Deets on "Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters"

Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters is just one of numerous supernatural action movie “re-envisionings” on the horizon, and it features rising stars Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton as the adult versions of the famous fairy tale siblings, who are now highly-skilled professional bounty hunters.

Villainous character actor Peter Stormare (of Prison Break and Fargo fame) and Norwegian actress Ingrid Bolsø Berdal signed on recently for the film, the plot of which has remained largely under wraps up to now – besides the obvious implications of the movie’s attention-grabbing title, that is.

Moviehole has gotten ahold of some juicy plot details for H&G: Witch Hunters, which is a $60 million project that will be shot in 3D and begins production next month overseas in Germany, under the direction of Tommy Wirkola (Dead Snow). Since some of that information definitely borders on SPOILER territory, we’ll just stick to examining the more basic details of the film’s storyline.
Here are some of the basic plot points for Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters:

• Hansel (Renner) and Gretel (Arterton) have grown up and become famous for being highly-effective at hunting down and killing witches in the years since their infamous incident at the gingerbread house. The two were permanently scarred by that event, seeing as that Gretel still suffers nightmares from the ordeal and Hansel is now diabetic (since the witch forced him to eat all the candy when he was a kid).

• The town of Augsburg has a serious witch problem, what with numerous children having gone missing and the power-mad Sheriff Berringer (Stormare) burning potentially innocent suspects at the stake left and right. So the town’s mayor recruits Hansel and Gretel to help out.

• Hansel and Gretel have their work cut out for them when they arrive in Augsburg. It seems that the rise of the “Blood Moon” marks a holy night for witches, and the siblings have two days before the vivacious sorceress Muriel (Famke Janssen, presumably) uses the occasion to sacrifice multiple children for her own benefit.

Renner and Arterton are playing the titular witch hunters.

It sounds as though H&G: Witch Hunters will bear a definite resemblance to Terry Gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm, and Moviehole says that there are also shades of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and even the western Tombstone as well. The film is shaping up to be a bloody, R-Rated affair with some fanciful fight scenes, humor, suspense, romance, and all that jazz also thrown in the mix.

Development on another literature/horror mashup, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, has been start and go for a while now – seeing as how David O. Russell wrote the most recent version of the script, it’ll probably have more of the darkly comical overtones that look to be present in H&G: Witch Hunters. That’s not so much the case with director Timur Bekmambetov’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, which will reportedly be more of a serious biographical picture that also features lots of gruesome vampire violence.

Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters will beat the competition to theaters and is scheduled for release on March 2nd, 2012. Will you be checking it out?

Source: Moviehole