Image Ent. sees clearly through the ‘Mist’

I’m not sure if the alarmist print media are truly taking notice, but for the past couple of months, a whole bunch of home video distributors are coming out of the woodworks and joining the theatrical release game. With the majors closing down shops, Variety reports that a company like Image Entertainment will test the theater exhibition business with the AFM deal that gives them the rights to Bertrand Tavernier‘s serial killer thriller that features a Tommy Lee Jones in the swampy backwoods.

This past summer, Image released Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World, and they will release Tavernier’s In the Electric Mist sometime in spring 2009.

I’ve got a fairly complete synopsis from our preview page: scripted by Jerzy Kromolowski, Mary Olson-Kromolowski and Jones, this is an adaptation of James Lee Burke’s novel, which centers on Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux. New Iberia Lt. Dave Robicheaux is trying to link the murder of a local hooker to New Orleans mobster Julie (Baby Feet) Balboni–back in his home parish as co- producer of Hollywood director Michael Goldman’s Civil War film–when sozzled/psychic movie-star Elrod Sykes, pulled over for drunk driving, starts babbling about a corpse he found in the Atchafalaya Swamp–the corpse of a black man Dave had seen murdered 35 years before. Convinced that Baby Feet is the key to both the old murder and the horrific new serial killings of prostitutes, Dave goes outside the law to nail him over the protests of locals getting fat off Hollywood-and- mob money–provoking stunning new outbursts of violence, getting suspended after a shootout leaves still another prostitute dead, and finding himself holding hushed conversations with the specter of a Confederate general whom Sykes had already met deep in the bayou. Dave’s visions of the Confederate dead bring a Faulknerian resonance to the miasmal guilt and self-doubt that enrich all his encounters with evil.