You’d probably be forgiven if you didn’t remember The Legend of Hallowdega, an 18-minute short film released in 2010 and (bizarrely) directed by Monty Python veteran Terry Gilliam.
This black comedy/mockumentary/horror short is probably something more appropriate to visit ahead of the October race at Talladega Superspeedway this year, but I was itching to write about it, and here we are. Besides, I had the chance to meet horror icon Bruce Campbell last week and that sent me on a full-series rewatch of the Evil Dead franchise ahead of the new installment’s release, so that genre’s been on my mind as of late.
“Bizarre” is a word that’ll probably crop up a few times in this piece, and rightfully so; Hallowdega is an incredibly weird short film. Let’s start with some background (at least, what little I can find).
We’re essentially shown right away that it’s an AMP Energy Juice-sponsored production, thanks to an introduction from Dale Earnhardt Jr., and per Wikipedia it was produced by RadicalMedia and filmed in both Charlotte and Talladega. The short also ends with an “in celebration of the AMP Energy Juice 500 at Talladega” message, and Junior had a paint scheme promoting it on his car for the event:
We’ll get to how that race went later (spoiler alert: it didn’t go well for the No. 88).
Before that, the short film. The small cast is led by Justin Kirk, a veteran of both movies and TV. His most prominent credits include the recent Oscar-nominated films Molly’s Game and Vice, the latter of which featured Kirk as former U.S. Chief of Staff Scooter Libby. Kirk’s television appearances include main or recurring roles on Weeds, Modern Family, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and more.
Joining Kirk is David Arquette, one of the mainstays of the Scream franchise through last year’s fifth installment. Arquette’s role as Dewey Riley became a staple in the horror series; he was initially supposed to die at the hands of Ghostface in the 1996 classic, but director Wes Craven reportedly loved the character enough to make his fate ambiguous in the event viewers also became attached to the deputy sheriff. More recently, Arquette was also in the cast of S. Craig Zahler’s Kurt Russell vehicle Bone Tomahawk in 2015.
Director Terry Gilliam’s credits, along with the obvious (Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life), consist of the likes of Fear and Loathing in Las…
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