Esmerelda's Dreadful Theatre

Esmerelda's Dreadful Theatre features the lovely hostess, a goth glamour girl with big hair and affected speech, who guides us through some brief parodies of classic B-rated horror. The flicks are completely original, but based on things you've probably seen before. The scenes are as follows:

Stranger in the House
Poltergeist XIII
The Body That Wouldn't Rest
Vampire Valedictorian
Tina the Teenager from Outer Space
Modeling Interlude
Blair What Project
The Creepy Hand

The stunningly attractive and terribly vain Esmerelda decides, apparently on a whim, to devote this week's episode of Dreadful Theatre solely to her "finest moments" in B movies. However, whenever she tries to introduce a new flick or commentate on the one previously shown, she is plastered in the face with a fresh cream pie -- much to her consternation and dismay. Only in the end does she realize her crew hadn't forgotten about the vicious Halloween prank she pulled on them last year. Not a good hair day for Esmerelda, to say the least!

Our sultry, shapely film hostess has a rebellious, self-righteous attitude, fueled by lazy, inept co-workers, a worthless time slot, and a show-biz industry that has yet to recognize her talents. She's a victim of the ubiquitous absurdity that whirls around her. She's like Moe to her Stooges. She's a woman who strives for beauty and perfection, in spite of being trapped in a crazy, zany, imperfect, at times destructive and messy, world.

Esmerelda was wonderfully played by Layne, a hot young model and performance artist from the alternative/industrial scene. She had very little rehearsal for this video and took all her cues as we went along. She had some bright ideas, too, and brought much creativity and personal interpretation to her character and to the content of the film. Gorgeous, spunky, exceptionally smart, and a real go-getter, she gave an electrifying, charismatic performance -- arguably the best in any video containing messy substances.

Esmerelda was deceptively simple to produce. The shooting between Layne and I took only five hours, with another two hours of additional footage by myself. Her and I together shot everything in a single dwelling. The script flowed easily, like a natural stream. The shooting script called for filming the series of brief "mini-flicks" first, then the Esmerelda portions second and, considering the messy pies, last! They were then edited in post-production to provide continuity, alternating between her B-movie scenes and her Esmerelda hosting sequence.

There are also some "primitive" F/X techniques used in the film, like a trembling room, hovering spacecraft, inanimate objects going haywire, physical transformations, and a crawling hand with a taste for gossip. No expensive and lavish sets, models, and digital technology used here: just home-grown devices, desktop computer applications, and common-sense ideas that simply "work," fusing with the other components to form the holistic image of the film. The secret, of course, is in the power of suggestion, in the visual and aural illusions that somehow touch a nerve with the audience and generates the feeling that it's actually happening.

I must say something about the soundtrack. There were two things about this film that reached deep into my gut and got a hysterical reaction out of me. First, the physical humor of the many pies flying into the face of a pretty girl. Second, the music synchronization. When I first inserted and arranged the track for "Stranger in the House" -- that heavily-orchestrated, bombastic, alien-from-Mars accompaniment to Layne's femme-fatale, coy, comical posing while being stalked by the "monster" -- I was rolling in the floor, dying of laughter, and astonished at how the music could make such a big difference in a film sequence. Esmerelda's main theme sounds like a pet-cemetary spoof, dark and mysterious, visceral and animal. The best audio seems to well up in moments of exaggerated tension and vaudevillian climaxes.

The rest of Esmerelda also features professional-quality music tracks, progressive transitions, classic pinup modeling and pulp-fiction glamour, and a variety of action and comic skits. How can you loose with a gorgeous young lady stumbling about in mini-skirt and high heels, prancing around in a bathing-suit, delivering sardonic lines, reading from Shakespeare, playfully harassed by scary creatures and invisible spectres, and taking lots of messy pies in the face?

You be the judge!