It’s a bit like those horror movies when the chainsaw-wielding killer has been shot hundreds of times, battered into a bloody pulp, and had iron spikes shoved through their face ... but just won’t stay dead! You may not quite jump out of our seats as a result, but you may feel like wearily grabbing a baseball bat at the news that the long-assumed-perished David O Russell healthcare satire Nailed is not only staggering unstoppably on, but has a new trailer and a new title – Accidental Love – as well.
The movie industry, of course, is littered with the corpses of films that never happened, got screwed over, or royally messed around. But Nailed took things to a whole new level. Russell started shooting it in 2008, straight after I Heart Huckabees; he was a white-hot name even then. Jake Gyllenhaal, Jessica Biel and Catherine Keener – all major figures – led the cast. But the money disappeared and production was shut down; Russell eventually walked away, and Nailed was consigned to the we’ll-never-see-it vault. The director rolled swiftly on to The Fighter and Silver Linings Playbook, and appears to have suffered no long term career damage.
The film we must now call Accidental Love now bears no credit for Russell (the “director” is named in the trailer’s final card as Stephen Greene), so presumably he had nothing to do with this. Notoriously, a key scene – of Jessica Biel getting a nail in her head – was poorly lit and a reshoot was expected; from the brief glimpse on the trailer (at 0’25” in), I’d speculate no new footage has been added.
So what do you think? Are you pleased Nailed is finally seeing the light of day? Or would you rather its putrefying corpse had been left to quietly decompose? Let us know in the comments below.
