Spider-Man director Sam Raimi has signed on to produce Rampage, a movie about Yetis that terrorize a remote town. The film would be directed by Corin Hardy, a music video director, in an association akin to Peter Jackson’s producing the relatively unknown Neil Blomkamp’s District 9.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, “Genre auteurs are increasingly taking on projects from young directors and shepherding them through the indie and studio system as both producers and mentors.” The newspaper also cites Guillermo del Toro’s having championed Juan Antonio Bayona and other Spanish newcomers.

Before shooting the actual movie, the plans call for Hardy to produce a short “teaser” film while the script is being developed.

As a director, Raimi will soon shoot Super-Man 4 and a film version of World of Warcraft. As a producer, he has a large number of fantasy-themed films in the works, including Monkey’s Paw, a remake of the original The Evil Dead, Evil Dead IV, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and Jack the Giant Killer.

Before last year’s The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, film adaptations of the Yeti legend were rare.

A scene from Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

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In a presentation today at the annual Television Critics Association conference in Pasadena, the producers and stars of the upcoming series Spartacus: Blood and Sand emphasized that it pushes the limits of what’s been seen on television, with graphic violence and plenty of sex and nudity, but that it’s all in the service of a well-told story involving compelling characters.

“Nudity?” said co-star Lucy Lawless after being asked if she gets naked in the the first season. “I’m afraid so. Not entirely, no, and I’m kind of praying that day never comes.”

According to executive producer and co-creator Rob Tapert, “There’s a great deal of nudity, both male and female, and some guys are not as well endowed as others, so we had to create [a prosthetic penis which we called] the ‘Kirk Douglas’ so that certain actors would have [something] they could wear and feel comfortable.”

The prosthetic penis was named in honor the star of the classic 1960 movie, Spartacus, he said with a laugh.

As to which actors did or didn’t wear it, “We can’t give away our trade secrets,” he said.

The Starz network actioner, debuting January 22rd, tells the story of the rebel slave Spartacus who led a revolt against the Roman Empire in 73 BC. The show, which has a reported budget of $2 million an episode, approaches feature film quality, the producers said.

“When Rob and Joshua [Donen] came up with the idea, I was fascinated by it,” said executive producer Sam Raimi. “[The story of Spartacus] is such a great story, and only some of it is recorded, from the point he became a leader of this rebellion. Before that, no one really cared enough about this poor slave to record anything. … It’s the story of a man who was deemed worthless and found great stuff within him. The stuff of great drama.”

Lawless was asked if she was drawn to the project because it’s a period piece, much like her break-out show, Xena: Warrior Princess.

“I never think about the costumes, never about that,” she said. “It’s about the role and the company you’re in. I nearly didn’t take the role, I was so nervous. I was so happy living in LA, and [by returning to New Zealand, where the show is filmed], I felt like I was going back to Idaho or something. But the role is such a knock-out. Brilliant women’s relationships, very deadly, very subtle. Subtle and deadly, that’s what attracts me.”

Later, she added with a laugh, “Were you surprised to hear me use the word ‘subtle’? I’ve been deadly before, but not often subtle.”

Tapert acknowledged that the look and style of the show, much of which is created using green-screen technology and CGI backgrounds, is already being compared to the movie 300, which used the same technology.

“[300 director] Zach Snyder brought that hyper-realistic style to a period piece,” he said. But “Sin City prior to that had been all-digital backgrounds, along with other shows from Blue’s Clues all the way to Sanctuary. What 300 did so well was make a great deal of money.

“It was easy to point to that and say, it worked in that style,” he added. “It allowed us to actually bring this [elaborate, effects-heavy story] to the screen. There was no way to do it without the artifice, so to speak.”

Several of the participants emphasized that the general tone of the show is very different from that of Xena, on which Lawless, Tapert, and Raimi all worked.

“There’s no nudge-nudge, wink-wink,” Lawless said. “Tonally, it’s like nothing else I’ve done. It’s very real.”

“Spartacus was really a chance to be part of something that was entirely different than what Hercules and Xena was,” Tapert said. “It’s serious, it always tries to be genuine, it’s part of a natural [creative] evolution.”

As for the intense action scenes and graphic violence, head writer Steven DeKnight said, “Everyone knows that action is just a component, a tool that allows you to have a resolution happen differently. You still have to have great drama. This is a show that has action, blood, and sex, all the things you don’t see on network television. But all of that is just the initial wave behind which really good drama is waiting.”

“[The characters] don’t run along the same mores as we have,” Lawless added. “We strikes me [about the time in history] was the singular lack of empathy, and humans are just chattel, and it’s all about status, and if you’re of low status, I can kill you tomorrow. High stakes for people of low status and even for those of higher status.”

Twelve of the show’s first thirteen-episode season have already been filmed.

Renee O’Connor, Lawless’ co-star on Xena, will not make a guest appearance, at least in the first season. “Once Lucy’s there, it’s just not appropriate, that makes it a different thing,” Tapert said. But the show does make use of many of the same behind-the-scenes crew from that show.

“The time we were doing Hercules and Xena, that was a very special time,” Tapert admitted. “And we knew at the time that that would never happen again. We had pretty much untold creative freedom, we could do musicals and comedies.”

With Spartacus, he says, they have a different kind of freedom, including a network that is encouraging them to push limits.

“I [once] said to myself, ‘We’ve gone too far,’ and the executives from Starz got the director on the phone and said, ‘You haven’t gone far enough.’ And so the director said, ‘Now I’m gonna show them!’”

As for the crew he worked with before, “They know this is a different ride, entirely different than Hercules and Xena, but will boldly go where no one has gone before. Action is just a component, it just builds the characters, rather than stops to show you an action scene. What I’m happiest about is that it’s a well written show.”

“With an amazing new star,” added Lawless, referring to Andy Whitfield, who plays Spartacus.

Might the show have a musical episode as Xena once did? “I did Viva Laughlin,” DeKnight quipped, referring to a 2007 musical series that was a notorious bomb. “I don’t think they’ll be any musicals.”

Other than the behind-the-scenes joke about the prosthetic penis, does the series include references to the classic 1960 film? “I was blown away by [that movie] when I saw it as a kid, and then when I was older, I realized what it was really all about,” DeKnight said. “You will hear [the classic line] ”I am Spartacus,’ but it’s very different.”

The trailer for Spartacus: Blood and Sand

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Four and a Half Torches (Out of Five)

Sam Raimi really knows what he’s doing.

The film director famously first got noticed with The Evil Dead, his campy, non-budgeted 1981 horror movie that pretty much proved all you need to make a decent film is a guy with a camera.

A few years later, Raimi would team up with Evil Dead producer (and childhood buddy) Rob Tapert to create the classic fantasy TV series Xena: Warrior Princess. And in 2002, he would finally find break-out mainstream success with the first of his Spiderman movies.

None of these triumphs were flukes. This guy knows exactly how to tell a story.

Drag Me to Hell, Raimi’s first return to the horror directing chair since the second Evil Dead sequel, 1992’s Army of Darkness, is just about a perfect horror movie in every way.

Christine (Alison Lohman) is an insecure loan officer who, in order to impress her boss, refuses to grant an extension to an ugly old woman behind on her mortgage. When the woman literally gets down on her knees in the bank to beg for mercy, Christine rebuffs her.

The old woman, who turns out to be a gypsy spellcaster, casts a curse on her, declaring, “Soon it will be you who comes begging to me!”

And that’s when the “fun” begins. Christine soon discovers that the curse involves her being terrorized by an evil spirit for three days — and then that spirit will come and drag her soul straight to hell.

Raimi, who co-wrote the screenplay, is an amazingly economical director, always clear, always getting right to the point. He is the opposite of the Brian De Palma “auteur” horror director (although, to be fair, the movie does closely resemble Carrie in several respects).

There are no frills in Drag Me to Hell, no cheap gimmicks or dazzling special effects: just good, old-fashioned storytelling.

In short, Raimi is the Clint Eastwood of horror films. His subtle use of sounds and shadows is extraordinary (the film even includes several of Raimi’s wind-blowing-the-leaves Evil Dead trademark shots!).

But mostly, the movie is really, really scary.

If the movie has any flaw, it’s in several encounters with the gypsy woman that sort of go over-the-top. They’re openly played for laughs, which undercuts the admittedly intense tension.

In other words, Drag Me to Hell is an old-fashioned movie with modern sense of irony. But mostly, it’s a hell of a lot of fun.

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Okay, so maybe the Evil Dead movies aren’t really the best movies ever made. But they are sort of like my generation’s version of the Kennedy assassination: we all remember where we were on that bloody day we first saw Evil Dead.

For me, it was during a blizzard. I was living in Albany, New York, and some friends and I, aware of the coming monstrous snow storm, loaded up at the grocery store with food and beer, and hunkered down in an apartment to wait out the storm together. For entertainment, we had rented three films none of us had ever seen before: The Evil Dead, Evil Dead 2, and Army of Darkness.

Or, as horror geeks know them, the Holy Trinity.

The clouds came in early, blotting out the sun. (Then we will watch in the shade!) In no time at all, there was a complete whiteout, snow whipping around, the wind howling. It may not have been dark as night, but it was pretty darn eerie. We popped in the first DVD, and watched as the cheesy goodness of Sam Raimi’s early masterpiece unfolded before our eyes.

The Evil Dead is dated (1981), super low-budget, and too over-the-top by modern standards to be scary scary, and yet the film works magnificently: not as a so-bad-it’s-good guilty pleasure, but a so-good-it’s-freakin’-awesome cinematic gem. For one thing, it was a very early performance of Bruce Campbell, a man who made his career in cheesy B-productions, and it’s fun to see him young and subdued in this film. Also of note, writer/director Sam Raimi created the formula that was followed by The Blair Witch: a small budget, several game actors, and a good idea can be all you need to create a horror masterpiece. Oh, and luck, too. You need a LOT of luck. Which, fortunately, he had.

The plot is simple: five college kids go on vacation and stay at a cabin the middle of the woods. They stumble upon an evil book, which in the sequels is referred to as The Necronomicon (a name borrowed from horror author H.P. Lovecraft), and, one by one, the kids become possessed. Something awful happens to one of the women, which is so grotesque I can’t bring myself to describe it here, but it’s something only a man would come up with, and if you’ve seen the film you know what I’m talking about. Characters turn into zombie/demons, and begin hacking away at each other.

Only Bruce Campbell’s character, Ash, is not corrupted by the Evil Force that is the antagonist of the film — unusual for horror films, which typically feature a Final Girl as the hero (although, interestingly, his character’s full name is Ashley).

The movie is, for the most part, a splatterfest, filled with blood and guts and gore, oh my. It is sick and twisted and a great deal of fun, and I highly recommend it. But if you’re squeamish like I am, you might want to skip the part where Cheryl is lured into the woods.

At this point in our blizzard-induced film festival, we took a break and shook off the mild heeby-jeebies that one gets from such a film. We all agreed we had allowed ourselves to exist as uncultured mouth-breathers for not having seen this classic film earlier. We joked about the cheesy effects and talked about how Sam Raimi was finally getting the mainstream success he deserved as the director of the Spider-Man movies. Previously, I had been familiar with Sam Raimi only as a name in the credits for Xena: Warrior Princess, and had put two and two together and figured he was related to Ted Raimi, the actor who played Joxer. But I had had no idea just how cool he was. Oh, what lessons I had before me!

We popped more corn, grabbed more beer and put in the next DVD, Evil Dead 2. It’s an interesting film in that’s it’s kind of a sequel, and yet kind of a remake. The first ten or so minutes essentially replayed all the major plot points of the first film, not as a flashback, but as a quickie do-over. It seemed to assume that no one in the audience would have seen the first film. Evil Dead 2 is even more over-the-top than the first film, and in it Bruce Campbell truly begins to embrace his campy style of humor, going so far as hacking off his own demon-posessed hand and attaching a chainsaw in its place.

Yummy.

Both the gore and the comedy is amped way up, as is often the case in horror sequels, and the film ends on an exciting cliffhanger, with Ash being sucked through a portal and ending up in a medieval kingdom, where he’s hailed as a hero for killing a zombie, which the medieval people refer to as a “Deadite.”

One look outside told us we weren’t going anywhere any time soon. Not only were our cars completely covered with snow, so was everything else. It was a white world outside, so we delved into the black world of the third film, Army of Darkness.

Filmed 12 years after the first film and with a greatly increased budget, the film is a wholly different animal than the first two. It takes place entirely in the medieval world, and Ash has become an almost superhumanly cocky caricature of a movie hero. Bruce Campbell chews the scenery with panache, and the wacky slapstick makes for a funny, silly time. There’s no attempt at the scares as with the first two — in fact, this film mostly resembles one of the sillier episodes of Xena. It also boasts one of the best endings in all of film, when Ash returns to the present, and must do battle with another Deadite. It’s the cheesiest of the cheese, but will bring a smile to pretty much anyone’s face with a shred of a sense of humor.

I honestly can’t remember if we left that night or if we all crashed at my friend’s apartment, but I do know we did all get out of there before we had to start chowing down on each other, Alive-style. I have a blizzard to thank for a huge chapter in my horror film education, and I couldn’t be more grateful.

Incidentally, a few years later, I caught Evil Dead: The Musical when it was playing off-Broadway. The show was insanely good — it captured the feel of the first two films, had great, catchy songs, and dumped gallons of blood on the first two rows, known as the “splatter zone.”

The show still tours, and if you can catch it, do yourself a favor and go.

Interesting in buying the Evil Dead movies (or any other media)? Support TheTorchOnline.com by purchasing it through this link.

A number from Evil Dead, The Musical

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Xena: Warrior Princess star Lucy Lawless has signed to play the proprietor of a gladiator camp in Spartacus: Blood and Sand, a new series that retells the historical story of a rebel Roman slave, coming next January on Starz. The series is executive produced by frequent collaborators (and the executive producers of Xena) Rob Tapert and Sam Raimi.

The show is a big investment for Starz, a premium cable channel, with a per-episode cost of more than $2 million. As with Xena, the show will be shot in New Zealand, but much of the show will be reportedly be shot on “virtual” sets, mixing live actors and CGI backcrops.

The historical Spartacus lived from 109 to 71 BC. A slave and gladiator, he led an uprising against the Roman Republic in 73 BC. With 200 followers, he escaped the gladiator school of Lentulus Batiatus, the male basis for the character presumably played by Lawless.  Spartacus was eventually joined by 140,000 escaped slaves; together they successfully fought the Republic until their defeat in early 71 BC. Unlike the famous crucifixion scene in the popular 1960 movie, Spartacus’ body was never found.

Like Spartacus, the character of Xena frequently battled Roman emperors and soldiers, and even fought as a gladiator several times herself.

Raimi created the syndicated fantasy series Legend of the Seeker, and he and Tapert are currently that show’s executive producers. Tapert is married to Lawless.

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Four Torches (Out of Five)

I really didn’t want to watch Legend of the Seeker.

I knew it was the latest syndicated TV series from Xena: Warrior Princess producers Rob Tapert and Sam Raimi, but as much as I loved Xena, that pedigree actually worked against Seeker. Everyone kept saying that it was very much a straightforward fantasy project, and included none of Xena’s irony, humor, or wry self-awareness.

It’s not that I’m such a huge fan of irony — in fact, like the rest of the world, I’m getting pretty damn sick of it. But what was impossible not to like about Xena was its enormous risk-taking. The show was an almost dizzying creative explosion.

Xena and Gabrielle, mid-hot tub

And let’s face it: Xena was a cheeky creative explosion that the fantasy genre desperately needed. Fantasy in the 1990s was stuck in the past in more ways than one.

Legend of the Seeker, based on the Sword of Truth series of novels of Terry Goodkind, seemed to me the very embodiment of the deep, tired rut in which fantasy had found itself.

The Sword of Truth? I’m told the books are good, but I’m sorry, could something sound more hokey? We came up with better names than that when we were playing D&D in the sixth grade.

And oh, God, not another vengeful wizard. Plus, something about Bruce Spence, the actor who plays Zeddicus (another stupid name) just bugged me.

Then there’s the reputation of syndicated sci-fi/fantasy shows in general. I won’t name any names, but most of them, I can barely sit through a single episode.

Alas, after watching three episodes of Legend of the Seeker, I see I should have trusted Rob and Sam (and the series’ other creators, Joshua Donen, Ned Nalle, and Kenneth Biller).

Seeker’s Craig Horner and Bridget Regan

Seeker is definitely the anti-Xena in many ways. There is much less humor, and absolutely no wry cultural references. No lesbian subtext, no hot tubs, no musical numbers. They really do play it straight.

But, of course, what I liked most about Xena wasn’t the genre-busting irony, or even the audacious risks it took. Ultimately it was the characters and the storytelling: things that — duh — never go out of fashion.

When fantasy is dull, it’s because the characters are stock and the situations are cliche.

But Legend of the Seeker’s characters are not dull. In fact, the acting is much more consistent than Xena was in its earlier episodes. The scripts are much tighter too.

The show also looks great, with breathtaking fight scenes that have a Matrix-like trademark visual style that is completely different from Xena.

And after a couple of episodes, I’ve finally realized what they were going for with Spence’s Zeddicus: he’s supposed to be annoying and difficult (if ultimately loyal and lovable). Again: duh.

Bruce Spence as Zeddicus Zu’l Zorander

And that vengeful wizard I was dreading? Craig Parker’s Darken Rahl is smart and sexy and interesting — just one perfect whisker away from careening wildly over-the-top.

Legend of the Seeker has already aired 12 of its 22-episode season (and it’s already been renewed for a second one).

I wouldn’t have watched the show if I wasn’t currently editing this site, but I couldn’t be more delighted to have discovered it.

Watch all the existing episodes of Legend of the Seeker here. Watch the latest episode below:

Interested in buying The Sword of Truth books? Support TheTorchOnline.com by purchasing them through this link.

TheTorchOnline.com will begin episode recaps of Legend of the Seeker soon!

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