The film seems to still be in deep development stages but Nathan Philips is now being rumored to have joined up with the rest of the cast. Here's the official synopsis:

"NICK BIGMAN has a problem. He comes from a long line of surfers; his father was an amateur surfer, his grandfather ROD BIGMAN a surf champion who appeared in 1960's beach movies like Beach Bongo. Unfortunately, Nick suffers from Hydrophobia, an anxiety disorder that plagues many Americans who suffer from this extreme fear of the water. Nick can't go near any body of water without breaking into a sweat. If he's tossed in the ocean or a pool by a bunch of pranksters, he immediately goes into a panic attack. Those who suffer from Hydrophobia have been known to drown in a shallow body of water they could have easily stood up and walked away from, the anxiety's that intense.

'Hydrophobia' revolves around the ghost of 60's beach movie starlet KAREN SLATER. When Karen's controlling Hollywood agent DON BULASKY finds out about her love affair with her BEACH BONGO co-star, ROD BIGMAN (Nick's grandfather), her agent drowns her in a jealous rage. Overcome with grief DON seeks out the help of a local Jamaican witch doctor to bring his favorite beach movie starlet back to life.

There's only one problem. While what comes back resembles the beautiful Karen Slater, in voodoo mythology if a person dies a violent death, his or her soul returns as evil incarnate. In Karen's case, she's become a flesh-eating astral zombie residing in the pool of her old abandoned Malibu Beach house. Every spring Karen needs to feed on twelve poor souls so she can exist on this earthly plane for another year. And because she's an astral zombie, Karen can materialize anywhere in the house or pool area where there's water!

With the help of her keeper, Hollywood agent Bulasky, Karen lures a pair of college kids, who of course decide to throw a huge spring break pool party at her Malibu beach house! Being spring, it's feeding time again! To complicate matters, the protagonist, Nick, has a fear of the water so if he notices strange occurrences or claims to see weird stuff going on during the mayhem of the pool party, no one's going to believe him.

As the partygoers are knocked off one by one, Nick and his fun-loving dorm buddy DARYL don't realize what's going on – they're too preoccupied with getting laid! But when the girls (ALEX & CINDY) that Nick & Daryl have their eyes on fall prey to Karen as they wade in the pool, Nick is forced to confront both his Hydrophobia and this flesh-eating creature who was once Karen Slater, the sexy 60's beach movie starlet Nick's idolized for years. As Nick's friends are about to find out in 'Hydrophobia', it's time to be afraid of the water ... again!"

Sounds kooky enough. My only question: Bai Ling is going to play a 1960's actress named Karen Slater?

The posting goes on to describe the monstrous mermaid herself as a Species-like movie monster, "a sexy femme fatale who lures both men and women into the pool, appearing as a sexy vixen at first who then morphs into an Alien-like creature with razor-sharp piranha teeth capable of opening her mouth as wide as a python to bite a man's head off!"

We're not going to let this ridiculous gem of a film slip by without a trailer of Bai Ling feasting on the beach-blanket-bingo remains of a pack of beach boys and girls. We'll keep you updated.

[via Bloody Disgusting]

After meeting Bai Ling the other day, I was inspired to track down the DVD of The Gene Generation, which came out a few months ago. (Our intrepid columnist, Lisa Katayama, reviewed it last year.) The rest of the movie isn't quite as fantastic as this opening sequence, which sets up the whole DNA-rewriting, crazy tentacle-face premise. (The "cheap science fiction movie voiceover opening sequence" is an art form in itself. How many movies have them? I feel like it's become a standard feature.)

After this, the movie sort of descends into a bit of a tawdry melodrama in which Bai tries to save her degenerate gambler brother from the gangsters he owes money to. And then the brother, by coincidence, steals the prototype DNA transcoder, and wackiness ensues. On the plus side, there are golden showers and cool CG vistas, including flying sampans with giant video screens on them. It's very Blade Runner-ish, except if reinterpreted by Uwe Boll.

We were lucky enough to spend some time with Bai, whose well-known zany sense of humor was on full display. (When we asked her where in China she originally hailed from, she told us she'd actually descended from the Moon, via satellite, and had landed in Asia.)

But then she did tell us all about Ria, her character in the movie: "She's totally crazy, and she's very free and she's hilarious. She'll make you laugh..." When we first meet Ria, she falls from a second-storey window, onto the street.

The film's hero, Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) saves Ria's life, and afterwards, Ria says, "I'm yours, you saved my life!" Chev is in a hurry to track down his superpowered heart, which an elderly Chinese gangster has stolen. So he tells Ria that he doesn't need her. And Ria says, "You need me like Whitney Houston." The madly-in-love Ria starts following Chev around, and eventually helps him track down the bad guys.

But first, Ria has to have a hilarious catfight with Statham's girlfriend, played by Amy Smart. "She beats me, too. She's tough. It's fun." She calls it a "rollercoaster" of a movie, a 90 minute adventure that feels like 20 minutes. There are tons of crazy moments where Jason Statham goes around electrocuting himself to keep his artificial heart beating. Statham gets pumped up like a cartoon character, grabbing wires that are attached to devices with "DANGER" written on them, and he gets blown down the street but still survives. All the while, he's searching for his missing heart.

"There's a great message in the movie: Looking for a heart," says Bai. "Aren't we all looking for a heart?" Especially in the modern world, with everybody spending all their time on computers and interacting with technology, this is a message she feels resonates.

And Bai explained that she improvised a lot of her dialogue in the film:

My character's supposed to be funny, because it's a comedy. They ask me to read specifically what they've written, because they think it's funny. I ask, "Can I do something else?" They say sure, so I start to improvise. And then after that, they say, "Wow, you're hilarious!" So they let me do whatever I want to do, and say whatever I want to say. "Just keep going, Bai Ling!" Okay, if you encourage me, I'm like a kid. All these weird things come to my mind. Everything I say is like strange - it doesn't make any sense to you, but in her character, when you hear her, it makes perfect sense.

Not only that, but she did all of her own stunts, including one sequence where she gets hit by a car and goes flying up in the air. The wirework backfired, and Bai nearly smashed her nose on the pavement.

They had a stuntwoman there, who looked exactly like her, but Bai insisted on doing the stunt herself, even though the stuntwoman said, "You're crazy." But the directors said it was okay. She had straps attached to her legs and waist. She's chasing after Chev, and the car comes out and hits her. She's flung up in the air, and falls upside down, and the pavement rushes towards her face. She was supposed to flip over and land on the sidewalk, but she hurt her arm in the process.

Bai also said she developed her own "silly but crazy" fighting style for the film. And when directors/writers Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor told her how her character ends, she decided that wasn't fun enough and came up with her own final scene. They let her choose her own guns - which turned out to be way too heavy and overwhelming for her to handle. And she came up with a "very spontaneous" ending for Ria. (But it sounds like Ria doesn't die, because Bai says she's hoping to come back for Crank 3.)

I asked her if she's comfortable with the way Crank 2 portrays Asian people, since its main villain is Hu Dong, a 100-year-old Chinese gangster. She responded, "I don't consider myself an Asian actress or an Asian American actress. I'm just one of the creatures in the world, happy to have the gift as an actress [who's] working." People might point out that a lot of actors from Asia or Eastern Europe play prostitutes or "somebody's girlfriend," but "a lot them in real life are." So there's nothing wrong with showing it. And there's no point in having a lot of anger, or being caught up with criciticizing one aspect of a movie. "There is a Chinese mafia, and they do a lot of bad things. So it's fine for this film to show that. It's their choice."

The best thing about Crank 2 is that it's not the type of "fashionable action movie where everything's polished and beautiful. Everything's raw, like the street." Neveldine and Taylor shot the movie in the worst parts of Los Angeles, and filmed from weird camera angles. The directors shot some of the movie themselves, racing around on roller blades. There were eighteen cameras, and Bai couldn't even tell where they all were. Once, she asked where the camera was, and the directors pointed directly under her skirt. (At this point, she mimed looking down, locking her legs together, and pulling her skirt down tight.)

Bai said she hopes she'll return to Lost at some point. "They told me it's like the pyramids. Every character, every element is planned. I love that show."

She also talked about how she had to learn French in two weeks for Luc Besson's 2003 film Taxi 3, in which she plays a leading lady who "says philosophical things." She managed to memorize the French in the movie, in time to audition for the film, but was so embarrassed afterwards she ran and hid in the bathroom. But then Besson came and found her and said everybody adored her performance because it was funny. "After that, I learned the potential of the human mind," she said.

Crank 2: High Voltage is in theaters April 17.