What is it with nostalgia giving way to a half-ironic appreciation of trash culture? There’s nothing wrong with something oily and ridiculous like “Grindhouse” which seems aimed towards the exploitation fare of the sixties and seventies. It’s when we start recycling the low-down commercial eighties and the beginning of the bottom-barrel VHS days that we have to question what’s worth rehashing. We’re already beginning to see it with needless remakes of not-at-all-classics like “Red Dawn” and “Karate Kid,” and now we’re getting a full length tribute to direct-to-cable movies. Did anyone ask for this?
“Splatter Sisters,” currently being shopped at Cannes, is director Adam Bhala Lough’s own attempt to create “Skinemax Cinema” as he claims, a tribute to the “direct to cable movies of his childhood.” Onboard is some serious star power, with superduo Marilyn Manson and Evan Rachel Wood agreeing to feature in the film, which will be produced by Edward Pressman and David Gordon Green. “This is a role Marilyn Manson was born to play,” says Green, which implies Manson is playing a second rate musician who stole his best ideas from David Bowie and Nine Inch Nails, “and with Evan Rachel Wood bringing dramatic gravity to the ensemble, I have no doubt this will take the horror genre to a new level.”
The “sexploitation-serial-killer-slasher-road-movie” is a curious step for Lough, an interesting filmmaker straddling the line between feature films and documentaries. He previously drew critical acclaim for the graffiti drama “Bomb The System” but was sidetracked by a severe one-two punch. After his narrative film “Weapons” was heartily booed at Sundance before receiving a quiet straight-to-DVD release two years later, his all-access documentary about Lil’ Wayne, “The Carter,” was nearly torpedoed by Lil’ Wayne himself (a great article on that here). We wish him the best of luck, but this doesn’t seem like the type of movie we expected him to be making at this point.
