Thursday, February 21, 2013

Remaking Malice

As the title would suggest, I am remaking the never finished movie that started me on all this demon stuff, Malice.

I have no idea what prompted this, but the idea just popped into my head this morning and I debated doing it or not. So I sent a message to the original lead actress, Heather, and gave her the rundown on my idea. It's not that I wanted to let the project go, but I just couldn't see it be completed to a point where I'd really have been happy with it.

It suffered a massive amount of issues because of the length of time it took to make it. Continuity errors were everywhere, nearly everyone's hair changed at one point or another, some very dramatically at that. Just so much changed as we shot it that I just can't see salvaging anything really worthwhile out of it all.

The only people who would even enjoy it where those who were in it, I couldn't see myself being comfortable posting it online (and it would've been unfair not to) because of the barrage of insults and comments that would've come flooding in regarding all the problems with it.

It was fullscreen, standard def, some video glitches as well. The number of reasons not to finish it just piled up and got worse with every year it wasn't completed. So today, I decided to just let it go.

Now, the remake isn't going to be a direct remake of the original story. I'm taking a queue from the reshoot of BZK! Moonshine of the Damned, taking the best parts of the story and reworking everything into an entirely new story. The idea came from working on the grant for another project called "Conversations with Demons", which is about a world in which we've discovered that Demons exist, it deals with the social implications, not the military fighting large hordes of murderous creatures, but the simple notion of how we would welcome a race of creatures we previously only believed to be fictional and have for hundreds of years just passed off as evil anyway.

The remake of Malice will be a much simpler, and much more peculiar story - I'm planning parts of it to have no dialog for very long stretches, leaving the audience to figure out what's going on for themselves at first and finally revealing as much as possible by the end.

Malice will no longer be a human girl with an eyepatch and super strength, but a full blown Demon. I'm hoping that will remove any issues with hair continuity that might arise should it take awhile. At this point, I'm still talking (more or less) with Heather about being involved as Malice again - time commitments are obviously a consideration. So I'm hoping she's willing to wait to see an almost final script before making a definite choice.

We'll see how it all goes. I'm planning on writing over the course of the next year, planning it out as much as possible so when time comes to shoot, the bulk of the work will already be done and we can just focus on shooting instead of struggling with making things work and juggling schedules last minute.

And, the footage from the original will not just vanish, but I've decided that from now on, anytime I shoot something involving a TV screen, we'll be showing part of Malice randomly.

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous9:13 PM

    I like the idea of seeing it used in other movies.... on TV etc.

    Sometimes you gotta know when to say "enough".... I think you're right about this.
    Kim B

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  2. I guess it's not really even a remake so much as it is reusing the character in a project that's much better suited to tie into everything else I created that was supposed to tie into the original movie - so it's kind of gone circular.

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