It all started with a call from Dale, “Lets do something fun – vampire, zombie, something with swords and action!”
“Uh… why?”
“FOR FUN!”
“Okay, let me get something for you.”
An hour or so later I send Dale a short script about a special agent type who leaves his girlfriend/lover in the middle of the night. He goes into a secret room and retrieves a high-tech gun with special frozen ammo shaped balls in a special freezer. He loads up what we discover is a paintball marker specially equipped to shoot these ‘balls’.
He gets on his motorcycle and rockets through the night to a warehouse where his ‘sidekick’ partner waits.
They go in, stealth like, and bust into a huge area filled with ‘creatures’. Zombies! And the special agent, we find out, is a zombie hunter. The frozen balls are holy water that penetrates the zombies and throw them into agony as if it were acid eating their skin.
Soon, he runs out of ammo and is overwhelmed and must use a sword. And when he finally is enveloped by rushing zombies, his sidekick comes to the rescue blowing away zombies with more holy water paintball pellets.
They did their job – the world is saved.
Back home, the special agent quietly rejoins his sleeping lover in bed when we realize…
SHE HAS BECOME A ZOMBIE!
Greenlight?
Nope.
It goes through many rewrites as usual.
The paintballs are taken out.
Black Ops agents training in a government agency sent on a suicide mission is written in.
These agents are equipped with high tech equipment; they can get hostages out of Iraq in 10 minutes if they had to. They risk their lives. They are killing machines and are a highly trained group of military power. They train with virtual reality and go through many scenarios from protecting hostages to fighting their way out of ambushed streets of war zones.
They are sent to a secured island to rescue a group of scientists when they find out the island is infected with a growing virus that turn people into undead creatures that ravage the island. Pretty soon, their team is cut in half – killed, and their ammo is gone.
They have to fight their way to a safe zone, destroy the island, and take with them the anti-virus! Their only source of defense – swords found in the facility. They become modern day samurai up against modern day foes – the undead.
And just as they think their mission is complete, its not, and the only two survivors are sent to a small island in Hawaii to rid the last of the infected – the source.
The short film that was supposed to be fun turned into a feature.
We took the ending, cast it, found a location, used stunts, swords and in two nights time and a small budget, “The Pledge” was filmed.
It then became, “The Turning” – a film made… well… for fun.
It is now playing on “The Lot” and has been accepted to the Hollywood DV film festival (other festivals pending).
Cliché? We smile when someone says that… Uh… okay… sure… whatever… what Zombie movie isn’t? Oh, I did see a ‘character driven’ zombie movie once and wasn’t so cliché, but the problem is, it sucked and it cost 100 thousand fricken bucks! So what’s wrong with Samurai and Zombies even if it is a cliché we asked? Well, nothing!
We came up with a fun concept, planned it out, shot it, and tagged it with ‘the end’. A test in filmmaking. And what do you know… it was pretty good and a ton of people liked it despite the cliché-ness. Was it fun? Watch it and you tell me!!!
Funny thing is – there’s a back-story… and an end-story that has yet to be told. Let me tell ya, it's probably cliché… but if we ever shoot it, and you get a chance to watch it, you’ll have the a good old fun time!
And if you're patient enough, you can watch the behind the scenes "Making of The Turning". It's a 50meg file that requires RealPlayer. Check it out here:
THE MAKING OF: "THE TURNING" http://www.squint.tv/Turning/video/makingof.rm Click on link and, HOPEFULLY, REAL PLAYER will pop up for you to watch the movie!
