Dallas filmmaker Israel Luna scares up campy suspense with new popcorn slasher ‘Fright Flick’

Dallas filmmaker Israel Luna scares up campy suspense with new popcorn slasher ‘Fright Flick’

Beware of the vengeful gay filmmaker.

When Israel Luna was shooting his 2004 feature, “The Deadbeat Club,” his homicidal tendencies took over.

“By the second day of production, I wanted to slaughter the cast and crew. Oh my God, the egos! My crew complained to each other, saying things like, ‘I know more about directing than Israel.’ They filmed things without me knowing. There were alliances on the set … It was horrible,” Luna remembers.

So he got them back — with his new movie, “Fright Flick,” which premieres Wednesday night at The Magnolia.

“Fright Flick” is a film-within-a-film about a low-budget crew shooting a third horror installment where actors and crew are victims of grisly murder: throats slit, hammers to the head, barbed-wire decapitation and even a knife in the vagina. Luna says he based some of the “Fright Flick” characters on his “Deadbeat Club” colleagues.

“I even kept their real names,” he says.

Luna shot the film over an 18-day schedule last summer at a motel in Runaway Bay, Texas. Most of the actors are from Dallas — including Richard Curtin as sleazeball director Moureau Laurent, who hits on male production assistants as well as his F-cup leading lady Ophelia Cumming (the unforgettable Valerie Nelson). Luna also tapped actor Chad Allen of “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman” fame to play Brock, the lead actor in the horror film.

After the film wrapped, Luna spent six months shaving 22 hours of footage into one hour and 43 minutes. At the same time, he was also marketing and promoting his last feature, “R U Invited?” a comedy about a gay sex party.

“R U Invited?” is definitely a gay film. But “Fright Flick” — written and directed by a gay director and with several gay roles “isn’t gay enough for gay film festivals or even Logo,” Luna explains. “This is how it works: For a horror film, you have pretty people who get murdered. For a gay film, you have pretty people who get naked. It’s good to have a storyline in both. But without the storyline in the gay film, it’s just porn.”

So “Fright Flick” will be marketed and perceived as a horror film, which seems like a more successful route. Last month, it premiered at the Chicago Horror Festival, and two weeks ago, it screened at the B-Movie Film Festival in Syracuse, N.Y., where Curtin was nominated for best supporting actor and the film won the award for “House Pick As Most Memorable Of Fest.”

Luna says the production experience on “Fright Flick” was his most enjoyable. But he’s already trying to get his next two projects off the ground: “Donkumentary,” a documentary about Mexican “donkey shows” (where women engage in bestiality for public spectacle) and “Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives,” a transgender romp in the tradition of the Tarantino-Rodriguez flick “Grindhouse.”

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This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition October 24, 2008.