Back in November 2011 Hammer announced that they were developing a film version of Boneshaker, the first of Cherie Priest’s highly successful steampunk “Clockwork Century” novels, in partnership with Cross-Creek. John Hilary Shepherd, known for Nurse Jackie was on scripting duties.
The set-up: an alternative history, steampunk Seattle in the mid-19th century. Sixteen years before the “present” time, an inventor called Leviticus Blue had created a revolutionary mining machine called the “Boneshaker”. A horrendous accident had caused the machine to destroy much of the city and, burrowing into the rocks beneath, released a strange gas known as “Blight” that poisoned the living and resurrected the dead as flesh-hungry “rotters”. In the “present”, a huge wall encloses the infected area. Blue’s widow, Briar Wilkes, and their son, Zeke, are among the survivors scraping a living outside the walls. When Zeke decides to enter the city in search of information that he believes will clear his father’s reputation, Briar must follow him to try to get him out before they succumb to the gas, the rotters, or the would-be tyrant, Dr. Minnericht, who may, or may not, be Leviticus Blue himself.
It all sounds quite promising but it quickly emerges that we’re going to get incident instead of plot and that what should be a race against time is just going to plod along with no sense of urgency. It’s always obvious that Minnericht isn’t Leviticus Blue just as it’s always obvious what Blue’s fate had been. There’s a colourful roster of characters but none of them get any real payoff and several of them just get forgotten about along the way. I found it a real slog to get to the end.
I’ve no idea why Hammer picked this up and not just because I didn’t like the material. It’s very clear that there’s no way they could have delivered a film of this novel within their normal low-budget business model, given that it involves steampunk inventions, a period setting, crashing airships, hordes of zombies and a large-ish cast of supporting characters. I suspect that this is no longer on Hammer’s books and I’d be very surprised if anyone manages to get it off the ground.
Sterling work on the Unfilmed Hammer front, Mal. Your insights make for intriguing reading, though I suspect some of the stories themselves would have made for crap films. Including the one under advisement.