Bruce Campbell has always understood that you need a healthy dose of humor with your horror. While reminiscing on the Evil Dead films with the LA Times’ Hero Complex blog recently (way back in 2010, thanks for the correction ya’ll!) he emphasized how his famous, chainsaw-handed, shotgun-wielding character Ash Williams started out as a pretty dopey Everyman for the audience to laugh at, and with.
His skewering extends to Bruce Campbell himself—or rather, the public’s perception of Bruce Campbell the horror movie icon. In 2008, he starred in the satire My Name Is Bruce. Now, he wants to do a sequel—basically, The Expendables, but starring horror greats.
This time, he wants to bring in others for the fun—notably, Robert “Freddy Krueger” Englund and Kane Hodder, who has portrayed Jason Voorhees since Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood. Here’s Campbell’s pitch:
Yeah, The Expendables, or more like the It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World of horror. I want to get so many horror movie stars that people can’t possibly not see the movie. I want to give them other stuff to do. I want to have Kane Hodder be very particular about what he eats. I want Robert Englund to be a tough guy, like he knows tae kwon do or something. I want to find out the hidden sides of all these people. Some will play themselves, some will play alternate characters as well. I may approach Kane Hodder to play Frankenstein. He could be Kane Hodder himself fighting himself as Frankenstein. It could be crazy.
How cool would this be? Imagine rounding up the men who haunted us as the Candyman, Leatherface, Pennywise, and more. And what if they also pulled from horror’s current generation, some young bucks to balance out the icons? Eli Roth has no problem killing himself off (see Hostel and Aftershock); by the same token, you could throw in Dr. Heiter from The Human Centipede or Jigsaw to pit today’s torture porn films against their more elegant predecessors.
At any rate, we’re looking at a long wait, which gives them plenty of time to amass a fearsome cast. Campbell explains:
It’s a silly concocted story that we hope to do maybe in a year or so. My breaks between Burn Notice have been getting tighter because they’ve been adding episodes. They’re trying to trap me like a rat in the TV world, and I might just let them. There’s a script, [but] it just kind of blows right now, so no one’s really seeing it. We gotta work on it.
The other major point in the interview was Campbell saying that, while “none of us have said no” to another Evil Dead movie, “we both [him and director Saim Raimi] have day jobs now.” Womp womp.
There’s also the issue of creative control: The Evil Dead was very much an indie, whereas the sequel, Army of Darkness, was studio-managed from the beginning—an experience that (in part) turned Campbell off to the idea of continuing. And yet, this quasi-sequel could be the closest thing we get to staring into Ash’s crazy eyes again.
Read the full interview at Hero Complex.
Photo: New Line Cinema
