Financial disappointment or not, Rodriguez and Tarantino’s loving song to the exploitation era has emboldened more than a few filmmakers to pay tribute to their trashier, grimier influences. A few straightforward Grindhouse-style films have shot or are shooting, but it seems a few filmmakers are looking to apply the same mindset to resurrecting a different genre of crap… Skinemax. At least, that’s what I take from an MTV interview with director Adam Bhala Lough about his film Splatter Sisters where he drops the term about 30 times.
Aiming for the “late-night direct-to-cable” aesthetic, Lough has concocted (along with Producer/Mentor David Gordon Green and Producer Edward R. Pressman) a hell of a pitch…
“It’s about two 18 year old beautiful drifter girls who go on a murderous rampage across California, killing scores of teenage boys. And they’re under mind control by the leader of this death metal band, this underground death metal band.”
So an adolescent, sapphic Natural Born Killers? Well, there’s more… Marilyn Manson will be playing the death metal band leader, Lars (he’ll be forming a new band to record music for the film) in true “late-80s” style. His fiance Evan Rachel Wood will play one of the titular sisters (they’re not actually sisters) and yes, they’ll all be fucking each other-
“The girls are lovers as well as [being involved] with Lars himself. So it’s like a menage a trois. That’s our new twist on the whole ‘lovers on the run’ thing– there’s a whole menage a trois aspect to it.”
It’s also worthy of note that Manson’s character will have other interests besides death metal, according to Lough, “there is a lot of samurai shit in [the movie] too because Lars is a samurai… There is a lot of decapitation, a lot of arms getting chopped off, blood gushing, but in the beautiful way of a Japanese samurai film.”
I can’t help but think Lough sounds like a 14 year old when he talks about making a tits & ass-filled gore-fest “inspired by Dogma 95” (lol), but that could just be his infectious energy as reduced to two-sentence chunks. I’m certainly not going to pretend I don’t want this guy to take attractive women out on the road to strip down and chop people up. Hell, if this inspires Manson to get out of his melodramatic weepy-metal comfort zone and inject some energy into his work, we could even get some good music out of the deal.
Apparently he and Gordon Green have lined up the scratch to get this going and are “sitting down and putting this Skinemax manifesto together.” How soon this would start filming if it makes it all the way in front of cameras, I have no idea.
This is all fucking crazy enough that I’ll certainly keep an eye on the project.