2007 might’ve been the year of Josh Brolin, but it was also a pretty good year for Garret Dillahunt, too. And if you’re thinking to yourself, “Garret Dillahunt…?”, why, you can go straight to hell.
Since too many of you didn’t see The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (i.e. if the film’s shameful $3.9 million box office haul is any indication), it probably won’t do to remind you that he played the dim-witted Ed Miller. So let’s try this: did you see No Country for Old Men? Yeah? Well, he was Deputy Wendell to Tommy Lee Jones’s Sheriff Ed Tom Bell. And he was so good as Wild Bill Hickok’s murderer, Jack McCall, on Deadwood that David Milch brought him back as a completely different character later in the series. (I also helped audition Dillahunt for a role in a play called 900 Oneonta back in 1996, but this is of interest to no one but myself.)
In any event, while Dillahunt has worked fairly steadily in television over the last eight years, he’s yet to breakthrough in a big way (Ed Miller might’ve been that role; it’s just Dillahunt’s bad luck to give a great performance in a film lousy with great performances). I’m hoping this will change with his casting as the murderin’-and-rapin’ Krug in Rogue Pictures’ remake of Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left – even though I can’t say I’m looking forward to the actual movie all that much. Sorry, but I’ve a low tolerance for rape/revenge movies.
It sounds like director Dennis Iliadis and screenwriter Adam Alleca have reworked Craven’s reworking of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring by having the daughter survive her ordeal at the hands of Krug and his psychopathic cohorts. According to Variety, the plan is to strike a “more realistic tone” (Martin Kove wept). That said, the basic hook – civilized married couple exacts a bloody revenge on the thugs who assaulted their daughter – remains intact.
Also cast alongside Dillahunt are Rhys Coiro, Martha MacIssac and Riki Lindhome. Feel free to browbeat me for not knowing who the hell these people are.
The Last House on the Left begins shooting on March 24th.