Well, I’ve been running around with theatre people for quite a while now. These people are odd, bizarre, strange, hedonistic, blasphemous, weird, and oftentimes scary.
About ten months ago, me and two other friends, Chris and Flip, were bored one night, and decided to film a movie. Thus, with twenty minutes of battery life and thirty seconds of prep time, we wound up making a masterpiece of a film called Master Karate Masters from Outer Space. It was a silent film, and depicted of the evil Flip Wolfenstein coming to Earth to destroy the producers of the movie Zoolander. Following him to Earth was Mayor Rudolph Guiliani, who was dedicated to evil’s destruction. After 2000 years of searching, they finally clashed, and, following a wonderful slow-motion fight sequence to the tune of “Lady In Red” and a really, really cool Matrix-effect (actually, I was holding Chris up as the camera circled around us, but it was good enough), Good defeated Evil.
The film wound up being about six minutes long. Not bad. But it was strange and bizarre… and, based on that, we created and named our production company, MaDa, derived from the phrase “Mocking Dada” (our movies have a lot of odd stylistic elements that don’t mean anything, but are constructed in such a way as to make it look like they might).
Following the success of MKMFOS, we embarked on our second endeavor, Attack of the Uberpimps: A Dance Extravaganza. Chris played Lucky Hood, a 6’7" leprechaun from a leprechaun colony in the Alps, who was exiled for being too tall… he came to America to rob from the short and give to the tall. Flip played Die Uberstud, an ex-Uberpimp who left behind “the fly honies and the bling-bling” to come to America to find true happiness in himself. Flip also plays all three of the Uberpimps who came to stop him, and Rupert Stuffyname, the narrator of the movie. As for me, I play the 1/5’s Jesus, a local sage who guides our heroes on their way (why “1/5’s Jesus”? The other 4/5’s are badassness).
The movie is told entirely through dance, opening with Lucky’s dance number to the tune of the “Mr. Belvedere Theme”, to Die Uberstud’s numerous Beck songs, the 1/5’s Jesus’ pole-twirling performance over the “Katchaturian Sabre Dance”, going through several Michael Jackson songs for the final dance-fight with Die Super-Uberpimp, and closing with Earth, Wind, and Fire’s “Let’s Groove”.
Our third movie - and least popular, unfortunately, due to our first foray into dialogue - was titled Charles In Charge The Movie: The Insects Will Get You. It told the tale of a bounty hunter, Jefferson Davis, seeking out an insane - and possessed by an evil demonic cloak named Steve - Mayor Rudolph Guiliani in the wilderness. Along the way, Guiliani kills and eats two young lovers in the wild, a Tennesseean woodsman named Bernie, a detective named Joe Decker, and tries to kill Jefferson Davis, but Davis manages to defeat the evil and frees Guiliani from Steve’s evil curse.
Our final movie - for now - is titled Zounds! The Moogly Adventures of Ods Bodkins & Egad. It’s a tale of two superheroes - Ods Bodkins and Egad, obviously - as they attempt to take down an evil sueprvillain - the Great Googly Moogly, played by me - and his two henchmen, Jiminy Christmas and Great Scott, before the villains could replace all the toilet paper in the world with one-ply and then pour Super Ex-Lax in the global water supply (the resultant screams when the population of the planet wipe with one-ply toilet paper would destroy the world). Probably our best movie for the time being.
Then there was The Shoes, a short, two-and-a-half minute film that depicts a young man trying to find his best pair of shoes - which he’s misplaced - for his date. He searches the house, meeting denizens such as Bearhead Bill, Bloody Hand, and a Hitler Antenna Ball, but not finding his shoes until he searches the closet where his dead friend is hanging by a noose. This is probably our best film to date (it IS good. Really).
Currently, we’ve just begun working on the sequel to Uberpimps (ultimately we plan on making it a trilogy), which we hope to be our greatest filmmaking triumph.
I’m hoping to get our films online sometime, but have yet to scrounge together the necessary funds in order to do so (it’s looking like we’re gonna need a couple hundred dollars to do it). But that’ll happen sometime in the future.
So… after I’ve blathered on endlessly… anybody else made any amateur movies they’d like to mention?