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In spring of 2005, the production of “The Wretched” made an unexpected move to Hollywood. Apparently a very interested producer there, had stepped-in, offering that he and his sources would put up a good deal of the cash for the project but in return he would want a lot of control …

… whether it was direct, explicit control, or just perceived control on the part of the original team (grateful to have someone so enthusiastically backing the project) I can’t really say. I did witness, personally, on several occasions, angry outbursts over creative decisions that inevitably ended with him having his way, with much whispered grumbling from those of us who had already been with the project for so long.

The first major decision was that the co-producers from Spain were out. Why I do not know. But shooting is Spain, now, was not a viable option. True, the cost of shooting in Europe, from the new home base of L.A. would have been cost-prohibitive. So, director Andrew Goth and writer/producer Joanne Reay started looking at other options. Top of the list: New Mexico, where more than one Western had been shot over the years (and continued to be shot, (Spielberg’s “Into the West” was currently shooting there). Location photos certainly seemed to prove the screen-worthiness of this place, but the charm of shooting a Spaghetti Western where Spaghetti Westerns were intended to be shot was lost forever.

Trouble at ‘mill

By now, creatively, the script was becoming as finely honed as anything I’ve ever read. Now the story of Rellik, a bounty hunter of the undead, who pairs up with a young gunslinger named Twenty-One (he has one extra finger on his right hand) to hunt down the gang of men responsible for the rape and murder of his one and only love which leads them to the brink of Hell and back again. Elements that had proven successful from previous drafts were carried over an improved upon, such as the very Spaghetti-Western-esque opening, now becoming more of a one-on-one encounter with undead religious psychotic Union Hole against a one member of the order of the Sisters of San Diablo (storyboard link).

But how ever well things sounded, it became clear, very soon, that there were in reality two films being made, the one based on the script, and its continued creative evolution, and the one based on the concept and whatever else could be thrown into that. The new Hollywood co-producer was content to sit still and continue the development process until the end of time, because it was fun. Hey, don’t get me wrong, it is kinda fun to talk about movies and ideas all day in sunny L.A., but if you have a lot of ideas, you just kind of want to get the work done and move onto something new rather than talking and talking and talking.

I’m not one to judge anyone’s ideas, but some of the new things that were being thrown into the mix were from way out of left field and really had nothing to do with the original intention of crossing a serious Spaghetti Western with a horror film, such as the never-ending compulsion to include cars in the story, zombie sex scenes and, on several occasions, the insistence that the saloon sequence, near the beginning of the film, should be like the cantina scene from “Star Wars”, complete with a zombie band playing on the stage (no matter that only one zombie had been introduced in the story by this point).

It was becoming an unwinnable war. Creativity was certainly suffering with all these daily battles. I know from my point of view, having spent days on several pages of storyboards, only to find out that the film now suddenly had a new “flavor” was becoming gut-wrenching.

The only good news was that Chow Yun-Fat was still interested and well on the way to signing officially. He’d even begun testing out different looks for the character, growing a sharp goatee which, at the time, hit the front page of a lot of the fan sites in China and elsewhere. But every day, there was a new threat to the relationship, with new demands and contract changes from this Hollywood co-producer. All in all, “The Wretched” was shaping-up into a wretched experience.

Hello New Mexico

By now, all of this stress was beginning to take a physical toll on Joanne Reay; something had to change. A semi-amicable break was made with the Hollywood producer and we made a move to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where some investors co-incidentally existed, who were willing to put what they could into the film, by way of resources, such as studio space, if not very much by way of cash.

Creatively, we were thrilled just to be going forward, and the locations in New Mexico were certainly inspiring, especially the large number of existing Western towns that we could literally move into with very little dressing and start shooting. Simon Bowles was summoned from the U.K. to start working on the Production Design and I worked busily on rough storyboards with Goth while Joanne worked very hard trying to pull money together and rewrite the script at the same time. We now worked under the tentative title “Rogue Dead” (based on the name of a local beer, “Rogue Dead Guy”), Joanne’s lofty goal being to pretty much rewrite the whole script from scratch, which she did an admirable job of. Retained were the broad strokes of the main characters, but the situations and plot were refined even more to suit the new creative push and the now very streamlined budget.

Simon, Goth and I were very much taken by the locations. I was so very easy to imagine shooting a Western here. It wouldn’t be the original Spaghetti Western that we had in mind a year prior to thos, but it would be pretty close. We spent a lot of time working on the first shootout in the town (storyboard link), with the main bad guy, Koy, who peels the skin off a young shopkeeper to replace his decaying one, while his gang waits for a train to roll into town so they can do the same with fresh human flesh.

But all the creativity in the world couldn’t hide the fact that what little development money there was, was running out fast, and the production was soon put on hold — before even coming up with a proper title!

It’s unfortunate that this project never saw the light of day. I thought it was the perfect mix of Spaghetti Western and horror film, with just enough aspects of both to keep fans of both genres very happy. Who knows, maybe someday this project will be resurrected in some form, but until then, we’ll all have to just image what might have been.

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