Grindhouse spin-off on?

According to Bloody Disgusting, the long-discussed (see here, here, here and here) “Machete”, a spin-off of the popular box-office failure (I still can’t work out why, it was frickin’ amazing!) “Grindhouse”, might be coming to fruition.

The flick, based on one of the faux trailers in Robert Rodriguez’s exploitation movie spoof, will see Danny Trejo playing a gun-toting ladies man (see the trailer here). And if Rodriguez sticks to the trailer, we can expect to see Jeff Fahey and Cheech Marin in there too.

The Weinstein Company may be ready to shoot as early as later this year.

If “Machete” is indeed a reality, I’d bet money on it going direct-to-DVD (no studio’s going to waste good marketing dollars on a spin-off of a film that tanked like a gulf-war assault vehicle are they!?) with the possibility of it opening theatrically in Europe.

In 2007, Rodriguez told IGN that he’s already completed the script.

“We’ve got a script already and Danny Trejo says, ‘I’m in the best shape of my life, bro. I am so ready to do this movie!’ So it’s really cool. I’m going to direct some other sequences in it for sure, and maybe the whole thing. I don’t know if I should do it like El Mariachi, but I want it to look really good. That trailer came out fantastic. Danny is really great in it and there’s some other surprise actors that show up in this trailer. And it just looks fantastic.”

The character was something Rodriguez and Trejo came up with when they working on “Desperado” in the mid 90s.

“It’s an idea I came up with back during Desporado,” said Rodriguez. “When I met Danny, I said, ‘This guy should be like the Mexican Jean-Claude Van Damme or Charles Bronson, putting out a movie every year and his name should be Machete.’ So I decided to do that way back when, never got around to it until finally now. So now, of course, I want to keep going and do a feature.”

But let’s not get too excited just yet – the film, after all, has been on-and-off more times than Pam and Tommy’s marriage.