Holy crap. If you haven’t seen the blood-tastic trailer for the upcoming Starz original series Spartacus: Blood and Sand, you need to do so. In fact, you can do it right after the break. It’s over the top and filled with sweaty men cutting chunks of flesh out of each other with all sorts of weapons. There’s blood, tons of nudity of both the female and male variety, (Lucy Lawless may even get fully naked, according to her), and lots of testosterone flying around. If you loved 300 and/or Gladiator, this is right up your alley. In fact, it’s so far up your alley that you might be sitting a bit uncomfortably right now.
The series is produced by Sam Raimi, he told us yesterday that he’ll have to vacate that seat for his directing duties on Spider-man 4. But his longtime producing partner Rob Tapert will be handling the reins, which is a bit of a return to the days of Hercules and Xena. If you listen to the Army of Darkness DVD commentary, you’ll hear Sam Raimi sort of half-heartedly apologize for the scene where two topless women are dragged offscreen by two skeleton warriors, and he blames it all on Tapert. Does that mean we can thank him for all of the gratuitous nudity in Spartacus? We hope so. Although it was a bit disturbing to learn that some of the men on set were not “very well endowed,” so they created a fake penis prosthesis for those scenes, and they appropriately called it “the Kirk Douglas.”
Check out the trailer for the series below. Spartacus: Blood and Sand will begin airing on Starz in 2010.
