You might not know of Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation, unless you've been listening to the drums we've been banging during Indy Month here, but it's an utterly charming, heart-warming and delightfully ramshackle remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark, as made by a then teenage Chris Strompolos, Eric Zala and Jayson Lamb over a period of seven years. If you ever get a chance to see it on its occasional journeys round the world, run don't walk. Run as if a giant boulder is in hot pursuit.
Now, those filmmakers are back. Strompolos and Zala (Lamb has gone on to other things) are planning their next film and, no, it's not Temple of Doom. The pair told Vanity Fair that they're working on "Southern gothic action adventure" What The River Takes. Zala, who would direct the film with Strompolos producing, describes it as the story of "a young man, haunted by his father’s disappearance and presumed death, discovers eight years later his father is still alive and being held captive by a mysterious river cult. In search of his father, he goes up river, all the while hunted by the man responsible for his father’s abduction.” The "river cult" is a group of people whose town was isolated by flooding of the Mississippi, which has driven them all a bit bonkers.
The project doesn't currently have backing, but the pair are shopping the film around. We've no idea what kind of directorial vision Zala and Strompolos have, since their Raiders movie was a shot-for-shot remake, but if the low-budget invention they showed on their first project is anything to go by, you could give them a few dollars and a few years and they'd create something highly entertaining.
You can read the full story of What The River Takes at Vanity Fair, here.