Sometimes you hear about a project that just sounds so cool that you have to ferret out more details. That’s how I feel about 90, the next film from Darren Lynn Bousman, of Saw and Repo: The Genetic Opera fame. While I may not have been the biggest fan of Bousman’s previous films, this new one sounds like it was just about tailor made for me.
The concept is delightfully simple: 90 kills in a 90 minute movie. It’s not real time, but the kills will still be coming fast and furious. The killer is a man who was wrongfully convicted and spent time in jail; when he gets out he decides to get revenge on the hot shit detective who put him in the slammer by killing one person for each of the detective’s convictions.
You have to have a way of keeping track of the kills, so at one point the murderer will come into possession of one of those clickers that bouncers use to count how many people have come in the door. With each murder he’ll click one down. There will be a couple of mass kills – you have to, otherwise there’s no way you could fit the whole thing into 90 minutes – but there will be plenty of standalone goodness as well.
From what I understand this is going to be a gleeful splatter romp, and while I don’t want to ruin any of the kills, at least one of them sounds stomach-churning and like nothing I’ve ever seen before. The movie will be rated R, but I’ve been led to believe that 90 will be shot with an eye towards a harder, unrated DVD release.
Oh, and it’ll be 3D from what I’ve heard. I get shit for being anti-3D but I’m really just anti-post conversion. I’m all for joyfully gimmicky 3D, and I think a splatter film like this is exactly where we need 3D.
Everything I have heard about 90 puts me in the mindset of a young kid reading Fangoria back in the 80s, when horror was wet and fun. If you’re anything like me that fun is what you’ve been looking for in horror movies – that theater-wide cheer at an inventive kill, the crowd-permeating moan when something really gruesome happens to someone’s body and that collective flinch when the film shows you something nobody should ever see… followed by a nervous chuckle.
90 is still just a script, but I’m looking forward to seeing what comes of it.