If the thought of a 90-minute gunfight seems crazy to you, well, you don’t know Ben Wheatley. While the director has long been a favorite of genre film fans everywhere — his 2011 sophomore feature “Kill List” sits near the top of most lists of the best horror films of the decade — it is only recently that Wheatley has pivoted into slightly more mainstream fare, carving a niche out for himself as a purveyor of art film quality and B-movie execution. Our review of the upcoming “Free Fire” called the film “his most purely popcorn and wildly enjoyable movie to date,” suggesting that Wheatley was poised to bring a little bit of mayhem into multiplexes around the world.
And while we’ve known for a while now that Wheatley’s next project “Freakshift” would be another B-movie blast, every time the director describes the film we find ourselves a little more excited for what we’re about to see. In a recent interview with Collider (via Birth.Movies.Death), Wheatley took his description of the movie to a whole, whole new level:
It’s monsters, shotguns, trucks, fighting at night, and it’s in the future, things coming out like crabs. Stuff with claws. That’s the elevator pitch. And August is when we shoot it… It will be dynamic and exciting the same way that “Free Fire” is. But it won’t be sadistic. But it will be fun. It’s a kind of a 50s B-Movie done through the prism of “Hill Street Blues” and “Doom.”
You ever hear someone describe a project as the confluence of several other films — films you’d never think to link together in a million years — and suddenly you wonder why it’s never been done before? Yeah, that’s “Freakshift.” Wheatley’s movie sounds like a throwback to the cheesiest of monster movies, the types of things that you’d discover on the back shelf of your local video store and carry home in a fog of excitement and confusion. If “Freakshift” can live up to even a tiny fraction of its potential, it’s already one of my most highly anticipated movies of 2018, 2019, or whenever this beautiful monstrosity actually hits theaters.