It's ghoulish puppet show time as Val Kilmer "appears" in As Deep As The Grave trailer

The Kilmer puppet is all over the trailer, actually, appearing in a guise resembling both the actor’s younger self and one closer to his death last year at the age of 65. And he is accompanied (per Variety) by a whole host of disclaimers, caveats, and explanations offered by writer-director Coerte Voorhees and his associates: Kilmer deeply wanted to be in the movie, but was too sick to do so. His family endorses and supports his inclusion. He was a big fan of technology, including, presumably, its use in turning his own image into a digital avatar to then shove into movies. Honestly, if you listen to the team desperately trying to sell this narrative, you’re kind of a jerk if you don’t treat Voorhees and company puppeteering his grim visage across the screen as a respectful tribute to a beloved Hollywood legend.

The fact is, of course, that nobody would be paying a fraction of this attention to As Deep As The Grave—about early female archeologist Ann Axtell Morris—if it weren’t now being used as the stage on which Voorhees was very publicly accepting the dare to go full-on ghoulish with AI tech. Someone was going to do it, selling whatever genuine interest that their film could have drummed up on its own merits in favor of acting as a carnival sideshow; Voorhees is just the one who got there earliest, and with a dead movie star’s family on board to support it. The upshot is that the trailer (which also stars the actual human faces and bodies of Abigail Lawrie and Tom Felton, who presumably worked very hard to make it) is now almost impossible to parse through any other angle; turns out, once you create a puppet of a famous dead person and then parade it around on stage, the taste it leaves in the mouth overwhelms and obliterates everything else.