With trailers for his remake of Halloween now in heavy rotation, rocker-turned-filmmaker Rob Zombie (Devil’s Rejects, House of 1,000 Corpses) is again taking time to update fans on his first animated feature, The Haunted World of El Superbeasto. The Starz Media direct-to-DVD project was announced in July of 2004 but there have been few updates as Zombie has been busy pulling double duty on the film and Halloween, which slashes into theaters on Aug. 31.
‘I just saw the first cut of the film and it is awesome,’ Zombie recently posted in a brief blog entry on the El Superbeasto MySpace page (www.myspace.com/elsuperbeastoofficialpage). ‘We have a little more animation to do, but this sucker is almost 100% finished. It is some crazy s**t. I know you are gonna love it.’
Based on Zombie’s limited-run Spookshow International comic book, The Haunted World of El Superbeasto will follow the adventures of an over-the-hill masked wrestler who now fights crime as a secret agent. El Superbeasto has more interest in strippers than adventure, but still manages to get involved with murdering super-intelligent gorillas, Liverpudlian zombies and manic depressive, mad scientist Dr. Satan.
Oscar-nominated actor Paul Giamatti is lending his voice to the role of Dr. Satan and scream queen Sheri Moon Zombie (Devil’s Rejects, House of 1,000 Corpses) will voice Suzie X, El Superbeasto’s sexy super-spy sister. Stand-up comedian Tom Papa (The Life Coach, Analyze That) will play El Superbeasto and Brian Posehn (The Sarah Silverman Program, Just Shoot Me) will be the voice of a robot named Murray.
Zombie wrote the story for the movie and is serving as exec producer. Starz Media’s Film Roman is doing the animation for the film, which will be released domestically on home video by Anchor Bay, also a Starz company. Zombie, whose previous foray into animation involved designing a hallucination sequence in Mike Judge’s feature film Beavis and Butt-head Do America, says there’s more news on El Superbeasto to come soon. ‘Things should really start moving now,’ he assures fans.
