Volume 3, Issue 12
June 7 - June 20, 2001

Snakes in the Grass

How local filmmakers turn the twisted into a living

I'm having beers with Chad, Max and Aaron in the Skylark Lounge one weekday night, when things get plain ugly. We're talking about some of the special effects in this movie that they're wrapping production on-- Hannah House, a supernatural rattlesnake horror flick-- and I'm taking a drink of beer when I hear, "Yeah, Summer was really happy with the prosthetic vagina that I put on her."

More than a little intrigued by this statement, I pause to repeat it in my head a few times, while trying to swallow the beer I nearly rifled in Aaron's face. Summer Sawyer is in the movie, but is also Chad's girlfriend. It takes me a few seconds to compose myself, and by then the conversation has politely moved on.

"Wait, you really have a prosthetic vagina?" I ask.

"It's, like, nine inches long ... it's huge ... it's massive," Chad replies.

Apparently, Summer's character in the movie gives birth to a rattlesnake. This scene involved some special equipment, which Chad was able to handcraft using latex and some of Max's old issues of Hustler.

"It looks pretty amazingly accurate." Chad said, who also notes that it is complete with a "tar-star." As for the scene, "It was really bloody. That's probably the best performance we got out of Summer."

Such is the work of Monkey Angel Studios. A movie-making team conceived by youngsters with handheld cameras and bloody visions in need of documentation, which has evolved into a full-fledged production studio. Hannah House is its first foray into feature-length film, and it is a story that begins on the dusty plains of Nebraska.

Chad and Max Smith are brothers. As children, they spent summers on their grandfather's farm in Nebraska helping with the harvest. Relatives used to tell them stories about a nearby place, the Hannah House, where some unfortunate homesteaders unwittingly built a house atop a rattlesnake bed. Supposedly, come winter the snakes were seeping through the floorboards, eating the babies and driving the adults insane.

When the boys were out in the field with their grandfather and saw a rattlesnake, it was necessary not only to shoot the thing, but also to also cut off and bury its head. This was to prevent just the kind of bad luck the Hannah House tenants had been at the shit end of so many years ago.

Such a cryptic nugget of Nebraskan lore made an undeniable impression on these young lads. I suspect it was this combined with God-knows what else that propelled these two in the direction of horror cinema.

Or maybe it was making menacing super-8 vignettes about homicidal childhood icons with their buddy Aaron Sloan. Take for example The War of the Scouts (1981), a bloody war epic about the battle between the Boy Scouts of America and the Webelos. Or Pac-Man Fever, in which Pac-Man manages to escape from an Atari 2600 in Max and Chad's house and proceeds to murder children throughout the neighborhood. Pac-Man was played by foam on a string.

Max pontificates on the joys of working with foam:"The great thing was that you could throw it, and then you'd just attach it to your neck and roll around."

Chad remembers the earlier films of Monkey Angel Studios. "We were young and we were ambitious. Max, he took us to so many different locations:our backyard, the front yard; he even took us to a pond once. We had desert scenes, we had snow scenes, we did every climate."

Production was taken to new extremes with Care Bear From Hell. Along with melting heads a la Raiders of the Lost Ark, and karate scenes, this film featured the homicidal rampage of a Care Bear with a pentagram on his chest. Holding true to the Monkey Angel style, this symbol of caring and sharing went on a house-to-house killing spree.

Not content just experimenting with time-tested special effects techniques like scratching 8mm film to create laser beams, this budding set of filmmakers was also learning a few things about gore.

"The snow scenes work better," Chad said. "You can see the fake blood better on the snow," Max and Aaron chime in.

The progression was becoming clear, but there was still a missing ingredient.

"The only weakness was we didn't have a whole lot of women back then," Max said.

Do they have a lot of women now? "No." "This is what the movie is supposed to do for us. It's to draw women," Chad said.

Near the end of last summer, I went to Summer's parent's project-house near Grand Junction, the pretense of my attendance being that some friends of some friends of mine were shooting their movie there.

This was a confusing weekend for me. Upon arrival, I was thrust into woolly pioneer garb and placed in the roasting barn to sit on a homemade pew as an extra in a church scene. I found myself staring over a woman's bonnet at a preacher who stood behind a crude wooden lectern. When I'd look over my shoulder between takes, I was seeing the bizzaro cast of "Little House on the Prairie" as they smoked cigarettes and drank Keystone huddled around someone's pickup truck.

Later I was strolling around the property drinking beer when I thought I saw a dead body in a ravine. At that time, more or less a virgin to Monkey Angel productions, I got all freaked out and plodded over to investigate, slipping on dirt clods and spilling beer the whole way. It ended up being a dummy. Chad, Max and some of the crew had filled a model head with jam and spent the afternoon shooting it off of the body with a shotgun-- filming it all, of course.

As the sun set everyone headed back to the barn. This time we were all crowded in the back of the hay loft. Through the flashes of a strobe light, I made out about 50 giant rubber rattlesnakes with fishing line attached to their heads. Somebody yelled action, and everyone in costume was walking slow and ghostlike to the other end of the loft. It got real hot up there real fast, so I went downstairs and sat on a overturned rowboat nearby, admiring the scene of a rustic barn in a disco blaze.

By ten that evening, I was drunk and standing in with a circle of people firing a cap gun at the ground.

Everyone around me had some sort of noisemaker-- be it cap gun, drum or wind chime-- and the whole loud product was being recorded. It was a perplexing mix of real musicians doing their best to keep beat and rhythm on drums and guitars, and people like me-- drunk and creating the kind of racket I used to drag my mother's pots and pans out of the cupboards to make in my toddling years. The more I drank, however, the more musical and profound my little pistol became.

By five in the morning, everyone who was still awake was juicing a bottle of Jack Daniels and telling stories on the back porch. I fell asleep on some balcony next to paint cans and a caulking gun with my foot in a wheelbarrow.

Amidst the bleary-eyed chaos of the next morning, I learned from various people a great deal had been accomplished that weekend. Not only was there a huge dent in an absurdly large booze supply, but also many scenes had been successfully shot, a fake head had been adequately destroyed, and the musical interlude had been recorded and filed for later use on the soundtrack. What had seemed like a party in an abandoned house was actually progress made on a real movie set.

Older brother Max lives in Lakewood. Arguably the second coolest feature of his house in the suburbs is the garage he built himself off to the side (the coolest feature is the large single-malt scotch collection he built in the living room). This is no ordinary garage. Inside it looks like Steven Spielberg's tree fort. It's got all of the features of a regular garage:open rafters, a musty smell, a mini-fridge full of 11-oz. Olympia bottles, some tools lying around-- garage basics. What sets it apart is the collapsible blue screen; or is it the sound studio; or the digital video-editing studio; no, it's probably the burnt latex corpses hanging in the rafters.

This is a fully functional movie studio. Hannah House is being edited here. Three years worth of work is being boiled down into a motion picture. Hannah House is not your typical digital movie with extreme close-ups of middle-aged men drinking in a trendy bar discussing the various ways they've fucked up their relationships. The story itself--a haunting tale of a doomed house, its doomed inhabitants, and its demonic rattling evils-- is unique, but there is more. This is digital movie pioneering. Filmmakers from Hollywood to Ohio have been raping the benefits of digital video for years now, but Monkey Angel Studios decided to take it a step further. Along with shooting the entire movie digitally, they have also employed various digital editing techniques to give Hannah House a unique feel.

They have aged the footage using filters and software-- giving it a sepia hue and adding skips, pops, scratches, and lint-- to make it look like it was made in the early 20th century.

"It's like a silent film that's trying to jump into the talking genre. It looks like Metropolis, it looks like an old film ... like it had been sitting in an archive for a long time and then they pulled it out, and it's all fucked up ... it works with the story. Using pops and burns, you know imperfections, to enhance the story, to use it as a narrative rather than just a texture."

Or as Max puts it, "Kind of the look of 'Alien Autopsy' without that guy from Star Trek introducing it."

Aside from this strategic texturing, they have also been able to do some more CGI-looking effects. Using digital footage they shot of two real rattlesnakes, they were able to create the illusion of thousands of rattlers covering a floor. There's also a rather nightmarish sequence of their friend Steve Millin-- Jobe in the movie-- with six heads on a snake-like body dancing around. Not to say that the movie is overrun with digital effects. There is of course the latex vagina, the jam-filled head, and the rubber snakes.

This ties in to some of the other studio work that Monkey Angel hopes to do in the future: making horror effects for haunted houses, Halloween parties, and lower-budget horror/sci-fi movies. Chad wrote this movie based on the folklore he and Max were fed as children, using his friends as models for the characters. These were the friends who gathered at Summer's parent's house. These are also the friends who helped rewrite a lot of the dialogue, design costumes, hold boom mics, and put out fires on set with beer. A real family operation.

Chad, Max, Summer and Aaron are all active in the local art and music scene and have populated their movie both on-screen and behind the scenes with friends they've met though previous endeavors. Hannah House is the cumulative effort of a heap of local writers, musicians, artists and drinkers.

"I had the story in mind, and would think of who would be perfect as actors. I mean like Steve [Millin], he was a natural actor for one of the main characters. Max's character was an alcoholic, so he was absolutely perfect for that."

Combining classic camp and gore with an element of psychological terror is the cheeky aim of Hannah House.

"We wanna make films that have depth, but we also want some pretty funky gory stuff. We love the Night of the Living Dead aspects, but we love the David Lynch stuff, too."

According to Chad, the seemingly endless possibilities of digital video have allowed warped imaginations to run wild.

With Hannah House under their belts, they are planning on sending the finished product to film festivals, from traditional (Sundance) to digital (RES-FEST). Monkey Angel Studios plan to promote the film locally as well. Chad said he would like to organize a showing of the movie with some live bands, or a midnight showing at the Mayan.

Holding true to their art-gallery roots, there will be a show celebrating the completion of Hannah House at the Eight Ounce Fred Art Gallery on South Broadway on June 29.

There is a lot to celebrate. This is a project conceived, designed, and produced by a tight, committed group of individuals. Personally, I'm a little afraid of being clocked in the head by a swooping vagina, or kicked square in the nuts on video, but they will be showing clips of the movie in a very dramatic and telling manner-- refreshments will be served.

Monkey Angel Studios also lurk on the web at www.monkeyangel.com The website features information on Monkey Angel Studios, as well as the trailer for Hannah House and screening information for the film.

Chad managed to sum up my attitude toward the creative process with one tight slice of projection:"We don't know what the fuck we're doing, but at least we're doing it."

"So far it's turning out good."