Movies
Danny Trejo Talks ‘Machete Kills in Space’; “It’s All Bogged Down in Bullshit”
Way back in 2013, Robert Rodriguez teased third installment Machete Kills in Space at the very end of Machete Kills, but here we are six years later and Danny Trejo still hasn’t been sent off to outer space. What’s the latest on all that? Trejo updates in a chat with Syfy Wire.
“You know what, everybody in the world wants that. I keep telling Robert, and you know, it’s all bogged down in bullshit, so I might do it,” Trejo told the site, suggesting that he may direct the movie himself if nobody else does. Trejo continued, “Yeah. I might just produce it and do it, if he don’t get off his buns! Everybody wants this, I mean, everybody in the world. I’ve been asked that all over the world. ‘Hey, are you going to do Machete in Space?’ It was the biggest thing in the world for a while. I mean, you got endless movies doing number six, number seven, number eight. And Machete had a great story to it, you know what I mean? I might try to figure out how to do that myself. If I could do a movie, I would direct Machete.”
“I’ve just got some great ideas for it,” Trejo added.
In the meantime, catch Danny Trejo in 3 from Hell, in theaters beginning tonight.
The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.
Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.
That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.
Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’
Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”
And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.
Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.
Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.
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