Movies
‘Lord of Illusions’ Star Hospitalized After Suicide Attempt
Literally a day after I went on a Twitter rant about the local news being worse than anything you’ll ever see on the big screen, ABC shamelessly shares a horrifying story about an ex-movie star who attempted to take his own life. In a world where news outlets brag about scoring exclusive interviews with the parents of rape victims, they also have audio of a 9-1-1 call where Lord of Illusions, The Silence of the Lambs, The X-Files and Thinner star Daniel von Bargen survives a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. We will not link the audio. If you’re a sick f*ck, go Google it.
According to the call, Von Bargen shot himself to avoid going to the hospital. He is a diabetic and was supposed to have two of his toes amputated that day. According to Montgomery Police Srgt. Greg Vondenbenken, Von Bargen was “seriously injured.” They took him to Bethesda North hospital, where Vondenbenken says that his condition is improving.
It’s a sad world we live in when local news outlets celebrate their success at the expense of another human being. It’s a tough, brutal world we live in and all of our thoughts go out to Von Bargen and his family.
Universal has been having a hell of a time getting their Universal Monsters brand back on a better path in the wake of the Dark Universe collapsing, with four movies thus far released in the years since The Mummy attempted to get that interconnected universe off the ground.
First was Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, to date the only post-Mummy hit for the Universal Monsters, followed by The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Renfield, and now Abigail. The latter three films have attempted to bring Dracula back to the screen in fresh ways, but both Demeter and Renfield severely underperformed at the box office. And while Abigail is a far better vampire movie than those two, it’s unfortunately also struggling to turn a profit.
Where does the Universal Monsters brand go from here? The good news is that Universal and Blumhouse have once again enlisted the help of Leigh Whannell for their upcoming Wolf Man reboot, which is howling its way into theaters in January 2025. This is good news, of course, because Whannell’s Invisible Man was the best – and certainly most profitable – of the post-Dark Universe movies that Universal has been able to conjure up. The film ended its worldwide run with $144 million back in 2020, a massive win considering the $7 million budget.
Given the film was such a success, you may wondering why The Invisible Man 2 hasn’t come along in these past four years. But the wait for that sequel may be coming to an end.
Speaking with the Happy Sad Confused podcast this week, The Invisible Man star Elisabeth Moss notes that she feels “very good” about the sequel’s development at this point in time.
“Blumhouse and my production company [Love & Squalor Pictures]… we are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” Moss updates this week. “And I feel very good about it.”
She adds, “We are very much intent on continuing that story.”
At the end of the 2020 movie, Elisabeth Moss’s heroine Cecilia Kass uses her stalker’s high-tech invisibility suit to kill him, now in possession of the technology that ruined her life.
Stay tuned for more on The Invisible Man 2 as we learn it.
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