Hacked to bits
>> Maurice Deveraux’s $LA$HER$ gets the
“cutting edge” treatment

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

After an auspicious unveiling at Fantasia last year, local filmmaker Maurice Devereaux’s $LA$HER$ has seen some ups and a big down. The low-budget, shot-on-hi-def flick imagines a twisted Japanese reality-TV program where contestants battle cartoonish psychos armed by Black & Decker for cash prizes. The neat part is, the whole thing is shot to seem like one continuous take, in the style of Hitchcock’s Rope.
The problem with the approach is, it doesn’t leave much room for editing. This didn’t stop the company putting out the Canadian DVD from excising essential footage in the interests of a safe (but unnecessary) R rating. Between crying jags and fits of rage, Deveraux laid out the situation for the Mirror.

Mirror: When we last spoke, you were getting ready for a pretty successful debut at Fantasia last year.
Maurice Deveraux: Yeah, it was completely sold out, and friends told me scalpers were selling tickets at $15 a pop. Everyone was making money but me!

M: Has it shown at any other festivals? What about a theatrical release?
MD: It played at Sitges, a fantasy-film festival in Spain, and another one called Ciné Fantastico in Malaga. I submitted it to Sundance but it was rejected. I didn’t do a lot on that end because there aren’t that many festivals for horror and fantasy films. Also, I don’t have a print, and many festivals won’t do video projection. I would have adored a theatrical release, but it wasn’t to be.

It’s still rare that a low-budget film with no stars can get theatrical play, especially in the States or Canada.

M: It seems that, considering what $LA$HER$ is, it’s more suited to the small screen anyway.
MD: Sure, though having it in cinemas generates a lot of publicity for the video release. Also, people were surprised how well it played to a crowd. Like at Fantasia, you had all the cheers and hoots, which made it a fun experience. Odds are, people will see it on video, which is fine—as long as they’re seeing it uncut!
The roughest cut

M: Okay, let’s get into that. There’s an American DVD coming out.
MD: That’s with Fangoria magazine’s video label. The DVD is absolutely amazing. Sixteen-by-nine enhanced widescreen transfer, a 55-minute documentary, deleted scenes, trailers, cast bios, director’s commentary—you can’t have a nicer DVD. That’s the good news. The sad story is, a Canadian company called Kaboom picked up the English-Canada rights from them, an offshoot of 49th Parallel, the company that produced Ginger Snaps, which I absolutely loved. They decided to have an R-rated version, and took out two and a half minutes of gore. Since my movie was all one take—

M: Okay, one, it’s absurd to take the gore out of a movie called $LA$HERS. Two, as you say, it completely blows the whole, if I may say, gimmick of
the film.
MD: Sometimes you don’t notice, but in this case people will. You have this one-shot thing, and then suddenly characters go poof! The music just cuts. I called it a chainsaw massacre. Of course, this is all my opinion, but even if their reason was that it would cost too much to have it be rated by each individual province, I don’t know what their thinking is. From what I’ve seen, every video club across Canada, including Blockbusters, have unrated horror DVDs—Evil Dead, Suspiria, Dawn of the Dead, Reanimator. It costs so much money to have a movie submitted to these rating boards, so rather than risk paying a second time if it’s refused, they just took everything out.

M: I would imagine this has created an unpleasant situation between the company and yourself.
MD: They’re legally entitled to do whatever they want. It’s just a sad situation where I was trying to convince them that they’ll probably lose the money of all those who order the American DVD. And it’s sad for the horror fans who’ll rent it and get ripped off. Especially a company that calls itself, on its site, “edgy.” Well, they took all the edge out of my film.

M: I guess $LA$HER$ is your main focus right now, but what’s cooking for the future?
MD: I wrote a new script that’ll be a tough sell. It’s another horror film, called Sawney Bean, about a 16th-century Scottish man who went with his wife to live in a cave near Edinburgh. For 25 years, he raised an inbred family in this cave, and they’d attack travellers on deserted roads, kill them, take the bodies back and eat them as sustenance, because the money they’d steal wasn’t enough to feed the whole clan. This is either a true story or a big urban legend—I have my own opinions on that. What really intrigued me was that, when they were finally caught, they were all executed, even the children. I right away thought that, if this was true, these children had no idea of good and bad, right and wrong. They were completely isolated from society. I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting to completely turn the story around and have it be from the point of view of one of these children, where the outsiders were the evil demons who at the end, come and kill them? :

$LA$HER$ plays Friday and Saturday, Sept. 20–21, 11:30pm, at Cinéma du Parc

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