Carolco Pictures is making a comeback. The production company behind such films as the first three RAMBO movies, TOTAL RECALL, JACOB'S LADDER, TERMINATOR 2, and BASIC INSTINCT, among many others, is being revived by producer Alex Bafer, who acquired the rights to the name and logo earlier this year. He has hired Mario Kassar, who co-founded the original Carolco with Andrew Vajna in 1976, to be the company's chief development executive, and placed Harrison Smith and Felissa Rose (yes, SLEEPAWAY CAMP's Felissa Rose) at the head of the genre division.
The first project Smith and Rose are developing for Carolco is LOVE BITES, an adaptation of the 2010 novel written by genre icon Adrienne Barbeau.
LOVE BITES is actually a sequel to an earlier novel by Barbeau entitled Vampyres of Hollywood, and both stories center on a character named Ovsanna Moore, a "seductive scream queen" who is "the head of Anticipation Studios and the writer and star of seventeen blockbuster horror films, several less than successful ones, and a few that went straight to DVD." On top of all that, she's a vampire. In Vampyres of Hollywood, Ovsanna teams up with Beverly Hills detective Peter King to stop a serial killer who's knocking off Hollywood stars. The synopsis of LOVE BITES goes like this:
Ovsanna Moore is a gorgeous Hollywood scream queen with a secret no plastic surgeon can rival: she’s a 450-year-old vampyre. So when Beverly Hills Detective Peter King discovers that Ovsanna’s pearly whites are really fangs, instead of grabbing garlic and a wooden stake, he asks her out. And a romantic Christmas Eve turns into a holiday of horror.
First there’s the werewolf attack, then the mutilated body at the Sportsmen’s Lodge, and finally, Orson Welles and Mary Pickford in a rat disguise and a Cyndi Lauper costume. And it doesn’t help that Ovsanna’s personal assistant and sometimes lover, Maral, will do anything to get Peter out of the picture.
Peter and Ovsanna end up fighting for their love affair and their lives. Ovsanna enlists her clan, the Vampyres of Hollywood, to help battle a menagerie of supernatural beasts straight out of Alien Vs. Predator. This isn’t a box-office ratings war, it’s a fight to the death.
Sounds like this story could make for a very entertaining movie, and it also sounds like Ovsanna Moore could be a fun role for an actress to take on.
Felissa Rose was a guest at the Rock and Shock convention this past weekend, and according to Broke Horror Fan she revealed during a Q&A panel that Milla Jovovich is in talks to star in the film.
Jovovich seems like a good choice to me, so I'm hoping the talks will end with her signing on. I can definitely imagine her playing a vampiric scream queen, and actually see some resemblance to her in the image on the cover of the book.
We will keep you updated on LOVE BITES as its development continues.