Bruce Campbell may be done with Ash Williams and the Evil Dead franchise, but that doesn’t mean he’s leaving the world of horror. Aside from Ash, Campbell has also appeared in great B-movies like Maniac Cop, Congo and the excellent Bubba Ho-Tep. Now, it appears that his next major project will be Bruce vs. Frankenstein, a sequel to 2007 horror-comedy My Name is Bruce.
In that movie, Campbell played a fictionalized version of himself and poked fun at his public image. His indelible association with Ash Williams came back to bite him in the ass when a group of teenagers kidnap him to help them defeat a real-life monster. It was a fun romp, but it looks like this sequel will go way beyond the original movie.
The plan for Bruce vs. Frankenstein is to do for horror what Sylvester Stallone did for action: bring back all the greats and give them a moment in the spotlight. He laid out his vision in a recent interview with JoBlo, saying:
“I want to get so many horror movie stars that people can’t possibly not see the movie. I want to give them other stuff to do. I want to have Kane Hodder be very particular about what he eats. I want Robert Englund to be a tough guy, like he knows taekwondo or something. I want to find out the hidden sides of all these people. Some will play themselves, some will play alternate characters as well. I may approach Kane Hodder to play Frankenstein. He could be Kane Hodder himself fighting himself as Frankenstein. It could be crazy.”
But it seems like we have a long road to travel before Bruce vs. Frankenstein. Right now, the project isn’t in production and Campbell hopes to spark interest with a graphic novel telling the story.
“I talked with Mike Richardson, who is my partner on this and we’re going to start with a graphic novel. So, I am going to adapt the screenplay. We’re going to put that out first so people in the industry can get a better sense of it. Mike has been selling a lot of projects to Netflix and he said that’s kind of the way to go with his material and fantasy stuff so he suggested we do that first.
We’ll get a great artist, sell it in comic book form, people can totally see it and as a director, it’s kind of like doing storyboards. It’s a tremendous amount of extra prep that I can do just by going through it because I actually have to think about pages, panels and descriptions. It’s a format that’s not my normal format. Screenplay format, I can fart, I got that down. This is different with the way it looks on the page so it will be a very interesting translation process.”
It all sounds pretty damn fun, so here’s hoping the wheels on this move quickly. Now that Ash vs. Evil Dead is on Netflix (and apparently quite popular), that may encourage the network to give the green light to this. Whatever else happens, I’m just happy that Bruce Campbell is still in the monster ass-kicking game. Sure, he might not have a chainsaw for a hand anymore, but he can still bring the pain. Watch out, Frankenstein!
