“Hey, kid. Wanna buy a Big Bang Theory boxed set?”
As we’ve been over, a Uruguayan dude (Fede Alvarez) who broke onto the scene with a four-minute YouTube short that had him getting calls from producers the same day, is directing a remake of The Evil Dead, supposedly without any CGI and with Sam Raimi’s blessing. Now there’s a longer trailer, and it’s got all the tree-rape and blood puke you could hope for, plus, dub step! What’s not to love? Oh right, the dub step. Anyway, proceed.
I posted the leaked New York comic-con footage from the Evil Dead remake last week and it caused quite a stir, judging by the nearly 4,000 Facebook shares, despite the crappy bootleg-quality video. Like I said at the time, two things it has going for it are that the project reportedly has original Evil Dead director Sam Raimi’s blessing, and director Fede Alvarez says he shot it entirely without CGI. He also says that the raping tree is “way more terrible than the original,” for what that’s worth.
Fede Alvarez: We didn’t do any CGI in the movie. There’s no CGI in the movie. Everything you will see is real, which was really demanding. This was a very long shoot, 70 days of shooting at night. There’s a reason people use CGI it’s cheaper and faster, I hate that. We researched a lot of magic tricks and illusion tricks. [Like] how you would make someone’s arm disappear.
Fede Alvarez’s remake of Evil Dead starring no one you’ve heard of opens April 2013 and the first teaser dropped at New York Comic Con over the weekend, a bootleg of which just hit the web and you can watch below (quickly, it’ll probably get pulled off faster than one of your mom’s houseguests). I’m as skeptical of remakes as anyone, but Sam Raimi reportedly hand picked Alvarez for the job himself. Also, no CGI:
How much CG is in the movie?
Fede Alvarez: We didn’t do any CGI in the movie. There’s no CGI in the movie. Everything you will see is real, which was really demanding. This was a very long shoot, 70 days of shooting at night. There’s a reason people use CGI it’s cheaper and faster, I hate that. We researched a lot of magic tricks and illusion tricks. [Like] how you would make someone’s arm disappear.
There’s a moment where a girl goes through her arm with a kitchen knife — spoiler alert. And we knew since day one the camera would start wide, she goes for the knife, you see her arm, she starts going for it. And you think they’re going to cut away at any moment, but we don’t. She just goes for it and screams and the arm breaks and falls. So we really pushed the boundaries there, trying to create those illusions… It has a particularly bloody ending. The last scene is just…I want it to be the bloodiest scene, ever. And I think it is. [i09]
He also says that the raping tree bit is “way more terrible than the original.” He’s saying all the right things (I’m a sucker for trees that rape), but the best thing about Sam Raimi is that he always seems to embrace the silliness of whatever he’s making. Whenever people remake movies, especially horror, all they ever seem to think about is “BRO, HOW CAN WE MAKE THIS EVEN MORE BADASS?!?” But really, the challenge is capturing the goofyness. I was back in Fresno over the weekend, and everyone’s t-shirts had pictures of dragons choking each other out on them. I promise, guys, we’re already pretty well stocked on “badass.”
This is a four-minute short called Panic Attack from Uruguayan director Fede Alvarez, reportedly made for just a few hundred dollars. He was supposedly getting calls from Hollywood producers the same day he posted it, and now he has a deal with Sam Raimi’s production company.
The deal, in the six- against seven-figure range, will see Ghost House hire a writer for the project, which is based on an idea by Alvarez. [THR via Collider]
People are comparing the deal to the arrangement Peter Jackson had to produce Neill Blomkamp’s District 9. As for the short film that inspired the deal, there’s really not much to it. Some giant robots attack Montevideo (that’s the capital of Uruguay, genius), and that’s pretty much it, though the visuals are impressive. It kind of looks like if Michael Bay and JJ Abrams had a butt baby who grew up in Uruguay, and it definitely seems like it cost more than a few hundred dollars. With seven figures, I expect a few more crotch shots and the finest record scratches money can buy.
