The Werner Herzog “Bad Lieutenant: Port Of New Orleans” promo trailer making the rounds is probably the talk of the Interwebs this week.
To some it looks terribly awful and to others it looks awfully good in that ironic sense, but pretty much everyone can agree that it does have B-movie-ish qualities and or looks more like a typically wacky Nicolas Cage vehicle than a sublimely odd Werner Herzog film.
Maybe these two were just born to work together and we’re all just figuring that out now. Either way, it kinda looks low-budge and weird which might really limit its chances of selling.
According to the L.A. Times, the film, and presumably this trailer, was shopped around at Cannes, but response was tepid and bites were few. Responses from the web aren’t entirely kind either which doesn’t help. EW called it the “worst trailer of the year?” and the Guardian (and we) asked, “is this thing a comedy??” GQ U.K. titled their headline about the promo, “Looking for the Good in ‘Bad Lieutenant.”
The guys who financed the film, Millennium Films, seriously sound like the shadiest bunch, as if they broke kneecaps to fund the film which doesn’t help. They’ve been shopping it around, but the LA Times says the reactions are “muted at best.” With the indie film community drying up, the film evidently has a very small list of usual-suspect buyers who might even be interested in this kind of film, which more than makes sense. LA Times speculates (with good guesses) that genre-film studios/places that love B-Movies are probably the only potential hopefuls: Lionsgate, Summit, Rogue and Dimension.
Here would be another strange, but not implausible-sounding possibility: straight to DVD? Hmm…let’s hope not for Herzog’s sake.