Freddy's not dead. He's too busy playing with Dracula!
Robert Englund and Christopher Lee, two of the biggest horror icons of their respective generations and two men who would probably both be the first to admit they have starred in an awful lot of crap in their long career's, are to work together on screen for the first time it's been revealed by Variety. The movie in question is THE VIJ, a Gothic horror film based on a dark fantasy novel written by Russian writer Nickolaj Gogol which Englund will direct, and Lee will star.
The Vij revolves around an evil genie who conditions the actions of a young priest, leading him to commit murder and fall in love with an old witch who is actually not what she seems...Besides Christopher Lee, who will play a God-like character called The Father, The Vij will star Englund and Rome-based Russian actress Olga Schuvalova as Alina, the female lead. Casting for other roles, including the wayward priest called Khoma, is still underway.Cool, Englund's acting in the movie too. Sounds very similar to those old Christopher Lee/Hammer Horror movies, especially with The Father, sounding a lot like a Dracula-stature character. But however camp and ridiculous those movies might have been, I do have a soft spot for those Hammer features and well it's the great Christopher Lee, who unbelievably is in his 60th year of acting. This is good news. Neve Campbell and Italian heart-throb Rob Bova were originally cast in the picture but there's no word of their involvement in today's report. Campbell obviously looks to have been replaced by Schuvalova. I've never seen Englund's 1989 directorial debut 976-EVIL but a 4.0 rating on IMDB after nearly 1,000 votes is enough for me to say I haven't missed much. This year he directed his second feature length film KILLER PAD, a horror-comedy about teenagers who move into a Hollywood haunted house which sounds pretty cool but this would seem to be his biggest and most ambitious project to date behind the camera. And we wish him well now that he's no longer Freddy Krueger on screen. Let's hope he hits this one out of the ballpark.