EXCLUSIVE: Cult genre filmmaker Richard Stanley, known for movies including Hardware, Dust Devil and Color Out Of Space, has been set to direct horror Steel Donkeys for new UK outfit Steel Mill Films, which is based out of Judas Priest guitarist K.K. Downing’s rock venue in Wolverhampton.
Andrew Prendergast (The Courier) and Phill Cates are producing the script, which has been written by Stanley.
The privately-backed film charts the story of three young, small-time crooks tasked with stealing a precious artefact of great power from a mysterious rock star at a huge music festival. The botched heist takes an apocalyptic turn as the three teenagers unwittingly unleash a malignant entity, imprisoned for eons within the artifact that proceeds to party like a demon, wreaking havoc on the bank holiday revellers and threatening to bring the world as we know it to an end. As the night of high octane weirdness escalates out of control, the teenagers find their only hope is to recruit a team of unlikely heroes to battle the demon and restore balance to the universe.
The team will film all exterior scenes at the UK’s biggest heavy metal festival Bloodstock Open Air, which takes place August 7 – 10 at Catton Park in Derbyshire, with the rest of the production shooting at K.K.’s Steel Mill in Wolverhampton.
Veteran martial artist Cynthia Rothrock will be joining a cast, some of which will be drawn from the world of rock and heavy metal. Talks are underway with them.
Stanley’s last film was 2019 Nicolas Cage pic Color Out Of Space. He was famously the original director of 1996 big-budget Marlon Brando film The Island Of Dr. Moreau, but exited early into principal photography due to creative differences.
Stanley said about the new project: “The stars have aligned to conjure this dream into manifestation, a perfect storm of metal, martial arts and cosmic horror, precision calibrated to burn its way into the brains of a whole new generation of metal fans. It makes me hugely happy to be back in the UK and to be returning to my cultural roots with this supernaturally charged psychedelic hand grenade, freely inspired by a real-life misadventure from my younger years. Given the current state of the nation, I firmly believe Steel Donkeys is exactly what Britain both needs and deserves…”
Bloodstock Open Air festival founder Adam Gregory commented: “We are delighted to be working with Steel Mill Films and with Richard Stanley on this fantastic project which will showcase Bloodstock to an international audience on the big screen.”
