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DETAILS
ABOUT THE FILM "BLEAK FUTURE"
"This
movie is awesome!"
- Ain't
It Cool News (click for full review)
"The
energy and enthusiasm of
Peter Jackson's Bad Taste."
- Nathan Shumate
Cold
Fusion Video Reviews (click
for full review)
"Funniest
sci-fi film in years."
- SFX Magazine, U.K. 1998
"Rude,
unapolegetically ghetto, and insanely funny. Brian S. O'Malley's vision of apocalyptic
doom
owes as much to the Marx Brothers as Mad Max."
-- Roger M. Mayer, Sundance Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, Silver
Lake Film Festival
Foolishly encouraged by the successful do-it-yourself independent films of Robert Rodriguez and Kevin Smith, O'Malley shot the film on Super 8 filmstock. The sound-striped film cartridges were the consumer favorite of the 1970's but were quickly made obsolete by the video revolution of the 1980's. The filmstock came in 2-minute cartridges, and were able to record sound on a magnetic stripe alongside the actual film itself. Kodak ceased production of this sound-striped film about mid-way into Bleak Future's production.
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Writer-Director Brian S. O'Malley
at El Mirage Dry Lake Bed, California (1996)
Photo by Marc Campos
Two $800 Super 8 cameras were destroyed by the rugged desert filming, which
took place on the outskirts of Death Valley, California.
Sticking fiercely to that now-tired cliché, O'Malley funded the
film entirely with credit cards and what little money he raised from delivering
pizzas while working his way through the Communications program at Cal State
Fullerton.
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JPG 274K
(R to L) Wendie Newcomb (FEMME) , Frank Kowal (SLANGMAN) ,
Brad Rockhold (ATLATL), Steven A. Kowal (BROTHER ALFONZE) (1996)
Photo by Marc Campos
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Filmmaker Brian S. O'Malley with the Super 8 Camera in Death Valley (1996)
Photo by Marc Campos
O'Malley went on
to work for Roger Corman in 1997, legendary filmmaker whose proteges include
Ron Howard, James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppolla, Martin Scorcese, Bill Paxton,
and many more cinema titans. O'Malley worked his way up from Secretary to Co-Writer
and 2nd Unit Director on several Corman films and the Sci-Fi Channel television
series Black Scorpion.
In 1999, O'Malley wrote and directed his follow-up feature film comedy, Minimum Wage. It was written as a satirical take on the "talking heads" indie film genre, but the point was lost on the financier/producers, who took the film out of O'Malley's hands and cut the film themselves, turning it into the exact type of film O'Malley was hoping to satirize.
O'Malley has recently co-written and produced the feature film Boppin' At The Glue Factory with writer-director Jeff Orgill. He is currently in development with Brooklyn Reptyle Films on his next feature film, Francis Hamper, a dark romantic comedy in the vein of Dr. Strangelove, Harold and Maude, and The Big Lebowski about a hypochondriac who stalks a nurse until she starts stalking back.
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Bleak Future (1996)
Photo by Marc Campos
An unfinished, unmixed Avid output of Minimum Wage won Best Actress and Best Cinematography at the 2000 No Dance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.
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Bones (KING MALICE) and Writer-Director Brian S. O'Malley
Near Death Valley, California (2005)
photo by Marc Campos
In 2006, after nearly 3 years of painstakingly re-cutting the film, returning to the desert to shoot several missed pick up shots, re-recording every last bit of dialogue and sound, restoring over 500 photographs, compiling over 50 minutes of behind the scenes footage, assembling 8 different subtitled language tracks (including one in Pig Latin) and designing and animating 30+ menus, the DVD of Bleak Future is now complete.
BLEAK
FUTURE FACTOIDS
* the film was featured in a 1997 issue of Fangoria Magazine.
* the film won the Bronze Seal at the 1997 IAC Awards in the
U.K.
* Bleak Future is fairly well-known in the Super 8 fanatic
communities
* Brian O'Malley and actors Frank Kowal, Wendie Newcomb, and
Steven A. Kowal all went to work for Roger Corman
* the crew had the Nevada State Police pull guns on them, thinking
a decapitation scene was real
* the crew's vehicle was stuck in the mud for 36 hours in the
middle of nowhere
* the film's premiere was at night during a record torrential
rain in Santa Monica
* during the 2006 DVD authoring, primary and backup data drives
crashed, forcing a 3 month/$5000 process of forensic data recovery from the
failed harddrives in a laboratory
* two cameras died during the production of Bleak Future
* the film was shot predominantly on weekends
* only one actor refused to come back in 2005 and re-record
his dialogue
More
information is available directly from
Brian S. O'Malley and AnARcHy 101 Productions
http://www.bleakfuture.com
http://www.bleakfuture.com/press.html
SPAM brian@bleakfuture.com (Remove
the word "S P A M" from the email address before sending)