Russell Brand will play an industrious ghost.
Oh good, it’s not only American TV shows that are being scraped out of the bottom of the barrell to be turned into feature films. Deadline reports that Russell Brand will star in an adaptation of the British TV comedy “Rentaghost.” Warner Brothers picked up the rights to the show, which ran from 1976 to 1984 on the BBC. Brand will produce along with Gail Berman and Lloyd Braun.
Here’s the story:
He’ll play Fred Mumford, a recently deceased guy determined to be more productive as a corpse than he was during his life as a slacker. He attempts to set himself up in a business with a couple of other ghouls, starting a temp agency for the dead. Mumford and cohorts rent out ghouls and ghosts to the living, until things go awry.
The idea is to get something like “Beetlejuice” out of that.
Brand is funny enough on his own, but I think we still have to see how he is playing real characters and carrying the lead role in a movie. That means we’re waiting for “Arthur.” By no means am I predicting he’ll fail–I’m just saying we don’t know yet. Sometimes those kind of personality-intense, high-energy comedians don’t fit into a movie beyond cameos.
