By MICHAEL GINGOLD
A genre Blu-ray specialist teamed up with Joe Bob Briggs collaborators for this ’70s/Eurohorror homage.
EIGHT EYES, a co-production of Vinegar Syndrome (its first in-house production) and Not the Funeral Home, was just announced as a world premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival, screening Friday, August 4 and Sunday, August 6. Directed by Austin Jennings from a script he wrote with Matt Frink, and produced by Justin A. Martell and Matt Manjourides (the latter two and Jennings are veterans of THE LAST DRIVE-IN WITH JOE BOB BRIGGS), it stars Emily Sweet, Brad Thomas and Bruno Veljanovski. The movie was shot on 16mm film, entirely on location in Serbia and Macedonia. The synopsis: “At the breaking point of their dysfunctional marriage, Cass [Sweet] and Gav [Thomas] take a trip through former Yugoslavia in an attempt to mend what has soured. After meeting a mysterious local, Saint Peter [Veljanovski], who eagerly offers to be their guide, the couple embark on an impromptu sightseeing expedition. However, Cass becomes increasingly disturbed by Saint Peter’s unsettling fixation on them, as they soon find themselves trapped in a nightmarish descent where supernatural forces threaten their lives!”
Martell and Manjourides, who gave us the first look at the festival poster by Matt Needle and photos seen below, have worked on six films (including the CASTLE FREAK remake) through Not the Funeral Home on Eastern European locations. Martell tells RUE MORGUE, “After doing production services for other studios like Full Moon, Fangoria, The Asylum and Shudder, where the stories were either period pieces set in medieval Europe or required a highly specific location around which the pre-existing scripts were rewritten, we wanted to develop a horror film with native story elements and which utilized the myriad Brutalist, former-socialist wasteland locations that haunt the landscape as both a reminder of its opulent past and recent, turbulent history. So we kind of reverse-engineered EIGHT EYES’ story to incorporate specific locations and anecdotal details about life during the collapse of the former Yugoslavia, which we knew we would never be able to include in a production services project, but needed to be immortalized on film.
“Luckily, this sort of project was perfect for the newly formed Vinegar Syndrome Pictures, who were looking for original productions that mirror their established brand of releasing long-neglected genre and underground films. Our local partners, Red Production in Belgrade, were also more than happy to see these themes and locations incorporated into an international production, as generally they only appear in local projects.”
Adds Vinegar Syndrome topper Joe Rubin, “Vinegar Syndrome Pictures was founded on the basic principle of creating and distributing high-quality and contemporary genre films, produced entirely on motion picture film. We were attracted to this project because it spoke directly to the filmmaking aesthetics that we like and release already, and we were excited to work with Not the Funeral Home, whom we’ve known for years. We believe DP Sean Dahlberg did a great job creating visuals that really take advantage of the aesthetics you get when shooting on film. We are also very proud of several sequences featuring glass-plate optical animation that was all done by hand and on film, adding another layer to our dedication to analog production techniques.”
Says Jennings, “EIGHT EYES draws equally from Eastern European genre cinema and American regional horror films of the ’70s to create a nightmarish tableau of nostalgia twisted into berserk, new shapes. Set among the ruins of the former Yugoslavia, EIGHT EYES was scripted and structured with significant contributions from the film’s local cast and crew to ensure an authentic portrayal of the cultural environment in which it is set–one which has rarely been documented on film.”
