WWII creature feature Orang Ikan has cast Dean Fujioka (Fullmetal Alchemist, The Man From The Sea) and Callum Woodhouse (All Creatures Great and Small, The Durrells), Variety confirmed in an exclusive article.
The movie will be written and directed by Mike Wiluan, who previously produced Headshot, The Night Comes For Us, and also directed 2018’s Buffalo Boys. Production is set to begin next month in Indonesia. SC Films International is handling it.
Set in the Pacific, in 1942, a Japanese ship transports prisoners of war to occupied territories as slave labor. After being torpedoed by Allied submarines, a Japanese soldier and a British POW are stranded on a deserted island, but soon discover they are not alone. A ferocious mythological creature, the Orang Ikan, a human-fish hybrid is hunting them. Unable to communicate in each other’s language, the two mortal enemies must unite to survive the unknown.
Orang Ikan will be produced by veteran director Eric Khoo, who told Variety how delighted he is to work on a creature feature.
“I grew up on a steady diet of horror movies, which ranged from the supernatural to monster flicks. One of my childhood favorites was the classic 1954 monster movie, Creature from the Black Lagoon. During the pandemic I came across Hell in the Pacific, a 1968 war film about a Japanese soldier and an American serviceman marooned on an island trying to kill each other off. This was the lightbulb moment for me – what if an orang ikan had come ashore in that scenario? In order to survive, the two mortal enemies would have to team up to battle this terrifying beast! What an exciting premise!”
Yoshi, Grace Wu, Han Minli, Natalya Pavchinskaya, Jomon Thomas, Anthony Khoo, S Shamkumar, Kenneth Poh, Simon Crowe, Matthew Joynes, and Takahiro Yamashita will be on board as Executive Producers. The film will have a score by Akihiko Matsumoto.
