Fango heard from director Donn Kennedy and line producer Jennifer Kreuser of the new Wisconsin-lensed indie BACKWOODS BLOODBATH, and Kreuser also passed along the exclusive photos seen below. “It’s currently on the film festival circuit,” Kreuser tells us, “and was nominated for Best Screenplay at the Terror Film Festival, was the Best Feature runner-up at the Full Moon Horror Film Festival and was nominated for Best Feature at the It Came From Lake Michigan Horror/Sci-Fi Film Festival. Our indie gore flick is about six friends who take a road trip to a back-country town where a local legend has been feeding off the population for years—only to find themselves becoming the latest items on the creature’s menu.”
Shot on 24p hi-def, the movie “is a throwback to the old-school horror films I grew up on,” Kennedy says. “I had a hundred stories I wanted to tell, but in the end, it all came down to a simple premise: get some kids in the woods and get them dead. Our movie has a classic backbone, and what we tried to do was put fresh meat on it with the energy you only find in independent films.
“I’ve seen enough straight-to-DVD horror flicks where the jokes aren’t funny, the gore isn’t supposed to look good or gross and you can tell it was made by a bunch of businessmen just trying to cash in on the genre who really don’t give a shit,” Kennedy continues. “Hopefully our film is fresh as well as classic. We wanted our characters to actually be funny, we tried to make our kill scenes look wicked and enjoyable, we didn’t just write scenes to eat up space between the creature attacks, etc. We know the genre’s clichés, and we poke fun and play with them in the film—like when the phone is dead and the tires are slashed, a character simply responds with, ‘Classic.’ Being tired of the PG-13 bullshit horror movies, we tried to pack the film with all the right elements: gore, profanity, nudity, drug use, violence…all in good fun.”
Having toiled on the Asylum productions EVIL EYES, INTERMEDIO and DRAGON alongside old friend Dominic Ceci, Kennedy returned to Wisconsin and formed Locked Trunk Productions with the goal “to make a feature film in 11 days with no money,” he says. “Everyone thought I was crazy, but I knew it could be done. We had an incredibly young cast and crew: Jennifer, our line producer, was 19 years old, I was 24, most of my cast couldn’t go out to bars, etc. Erin Castrapel was the cinematographer/vegetarian we made fun of every day, Four Finger Effects provided the special makeup, Dominic was the production designer, Alex Lucas edited the picture and Mark Theil and Ryan Buth provided the score. We have an original, kickass soundtrack from local Wisconsin bands like Kill Courtney, 8 Hours of Silence, Anura, Flameshark, The Moon is Down, Salvage and Talisman.”
BACKWOODS BLOODBATH next plays the New York Independent Film Festival sometime between February 28 and March 6 of next year. Locked Trunk is currently in preproduction on SALVATION SEMINARY, and developing CICADA and the wonderfully titled SUCK U.; you can see the company’s official site here and BACKWOODS BLOODBATH’s MySpace page here.
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