Combs Talks House Status!

Since I know most of you are hellaciously lazy when it comes to reading our accounts of festival outings (just wait for Rock and Shock ... that’s gonna be insane), I thought it’d be a good idea to highlight a bit from Evil Andy’s Festival of Fear report, specifically Jeffrey Combs discussing the status of House of Re-Animator.

The sequel’s been in the gestation period for a very long time, the brainchild of original director Stuart Gordon and screenwriter Dennis Paoli, but with the dissolution of Brian Yuzna’s Fantastic Factory and subsequent forming of Halcyon Entertainment, the project started becoming more and more a reality. But what’s happened since the initial announcment, aside from the casting of William H. Macy (!) as the President?

"It got all frothy about eight months ago," Combs told the Toronto crowd. "Brian Yuzna tried to get distributors interested in House of Re-Animator, which takes place at the White House. The Vice President is dead, but he can’t be because the President is a clueless fuck, so they bring in Herbert West. Brian put together an audio-visual piece with William H. Macy playing the President and took that to Cannes. Everyone thought it was great, and so at that point Brian needed to get a script, which means that he has to pay Stuart Gordon and Dennis Paoli to write one, and so that’s the last I heard of that. This was four or five months ago. I wouldn’t say it’s dead though."

Well, I guess that’s somewhat good news, right? We know that Gordon is in pre-production on his next feature, Stuck, for the newly re-formed Amicus Films, so if House does happen, it likely won’t be until after that’s done.

Damnit, what I wouldn’t give to see that test footage mentioned ... Check out Andy’s full report here for Combs' thoughts on the Wizard of Gore remake he recently took part in as well as words from Hellboy creator Mike Mignola on the second film staring Big Red!

- Johnny Butane