Who knew The Evil Dead and John Waters' Hairspray had so much in common? Neither were big box office successes in their original releases, but lived on in the hearts and minds of diehard fans. Both inspired stage adaptations with kicky song and dance numbers. If "serious rights issues" can be worked out, both will have new movie musical versions, too.

Where they differ, though, is in Carmody's plans to make his movie in 3-D. I've already whinged about 3-D movies popping up everywhere, so I won't do it again. In fact, in this case, I can almost understand the need: For the stage version, the first three rows were known as the "splatter zone", where audience members were likely to be splashed with phony blood. Using 3-D is probably the only way to recreate that sort of "audience participation" feel, unless they plan on hiring extra movie theater ushers to stand in front of screens and squirt ketchup on people.