If you liked Hatchet...
Okay okay okay. This is a self-promoting post for a feature film I helped out with, but having said that and gotten it out of the way, I feel like it's something fans of Hatchet would really dig. It's called The Amateur Monster Movie (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1717690) and it's another horror/comedy film that pays tribute to other horror films of the past. Where Hatchet is about the slashers, we've tackled the zombie/werewolf scene.
Plot:
After a group of boy scouts are mysteriously killed by a wolf-like creature on Cadaverous Island, Walter Romero, whose best friend was among the killed, sets out to find exactly what happened. In order to reach the island, Walter teams up with Johnny Mason, neighborhood stoner, to smoke up Ashley Valinski, neighborhood hottie, and get her to take them out on her father's boat. But soon after arriving on Cadaverous Island, a horde of zombies steals their boat, leaving them stranded, and the three are forced to team up with two cops, the mayor, and a team of botanists to either kill the monsters... or be killed themselves..... DUN-DUN-DUN!!!
We were all in our late teens/20s when making this but after about four years of production/post production, it's finally finished. We were a crew of about 8 with the free help of about 300 others from around the area who all just wanted to work on something fun together. Being a completely unpaid production, we had to keep our day jobs and shot mainly on the weekends. As production got closer to a wrap, our main actress decided to not show up for her last three scenes and completely dropped all communication with us. Winter came and with most of our scenes being outdoors, we had to postpone production. We recast in the spring and were left to reshoot a vast majority of the film.
58 shoot days and almost two years later, it premiered to a sold-out theatre of 700 and has played at various film festivals around the midwest to overall, very solid reviews. We have put the film up in its entirety on Youtube to share with everyone and will continue putting our films online for free. If you love something and want people to see it, why not give it to them? It seems as though people really want us to keep telling these stories and have come up to the plate, and vocalized their support by donating to us or buying the DVDs.
Unfortunately, releasing a film independently for free isn't the best way to get attention which brings me to trying to expose it to people I feel may be interested.
Now, it is definitely no-budget, but I'd say given the equipment we were using, the production quality turned out as great as it possibly could have. The same crew went out to Arizona last year to shoot the survival drama / psychological thriller, The Wayward sun. We had our premiere for that last week and have gotten a tremendous amount of positive feedback. We're currently fine-tuning some visual fx and will begin submitting it to festivals. We're also starting a weekly sketch comedy/news show on the channel and are gearing up for pre-production for our next film, Birdland, which will be shot in New Zealand.
Here's the link to the trailer (one of several) and if you're still curious, you can find the whole film on our channel as well. You can also catch the trailer for our next film, The Wayward Sun.
trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aZquMQhAmo
full film: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sp_ulLsd4L4
The Wayward Sun trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmX4XKCB2vI
Would really love to hear what you all think!