June 25^th, 2000

"INDEPENDENCE DAY!"

Let's step outside of the limelight for a minute, shall we? Let's all stroll down the lane into the "bad" part of town. Yes, this is where with a small amount of cash and a lot of ambition there are literally hundreds of filmmakers struggling to get their vision made. Filmmakers who may not get millions of dollars but are happy with just completing a movie, getting it out there and actually having people who like it.

So let's "flip off" the mainstream and look at three way cool independent horror flicks.

The Vicious Sweet [1997] is Ron Bonk's masterwork. It stars familiar indie face Sasha Graham as a horror movie actress who's quite tired of being a celebrity. Well, she won't have to worry about it much longer as she winds-up being kidnapped and subjected to psychological warfare with her captor (who may just hold a secret himself).

This is a quiet, thoughtful and original little film with Graham giving the B-movie equivelent of a "tour-de-force" performance. It may be a little slower-paced and lack the good old sex and violence stand-bys; but it's an at times fascinating effort and one of my favourite underground films of 1997.

Too bad Ron has been too busy building his Sub Rosa Studios LLC into "the" place for indie films to direct more features - but I see the release of Strawberry Estates in the near future.

Drainiac! [1999] may seem like a silly little no-budget movie at first, and it is, but the difference here is it's a lot of fun to watch and writer/director Bret Piper has made this a none-too-serious little ass-kicker of a flick.

The set-up is old; some teenagers out cleaning-up a decrepit old house fall victim to an ancient demon. But this demon lives in the houses pipes and gets-up to some quite nasty goings-on including castrating the local bully.

Made with a sarcastic sense of humour and loaded with pretty neat effects (including some of Piper's mostly impressive stop-motion ones), Drainiac! turned out to be one of the more enjoyable horror flicks (from any budget range) to cross my path in a little while. And the fact it's an old fashioned monster movie also helped.

Hollywood Mortuary [1999] started out as a short feature by California director Ron Ford. Well, he liked the story so much and got such good feedback about it (myself included giving it a glowing **** rating) that he decided to film new footage and expand it to feature length.

A loving homage to classic horror this has Randall Malone playing an egotisical make-up man who finds his star in Hollywood falling. So he goes to a voodoo woman and gets two famous horror stars (the killer trio of Tim Sullivan and Ford himself) resurrected to wreak havoc on those who have called him "washed-up". Well the zombies don't disappoint and when they're not busy bickering and calling each other creative names they're out ripping limbs off.

While not quite as stellar as the short this is still a highly recommended time with good acting, a premise that's fun and some mock interviews with real people (including B-movie director David DeCoteau) that work well.

The titles above can be gotten from Kinetic Image (for Drainiac!), Sub Rosa (for Vicious Sweet) and Ron Ford...get them and see how things work in the "underground".