New Director Emerges from 'The Black Lagoon'

Wednesday

16Dec2009

New Director Emerges from 'The Black Lagoon'

Wednesday, December 16, 2009 at 12:02AM

It's been a crazy year for Carl Rinsch. The commercial director was at one point going to direct the Alien prequel, at least according to Tony Scott. Now that's his brother, Ridley's, gig. Then Rinsch grabbed 47 Ronin, the Keanu Reeves samurai movie. And it looks like Universal smells what the Rinsch is cookin', because The Los Angeles Times says he's now the new director of record on the update of The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

That's a pretty big project for a guy who hasn't directed a movie yet, don't you think? I mean, in light of the problems da U has had with The Wolfman, this is either a supreme vote of confidence or it's completely misguided, no offense to Rinsch, who is clearly a hot property at the moment.

He replaces Breck Eisner (Sahara and the upcoming The Crazies remake), who was pulled off the project only to move on to a new remake, David Cronenberg's The Brood. Eisner's revision of Gary Ross' script has apparently also been scrapped, but I think we could have all saved Universal money by pointing out that Gary Ross is one of the great American screenwriters and Breck Eisner...well, his dad used to run Disney. Can't say much beyond that at this point; Sahara blew and wound up in court for a couple of years.

Here's a great little tidbit from The Times piece: "The movie...was originally shot and shown in 3-D -- a very primitive, 1950s kind of 3-D." Now, to that I say, hells yeah. With all the 3-D going around these days, why not explore the fun of the way it used to be instead of being force-fed how great it all is at every turn. There's no mention of whether or not Rinsch will take it down that road, but that's something I'd hope to see, especially if Ross' screenplay stands a chance of survival.

Wolfman be damned, I'm still excited about the recirculation of these old monster movies. It's something that helped establish Universal in the first place, and if the studio approaches these the right way (not a great track record so far with two movies and two director swaps), it has potential. This one, in particular, could be cool if they go full queso and Rinsch isn't way out over his skis on this.

Colin Boyd |

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3D,

Black Lagoon,

Breck Eisner,

Monster Movies,

Remakes,

Universal Studios |

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