We’re sure that Hollywood knows what it’s doing (ha!), fast-tracking all these movies into production in an attempt to reduce the impact of next summer’s mooted industry strike, but we have to remind them of an old saying that might have some relevance: marry in haste, repent at leisure.
Well, ok – perhaps take out ‘marry’ and add ‘fast-track the pre-production process, which could mean weaker scripts and less preparation time, thus damaging the quality of the finished product’, and you should get what we’re aiming for.
Anyway, apropos of nothing, Platinum Dunes – the horror production company owned by Michael Bay, Drew Form and Brad Fuller - has just hired two new writers to shepherd its Friday The 13th remake to the big screen, with orders to put words on the page, and to put those pages in a rough running order, in time for an early 2008 start.
And those writers, according to ShockTillYouDrop.com, are… Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, the guys who wrote Freddy vs Jason waaaaaay back in 2003. Despite that, though, they’re still working, and a quick look at the IMDb indicates that they’ve been pretty busy of late, what with Untitled Shannon/Swift Project and Untitled Viking Project just some of the movies on their roster. Clearly, these guys are so busy writing that they don’t have time to come up with titles.
Anyway, to the redo of Friday the 13th, that classic Halloween rip-off that started off with buckets of blood, but quickly led to possibly the most anodyne horror franchise in history (and we are including you in that assessment, Hellraiser).
Although Platinum Dunes’ track record in the field of remakes of horror classics is less than illustrious– after all, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Amityville Horror and The Hitcher aren’t exactly modern-day classics – the law of averages suggests that they’ll get one right sooner rather than later. Could Friday The 13th be that film?
Well, Fuller and Form (and Bay, who mainly leaves the company to the other two while he's off directing) clearly believe so, for they’ve been embroiled in a battle over the rights with New Line for so long that they must want it really, really badly. They have had drafts of a new Friday The 13th – in which, it is rumoured, they will attempt to compress the events of the first three original Friday The 13th movies, so that we’ll see both Mrs. Voorhees and her legendary son, Jason indiscriminately hacking horny teenagers to bits around Camp Crystal Lake – before, from a writer named Mark Wheaton, but it appears that Swift and Shannon are starting from scratch.
No word on a confirmed director yet – but he’ll be coming round on that fast track any day now, we reckon.