Cold Blooded

Sam Raimi could well be called a Renaissance man of genre movies. A Detroit native, Raimi startled Cannes and the rest of the film world in 1983 with the no-budget, gory masterpiece The Evil Dead. During the next decade and a half, he put his stamp on more than a dozen idiosyncratic films, ricocheting credit-wise from director to screenwriter to producer to executive producer-all that when he wasn't acting in the Coen Bros.' Miller's Crossing and The Hudsucker Proxy (which Raimi co-wrote) and lesser fare like Maniac Cop and The Flintstones.

Now, after helming Crimewave, Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn, the sci-fi thriller Darkman, the special effects-laden, time-travel oddity Army of Darkness, and the Sharon Stone/Leonardo DiCaprio western The Quick and the Dead, Raimi is back and-given his cult-figure status-in a pretty high-profile way.

The vehicle is Paramount Pictures' A Simple Plan, a suspense thriller based on the best-selling novel by Scott Smith. Published in 1993, Smith's tale of two brothers and a friend who discover $4 million in the cockpit of a crashed plane is that rarity in pop culture, a gripping, can't-put-down yarn, one that Stephen King called "simply the best suspense novel of the year." But, King's praise notwithstanding, it was A Simple Plan's page-turning ordinary readers who generated a word-of-mouth buzz that helped create a national best-seller.

A Simple Plan is almost Biblical in its tale of Midwest siblings whose lives are blessed but then horribly altered by a chance accident. Hank Mitchell (Bill Paxton), his older brother Jacob (Billy Bob Thornton) and Jacob's pal Lou (Brent Briscoe) discover the wreckage of a small plane that holds a dead pilot and a duffel bag filled with more money than they can imagine. Should they keep the cash or notify the police? They decide on a compromise, but, as time goes by, their shared secret eats away at ties of friendship and family, with greed and mistrust leading to murder. Bridget Fonda, Becky Ann Baker (Men in Black), Chelcie Ross (Primary Colors), Gary Cole (In the Line of Fire) and Jack Walsh (Eraserhead) co-star in the film, which Paramount plans to open in New York and Los Angeles on Dec. 4, prior to a wider rollout.

Like countless readers before him, Raimi admits to being "up all night" turning pages of Smith's work, which, by then, was already in screenplay form. "I was about 15 pages in when I knew this was for me," the filmmaker confesses. "It was an early draft, but Scott wrote such a gripping story. You identify with these characters, and then he has them do such horrible, awful things. When you look at them through the first person, it's really a gripping experience. I could not put it down. I just felt so much tension for these people. They were good guys and I identified with them, yet I found myself telling the main character: 'Kill him