Good Deed Entertainment’s new genre label, Cranked Up Films, has acquired U.S. distribution rights to XX director Jovanka Vuckovic‘s post-apocalyptic horror Riot Girls, ScreenDaily first reports. The film will open in limited theaters and on various VOD platforms this coming summer.
Madison Iseman (Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle) and Paloma Kwiatkowski (Bates Motel) star in Riot Girls, which takes place after a mysterious illness has killed all adults, leaving the town of Potter’s Bluff divided into two factions – the ‘East side’, made up of scavengers, and the ‘West side’, which hoards its wealth in the former high school and is ruled by a tyrant played by Munro Chambers (Turbo Kid).
When Eastsider Jack (Alexandre Bourgeois, Departure) kills two Westsiders on a scavenging mission, he is captured and sentenced to public execution, forcing his sister Nat (Iseman) and her best friend Scratch (Kwiatkowski) to cross into dangerous territory in a desperate bid to save him.
Vuckovic won the 2012 Fantasia Film Festival Best Short award for The Captured Bird, which was executive produced by Guillermo del Toro. She also wrote and directed a segment for XX, the all-female horror anthology produced by XYZ Films to be released by Magnet Releasing in 2017. She’s scheduled to direct the feature adaptation of Clive Barker’s Jacqueline Ess as well as All My Heroes Are Dead, a thriller based on an original screenplay by Vuckovic.
“I’ve always been attracted to films that break the rules,” said Vuckovic when announced earlier last year. “Riot Girls isn’t a simple post-apocalypse tale, a violent survivalist horror story, a queer romance, or a kids adventure film – it’s all of those things blended together beautifully. I look forward to bringing Katherine’s genre-bending, coming-of-rage love story to life onscreen.”
Riot Girls is written by Katherine Collins who was a writer on the first season of the NBC hit Blindspot.
