When I heard that the gorgeous Lucy Liu and the super cool Michael Chiklis were in the vampire movie Rise I was interested, and now that I’ve heard some of these details from Fangoria through Coming Soon of an interview with the writer and director Sebastian Gutierrez (writer of Gothika, Hollywood remake of The Eye and Pacific Air Flight 121 aka Snakes on a plane), I’m even more excited.
This doesn’t sound like your average vampire flick, in fact his comparison to John Boorman’s Point Blank has me salivating:
The premise has reporter Sadie Blake (Liu) reluctantly joining the ranks of the undead after an unfortunate encounter with a cult of vampires; unable to reverse her condition, she decides to seek revenge by hunting down and destroying the cult members over the course of 48 hours, with the help of a troubled police detective (Chiklis) who lost a daughter to the same monstrous group. Although RISE is clearly rooted in horror, Gutierrez says the film’s vibe is closer to classic film noir. “The story itself is very simple, but it’s told in a non-linear fashion,” he tells Fango. “And hopefully, it has a very nightmarish and relentless quality. It’s very bleak noir, like John Boorman’s POINT BLANK.”
He also goes on to talk about the vampires themselves.
…NEAR DARK and THE HUNGER, two pictures which he cites as having influenced RISE…Nobody says, ‘I’ve been around for 300 years’ in this movie…we don’t want to go into an Anne Rice Gothic/romantic terrain, or an UNDERWORLD/Ridley Scott sort of thing,” Gutierrez continues. “I’m not knocking those movies, because they’ve all been done very well, but we’re trying to do something that’s more like a modern-day noir. It’s very stylized, because it’s horror—all the colors are very saturated.
I don’t know about you, but that all sounds really intruiging. Reading the blurb straight makes you think of quite a few other movies, but when you hear the treatment, Point Blank indeed, it does sound very exciting. Especially from Gutierrez. What are your thoughts?
