It’s not human - and it wants your garbage!
OU alum’s debut feature film portrays horror of deadly masked carnivores
By Alexandra Hazlett
September 8, 2008
It started during spring break 2004, a time Travis Irvine “remembers like it was yesterday.” While he was camping with the OU Surf Club, raccoons started stealing food. And it wasn’t just your average mammalian plundering. The raccoons staged a cooperative effort to distract the campers from different positions and work together to achieve the goal, Irvine recalled.
Add in a viewing of the new remake of “Dawn of the Dead,” and the seeds for “Coons! Night of the Bandits of the Night” had been sown. Irvine, an OU alum, was a writer, director and producer for the film.
“Coons!” was released Aug. 26 by Troma Entertainment, the first feature-length release for the Ohio-based production company Overbites Pictures, LLC. All Internet DVD distributors have the movie, Irvine said, including Amazon.com, Bestbuy.com, Barnes & Noble’s Web site, Blockbuster’s online rentals and Netflix.
Troma Entertainment acquired the movie in 2006 and delayed the release until a few weeks ago. The 35-year-old independent film company does not pay for the films it acquires, but promises 25 percent of net profit down the line, Irvine explained.
“The real thrill of it is to say ‘We have a movie on DVD’,” Irvine said.
Producer Mark Lammers, also an OU graduate, said there was “satisfaction” that the movie was finally released.
“Either it will prove itself through word of mouth cult, or fall slightly flatter,” he said.
The plot line is simple: campers are harassed, mauled and killed by a band of vicious killer raccoons. Chaos ensues. The film joins the ranks of man vs. horror genre films such as “Frogs” and “Grizzly,” which could be categorized as “so-bad-they’re-sort-of-good” movies.
“’Grizzly’ is probably my favorite. It’s really terrible,” Irvine said. “’Frogs’ is equally bad.”
After coming home from that formative camping trip, Irvine first checked if anyone else had made a movie about killer raccoons.
“It seemed so obvious to me,” Irvine said.
No one had.
He then studied abroad in London, where he took a scriptwriting class. That class “was kind of conducive to getting a script done,” Irvine said.
Now that Irvine was armed with a script, he recruited actors from everywhere that his friends lived: Los Angeles, London, Ohio and Michigan. “Coons!” was filmed in Athens, Irvine’s hometown of Bexley, Ohio, and around Columbus. But the critical components were the four-legged creatures themselves.
Irvine consulted a raccoon expert at Ohio State University, and had planned on having the raccoons stuffed by a taxidermist. But he was told that the cost would be i hundreds of dollars per animal, much more than the budget could afford. The expert, however, told him about another way… dead frozen raccoons.
“Dead frozen raccoons are notorious in the biology community for playing pranks. You can thaw them and move them, and then refreeze them, and they’ll stay in that position for up to 24 hours,” Irvine said.
The movie used seven legally donated frozen raccoons, The 35-pound “big mama” raccoon needed two people to hold her, Irvine said. The August heat when the crew filmed the movie was not helpful.
“Sometimes they [the raccoons] were a little soft,” he explained. “It was like a messed up puppet.”
The animals could be repositioned and refrozen for continued use once they started to melt.
Overbites Pictures is in good company having Troma Entertainment pick up its first movie. Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of the Comedy Central show “South Park” had their first movie, also made in college, distributed by Troma.
Overbites’ second movie, “American Mayor,” is in post-production. A “call to action as well as a how-to,” the documentary follows Irvine as he enters the Bexley, Ohio mayoral race. Endorsed by both the Libertarian Party and the Green Party, he won 5 percent of the vote.
The film is currently on hold until enough funds can be raised to complete it. Irvine estimated the post-production costs at $10,000, which would cover editing, sound, music and getting the movie out to film festivals.
Ten grand, while not a small sum, places the movie firmly into the “no-budget” category.
Anything under $200,000 is considered “no-budget,” Irvine explained, and is usually financed by small donations. “No-budget” films allow for more creativity, however, Lammers pointed out.
Between $200,000 and $1 million is a gray area, but is still usually financed through donations, though some of them may be larger.
“A million or more is where you have a star attached and you go to a studio and get someone to write you a check for a cool million,” Irvine said.
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