Evil Dead Director Fede Alvarez Sells Super Secret Sci-Fi Project Machina
This article is more than 2 years old
Fede Alvarez may be best known for his horror work, after all, his biggest movie to date was this year’s remake of Evil Dead, but there’s no denying that he has sci-fi tendencies. He got his big break when a short he made, Panic Attack, about rampaging robots, caught the eye of Sam Raimi, just as he was looking for someone to direct a reworked Evil Dead. After dousing audiences with copious amounts of blood, not to mention that bit with the nail gun, Alvarez is getting back to science fiction, and has sold a project called Machina to MRC.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Alvarez will co-write the script with his writing partner Rodo Sayagues, and the 35-year-old Uruguayan filmmaker is also on board to direct. Aside from that, almost nothing is known about Machina aside from the fact that it lives in the sci-fi realm. The title could imply that it has something to do with machines, which is certainly a possibility, given Alvarez’s previous cinematic endeavors. Then again, it could mean absolutely nothing, any supposition is pure speculation at this point, so I’ll stop.
Panic Attack made people take notice of Alvarez back in 2009, and I hope that his next feature length movie is something similar in nature. The five-minute film depicts massive alien robots, along with spacecraft, appearing out of the mist, invading Montevideo, the capital city of Uruguay, and generally wrecking up the joint. Buildings get knocked down, things get stomped; you know, the usual. For something so small, it has an impressive scope and scale. I won’t ruin it, but just wait until the end. It earned him a place at Raimi’s Ghost House productions to develop an original project, which ultimately positioned him in the director’s chair for Evil Dead.
I, for one, really want to see what Alvarez could do with a budget and access to big time special effects people. Evil Dead was a good time, but I would love for him to be let loose to run wild with a full-length version of a concept like Panic Attack. In that situation, we could be looking at something along the lines of Pacific Rim. It would be cool to see Alvarez’s career follow a similar arc as Gareth Edwards, where he made a small genre movie that gives him the opportunity to do something thematically similar, but on a much grander stage. Oh hell, at the end of the day, I just really want more movies to star giant robots. But don’t we all?
