(Cinema Retro's Mark Cerulli provides an update on his initial report that took readers inside the making of an indie horror film.)
By Mark Cerulli
My
first Cinema Retro report was just after we had wrapped our first shoot for Area
5150, a sci-fi/horror comedy I co-wrote with director Sean Haitz. It was 6 days filled with
warmth, laughter and moments of terror in the high desert outside Palm Springs,
California. But we got it done, movie in
the can, premiere on the horizon, right?
Not
so fast.
Haitz,
an intense storyteller (who also fronts a rock band), wanted to do a “Cold
Opening” to the film, launching the audience right into the action. He had a vision of a terrified young woman,
babbling in a foreign language, running down a deserted highway, trying to get
away from… something. Several
weeks later, damn if Sean didn’t have Kati Rausch, a young Finnish actress,
running down an empty highway in a bloody hospital gown at 7 AM on a
Sunday. She gets recaptured – ‘natch - and
then we meet our villain, Dr. Izar (an amazing character actor named Jed Rowen)
in a prison cell that would have done Hannibal Lecter proud.
A
few months later Sean landed Felissa Rose – the “it girl” of Sleepaway Camp,
now a well-known genre star with over 100 credits including Victor Crowley,
Terrifier 2 and the upcoming Dark Circles. We had her for only one day, so Sean and I pounded
out some scenes where she played a crazy desert rat mom with two feral kids – local
desert residents who brought a menagerie with them including a tarantula,
snakes and scorpions! (In a very un-Bondian
manner, this writer declined the opportunity to have the tarantula crawl up his
arm.) Felissa went all out and delivered an outstanding performance, getting
applause from the sleep-deprived crew.
That’s
a wrap, right? Well… we realized the
film needed more. In came a
brilliant young producer named Ryan James who had us write some
character-building scenes and stayed on for the duration. The entire cast was brought back for a new
shoot in March ’22. Like the previous year, we made use of every last
minute of daylight, especially during the fabled “Golden Hour” which seemed to
go by in minutes. Once again, we shot
scenes in an abandoned crack house – now even MORE vandalized than on our
previous shoot. Somehow, we managed to
get our new scenes shot both in the desert and in a soundstage in LA that had
very realistic standing sets which we used for the interiors of Area 51.
There
is still more to do – a few more scenes (possibly with an iconic genre actor)
and Sean has an epic attack on Area 51 by our lead mutant, Ruby Rose in mind.
There’s also hiring a skilled editor and funding the maze of post-production –
mixing, scoring, color correcting, etc. But we’re getting there…
For more on Area 5150 or to get involved on the
film, click here.