'Leprechaun' director Mark Jones on his new thriller 'Scorned'

Hell hath no fury like a you-know-who who has been you-know-what-ed in the new thriller Scorned, which is released on Blu-ray and DVD Tuesday. The film stars AnnaLynne McCord (90210) as a woman who discovers her boyfriend (Billy Zane) has been cheating on her with dramatic and — judging by the movie’s trailer — dog-in-microwave-featuring consequences.

Below, Scorned director Mark Jones (Leprechaun, Rumpelstiltskin) talks about the film — and the time he got punk’d by George Peppard.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Tell us about Scorned.

MARK JONES: Okay. Well, it’s basically Misery meets Fatal Attraction with young people.

I’m in!

Yes. This girl, AnnaLynne McCord, is terrific. She’s like a young Kathy Bates and basically she finds out her boyfriend has cheated on her and she knocks him out, ties him up, and texts her girlfriend [with whom he’s been cheating] to come to the isolated lake house. And she kind of has at ’em for the weekend. She becomes this incredible, crazed killer and she’s terrific. It’s a pretty cool movie. It’s a different kind of movie, for me. There’s no little monsters in it.

You cowrote the film with the actress Sadie Katz. How did that come about?

Sadie and I have been friends for years. We’d commiserate with each other about relationships and things like that and I came up with this idea. I said, “I’ve always wanted to do kind of Misery.” I love that movie. As a matter of fact, we make reference [to that] in the movie, we do the ankle-breaking scene. We talked about it and that’s how it came about.

And AnnaLynne McCord’s character is actually called Sadie.

You know, that was a coincidence. [The character] is sort of a melting pot of every girl I’ve known. [Laughs]

Would it be fair to say that Scorned is more of an erotic movie than Leprechaun?

I don’t like the word “erotic.” It’s a thriller, whereas Leprechaun was obviously a horror-comedy. It was a step out for me because it was more of an adult movie. I just wanted to see if I could tackle that because people kept making fun of me for dealing with these little monsters. I really think it’s one of my better movies.

Before you became a director you worked as a writer-producer on the A-Team TV show. What do you remember about that?

George Peppard was the lead and the cast kind of followed what he said. One day I’m sitting in my office and George Peppard came in with the producer and he threw the manila envelope of the script that we were prepping on my desk and he said, “You wrote this, right?” And I go, “Yeah.” I opened the manila folder and the script was ripped in half. I’m sitting there and Stephen J. Cannell (A-Team cocreator) was there and George Peppard and I’m just sitting there speechless.

Then they started cracking up. It was a joke. That was my introduction to working with the A-Team. I thought I was going to be fired after my first script.

You can check out the trailer for Scorned below.