Bruce Campbell To Take A Vacation

Preview screenings for My Name Is Bruce have been going on - both privately, and also to the public at one special event in Oregon. Reaction has been fairly positive, though hardly ecstatic.

Campbell's The Man With the Screaming Brain was really quite an awful film, unfortunately, so any signs this one will be better at all are gratefully welcomed. Mark Verheiden's script isn't half bad, by all accounts, and the premise is certainly a belter. And when hasn't Campbell come across as the most charismatic screen presence you can imagine?

Okay, apart from Screaming Brain?

Word is creeping out from these Bruce screenings, however, that Campbell is close to an agreement to star in Richard Stanley's next film, Vacation. Apparently budgeted at just a little over a million dollars, the film tells the tale of some Americans abroad. Not quite your typical fish-out-of-water yarn, however - in this case, the Americans have upped sticks after an apocalyptic cataclysm has pretty much wiped out the west and are trying to start new lives in the Middle East, whether the Middle East likes it or not.

Campbell is to play a US businessman who, with his stripper girlfriend, tries to climb the power structure in this new order. Sounds like you can take this couple out of America, but you can't take America out of this couple.

Stanley's Dust Devil is a bonafide winner and the fully-loaded recent DVD from Severin is well worth anybody's money. Apparently, his first film Hardware is soon to be bonafide winner too - a director's cut is on the cards for DVD release later this year. This edit reportedly fixes all of the niggles that dampened the original version - principally the unrealistic character interactions and some key moments of thematic and subtextual relevance that were snipped for being 'redundant'.