Movies
Grizzly ‘Red Machine’ Has More Prey
The big bear will have a few more picking for dinner as Piper Perabo (pictured below) will star opposite Billy Bob Thorton, James Marsden and Thomas Jane in director David Hackl’s thriller Red Machine, reports Deadline.
The star of The Prestige and Looper will play a deaf photographer who is engaged to Beckett (Jane), whom she met during the Iraq War. The story revolves around two estranged brothers (Jane, Marsden) and their girlfriends (Perabo and an actress yet to be cast) who go camping in the Alaskan wilderness. An erratic grizzly relentlessly stalks the two couples, who are forced to rely on their own senses and skills to survive.
Rick Cleveland and J.R. Reher wrote Red Machine, which Tai Duncan, Dominic Ianno, Stuart Pollack, Hadeel Reda, Paul Schiff, and David Valleau will produce. Shooting begins this month in Vancouver. 
Remember the Jim Carrey movie The Mask back in the 1990s? The film ended up being a family friendly affair, but did you know that it began its life as a New Line horror project?!
Chuck Russell (A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, The Blob) directed the 1994 movie starring Jim Carrey, which was based on the comic series from Dark Horse Comics. The darker, more violent comics ultimately became a family friendly slapstick comedy, but New Line actually originally hoped to use the property to create their next Freddy Krueger.
As Russell himself explained way back in 2017, “It’s a great example of really fighting for your vision in a film. We changed it from a horror film into a comedy. It was originally conceived as being a horror film. That was a real battle. New Line wanted a new kind of Freddy movie.”
“I had seen the same original Mask comic they ended up buying, and I thought, ‘That’s really cool, but it’s too derivative of Freddy Krueger.’ He would put on the mask and kill people. And have one-liners. It was a really cool, splatterpunk, black and white comic,” Russell continued. “They’ve redone the comics to be more like my movie, but the original comics were really cool, dark and scary. But I knew, as a film, it would be very reminiscent of Freddy Krueger.”
Could The Mask someday return to the screen with a darker adaptation more in line with the original comic books? One filmmaker who has thrown his hat into that race is Sébastien Vaniček, who follows up his spider horror movie Infested with the now-in-theaters Evil Dead Burn. In a Reddit AMA this week, the French filmmaker floated the idea in a response to a fan.
When asked which intellectual property he’d be interested in getting his hands on next, Vaniček replied: “I think I would dig into The Mask, but make it closer to the comic books.”
He added, The comic books are actually very, very violent and dark.”