In our recent chat with Jason X / My Bloody Valentine 3D screenwriter Todd Farmer, we learned all about the MBV 3D sequel that he’d penned but was never produced. During that talk, a surprising tidbit was discussed about another of Mr. Farmer’s credits – the horror/action road movie Drive Angry, co-written and directed by his frequent collaborator Patrick Lussier. Though the film made it to screens in 2011 with Nicolas Cage and Amber Heard in the lead roles, it was originally meant to have starred two very different actors…
As Mr. Farmer tells it, the film was originally conceived to be made from the leverage Lussier and Farmer would have had with the studio, assuming they wanted a sequel to My Bloody Valentine 3D. “We expected they would want [the MBV 3D sequel], and so we said to them ‘We have an idea. Here’s what we’re gonna do. We’ll make your sequel. But, on the side, we wanna do this dirty little road movie. Sort of like Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, Race with the Devil – a car/road movie. We wanted to do a grindhouse movie, but in 3D. And we’d shoot it for next to nothing.
“So we’d do the two movies, and we’d shoot them at the same time. We’d shoot [My Bloody Valentine 3D Part 2], and while the crew was still together we would shoot this road movie. And they loved the idea! But then we never heard back. That was just an idea at the time. So then later, we wrote that movie, which was Drive Angry. And the original idea was, we’d bring Tom [Atkins] and Betsy [Rue] to play the leads. And then we ended up with [Michael] De Luca as a producer, and De Luca went to Nic [Cage] and everything changed.”
So wait a second…the leads of Drive Angry were meant to be My Bloody Valentine 3D’s Tom Atkins and Betsy Rue?! “Yeah! We told them that we’d make them their sequel, but first we wanna make this little five million dollar movie, bring Tom in and bring Betsy in to play [the roles eventually played by] Nic and Amber [Heard]. Because we never went down the road [of making the MBV 3D sequel], and we weren’t getting offers for any 3D stuff, we thought ‘Well, screw it. We’ll write it.’ We didn’t even have the name Drive Angry. I think we were calling it Don’t Drive Angry, because that’s what Bill Murray said in Groundhog Day. We later dropped the Don’t. So, yeah. Our original take was Atkins and Betsy Rue. But, didn’t happen that way. But, y’know, that’s a Tuesday in Hollywood.”
So there we are. Though Mr. Atkins would eventually appear in the finished film in a different role, one can’t help but wonder about the film that might have been. In some incredible alternate universe, there exists a low budget, 3D grindhouse flick called Don’t Drive Angry, starring the Night of the Creeps actor and Betsy Rue. While the film we got is an underrated gem, just imagine how much fun it would have been to have seen a then-75 year old Atkins kicking ass and taking names as a vengeance-seeking badass outta hell, accompanied by an equally badass Rue in the role eventually essayed by Amber Heard.
What say you all? Do you love the film we have, or do you wish we’d seen this version of Drive Angry instead? Sound off in the comments section below and let us know!
