BIG FUCKING EXPLOSIONS

‘A Tear In Our Beer,’ hopefully will become a semi regular feature where the Big Fucking Explosions crew looks back at a film that languished in development hell for far too long and sadly, it never saw the light of day. Our first feature, Crusade.

The first proposed follow up/re-teaming for Total Recall director Paul Verhoeven and star Arnold Schwarzenegger was not so surprisingly a sequel to the mind bending sci-fi epic. The filmmakers wanted to go back to the Philip K. Dick well again and use the short story, “Minority Report” as the basis for the sequel. However, things weren’t meant to be and quite a few years late, Steven Spielberg made Minority Report with Tom Cruise as his lead. However, the project we’re lamenting is Crusade, a religious epic to end all religious epic.

With a original screenplay by Wild Bunch co writer Walon Green and revisions by Gary Goldman (Big Trouble In Little China, Total Recall, and Navy Seals), Arnold Schwarzenegger would have played potentially iconic character, Hagen, a prisoner who is set to die, but is freed when he fakes a miracle during a visit by the Pope, and is drafted to recapture Jerusalem (log line/premise via Script Shadow). I can safely assume that you can paint a mental picture of the film from here. Verhoeven, religion, over the top violence, Schwarzenegger being stitched into a live donkey, and probably all other sort of awesome-ness.

In early to mid 1990s, Carolco Pictures, the production company behind the Rambo series, Total Recall, and Terminator 2: Judgement Day snapped up the rights to the screenplay and was ready to produce the picture with a $150 million dollar budget. Yet for whatever reason, Carolco heads Mario Kassar and Andrew G Vajna felt the $100 million dollar budgeted Geena Davis/Renny Harlin pirate epic, Cutthroat Island was a safer bet and pulled the plug on Crusade. Cutthroat Island went on to become to the biggest flops of all time (according to the Guinness Book Of World Records) and lead Carolco to their eventually bankruptcy.

Crusade became one of the most famous films to languish in development hell, thanks to the internet boom. During his site peak, Harry Knowles of Ain’t It Cool News seemed to publish a story or two on the state of the production every other week. Sadly, the film was never meant to be. Schwarzenegger became the governor of California, Verhoeven went on to direct some classic films like Starship Troopers and more recently, Black Book and sadly, we, the movie going public have this:

-Douglas Reinhardt

“I am the last gladiator in the New Rome. I go into the arena and I compete against destruction and I win! And next week I go out there and I do it again,” - Evel Knivel (George Hamilton), Evel Knivel (1971)

Since the Romans, men or women battling to their deaths has been a popular form of entertainment and movie studios and producers are no different. However, instead of setting the stories of humans battling it out in arenas or modern day or looking to the past, Hollywood looked to the future to put our blood thirty culture under glass.

Academy Award winning director Norman Jewison teamed with James Caan for 1975’s Rollerball. The film was remade some 25 years later by John McTiernan starring Chris Klein, Jean Reno and LL Cool J.

Also, Rollerball was slightly remade or at least a giant influence on the 1998 TV movie, Future Sport:

Some films like The Blood Of Heroes took the “Mad Max” approach to their blood sports.

The most startling aspect of The Blood Of Heroes besides the fact that I, personally have not seen the film, but the film’s stellar cast: Rutger Hauer! Delroy Lindo! Joan Chen!

It’s only fitting that master Italian filmmaker, Lucio Fulci made a film called, The New Gladiators, a film that seems to combine elements of Rollerball, Fulci’s trademark excessive gore, and the television series, “Solid Gold”. Look at those fucking lens flares! Look at Fred Williamson’s fucking mustache! Dig that crazy soundtrack!

Based on a Stephen King short story, The Running Man combines elements from all of the films above, but it has two things the others do not. One, Richard Dawson and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The Condemned is a semi modern day take on the blood sport genre using “reality TV” as a guise.

-Douglas Reinhardt