sacha baron cohen

He wants $95 million in damages too.

Whether he’s handing a plastic bag full of feces to a dinner party host, trying to coax Ron Paul into a hotel-room gay sex scandal, or getting face-raped by the massive phallus of an elephant while hiding inside the cavernous vagina of a second elephant, Sacha Baron Cohen’s a born button-pusher. His unending search for shock value has now led him to Denmark, the home nation of the excruciating comedy of discomfort Klown. A new item from Deadline notes that the prank-happy provocateur will bring his talents for awkwardness to a remake of the taboo-busting Danish cringe-fest, and more specifically, that foreign distribution rights have been snapped up by Annapurna International.

Some funny timing: Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the release of The Phantom, the adaptation of the old comic strip hero created by Lee Falk. Falk was a prodigious talent who also worked as a theater director and novelist; as a comic-strip creator he also founded the long-running strip Mandrake the Magician, about a guy who used his magic powers (like hypnosis, invisibility, levitation) to fight crime. Created in 1934, Mandrake is sometimes billed as the first superhero. (He arrived about four years before Superman’s debut in Action Comics #1.) And 20 years after The Phantom movie, Mandrake will follow his colleague to the screen.