Imagine, if you will, a film by the director of House of Flying Daggers or Red Sorghum that has been remade from a picture by the directors of Raising Arizona or The Big Lebowski. What would such a thing look like? Courtesy of the first three stills from Zhang Yimou’s Three Guns, a remake of the Coen Bros. debut Blood Simple, you don’t even need that much an imagination. Check the images out below the break.

There are clearly some differences between Yimou’s film and the original, not least the period in which it is set. The title, Three Guns, seems to be referring to the odd three-barelled gun seen in one of the pictures, a weapon that is also not at all a direct carry-over from the Coens’ movie. Judging from the period clothes on display the narrative will have to have been jiggled in a few other ways too. What do you think they might have done about the photograph-in-the-safe plot point? I’m intrigued to see.

One of my all time great pleasures in life was the DVD commentary track for Blood Simple. In my dreams, Kenneth Loring will resurface to record a track for Three Guns too. Or maybe he has a Chinese counterpart?

These images come from an article on the Sina website which I can barely understand. To be clear, I don’t speak any of the Chinese languages at all and am rather dependent on translation software. Unfortunately, the software has proven quite hopeless with this article. I’m assuming it is written in a loose and colloquial style.

When Variety announced the film they called it Amazing Tales - Three Guns and said that the film would have two clear parts, one a comedy and the other a thriller. I’m not sure how accurate that is, and there’s definitely no giveaway indication of this in any of the stills.