How's this for a mind bender: Russia just may be the new breeding ground for the world's premiere genre cinema. They're certainly taking a good run at it. Strange, but true. Here's proof.
While looking around for information on Evil Dead 4 - supposedly now greenlit, see below - I turned up a listing for a Russian film just entering the early stages of production called Glubina, with a cast list that apparently includes Bruce Campbell, Rutger Hauer and Christopher Lee. The English working title is Depth and the film is based on a novel from the author of the Russian blockbuster The Night Watch - a copy of which I have sitting here waiting to be viewed and reviewed.
Here's a synopsis of the very Gibson-esque novel:
This book immediately became a cult book for the Russian web dwellers. In this book we encounter the world of the nearest future, where the Internet technologies, coupled with a "deep-program", produced the internationally shared virtual world - the Deeptown. Of its population , the most mysterious are the Divers, who can at will resist the deep-program and see not only the display picture as it is (where everyone sees an illusion of a very real world) but also programs with all their "holes" as images, and do things which the best hackers could never dream of.
Night Watch did better business in Russia than the Lord of the Rings films and has generated enough buzz that it, along with a pair of in the works sequels, has been picked up for North America by Fox. Sharing an author, key production people and some actors with Night Watch, along with western cult stars in key roles, Depth should be generating significant buzz among cult film fans any day now.
The IMDB listing is here.
**** UPDATE ****
Hauer has apparently said he doesn't know anything about this and his name has been removed from the listing.