Good Lord, Ben Wheatley's Giant Crab Monster Movie 'Freakshift' Keeps Getting Better And Better

Ben Wheatley’s bang-bang shoot-em-up, Free Fire, hits theaters this weekend (my review goes up tomorrow if you feel so inclined to check back), and as such, the director’s been on the press trail. This means that there’s been ample opportunity for people to ask him about his upcoming Freakshift, and the more he says, the more a movie that already sounds unbearably rad keeps getting better and better.

Talking to Collider, the High-Rise, Sightseers, and Kill List director had this to say about Freakshift:

“It’s monsters, shotguns, trucks, fighting at night, and it’s in the future, things coming out like crabs. Stuff with claws. That’s the elevator pitch.”

Yeah, that sounds just fucking phenomenal. And it’s very much in line with the “women with shotguns fighting giant crabs” description that he previously handed out. And I am still on 1,000,000% in the bag for this idea.

But bless his twisted little heart, Ben Wheatley didn’t stop there. He went on to add:

“It will be dynamic and exciting the same way that Free Fire is. But it won’t be sadistic. But it will be fun. It’s a kind of a 50s B-Movie done through the prism of Hill Street Blues and Doom.” 

Yes, yes please. I want this, I want this right now.

Freakshift recently landed Man From U.N.C.L.E. costars Alicia Vikander and Armie Hammer as the leads. From what we know of the plot, other than what’s above, they play a pair of misfit cops who respond to 911 calls as giant crab monsters emerge from belowground and cause a ruckus.

I can’t wait to see what Ben Wheatley has in store, and I adore the idea of him putting his own spin on a creature feature. And Freakshift has been in the works for years—he’s been talking about it since at least 2012—so you just know he has all kinds of warped, violent ideas to play with.

Freakshift is slated to film starting in August, and given the pace at which Ben Wheatley works, I wouldn’t be shocked to see it turn up on the fall film festival circuit in 2018. Free Fire played the Toronto International Film Festival last year, and the genre-heavy TIFF seems like a tailor made launch pad.