Mel Brooks has been cooking up a new horror project and he’s aiming to start shooting later this fall in Illinois. “I’ve got a script and I’ve got a director,” Brooks told Fangoria. “Pizzaman was written years ago by my longtime collaborators Steve Haberman and Rudy De Luca. They did Dracula: Dead And Loving It for me, a great horror/comedy film. Then they also did Life Stinks, in which I starred. It was funny and very moving, too. It was one of the best pictures I ever did as an actor. So these guys are not untalented.”
In addition to penning the script, Haberman will also direct and according to Brooks is currently scouting locations in Illinois. Brooks tells Variety, “Pizzaman is a flat-out horror film that I’ll keep my name away from, in case people think it’s a comedy.” Brooks is no stranger to backing horror films; he produced David Cronenberg’s The Fly and The Fly II.
Pizzaman follows a young man who is locked up in an insane asylum for a crime he didn’t commit and is driven to madness. When he’s released he decides to get even with the people who put him there and becomes a pizza delivery man in order to carry out the killings. “When they told me the plot of Pizzaman, I said, ‘Are you kidding?’ And they said, ‘No, it’s a real great idea for a horror story.’ And they wrote a rather exciting, interesting script, and I worked with them a little bit on it. It’s purely original, based on Rudy and Steve’s insane imagination,” Brooks added.
Cary Elwes, who starred in one of my favorite films of all time The Princess Bride and who also worked with Brooks on the hilarious spoof Robin Hood: Men in Tights, will play a detective in the film according to Brooks. I agree that the story is a great idea and is refreshingly original and am certainly looking forward to seeing this one.
