Ill-fated River Phoenix film will finally premiere in September

In May, we reported that Dutch director Georges Sluizer (The Vanishing) was attempting to complete his ill-fated movie Dark Blood, which had been sitting on a shelf incomplete for two decades. What made this newsworthy was that the movie was the last production actor River Phoenix worked on before dying of a drug overdose in 1993.

Against the odds, Dark Blood has been completed and Sluizer will premiere the thriller at the Netherlands Film Festival in late September. The director managed to obtain funding to complete his movie from the Netherlands Film Fund and the online fundraising site Cinecrowd.

Sluizer's crusade to finish the movie seemed quixotic at times. When Phoenix died, eleven days of filming still had to be done. The insurance company overseeing the production wanted to destroy the print, so Sluizer returned to Europe with the canisters, hoping to one day figure out a way to complete it without his star.

Dark Blood stars Phoenix as a disturbed hermit living out in the desert who encounters a rich married couple from Los Angeles, played by Jonathan Pryce and Judy Davis, whose car has broken down. Tension builds when the rescuer turns hostile.

More on this when the movie finally premieres.