Before Resident Evil: Extinction, the flashy Australian director Russell Mulcahy had pretty much been reduced to making movies for television – all despite (or possibly because of) a healthy career making a string of guilty pleasures, from Razorback to Highlander, from The Shadow to, erm (Empire frantically scans Mulcahy’s IMBd page for a guilty pleasure), the awesome video for Duran Duran’s Wild Boys.
But then Resident Evil: Extinction – despite being, like most of Mulcahy’s output, not terribly good – blasted a path to the top spot at the US box office last weekend, and suddenly Mulcahy’s movie career is back on! And he’s keen to get it going before the movie he’s currently shooting, ill-advised prequel The Scorpion King: Rise Of The Akkadian, sends him back to TV purgatory.
For the 54 year-old director has attached himself to an adaptation of Steven-Elliot Altman’s novel, Zen In The Art Of Slaying Vampires, about a young man who, along with his lover, is turned into a vampire. But while his lady dies, he learns how to overcome his blood-sucking instincts with, erm, the help of Zen meditation. So it’s got potential for plenty of gore and violence, but – hey! – really profound stuff about who we are inside and stuff.
The project is currently in development at CP Productions, with Altman writing the script from his novel, which is the first part in, God help us all, a trilogy. CP’s Michael Cerenzie and Christine Peters will produce and are also working on a game.