Movies
[Interview] Asta Paredes Talks ‘Return To Nuke ‘Em High’ Volume 1
Always the sleuth, Chrissy suspects something terribly wrong is going on inside the classrooms of Tromaville High School. The glee club has suddenly turned into a violent gang of psychotic mutants. Though they’re completely opposite of each other, Chrissy has to team up with Lauren in order to solve the mystery in “Return to Nuke ‘Em High Volume 1.”
I spoke with actress Asta Paredes about her role as Chrissy, dealing with the practical effects, and how she came up with the “Pollution Nerdz” viral series for the film.
Bloody-Disgusting: Tell me about your role in “Return To Nuke ‘Em High Vol. 1.”
Asta Paredes: Chrissy is an environmental blogger. She is a highly inquisitive person. That probably has to do with the fact that she is an orphan. And she’s a feisty person who’s kind of trying to figure herself out.
BD: What interests you about the character?
AP: I guess what I’m most interested about the character, especially with the Troma project, is how Chrissy began to shift and change as I began to audition for her. She has a structure. She was an investigator. She’s kind of like that curious spy, Nancy Drew, in a modern world. I’ve always been drawn to detective shows, procedural dramas, things like that. So I was very interested in playing a character who had a role in driving thought and looking into mystery. Chrissy is perfect for that.
BD: Tell me about creating the relationship, building the chemistry with your co-star, Catherine Corcoran, who plays Lauren, Chrissy’s lover.
AP: It was effortless. It’s the best word I’d used to describe it. We slowly got to know each other, not so much as Chrissy and Lauren. We were able to lay down a foundation that allowed us to not even have to use words to communicate what we wanted to do with our characters. So much so that, we used to share looks on set. And that became part of the actual shooting schedule. “Shoot Asta and Catie looking at each other!” It kinda reminds me of Roman Polanski’s “Romeo and Juliet,” the intense longing that you feel when you watch that production. That’s the same thing I wanted to bring to this.
Also, we became close friends after the first callback. We auditioned separately initially and then we became really good friends.
BD: The glee club mutates into a gang known as the Cretins. Tell me about staying in character while being surrounded by the FX, make-up, and visuals gags.
AP: It was actually like having a Q, like Q as in James Bond, on set! It was like you knew who you were. You have the training. I laid down the character. You worked on the script. And then suddenly, I have all these gadgets, who’s its and what’s it, and different factors to work with. So I got to work with great people like Drew Bolduc, Jason Koch, a wonderful team, and Kaleigh Brown, the woman who made my “penis.” So she and I had to work together a lot. It’s a fun dynamic in itself.
BD: Was it a challenge when dealing with all those practical effects?
AP: Yeah! Working on a film set itself is challenging, especially if you’re used to live performance. It’s a lot more to do with endurance, when you physically have a carry a practical effect, that a person has to pick up twenty pounds. You have to shoot all night into the morning. It’s really about the physical and mental endurance; keeping it fresh as much as you can mentally. Learning to deal with splattered blood, goo, mud, dust, fireworks, and all sorts of things. Just learning another stage is why Troma is such a great film school for people.
BD: Lloyd Kaufman has made a series of sequels with “Class of Nuke ‘Em High.” Tell me about putting your own spin, a fresh take on the franchise while keeping with Kaufman’s directions.
AP: I think he managed to revive the franchise by taking the initial story back to its roots, much like a lot epics and sequels tend to do in going back to the root of it. We went back to “Nuke ‘Em High” itself, not a college. It’s the actual high school where it all began. It’s like revisiting a war zone. You’re seeing the wreckage and seeing how people survived years later.
Lloyd is great because he considers all the current events, all the social issues. He considers how people will view it on that side. And then, he wants you to do the work as far as the character’s integrity goes. So he expects nothing but your full work ethic. Once you give him that, he allows you to put your say.
So having said that, on this production, everyone got to put in a creative voice as long as they were able to stand up for it, bring relevance to it. And he made sure his direction stayed in the same universe of “Nuke ‘Em High” – fun, campy, and all that. You just had to bring yourself to it.
BD: You also wrote, shot, and directed the viral segments for the Pollution Nerdz Tumblr page. Did this help you understand what direction you wanted to take with your character?
AP: Yeah! I wrote, directed, and worked on “Pollution Nerdz.” It was just an acting project that I wanted to do, just because it’s been a few years since I’d been in high school. Social media is a huge thing. So I worked on that and it helped me bring more to Chrissy because I realized the attention span of the character. I realized the idea of having to log something in. It reminded me of Lovecraft type stories. What if Chrissy disappeared? What if something happens to her in Volume 2? We don’t know. This is her archive.
I thought of someone who needed to archive everything. What is the mentality of that person? Are they very paranoid or are they savvy? I don’t know. That’s kind of something I wanted to explore with that. Unfortunately, I got to work the majority of that after the production was over, but I did have to do it six months prior to the actual film because I wanted it to be something of a prequel of sorts. I didn’t want to give anything away for the actual film. Lloyd encouraged me to actually publish it online so that people could have it as a little Easter egg.
BD: You were also in Funny or Die’s short, “Battleship Pitch Meeting.” Do you have a preference over comedic or dramatic roles?
AP: I think the best comedy is inherently dramatic. And the best dramas have a sense of humor. So it’s hard to pick when you think of it that way. I love and adore comedy only because it goes back to the basic need of film medium, which is escapism. Being able to leave your humdrum life for a little bit and…I don’t know…smile! I think drama can have its place as long as its relevant to the viewer, whether that be in the social matter or a personal matter for them. I think comedy can overcome that normally. I’m usually torn in the middle.
BD: “Return To Nuke ‘Em High Vol.1” premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May. And now it will be screened at the New York City Horror Film Festival. What were your expectations with the audience and have they changed?
AP: I honestly would say that I thought audiences were going to love it because I loved it! But then, deep down I was actually surprised at how much people did love it! And I was also surprised at how many people actually understood the transcendent message of extreme satire that we were trying to accomplish. I now hope that through the screenings that we’ve had and that the screenings we will have, which I’m excited to see what the horror community in New York think, I’m hoping they are able to give a sincere, critical eye and know that it is a joke, and not to take it too seriously, but take it to heart if anything.
BD: What other projects are you working on now?
AP: Right now, I am working on a couple of things but I cannot say until after January. Other than that, I am upping my game with reviving my martial arts skills, dance, and overall, just enjoying New York City.
“Return To Nuke ‘Em High Vol. 1” will be screened at the New York City Horror Film Festival on November 14, 2013.
For more about the upcoming screenings of “Return To Nuke ‘Em High,” click here.
Interview by – Jorge Solis
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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