Movies
Last Chance: Los Angeles Readers Nab Tix for ‘Re-Animator The Musical!’
For those of you in Los Angeles who thought you missed out, the widely popular “Re-Animator The Musical!” will be extending its stay at The Steve Allen Theater. Click the link for tix for any show from April 22nd, Midnight shows on Friday nights and 3:30pm Matinee performances on Sunday afternoons.
“In 1985 Stuart Gordon directed his first feature film and created a sensation. It was “Re-Animator,” a smashing success based on a horror story by H.P. Lovecraft. The film delivered as many laughs as it did screams, making it a cult classic among horror fans, and won a Critic’s Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Now Gordon is back with his co-writers Dennis Paoli and William J. Norris and composer/lyricist Mark Nutter to turn “Re-Animator” into a musical for the stage.
Special effects are being done by the same guys who did them for the 1985 movie: Tony Doublin, John Naulin, and John Beuchler. And the blood will flow so freely that the first row will literally be designated as a “splash zone.” Needless to say, the show is not for small children.”
The cast stars Harry S. Murphy, Chris L. McKenna (King of the Ants), and Jesse Merlin (Star of The Beastly Bombing). Also starring are Rachel Avery, Mark Beltzman, Cynthia Carle, Marlon Grace, Brian Gillespie, and Liesel Hanson, and introducing Graham Skipper as Herbert West.
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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