Movies
Kevin Smith’s ‘Red State’ Not Commercial Enough
While Kevin Smith’s out and about promoting his latest dick and fart joke comedy, ZACK AND MIRI MAKE A PORNO, he has also been chit-chatting about his long-gestured horror-thriller RED STATE. The good news is that Smith is apparently dying to make the movie, the bad news is that nobody will let him. Inside you can read the latest from an interview over at AICN.
Kevin Smith tells Aint it Cool News:
“I’m still trying to find money for Red State, though, admittedly, I haven’t been looking that hard yet, since it’s not something I’m gonna get to ’til March the earliest. Early prospects, however, look dim. Problem is, the flick is bleak. Beyond bleak, even. Remember how bleak Dark Knight was? This flick makes the bleakness level in that flick seem Beverly Hills Chihuahua bleak. Sadly, while the flick’s bleaker than Dark Knight, it’s also not nearly as good as Dark Knight. Or as commercial. Or commercial at all, really. The commercial prospects for Red State are not good. The only chance it’ll have at the box office would be if it caught a water cooler-kinda buzz out of a film festival. So when you go down the checklist (overtly bleak, unlikeable characters making horrible decisions, unhappy ending in which everyone dies, a director of questionable talent who’s never worked in this genre before), you can see why folks aren’t whipping out their check books.
The question, then, would be “Why bother?” For some reason, I feel like I’ve gotta make this flick. Part of the reason is that I never really feel like a filmmaker most days; more of a writer who gets to direct his own flicks. Trying my hand at another genre that’s 180 degrees away from anything else I’ve ever done might finally answer the question (for me) of whether or not I truly am a filmmaker, or just the guy who makes the dick and fart jokes movies. I suspect it’s the latter. I guess we’ll see. Maybe.“
RED STATE is a horror film in which a group of misfits encounter fundamentalism gone to the extreme in Middle America.
Zach Cregger is no stranger to violent movies, with his first two at-bats in the horror genre yielding the films Barbarian and Weapons. But even those movies can’t compete with the level of violence on display in his next movie Resident Evil, he teases in a new chat.
Zach Cregger tells Empire Magazine that Resident Evil is “definitely the most violent thing I’ve done.” He teases, “You gotta go grotesque! I wanted to go all the way.”
“So it’s gnarly. It’s brutal,” Cregger continues. “A very bloody affair.”
He also tells Empire, “Fleshing out what [the Umbrella Corporation is] up to and how the T-virus works, that’s not what this movie is. This movie is about one dude’s journey on foot, fighting monsters. I don’t give a fuck about checking boxes. All I cared about was just telling a fun story. We step on the gas at about eight minutes in and never take our foot off the floor.”
Resident Evil opens in theaters and IMAX September 18 from Sony.
The film is being billed as “a thrilling — and terrifying — reinvention of the Resident Evil franchise” from the mind of visionary filmmaker Zach Cregger (Barbarian, Weapons).
Austin Abrams (Weapons) stars as Bryan, a medical courier who unwittingly finds himself in a non-stop race for survival as one fateful, horrifying night collapses around him in chaos.
Zach Cherry (“Severance”), Kali Reis (“True Detective: Night Country”), Paul Walter Hauser (“Black Bird”), and Johnno Wilson (“Twisted Metal”) round out the cast.