This month, Steven Soderbergh “returned” (he was never really gone) with “Logan Lucky,” which frankly, more people should’ve gone to see. And considering it’s still in cinemas, and that the rest of August is a garbage dump for movies, you have no excuse not to see it.
Anyway, as per usual, the director has a number of things on the horizon including the iPhone shot “Unsane,” and the app-driven HBO project “Mosaic,” which will be arriving in two flavors. But as anyone who has followed Soderbergh’s career knows, his interests are wide-ranging, and so the idea of the director remaking a 1960s Japanese horror movie doesn’t seem so outrageous. In fact, it almost happened.
READ MORE: ‘Logan Lucky’ Is A Whip-Smart, Laugh-Out-Loud Funny Romp [Review]
In an interview with Little White Lies, Soderbergh reveals he tried to remake a bonkers Toho production from 1963. Asked about watching Ishiro Honda’s “Matango” twice in 2016, the filmmaker admitted it’s a movie he wanted to tackle.
“I wanted to remake that,” he stated. “[But] I couldn’t come to terms with the studio.”
Damn. The bonkers premise involves a group of castaways who land on a remote island and get mutated by some weird mushrooms. No, really. And we would’ve paid good money to see that.
“…it was a movie I saw as a kid and it scared the shit out of me. I wanted to remake it but I couldn’t figure out a deal with Toho, so it didn’t happen,” Soderbergh added.
Well, easy come easy go I guess, and the director always has his hands in a few different pots, but that would’ve been something. Of course, the filmmaker has tackled horror with the more somber approach in “Contagion,” but we would’ve love him to go hogwild with a monster movie. Ah, well, we’re sure he’ll come up with another way to scratch that itch.