By MICHAEL GINGOLD
The actor promises this new project will be as grisly as his notorious Italian feature.
Filmmaker Lucky Cerruti (FREAK) gave RUE MORGUE the news that Carl Yorke, one of the leads of Ruggero Deodato’s infamous CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST (pictured above), has come on board as an executive producer of his new shocker BOXCUTTER. The film is set to roll in late September/early October in upstate New York, and Cerruti is thrilled to have Yorke on the project.
“I met Carl at a Cinema Wasteland convention in Cleveland where my Dead Vision Productions company had a table, and Carl was a featured guest,” Cerruti tells us. “I went to him for an autograph, and we really hit it off. By the end of the weekend, I had talked to him about this new movie I was making and he asked to read the script. He offered so much insight from his time in the industry, and after many rewrites and passing notes back and forth via e-mail, we had something really special, and he agreed to come on as executive producer of the film. CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST is such a seminal film for me and such a huge part of my life, so working with Carl is such a crazy, surreal thing. 16-year-old Lucky wouldn’t ever have believed this.”
“It’s probably too corny to say I feel lucky to have met Lucky at the Cinema Wasteland convention in Cleveland,” Yorke says. “But I do. He exudes confidence and vision, two essentials in moviemaking. And BOXCUTTER will be gory enough to make CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST fans vomit!”
The synopsis: “BOXCUTTER tells the story of a family who, on their way to a funeral, are involved in a fatal accident. The events that follow plunge them into an unimaginable nightmare where every decision may cost them everything.”
“The story is really all about choice,” Cerruti says, “and the weight of wanting to do the right thing, and the harsh reality that life may not care about your best intentions. It’s very much a ‘no good deed goes unpunished’ sort of thing. I started writing the script about four years ago, after breaking up with a long-term, very serious girlfriend. I made the choice to end that relationship to change my life for what I thought was the better. But instead of feeling better afterward, I felt a million times worse—doubting my decision and feeling very lost. Very soon after, the world shut down from COVID. Not only did I feel beaten down from this personal situation, it really felt like I was being cosmically punished for trying to better my life. And this script really was born out of that feeling. The characters are put into a heightened and extreme situation, but the feelings of decision and fear and grief come from a very real place.
“My goal for this film,” he continues, “is to combine my love of the more visceral genre films with something a little deeper to say. There are some gags and setpieces in BOXCUTTER that are definitely boundary-pushing and shocking, but they are not gratuitous for their own sake. It’s very important to me to earn that stuff and to have it mean something. I think it’s way more effective that way.”
