Editorials
‘Dementia: Part II’: The Bizarre Midnight Movie Made in Only a Month! [Cinepocalypse]
The biggest surprise out of Music Box Chicago’s inaugural Cinepocalypse Film Festival was completely under the radar. It was a film not listed in the program. In fact, it wasn’t even a secret screening, but a challenge, a first-of-its-kind bet between a programmer and two producers.
The production team at BoulderLight Pictures consists of 25-year-olds JD Lifshitz and Raphael Margules. Alongside both Contracted films, they also produced Bad Match, which received its premiere at FrightFest, the upcoming Dismissed (starring Dylan Sprouse), and numerous other genre titles including Dementia.
With their youthful exuberance and heavy output, the festival issued them a challenge: produce a genre feature exclusively for Cinepocalypse 2017. There were no parameters other than it must be a feature-length midnight movie, and that they must begin production immediately upon release of our first announcement. They had a month to make a film from conception to world premiere, which took place last night at the ongoing film festival.
When the lights went down, not even us programmers knew what was going to be showing on screen; we had no idea of the plot, subgenre, who starred, nor who directed. It was one of the coolest mysteries I personally have ever experienced at a fest.
It turned out to be a tongue-in-cheek sequel to BoulderLight’s Mike Testin-directed Dementia (2015), their deadpan serious thriller about an elderly war veteran who is forced by his estranged family to hire a live-in nurse, only to find she harbors a sinister secret.
Dementia: Part II, however, is all midnight movie, a complete juxtapose of its predecessor that’s not only funny but disgusting. Where the first film was a slow-burn riddled with exposition, this “sequel” was an exercise in chaos, madness, and insanity. Co-directed by Testin and star Matt Mercer, the plot follows Mercer as an ex-convict who has become a small-jobs repairman, who ends up in a house with a frightening old woman (Suzanne Voss) with dementia. Shot in black and white, the nightmare escalates as the woman shoves $100 bills in Mercer’s pocket, stringing him along for the revolting ride. Testin and Mercer take from the pages of Sam Raimi with their blocking and gross-out humor, hammering home revolting sequences similar to those in Drag Me to Hell.
Being made in a month with barely any money allowed for these filmmakers to break the rules, take chances, and basically do whatever the fuck they wanted. The result is a trippy, mind-fuck of a midnight movie that does have cult potential (it’s unclear if this will be reworked for future festival submissions).
This is a first, as far as I can tell, and is perfectly reflective of what’s it’s like to be an indie filmmaker in 2017. Technology allows for filmmakers to pick up a camera and be creative, and while many are hoping to win the lottery with an investor, others should accept the same challenge and see what they can create just out of sheer will. Whether we’re talking about filmmaking or some other career entirely, the lesson here is to stop talking about it and just do it.
We’ll keep you posted if the film lands distribution or plays more festivals through 2018.
Additional Info: The full cast also includes Najarra Townsend, Graham Skipper, and Stacy Snyder. Matt Mercer and Mike Testin directed, edited, wrote, and produced the film in a month. JD Lifshitz and Raphael Margules are executive producers. Cathy Tuttle co-produced with Eric Slee and Rob Yoo serving as associate producers. SFX materials provided by Josh and Sierra Russell.
Some movies are just so beloved that you can experience them through cultural osmosis without ever sitting down to actually watch them. From loving parodies to meticulous recreations of iconic scenes, memorable filmmaking lives on even after the curtains close on the silver screen. And when it comes to horror, few films can compete with the massive impact that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining had on popular culture as a whole.
Whether or not you think the flick is a good adaptation of Stephen King’s seminal novel, 1980’s The Shining slowly but surely grew into one of the most influential genre movies ever made, inspiring everything from surprisingly heartfelt sequels to classic episodes of The Simpsons. However, not all The Shining references are created equal, and today I’d like to shine a light on six unexpected homages to Kubrick’s iconic film.
In this list, we’ll be focusing on references and Easter eggs that either came out of the blue or came from creators that you wouldn’t expect to be fans of this classic ghost story. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own favorite references to the Torrance family and the Overlook Hotel if you think we missed a particularly memorable one.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
5. A Nightmare on FaceTime – South Park (2012)
Regardless of the brand’s iffy reputation among former employees, the death of Blockbuster Video was a serious blow to fans of physical media. Of course, some folks were more affected by this than others, and South Park’s Randy Marsh definitely took things a little too far in the twelfth episode of the show’s sixteenth season.
Titled A Nightmare on FaceTime, the main plot of this 2012 story is a surprisingly faithful recreation of The Shining where Randy purchases an empty Blockbuster store and begins to go mad once he realizes that his investment may not have been a very good idea due to the rise of streaming and the now-defunct RedBox storefronts.
4. The Overlook Hotel Level – Ready Player One (2018)
I was never really a fan of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, so I viewed Stephen Spielberg’s divisive adaptation of the novel as an improvement over the source material despite having its own narrative issues. In fact, I actually prefer how Spielberg changed the story by removing several references to his own work and replacing a lengthy Blade Runner detour with an over-the-top homage to The Shining.
A CGI-heavy recreation of the film’s most iconic moments that feels like a big-budget ghost train ride set within the Overlook Hotel, this intense sequence is more of a recreation of the freaky aesthetics of The Shining rather than its mind-bending narrative. However, it’s still fun to see Spielberg make a heartfelt tribute to a filmmaker that was once his close personal friend.
3. IKEA Singapore Halloween Ad (2014)
It makes sense that commercials don’t typically borrow from the horror genre, as it might be a bad idea to scare away potential customers, but some references are just too much fun to pass up.
That’s probably why the publicists behind this Ikea ad from Singapore were allowed to turn their commercial into a genuinely unsettling recreation of Danny’s tricycle scene from The Shining. After all, nobody cares if your store is haunted so long as it offers late-night shopping hours and a large selection of merchandise that you can become lost in forever and ever…
2. The End of ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’ – Community (2014)
Community is no stranger to recreating iconic movie moments within the show, and the series had previously tackled horror tropes in episodes like the fan-favorite Epidemiology. However, the most laugh-out-loud moment on this particular list comes from a brief gag towards the end of the season five episode ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’.
The majority of this episode has nothing to do with scary movies, but there’s a brief subplot involving supporting character Chang and a possible encounter with ghosts that leads him to question his own existence. This subplot culminates in the episode’s hilarious ending where the camera zooms in on a black-and-white photograph of Chang in period clothing at some kind of celebration, just like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining.
However, the picture’s subtitle eventually reveals that it’s merely a conveniently placed keepsake from the ‘Old Timey Photo Club’.
1. The Overlook Hedge Maze Sequence – Zootopia 2 (2025)
Disney movies are pretty far removed from both the gruesome horror of Stephen King and the heady filmmaking of Stanley Kubrick, so I don’t think anyone was expecting the climax of last year’s Zootopia sequel to take place in an animated version of the snowy hedge maze from The Shining.
In this unexpectedly intense sequence, friend-turned-villain Pawbert Lynxley (an unhinged lynx cat played by Andy Samberg) chases our protagonists through a creepy labyrinth in a loving recreation of Jack Nicholson’s icy demise outside the Overlook Hotel. The actual ending here might be a little more child-friendly than what’s being referenced, but it’s amazing that the filmmakers were able to push the horror elements as far as they did – especially since the scene doesn’t really have anything to do with the rest of the movie.
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