Movies
Snipes Avoids Prison to Finish ‘Gallowwalker’
Eve though there are a gazillion stills online, and it has been over a year since the film was lensed, Andrew Goth needed Wesley Snipes on set to complete reshoots on his film Gallowwalker . The problem, Snipes is headed to prison for tax evasion – yet, he still managed to find a way on set to complete the film. Read on for the skinny. In the film AMAN is a gun-fighter who knows too well the ways of vengeance. Fast and furious, he has killed every man who crossed him. But his gift with a gun comes with a curse. All those who die by his hand will return. Enter the world of GALLOWWALKER, where vengeance lives forever.
Wesley Snipes is free to go…overseas to work on some films, that is.
A federal judge signed off Wednesday on the actor’s request to be able to travel for work while he waits out the appeals process pertaining to his conviction on tax-evasion charges.
According to Senior U.S. District Judge William Terrell Hodges’ ruling, Snipes is allowed to go to London this month to complete postproduction on the horror film Gallowwalker and then to Bangkok in September to film the action flick Chasing the Dragon.
Prosecutors objected to what they called Snipes’ vague estimate of how long he’d be spending in Thailand (eight weeks, the actor said), saying it’s one thing to let him go to England for a week but another to allow him to spend at least two months “beginning a new project half-way around the world with an open-ended return date.”
Snipes was sentenced in April to three years in prison for failing to file multiple income-tax returns but the court has allowed him to remain free while his attorneys appeal his case.
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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