JAY AND SILENT BOB MAY ENCOUNTER THE HORRORS OF KEVIN SMITH’S MOOSE JAWS
Most of Kevin Smith’s movies to date have been distributed through companies run by the Weinstein brothers, and the filmmaker has said that Bob Weinstein once approached him with the idea of taking his characters Jay and Silent Bob (played by Jason Mewes and Smith himself, respectively) in the Abbott and Costello direction and having them cross paths with horror characters Dimension Films owned the rights to. The stoners could run into Michael Myers or the children of the corn, or the idea Weinstein seemed particularly keen on: “Jay and Silent Bob vs. Hellraiser”.
None of those possibilities came to fruition, although Jay and Bob did have a quick cameo in SCREAM 3. The characters have also been left out of Smith’s own genre films, RED STATE and TUSK, but now their time to meet monsters may have finally come.
As he works on the screenplay for MOOSE JAWS, the film which will end the True North Trilogy of creature features that started with TUSK and continues with the recently wrapped YOGA HOSERS, Smith put the question out on his social media accounts: should he add Jay and Silent Bob to the MOOSE JAWS mix?
Smith discussed the idea further on the latest episode of his Hollywood Babble On podcast, which he co-hosts with SHARKTOPUS’s Ralph Garman, revealing that the inspiration came from a drawing he dug up from his school days in which he had imagined SCTV/STRANGE BREW’s Bob and Doug McKenzie starring in a sequel to JAWS. Well, MOOSE JAWS is his take on JAWS – with a killer moose terrorizing a summer camp rather than a killer shark terrorizing an island community – and Jay and Silent Bob are his own comedy team like Bob and Doug, so this could be a personal way of making that youthful dream come true.
Smith has now started writing scenes for Jay and Silent Bob into the MOOSE JAWS script, and if they do end up in the film they’ll be joining a cast that so far includes Genesis Rodriguez, reprising her role from TUSK, and EPIC MEAL TIME’s Harley Morenstein as a camp counselor character who is said to be a mixture of Roy Scheider in JAWS and Bill Murray in MEATBALLS.
Jay and Silent Bob made their debut in Smith’s directorial debut CLERKS and went on to have supporting roles in MALLRATS, CHASING AMY, and DOGMA before being at the center of 2001’s JAY AND SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK. The pair have only been in one live action film since then, CLERKS II in 2006, but MOOSE JAWS could be part of a resurgence for them, as they’re also slated to appear in the soon-to-film MALLRATS sequel MALLBRATS and CLERKS III.
Jay and Silent Bob are characters that pretty much anything can be done with, as they’re bit further outside of reality than the people they’re usually surrounded by. I wouldn’t necessarily want to see them playing a big role in the killer moose hunt, but it could be fun to have them appear on the periphery of the story.
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