What do you do when you've already established the most substantial genre-movie career this side of Roger Corman, the studios are still calling, and your 70th birthday is staring you in the face? Well, if you're Larry Cohen, you start all over again.
"The next movie coming out will be 'It's Alive,' the remake of my 1974 movie that we just remade with Bijou Phillips," the writer/director/producer told us recently. "It's a 2008 version with a lot of updating - new stuff, new gags. We filmed it in Bulgaria."
The original "It's Alive" is a guilty masterpiece, starring the creepiest baby since Maggie Simpson's uni-browed arch-enemy. Cohen said that the new Davis offspring will be equally terrifying, but will be aided with some modern CGI techniques that will allow it to come out of the stroller more often. "It'll be a CGI baby; that's why we did it," Cohen said of the flick, which is directed by Josef Rusnak ("The Thirteenth Floor") and co-stars James Murray and Raphael Coleman ("Nanny McPhee").
Beyond "Alive," Cohen is also in talks to bring back a blaxploitation classic and a 1985 zombie-mummy movie. "We're talking about doing 'Black Caesar' again -- which was a black gangster movie -- for MGM/Sony," he grinned. "Also, maybe 'The Stuff'."
"We're probably going to remake them all before we finish, [but] why not?" he laughed. "Every movie's being remade, every old horror movie has been remade, usually so badly ... I hope [these] will be good ones."
In case all that wasn't enough, the multi-tasking Cohen also has a few original scripts moving forward. "We've got 'Tremble,' which is a ghost story, 'Father Time' which is a New Year's Eve horror movie, and then we've got 'Message Deleted,'" he explained, citing his recent Colin Farrell and Chris Evans vehicles. "['Message'] is a telephone-related horror movie, the third in the cycle alongside 'Phone Booth' and 'Cellular.'"
Cohen added that none of the other films had been cast just yet. His horror script "Captivity," starring Elisha Cuthbert, is in theaters now.
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