One of my favourite films of the year so far, Sean Melia’s
whip-smart acidly funny 2015 comedy about a dysfunctional family of killers
seems to have sprung out of nowhere but definitely deserves your attention.
Sarah is a newbie catering assistant on her first job,
serving up the food and drinks at a wake for Hank Boyd. The dead guy’s not so
popular, what with being a convicted killer and everything, and so the guests
at the wake are mainly family. But what a family! Hank’s brother David, a
policeman with some, shall we say, control issues, presides over the
proceedings. Then there’s grandma, the seemingly-in-shock Beverly, and wackiest
of all is David’s sister Aubrey, who seems to have stepped straight out of Jack
Hill’s 1964 demented family saga Spider
Baby. Sarah starts to smell a rat when she realises that she had gone to
school with Hank and is pretty convinced he isn’t, or wasn’t killer material.
An overheard conversation between David and his cop partner Ray leads her to
think that the wrong person may have been convicted of murder, but before she
can do anything about it, she’s imprisoned in the basement while the whole
family show their true colours.
Sean Melia’s short films – including the excellent 2008 movie
You Don’t Know Me – suggested the
producer, writer and director was capable of a decent feature length movie, but
he’s surpassed expectations with HBID.
Comedy thrillers can be really problematic, but Melia has his cast – Stephanie
Frame as waspish but feisty Sarah, David Christopher Wells as on and over the
edge cop David, and the brilliant Carole Monferdini and Liv Rooth as,
respectively, Beverly and Aubrey – downplay their roles even when things on
screen are ratcheted up to 11, which works so effectively. The script is also a
winner, all sotto voce comments and
hilarious back chat.
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| Stephanie Frame as caterer in danger Sarah in HBID |
(This review was written for www.bloody-flicks.co.uk - Hank Boyd is Dead is on UK's Amazon Prime now).
I managed to snatch a few words with Sean Melia, director of Hank Boyd is Dead, via the magic of the internet:
I managed to snatch a few words with Sean Melia, director of Hank Boyd is Dead, via the magic of the internet:
DEoL: Where did the idea for HBID come from?
SM: I grew up loving all things horror and wanted to do
something that was within the genre but also poked fun a bit at classic tropes
like the psycho family, last girl standing, monster in the attic, that sort of
thing. I fell in love with the idea of a
bickering clan of sociopaths with the same dysfunctions as a typical American
family and how that could play against the horror of what was happening, sort
of an Arrested Development meets the Sawyers or the Firefly brood. Thankfully my cast got the joke and was able
to stride the line between farce and terror.
DeoL: Tell me a little about the shoot – budget, locations
etc.
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| Sean Melia |
SM: This is my first
feature, self-financed by me with some help from family and friends. Total budget was just under $50K, but
everyone got paid for their work and it was a fun shoot. I wrote the script with the idea of making a
movie in a week since that was all the time I could afford to take off and we
shot it in just under eight days. The
location is my home town of Edison, New Jersey and the house is the house I grew up
in. The cast is largely made up of actor
friends that worked with me on my short films, but it wasn't just a matter of
convenience, I thought they were all really great at what they did and would
add tremendous production value to the project.
I'm looking forward to working with them again.
DEoL: This was your first feature. Your previous short films
(What Goes Bump in the Night?, The Administrator, You Don’t Know Me) have all
dealt with seemingly innocent looking people showing a capacity for or being
exposed to violence, and HBID builds on this. What attracts you to this theme?
SM: I think the key to all great horror or suspense movies
is abnormal happenings in a seemingly normal day. You Don't Know Me turns the tables on a
prank, The Administrator is along similar comic lines of HBID where a hit man
is asked to make a slasher styled snuff film starring an unsuspecting
"client". My feature scripts
all seem to deal with horrible versions of the American Family that I destroy
in the most entertaining ways possible.
I'm a very empathetic person with a overdeveloped sense of right and
wrong to the point where I feel guilty about dropping a gum wrapper on the
ground. I guess I like to explore
whatever is the opposite of that.
DEoL: You seem to do a lot in your movies – writing,
producing – even music. Do you have a preference?
SM: I enjoy all of it, although I'm looking forward to
collaborating more on future projects and just sticking to the writing / directing
gig. Editing, producing, sound design,
composing, web design, artwork and the like were all done by me out of
necessity more than anything else.
DEoL: What’s next – any future projects?
SM: I have two other low budget scripts that I'd love to
make in the near future, both of which were written before HBID but were a
little too expensive to produce on our own.
One is a more serious thriller called I See A Darkness that
deals with a family man who's contacted by an old roommate from a decade
earlier who tells him that the house they used to live in is about to be torn
down and he needs help moving the body buried in the basement. Welcome To The Johnsons is very much like HBID in tone and tells the story of a family of siblings and their significant
others who gather at a lake house to stage an intervention, only to have the
interventionist be replaced by a serial killer who specializes in writing first
person obituaries. If I can scrape up
about $100K to do either of those I'm ready to go. In the meantime I'm writing a dark comedy
about a yard sale gone wrong that I think is also going to be a lot of
fun.
DEoL: Sean, thanks a lot - we'll look out for them!
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