LOS ANGELES, CA - 1988: Actor River Phoenix, star of “Stand By Me,†poses during a 1988 Los Angeles, California, photo portrait session. Phoenix, a rising young film star, tragically died in 1993 outside a Sunset Strip nightclub of a drug overdose. (Photo by George Rose/Getty Images)
Photo: George Rose/1988 George Rose
Dark Blood, River Phoenix’s final movie, will premiere at the Netherlands Film Festival on September 27. Director George Sluizer announced last fall that he was trying to finish Blood, which he had abandoned in the wake of Phoenix’s 1993 death, and now it appears that he has indeed completed the movie. Sluizer had just eleven days left of shooting when Phoenix died, and it seemed at the time that the movie, in which Phoenix plays a recluse who takes two chichi interlopers prisoner, would be shelved indefinitely. Twenty years is a long time or something!