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Writer & director Chris Baxter talks to us about his independent film Unlawful Justice. Learn more about the crime drama, who was involved with making it, and how it all came together.
Who?
The entire film had such a wonderful family feel. Our DP and producer were two of my roommates. Our editor/DIT and BTS photographer both crashed on our couch often and our lead actor was an acting friend from college. From there, everybody we had knew one or two people that were grips/gaffers/Ads, etc. We rounded off our crew with a couple of Facebook posts for some key positions. We held auditions at Cazt Studio in LA because it was free and it looked professional, but we all worked for far below minimum wage. It was a mix of finding people we have access to, feel comfortable working with, but also know what they’re doing.
Indie Rights released our film. About a year before that, we applied for the Sundance Creative Distribution Fellowship- which was way out of our league. We had a 35k budget for our film, yet the Fellowship’s winning films felt like they were twenty times that in budget. It was probably the equivalent of being one of the better basketball players at the local YMCA and saying one day “You know what, let me go try out for the Lakers.” We didn’t get it obviously. But, I stayed in touch with the director of the program and ended up joining her indie directors meet up. After a few months she connected me with Indie Rights who really enjoyed our film.
What?
The story is about a LAPD officer who is financially struggling to support his family. Mainly his daughter whose medical expenses are piling up. When he asks his boss for a raise, he’s given the opportunity to meet an unspoken arrest quota, and if he does, he’ll get a bump in his salary. However, this goes against everything he stands for as a police officer and why he joined the force in the first place; to protect and serve the community.
Meanwhile, there’s a seventeen year old kid from inner city LA who has just been accepted to a prestigious college. However, he doesn’t have the financial means to attend. With the help of his friend, who is a local hustler, he starts selling dime bags of cocaine to raise enough money to make the tuition down payment. Despite never having even jaywalked, he makes significant progress but it’s not enough to cover the tuition expenses. He gets in way over his head and tries to make one final score that will pay for his full tuition. At the same time the Officer is looking for one huge bust that can get him his promotion. The two eventually collide, and only one comes out alive.
Where?
We filmed all throughout Los Angeles. Parks, back alleys, and random neighborhoods. We didn’t have much of a budget so we cheated a lot of locations. The morgue, jail, trap house, and two different apartments, were all just at our house. Our PD was incredible and was constantly reconfiguring everything in our living room to make it look like a whole new location. The best compliment I got were various people who said they had no idea that it was all shot at one house and it looked like the production budget was ten times higher than it actually was.
We filmed a lot around LA without a permit. We drove around in a rented fake cop car. For once scene, the driver, who was one of our main actors (she was an incredible actor and so nice), but not the best driver- hah. To her credit, it’s probably insanely difficult to act and drive at the same time in actual LA traffic with roads you’re not familiar with. The DP and myself were squeezed into the backseat, no seat belt because it was a cop car, on hard plastic. Somehow we didn’t crash. It was the very first scene in the shooting schedule. I definitely said a few extra prayers that night and had a few ice packs on my back.
We also got kicked out of a few locations. Some we didn’t have permission to shoot at, some we did, some we talked our way back into. When making a movie on a limited budget like that you have to take what you can get and make the most of it. There’s constantly this balance between getting the best shots, but making sure you’re not endangering anybody… beside yourself, which you’ve already done because you choose the film industry as a career.
When?
We shot the movie in late 2016. The editing process took about 6 months. Our editor was living on our couch and we were both working full time just to survive and we worked on the film in any free time we had. His computer kept crashing so half the time we spent just redoing what we had already edited but neither one of us had access to a better computer or even $20 to get one. From there, the coloring and audio process took about another 6 months. We had some heavy audio issues and we couldn’t seem to get the coloring down, but after about a year we decided to call it. They say a film is never done, you just decide to stop working on it. I had worked on the film for nearly two years for probably an average of 10 hours a day for over 500 days straight. I was just so burnt out and decided I was happy enough with what we had.
We had been submitting to festivals and got in nowhere. We were submitting with basically an assembly cut, which I thought would work because during the one film business class I took in college (it was the only one the school offered) the teacher explained how he got a movie into SXSW without a finished cut. However he forgot to mention that the director was a Sundance alum, the film had a major star in it, a budget that was 20x what ours was, and that an unfinished cut meant temp music and a small bit of coloring and audio polish needed to be done… not an assembly cut of a 35k film from a total nobody director.
I took a couple months off from the film because I was so exhausted, disappointed, and not happy with the final cut. I saved up all my money in that few months from working, then I went back with a new editor and came out with a cut I was really happy with and proud of. We applied to basically one festival, got in, won best picture, and then I said lets just go into distribution. The film was released in the spring of 2019. Right when Amazon slashed their pay rates to indie filmmakers. Another bump on our rollercoaster ride, but we’ve made the most of it and gotten a ton of positive reviews.
Why?
I have this fundamental belief that almost everybody is a good person, but we do bad things because society forces us to make difficult decisions. I don’t think anybody is evil but we all do evil things, although usually we do them for a good reason. In Unlawful Justice, the police officer steps outside the boundaries of what he can legally do, but he thinks he’s doing it to protect the community and also so that he can get a raise to take care of his sick infant daughter. One of the main characters is a drug dealer, but he’s doing it because the school system failed him and he has no other options to support his family. Society has failed us. Our systems of policing, education, economics, and government have all failed us and it forces everyday people to constantly have to consider making immoral or unlawful decisions just to survive.
At the time, and still today, there were many stories of police brutality. There didn’t seem to be any answers and it seemed that people kept dying. There was this one unique case in the news where it felt that nobody did anything egregiously wrong, but it still led to this conflict between a police officer and a black individual. Thankfully nobody was killed, but it was still very problematic. It seemed that every news outlet was trying to paint one side as the victim and one as the criminal, and every news station was different. However, it seemed like it wasn’t either’s fault- it was just a horrible situation that was exacerbated by these systems we have, especially our system of policing.
So I thought about trying something extreme. Could we create a story where a black man kills a cop, but is in the right? Could we, in the same story, with that same cop, show him assault a black man, but the cop is also in the right? A story where everybody is breaking the law, but we not only fully understand why they are, we conclude that we would do the same thing if we were in their shoes. I hoped to accomplish in the movie that people would think about who their enemy really is a bit differently after they watched it. People aren’t our enemy. Our brother isn’t our enemy. The systems that plague us are. The system of policing. The system of systematic and institutionalized racism. The system of education that has failed us. Our political system which has led us astray. Our financial systems that have created poverty and marginalized communities. We’ve been pitted against each other, to keep our eyes off the real enemy.
How?
We’re on TubiTV, Amazon Prime and IMDBTV, Apple TV, and Goggle Play. Thanks for checking out the film!
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The Killing Death is a micro-budget indie film from Ian Russell that focuses on “two bumbling cops who are on the trial of a serial killer who makes pizza out of their victims.” The horror comedy is available on Amazon Prime and you can learn more about it here!
Today I stumbled upon a pretty awesome YouTube channel filled with independent horror movies, the Kings of Horror. Our Watch Online pick for today was recently added. Bigfoot The Movie is a horror comedy that was directed by Jared Show, and written by Show and Curt Wootton.
Official Description: Bigfoot The Movie is not a documentary or like Harry and the Hendersons. If you enjoy the movies: Tremors, Shawn of the Dead, and Tucker and Dale VS Evil then your gonna love this! Bigfoot has come to the town of Ellwood City, PA and is causing BIG problems. Now it’s up to four town locals, Chuck (Curt Wootton), Dale (Nathan Magill), Burl (Jared Show) and Kate (Joanie Dodds) to take him down. In this comedy/horror flick mullets, guns and beer are in full supply as the movie skewers the Pittsburgh ‘Yinzer’ stereotype right alongside the Bigfoot myth.
The movie stars both Show and Wootton, along with Joanie Dodds, Nate Magill, Terrence Evans, Jim Kreen, and Bill Crawford. Bigfoot The Movie is available to watch on YouTube for free!
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Purdah, a documentary directed by Jeremy Guy, focuses on “a young Indian Muslim woman who trades her burka for dreams of playing on the Mumbai Senior Women’s Cricket Team and how the harsh realities for women in her country creates an unexpected outcome for her own family.”
Love in the Sixth is “an enviromantic musical about living in the sixth extinction.” It was written, directed, and produced by Jude Klassen. Learn more about the movie in our spotlight; The 5Ws and How: Love in the Sixth.
We had a very honest and candid discussion with indie filmmaker Ian Russell of Ringo Jones Productions about his debut feature, the micro-budget horror comedy The Killing Death. The movie, in true b-horror, is about two bumbling cops who are on the trial of a serial killer who makes pizza out of their victims!
When?
The Killing Death was originally shot in 2006 over a five day period for approximately $500 (Canadian). It was screened that October and then put away in a drawer and the depths of various hard drives for years afterwards. A few film festival rejections led nowhere, so I figured it was a test feature rather than anything that would make much noise.
Flash forward over a decade. Amazon Prime has opened up a new avenue for independent movies and I’m contacted by Zellco who had attended the original screening and asked if the movie was available to put online. I decide to open up that drawer and dig through those old hard drives to re-evaluate the movie. With the passage of time, I noticed that there’s some funny stuff that could appeal to cult movie fans. I commissioned an all-new soundtrack from Bogman to replace the public domain old-timey jazz of the original cut and found that the movie suddenly played much better! From there, Zellco put it on Amazon Prime (and other streaming sites) for the world to see and a handful of curious people do.
What?
The Killing Death was inspired by the Herschel Gordon Lewis gore classic Blood Feast. Way back in my university days, I took a cult film class and was exposed to some obscurities that I’d never seen. Now Blood Feast is pretty famous to horror fans, but I’d missed it and there was a lot to like despite the budget limitations. Watching it, I thought that if it had only leaned a little more into comedy, it could work even better, so I decided to write a spoofier version. I kept the idea of two bumbling police officers on the trail of a killer following an Egyptian ritual, but amped up the silliness.
The story was deliberately kept simple to make it possible to shoot on the cheap and I took the idea that the reason the killer was murdering his victims was to take the best parts of them to feed to his new girlfriend in pizza form. That way, she’d be the sum total of all of the things he liked about others. That aspect of the story was perhaps a little undeveloped, but it was my first try, so it is what it is.
Where?
While the location the story is happening is never explicitly stated in the movie, The Killing Death was shot in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. We used a handful of apartments of the crew, my parents house, some streets where traffic would be at a minimum (since we didn’t bother with permits), a convenience store one of the cast worked at, the universities of Winnipeg and Manitoba where I’d been a student, and a local pizza joint. That restaurant, Chicago Phil’s, generously closed for a few hours so we could shoot inside. They may have been under the impression the movie was going to give them some free advertising, instead of just a couple of huge orders we put in to feed everyone.
Who?
I [Ian Russell] wrote, directed, edited, produced, location scouted, etc., The Killing Death. You name it, I probably did it. I’d hold the camera, set the lights, hold the boom, whatever needed to be done. But so did a lot of people. I had whoever was around take part, so the crew all got a chance to work on camera, lighting, sound, etc. Heck, one of the actors brought his teenage son to the set and we let him film a scene too! We were all amateurs who didn’t bother to let the fact that we had no idea what we were doing slow us down. Now a lot of that shows on screen. There’s stuff that makes me cringe and wonder if I should have ever let this out into the world, but then I’ll watch some terrible b-movie and see something way worse and not feel so bad.
I learned everything by doing. I’d only taken a short workshop in filmmaking, so if there was a mistake, I made it. My editing experience came from editing a short from that workshop on Final Cut Pro, so I basically was self-taught. There are so many more tutorials out there on Youtube nowadays that would have been lifesavers back in 2006, but I had to struggle through on my own.
My buddy Lee Hansen helped out with everything, from making the fake blood to directing a couple of scenes when the room was too crowded for crew, to letting us decorate his apartment walls with pornography. You’ll spot him in one scene talking to the University Professor who’s about to lose his brain.
Because this was our first project, everything that could go wrong did. From lights that got so hot everyone was sweating profusely, to the fact that our elderly cast members couldn’t bend at the knees to examine corpses, to overly verbose conversations, to a fight scene that was so poorly choreographed that the entire sequence was cut from the final movie. (Unfortunately I’d forgotten to tell that actress and she came to the screening with her entire family only to find out that her scenes had been whittled down to a few seconds. Oops!) Luckily we had some great actors who saved our bacon. The lead cops were played by Jeremy Dangerfield and Tyhr Trubiak, with the killer played by Neil Reimer and his girlfriend played by Veronica Ternopolski. Tyhr’s gone on to star in some other interesting indie horror movies (Aegri Somnia and Tempus Tormentum). Veronica was in Dark Forest, while Jeremy retired to Vancouver and Neil became a teacher overseas. Everyone did a great job with what they had to work with and I only wish I’d given them more and better things to do!
Why?
The Killing Death was made because we wanted to make a movie! In Winnipeg, there’s a very strong short film community based around the local film co-op. Taking Guy Maddin’s work as inspiration, they play festivals and get artistic cred. I didn’t want to go that route. I wanted to make schlock that was fun and entertaining without taking itself seriously. So rather than go through government funding organizations or apply for grants, I just sold some of my various collections (video games, comics, etc) to raise enough cash to buy a decent (for the time) prosumer camera, shotgun mic, home depot lights, and took the plunge. The script came quick (too quick) and we had a casting call to find people that were willing to work for free. The lead cop, Jeremy Dangerfield, was a member of the Actor’s Union so we had to sign a deferral agreement with them to use him, but everyone else was just as indie as we were.
I really wanted to use this as a chance for everyone to learn and grow, so the atmosphere on set was loose and open. My only regret was that we did everything so fast that I didn’t really get a chance to explore the story as much as I should have. I had so many ideas for new stuff that came after the fact. Which is what led to the novelization of the movie coming ten years later. It’s the version of the movie that I should have made / wish I could have. If you like anything you see on screen, read the book. It’s definitely a million times better in every way.
How?
Before COVID hit, I was all set to film another feature, but that’s been put on hold until restrictions lighten up here. In the meantime, I’ve been keeping incredibly busy publishing books, making youtube videos, and writing new screenplays. Everything I’m doing all connects back to The Killing Death and the characters of Frank and Jimmy have many more adventures on the page and (hopefully soon) on screen.
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