For the life of me, I cannot figure out how Paul W.S. Anderson keeps getting paid to make movies, especially movies based on videogames. The man is a different sort of enigma than Uwe Boll. Boll, after all, manages to self-finance the majority of his filmic game adaptations through a labyrinth of German tax shelters and Satanic covenants. Paul W.S. Anderson, on the other hand, gets actual studio funding to make stinkers like AVP and Soldier. In all fairness, Anderson’s Resident Evil trilogy and his legitimately hilarious Mortal Kombat don’t actually lower a viewer’s IQ like Boll’s House of the Dead; Anderson makes trash, not garbage. But it doesn’t change the fact that his movies suck. Yes, even Event Horizon.
When it was announced in 2005 that Anderson had gotten his mitts on the Castlevania franchise, it was pretty disappointing. Castlevania is, conceptually, pretty trashy, but as far as videogame with potential to be excellent movies, it’s high on the list. Killing Dracula has been a proven film premise for decades, but the setting is the real hook for a Castlevania special-effects spectacle. An ever-transforming castle that’s the living embodiment of chaos and appears on earth once every century? Awesome. Anderson, however, doesn’t have a track record of delivering on a property’s potential. The guy actually made a Resident Evil movie that’s campier than the games. From the sound of CC2K’s script review of Anderson’s Castlevania, it sounds like business as usual. A handful of pages for the script leaked way back in January, but this is the first report from someone who’s gotten a look at the whole shebang. Belmont brothers who lead teams of knights? A grotesque plot amalgamation that lifts from Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Francis Coppola’s film adaptation instead of the Castlevania world? NO WHIPS?! What the hell kind of Castlevania is this?
Luckily, Anderson hasn’t been able to get the project off the ground. Dimension Films lost distribution rights to Rogue Pictures in 2006, Sylvain White (Stomp the Yard) took over as director in early ’07, and the entire movie got shelved during the WGA strike last winter. IMDB says the picture’s on-track for release in 2009. Let’s hope that day never comes.
Thanks to AICN for letting us know about the review.
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