Nic Cage Set For “Surrealist, Heavy Metal-Soaked” Horror In ‘Mandy’

Nicolas Cage hasn’t made some of the best career choices in the past decade. A lot of that stems from tax problems. When you owe money, you have to work more often, it’s as simple as that. Mandy, however, already sounds like a winner. is reporting that Cage will star in the latest film from Panos Cosmatos, director of Beyond the Black Rainbow. This alone is cause for your attention, as that particular film is beautiful and wildly imaginative, among other things.

So what is Mandy?

Mandy is set in the primal wilderness of 1983 where Red Miller, a broken and haunted man hunts an unhinged religious sect who slaughtered the love of his life.

“Panos is one of the most vital young filmmakers alive, a pop-culture Kubrick in the making,” said Noah, SpectreVision’s Head of Development. “Nicolas Cage is a veritable god to those of us who grew up watching his classic performances. Bringing these two together for this surrealist, heavy-metal-soaked story of battle axes and demon bikers is unfathomably exciting to us.”

Let me get this straight: we’re in for an ’80s-set horror-action film where Nic Cage hunts and kills a horde of demon bikers? And there might be battle axes and heavy metal involved? Congratulations, SpectreVision, Umedia, and XYZ Films. That’s a winning combination if I’ve ever heard one.

What we have here is a premise that is pure exploitation and it’s coming from a director who has already proven to be a visionary. We’re talking about a man who, after the passing of his filmmaker father George P. Cosmatos (Tombstone, Cobra, Rambo: First Blood Part II), took a residuals check and used it to fund a delightfully weird and adventurous low budget science fiction film (the aforementioned Black Rainbow). Whatever he comes up with here is sure to be striking and intriguing, no matter how small the budget. Anyone worried of a repeat of two of Cage’s other cult-centric films (2006’s The Wicker Man and 2011’s Season of the Witch) need worry no longer. This one sounds more along the lines of Drive Angry, but with a harsher tone and a stronger vision sitting in the director’s chair. I can’t wait to see what Cosmatos and Cage conjure up together.