June 1st 2011 was a Wednesday. Nothing particularly special about it but it was the day that I chose for AndyErupts’ official “go-live” date. I had a couple of daft lists and news articles ready to go and my intention was to cover horror news in this order of priority; Scottish, UK and World. Strangely, it hasn’t quite worked out that way.
On July 26th, I published a news article on an upcoming remake of George A. Romero’s seminal zombie flick, Night Of The Living Dead. There have been remakes before, of course, but this one would be filming in Wales.
That was it for a few months until October 6th when I published yet another piece on the film. This led the director, James Plumb, to get in touch and offer his thanks for our coverage. Anyway, from there, James was good enough to do an interview with ourselves, explaining his motivation for making a new version of one of the most beloved horror movies of all time. We stayed in contact via Twitter mainly and since the interview, I have written several more articles on Night Of The Living Dead:Resurrection and his slasher short, Final Girl.
Following our coverage of Night Of The Living Dead:Resurrection and subsequent coverage of films such as Neil Jones’ The Reverend, Andrew Jones’ upcoming reworking of Silent Night, Bloody Night and SJ Evans’ Dead Of The Nite, I began to notice this little community of independent film-makers in Wales, who all seemed to know each other and were all working together, or had done previously, on numerous projects and doing exactly what they want, free of big studio involvement.
I wanted to know more so I got in touch with James and arranged another interview to discuss the Welsh genre film-making community at which point James suggested he get could get a few more people involved. So he did.
The date was set. Representing AndyErupts would be myself and my second-in-command, John Milton, while representing the Welsh film-making community would be James Plumb, SJ Evans, Dave Melkevik and Dave Beynon.
In an epic and massively fun 90 minutes, liberally sprinkled with knob jokes, we discussed everything from their individual projects to Wales, the UK film industry, David Cameron and crowd-funding.
Due to the full article being close to 15,000 words long, I thought it best to break the interview into three parts so. I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank James, SJ, Dave M and Dave B for taking the time to speak to us and to thank them all for the support that they have shown to AndyErupts.
So without further ado, let’s get down to business.
(L-R) SJ Evans, Dave Melkevik, James Plumb and Dave Beynon
AndyErupts – I guess the first thing is if you guys start by saying who you are and what you do.
SJ Evans – I’m SJ Evans. I’m the director and writer of Dead Of The Nite, with Tony Todd and im also directing Davids New Year’s Evil which we are hoping to shoot next year. I’m also directing another horror at the end of this year call Shadows Within with Natasha Henstridge and Corey Feldman.
Dave Melkevik – I’m Dave Melkevik, I’m writer/producer of New Years Evil. Im a screenwriter mainly, producing and at present trying to get New Year’s Evil off the ground.
Dave Beynon – Im Dave Beynon and I’m co-directing and co-producing a feature documentary project which is called Industry, My Arse. Its a film about UK 1980’s shot on video obscure movies that people haven’t discovered until now. We have tracked down a lot of the people who were working in the mid-eighties, 3 or 4 different groups of filmmakers and we have interviewed them and a few other people to get a bit of background and we are trying to put it all together as a feature documentary and we are hoping it will be ready this year.
James Plumb – and I’m James Plumb, director of the notorious Night Of The Living Dead: Resurrection.
(At this point, James is heckled on his notoriety and dubbed “The Infamous Plumb”)
I wrote the script with the producer (and AE contributor) Andrew Jones. It’s my first feature film and should be out in the next couple of months. I’m also working on Final Girl, the feature film, which AndyErupts has already featured with the short version which is out there now. I’s also looking to get another project announced very shortly. That’s coming soon and will probably be another AndyErupts exclusive.
(Thank you kindly!)
SJ – I’m also producing House On The Edge Of The Park 2 with Ruggero Deodato so I probably should mention that too.
AE – Lets get started. Firstly, to Dave M and SJ, with regards New Year’s Evil, is it a remake of 1980′s New Year’s Evil?
DM – No it’s not. To be honest, I thought of the title and thought, “it’s genius. No one has done that before”, and then i find out that yeah, someone HAS done it before. At first I was thinking, “do i have to change the title” but you can’t really copyright a title and the story is so different that I think i can get away with it and maybe I’m wrong but it is quite an obscure 1980’s slasher movie anyway so I don’t think they are going to come suing me, hopefully but you never know. So no, it’s not a remake. Its not even a reimagining. It’s a completely new idea that just happened to have the same title.
(At roughly this point, a conversation blossomed about John Carpenter’s Halloween that led to an “incident”. I believe that as a result of this incident, the internet went down, though all parties have similar suspicions as to why connection was severed… However, after a hasty router reset, we were able to get back on track)
AE – So how did your collaboration come about?
SJ – (To Dave M) I don’t know how I found you actually. How DID I find you?
DM – You stalked me a little bit…and you sent me little love letters through the door and i just fell for you in the end.
SJ – The cool thing about Cardiff and the film community in general is that there are so many of us but its small and tight and you just end up meeting people but I think, personally, that it was our mutual love of wrestling.
AE – SJ, you are a former wrestler, right?
SJ – Yep. My former job. I was actually just talking about this beforehand. I’m looking to train to get back into it for a possible documentary which would be quite good fun. But yeah, we just sort of chatted about wrestling and then you sent me the script, I loved it and said, “I want to direct this”, and Dave was good enough to allow me to.
AE – SJ, I don’t know how much you are able to say about Shadows Within at this stage…
SJ – Yeah I can talk about it. Thats fine.
AE – So I know you have Corey Feldman and Natasha Henstridge, the hottest Alien in cinema history, on board. Can you tell us a little bit about that project and how you got these guys?
SJ – I have got this vision of trying to do The Expendables of Horror. So Tony (Todd) is going to be in it again. Robert Englund is interested in doing it. Courtney Gains (The ‘Burbs, Children Of The Corn) is in it and Natasha and Corey have agreed. Gunnar Hansen (the original Leatherface) has said he is going to do a bit in it as well, so its a nice group of people there. We are currently talking to Linda Hamilton and it would be fantastic to get her on board as well. We are looking to shoot that out in America at the end of next year, no this year, what year is it? The end of THIS year, in Michigan, so we have their film board looking for locations at the moment. It’s part of a trilogy, called the Unholy Trinity, so Shadows Within is the first one.
It’s taken me 9 years to get this made so, it’s been a long hard slog. It’s the first thing I’ve ever written so it’s finally come to the front now and I’m very excited about it. It’s a slasher-stroke-satanic type film. Stroke monster movie. That’s all I can say for now.
AE – With regards to Dead of the Nite, which we have covered previously on AE, can you offer us some background on the film and the inspiration behind that?
SJ – I was writing another film called Cubicle, this very claustrophobic thriller/chiller. We wanted to get that made and were getting some money together for it but I didn’t want to just make it on the cheap so we sat down and wrote Dead Of The Nite. It took 2 weeks to write and it was something that, initially, we were going to shoot with a couple of friends, make it for a thousand pounds and just flex my directing muscles really and then we got guys like Claudio Pacifico on board to do the stunts.
He was coming straight off Pirates Of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and he had also done Prince Of Persia and Mission: Impossible, and that elevated it and then Paul Fox came on board and he had just come off of George Lucas’ Red Tails, to do our film. It’s strange because everyone is just working for free, they’d seen the script and really enjoyed it, so were just coming over and contributing to it.
We have shot the first part and it’s all shot on night vision cameras. We went to this haunted castle and there was no power in there, no heating. We just had the run of this haunted place for a few weeks so we went out there and shot in the pitch black. The entire film was filmed in the dark so actors had to hit their cues. Plus all the stunts were filmed with a real sickle, so we had scenes, in the pitch black, where basically if they missed it, youd see the sickle getting caught in jumpers and all that. We forgot to mention all this to the insurance company obviously. We have done all the night vision stuff so now we are just waiting to do all the daytime stuff with Tony, Joe Millsom and Gary Mavers, who was in Devil’s Bridge so that’s going to be good fun.
AE – Tony Todd is a pretty huge name, particularly in the genre. He’s the Candyman! How did you get him involved?
SJ – I met Tony about three years ago. He actually appears very briefly in my documentary on tattoos. We got chatting then and he said he wanted to work with me on something in the future. So, i got to take him up on it. We met up and I said, “here’s the script, would you be interested in doing it”? He took a read, said, “Yeah, get in touch with my agent”, and that’s it really. He’s been very supportive of everything and we kept in touch. He’s a good guy and it’s nice that he’s going to come over and do a British horror film.I believe its the first British horror he’s ever done. It’s definitely the first one he’s shot in wales.
AE – Well via a tenuous connection I am going to swing this round to James. Tony Todd appeared as Ben in Tom Savini’s 1990 remake of Night Of The Living Dead, and now you, like several others recently, have made a re-imagining of your own. We have covered it a lot but for newer readers, can you tell us a bit about Night Of The Living Dead: Resurrection?
JP – Yeah, theres loads out there but I think, from the ones I’ve seen and I’ve only really seen the 1990 one, that it was still a very literal remake and that’s the problem with many remakes, particularly horror remakes, They are almost shot for shot. They take the best set pieces and just kind of update them to make a comment on mobile phones and Twitter and all that but what we really wanted to do with NOTLD:R was just take the basic concept because I actually see it as a companion piece and less of a remake though im fine with using the remake tag. Loads of my favourite films are remakes. The Fly, John Carpenter’s The Thing. Those are amazing films.
What I did is pretty much what they did and that’s take the core concept, what was great about that film, and then you do what you want with it. We didn’t make this film by committee. It was just me and Andrew basically saying what was going into this film and what wasn’t, so if anyone watches the film and hates it, they can just level the blame squarely at myself and Andrew.
All we have done is taken the core concepts of NOTLD, in that the dead have returned and there’s an isolated farmhouse. There are some common things but pretty much everything else we have gone off and done in our own direction. Characters will react because thats how they react would in our film. With most horror films it’s just this group of strangers who spend the first twenty minutes introducing themselves to each other but the one thing that I did with NOTLD:R is that I set it around a family.
AE – How has the horror community reacted to the prospect of NOTLD:R?
JP – I have been surprised by the amount of positive comments. When Andrew told me about it I said, “you do realise that we will be hated by the internet for about 6 months”. The people who write the blogs and the people that don’t just copy and paste a press release, they’ve been really positive about it most of the time, especially when we actually released the teaser trailer.
(I fidget uncomfortably at the mention of copy and paste, having been guilty of that myself)
The comments sections are not somewhere that I dwell anymore on the internet but I remember that from when I used to go on AintItCool a long time ago. Down here, there are certain pubs you don’t go into because they are racist, sexist or people will beat the crap out of you, and thats sort of like the internet.
AE – Or Glasgow!
JP - The reaction is exactly what I had expected in some ways but I have been really heartened to see some of the positive feedback and people actually saying, “we will wait and see”. I think what has really helped is that Andrew has put together some great stuff, like the poster. It wasn’t just some rubbish photoshop job. We spent some time working on that poster in that it’s similar to the original but lets us say where we are going with this one. With the teaser trailer, there was only a small amount of stuff that we could show in the teaser without giving the whole game away but it’s been a lot more positive than i was expecting, to be honest.
AE – Final Girl. Are things still moving along for the feature length version?
JP – We shot the short film back in May and i think we did the original teaser trailer back in March. The original plan was to start the feature by the end of 2011 but it was on the basis of the FG teaser trailer and the short film that Andrew got in touch with me and said, “Do you want to make this other film?” and I said, “What’s the other film?”
Andrew said “It’s a zombie film” and I hesitated because at that time i wasn’t quite sure what kind of zombie movie I wanted to make, I said I was interested but wanted to know more about what he had in mind, and he said, “I want to do a remake of the best zombie film ever made”, so I hesitated a little bit more but then, while delaying, I thought the idea around a little bit and realised that there was actually something pretty interesting that could be done with it.
But Final Girl was basically put on hold because I had NOTLD:R which has taken up about 6 months of my life so far. We are nearly at picture lock on NOTLD:R so thats then off to the sound mixer to sort out then off to get graded before it’s then off to interested parties. Then I hope to dust off Final Girl.
Script-wise I’m in a pretty happy place but it definitely needs some more work. I’ll be investigating the crowd-funding route on that one because I think with the trailers and the short film that we have some interesting stuff and hopefully, we can generate some excitement, and with NOTLD:R, we have had quite a bit of press on that, so hopefully we can use that to go on and make something original with Final Girl.
AE – So Dave B, can you tell us a bit about Industry, My Arse, which is a great title, and why you chose to make a documentary about such obscure films and filmmakers?
DB – To be honest, it was just having grown up with that stuff. Grown up in the 80’s, watching videos and renting stuff out. As I got more into the filmmaking side of things myself, doing bits and pieces for people on documentaries and things like that, some of these things started to resurface on obscure DVD releases.
There was one film which sort of started it. There was a film made in Manchester called GBH, which I think was in 1982. It’s a gangster movie. Shot in Manchester. Sort of tongue-in-cheek. You can tell they knew their limitations but they were still wanting to make something for the audience that had a lot of action, a lot of comedy and a little bit of a sly wink to people like, “we know this is not a big budget, Hollywood sort of thing”, but they did it. You see that film and it’s like something from a parallel universe because it’s quite well done, in a lot of respects. The technical stuff is great and it was shot on good equipment for the time but its not a conventional film by a long chalk. You think that was just a one off and then you find that these guys made about a dozen films between the 80′s and the early 90s, until Cliff Twemlow (writer, producer, actor), died in about his late 50s, which kind of stopped them, but they made about 12 films.
Most were shot on video, some of which got releases in weird territories, wherever they could sell it. Spain, Portugal, Turkish TV. We were quite amazed that there was this complete industry that nobody knew about and they were the forerunners of what people are able to now with digital equipment.
Moving it on a bit, we (Beynon and co-director John Ninnis) then found, there was another guy called Mike Murphy, who did a film called Invitation To Hell (1982), which isn’t well known. Some people who are into horror know about it but nobody knew that he had made 20 or 30 films in Portsmouth and Greece. there was just this little sub culture. We rounded that off with some films made in Cardiff by a guy called John Eyres, who went on to make Hollywood B-movies. He made a slasher film in Wales called Goodnight, God Bless, in 86 and he was guy who owned a video shop. He was renting stuff out and was looking at the tapes and going, “I could make one but I’m not paying a distributor £50-60 per tape. I’ll make a film, own the rights myself and clean up”, and he did.
They were the main ones. We tracked people down, interviewed them where they were available but we also got some other people in to give a bit background. Kim Newman (Nightmare Movies, Anno Dracula) is on it with us. The interviews have pretty much all been shot and now we are looking to piece it together. That’s about it…
So with introductions out of the way, it was time to get down to the nitty-gritty…
Stay tuned for part 2!
