Cult icon Crispin Glover is tackling one of cinema icon’s most infamous roles for his next movie. The Back to the Future star headlines A Blind Bargain, a 1970s-set remake of the Lon Chaney film of the same name, using Kodak film to reimagine one of the most infamous lost films in cinema history.
Directed by Paul Bunnell from a script he co-wrote alongside John E. Falotico, A Blind Bargain also stars Jake Horowitz, Lucy Loken, Annalisa Cochrane, Amy Wright, Sean Whalen, Jed Rowen, and Rob Mayes. The film’s synopsis is as follows:
Home from the Vietnam war, struggling with addiction and living with his mother, Dominic Fontaine (Horowitz) has already hit rock bottom when mom (Wright) delivers an ultimatum.
Desperate to settle a dangerous debt with a volatile drug dealer (Mayes), Dominic accepts an unexpected offer from a charming, young nurse at his clinic. The deal seems simple—and lucrative—but comes with a hidden cost. Without fully understanding the consequences, Dominic signs his mother up as a patient of the enigmatic Dr. Gruder (Glover), a morally ambiguous physician whose radical research is seeking to reverse the aging process.
At first, the arrangement seems promising—his mother thrives and he sets aside his nagging guilt. However, he soon realizes that he failed to read the fine print and that every bargain has a price—Things at the Gruder Institute are far more sinister than he ever imagined…
The original version of A Blind Bargain was released in 1922, featuring Lon Chaney in a dual role as an enigmatic doctor and one of his horrific experiments. After facing heavy censorship because of its themes of artificial life and a Frankenstein-like character playing God, the film’s original negative was destroyed by MGM in 1931. After a 1965 fire that destroyed the last surviving print, the film is now considered lost, along with numerous other films of Chaney’s from the era.
A Blind Bargain opens in limited theaters in New York and Los Angeles on May 8. Stay tuned to FANGORIA for more updates.
