced on YouTube. Using clips from both franchises, it teased “the fight of the century“… a fight that, unbeknownst to New Line at the time, wouldn’t go down until six years later.
Enjoy this fascinating piece of horror history.
After pulling in $28 million at the worldwide box office this month, director (and star) Dev Patel’s critically acclaimed action-thriller Monkey Man is now available to watch at home.
You can rent Monkey Man for $19.99 or digitally purchase the film for $24.99!
Monkey Man is currently 88% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, with Bloody Disgusting’s head critic Meagan Navarro awarding the film 4.5/5 stars in her review out of SXSW back in March.
Meagan raves, “While the violence onscreen is palpable and painful, it’s not just the exquisite fight choreography and thrilling action set pieces that set Monkey Man apart but also its political consciousness, unique narrative structure, and myth-making scale.”
“While Monkey Man pays tribute to all of the action genre’s greats, from the Indonesian action classics to Korean revenge cinema and even a John Wick joke or two, Dev Patel’s cultural spin and unique narrative structure leave behind all influences in the dust for new terrain,” Meagan’s review continues.
She adds, “Monkey Man presents Dev Patel as a new action hero, a tenacious underdog with a penetrating stare who bites, bludgeons, and stabs his way through bodies to gloriously bloody excess. More excitingly, the film introduces Patel as a strong visionary right out of the gate.”
Inspired by the legend of Hanuman, Monkey Man stars Patel as Kid, an anonymous young man who ekes out a meager living in an underground fight club where, night after night, wearing a gorilla mask, he is beaten bloody by more popular fighters for cash. After years of suppressed rage, Kid discovers a way to infiltrate the enclave of the city’s sinister elite. As his childhood trauma boils over, his mysteriously scarred hands unleash an explosive campaign of retribution to settle the score with the men who took everything from him.
Monkey Man is produced by Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions.
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