thanksgiving

By Todd Gilchrist

During an exclusive telephone interview to promote his role as Pvt. Donny Donowitz in Quentin Tarantino's WWII epic Inglourious Basterds, Eli Roth told Cinematical that Thanksgiving is not the next film he's set to direct, but it's definitely going to get made. "That movie, the financing, the money is in a bank account," Roth said. "I mean, I could literally say I'm starting production tomorrow we'd start. It's 100 percent up to me, but I'm just working on the script with Jeff Rendell, the co-writer. Jeff's the one who in the trailer, he plays the Pilgrim, and we're just writing it. We're just figuring it out and we're just coming up with the kills and the characters."

Thanksgiving was initially created as a fake movie trailer that connected the two theatrical halves of Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez' Grindhouse, but its own popularity inspired the director to blow it up from a 16mm short into a feature film. Roth actually indicated that Endangered Species, a PG-13 sci-fi film in the vein of Cloverfield, was to be his next directorial effort. "I want to be finished with Endangered, and then Jeff is supposed to come out to Los Angeles probably some time in August and we'll probably bang out the script," he explained, indicating that the disparate content of the two films may ultimately complement his enthusiasm creatively.

If you said "Eli Roth," then you're psychic. (Or you read the recent interview over at Fango.) Turns out that in addition to projects like Endangered Species and Thanksgiving, Mr. Roth is also involved with a faux-doco possession thriller called Cotton, a POV slasher flick called Psycho Killer, and (if he has his way) a new version of Tobe Hooper's The Funhouse! Now that's a remake I can actually get behind, for most of the reasons that Eli mentions below:

"The first half is brilliant-they set up these great characters-and then they pay off none of them. You have Marco the Magician sawing his daughter in half, the brothers who run the carnival and the funhouse setting. And then it's all about this weird mutant thing. It should be about the kids getting killed in horrible ways, put in different contraptions in the funhouse and the final girl being strapped into the ride and sent into the tunnels to be confronted by terrifying tableaux of her dead friends. A smart remake could be so much fun."

And here's a strange bit of trivia regarding the original flick: Dean Koontz wrote a novelization of the screenplay, but the flick got delayed a bit, which means the book actually came out first. The film is NOT based on a Koontz novel, but in fact it's the other way around. Dorky horror trivia like that is why I'm here.

Thoughts? Opinings? Do you love The Funhouse so much that you can't stomach the idea of a remake? Or does this one actually sound like a good idea? Lord knows with Gorehound Roth at the helm, this remake would be no lame-ass PG-13 affair.

By Monika Bartyzel

The bloody turkeys are coming! Okay ... this isn't the big news, but it's what I'm going to go with first, because I think we've all been waiting long enough to hear about a longer, more bloody Thanksgiving. Eli Roth may have said: "Thanksgiving was the most fun I've ever had shooting anything, and the response to it was the best response to anything I've ever done in my career," back in 2007, but that's all we heard -- the faint glimmer of hope thrown at the fans, just like Machete. But the idea isn't dead.

In a discussion with MTV, Roth revealed that he still wants to make that Grindhouse trailer into a full-length feature. "I want to make the highest body count slasher film I can," Roth said, while explaining that he hopes he can tack $5 mil and a few weeks onto another, bigger film to finally make Thanksgiving a reality.

This bigger film doesn't have a name yet, but Roth says he's almost done with the script and plans to start production this fall. "I don't want to give away the title yet, because I have to make sure I own it 100%, but it's going to be something that is really fun with lots of mass destruction. I wanted to do something along the lines of Transformers or Cloverfield that was a little more science fiction-based, and with lots of chaos and mass destruction."

He says it's not aliens, or robots, or a virus, so what could it be? All he'll say is: "when people hear it they are going to be like 'That is going to be insane!'" But first he's got to shop it around to studios who can pay his proposed $85 million price tag -- $80 for the scifi feature, and $5 for Thanksgiving. If only the latter could gobble its way to screens in time for the holiday...