“PSYCHO HAPPY PLACE” (2002)

Starring: Ignazio Rao, Jennifer Kersey, Zach Kates, Phyllis Stanley & Dana Peterson
Written & Directed by David Wanger
Mamba Fever Pictures

Polly Staffle Review: ****

Sometimes directors seem to forget how important visual images are when they make their films. There are plenty of mainstream movies that cost loads of money to make that just aren’t that much fun to look at. Still, others get too wrapped up in visuals and the finished product is lifeless because everything was shot in front of a green screen with the background added in using computers later. It may seem silly, but something as simple as picking the right location to film can make all the difference in the world. This is something independent filmmaker David Wanger shows he understands with his short “Psycho Happy Place.”

The 15-minute film was shot on 16mm with a budget of $1,500 and is filled scene after scene with great locations. Wanger, who was 24 at the time it was completed in 2002, describes his experimental piece as a “dark surreal odyssey a la ‘Alice in Wonderland,’” and it very well lives up to that in transporting you to an alternate universe. It’s almost as if Wanger and his Mamba Fever Pictures picked the perfect backdrop for every frame. This combined with the fact it is in black and white and has an offbeat story works to such an effect it could play as an old episode of “The Twilight Zone.” All you need is an introduction from Rod Serling. Ironically, Wanger admits he was watching a lot of the series at the time and even had “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” which just so happens to be one of my favorites, on DVD. (I was also reminded of the cult classic “Carnival of Souls,” but Wanger said he hadn’t seen that film.)

“Psycho Happy Place” opens with a scene on a small cobblestone-styled street that looks like it’s straight out of a foreign film. After an incident that connects three strangers, we are treated to a foot chase. Since one character is carrying a dead body, it’s not just your average foot chase. Down a path to a waterfall and into an underground tunnel, we follow the journey that makes the boring “over the river and through the woods” trip to grandmother’s house even more dull than it really is. The viewer is treated to dark and creepy visuals in the tunnel. With the help of the eerie soundtrack by Nischom Silverman, this scene seems to take us straight to hell. When we reach daylight and feel we are in the clear, it’s off to a swampy forest with a spooky old lady and flying chairs.

This production is more than great locations. Wanger, who also handled all the cinematography, just knows where to place the camera, how to frame the shot and uses all the environmental elements to his advantage. Even when his camera gets up close we are treated to images that would look nice formatted, framed and hung on the wall. The simplest things like the smoke of a cigarette, the glare of the sun and blurry focusing is enough for him to liven up a scene inside a car near the film’s end. Not surprisingly, Wanger says photographs are what actually helped him write the script.

“I went through some magazines and photo books looking for black and white images to build a film around,” Wanger said. “I picked about four and laid them out on the floor as a reference while I wrote the story outline. One photo was a dark train tunnel entrance. Another was a soothing picture by Anton Corbijn of Peter Gabriel stranding on a curvy road, which inspired the final scene.”

Wanger gives credit to his producer Anthony Scimonelli for finding the key locations of the train tunnel and downtown Ellicott City, Maryland, which is featured heavily in the beginning of the film. Instead of trying to secure a permit for a side street they used to run a woman over with a car, Wanger says Scimonelli talked to all the shop owners on the street and made sure they were okay with them being there.

Wanger said besides photos, he was influenced by the Depeche Mode music videos directed by Corbijn. He also had a picture of a cow that led him to writing an Ozzy Osbourne-like character that’s in love with his cow, but due to time constraints wasn’t able to shoot it. Besides that scene, Wanger says he stuck pretty close to his screenplay.

If you hadn’t noticed yet, Wanger has a quirky sense of humor and it completely shines through his work. Otherwise “Psycho Happy Place” wouldn’t have a scene with a man offering a dead woman pizza or an opening pedestrian hit-and-run, followed by a discussion of who gets to have the body so they can have sex with it. There’s also this classic exchange between a man hitchhiking and a woman that stops to see if he needs help. “Have you seen a man carrying a dead woman by chance?” he asks. “No, not lately… Do you need a ride?” she responds very nonchalantly.

The sense of humor also probably helps when someone calls the cops while you’re filming, which happened during the shooting of actor Ignazio Rao running with a dead woman on his shoulders.

“It’s not the most life like dummy I have seen,” Wanger said. “But someone saw us and called the police, which was kind of crazy.”

A homicide detective actually came out to see what Wanger and company were up to, but “he was cool, didn’t care and left.”

“But now there were about twenty cars pulled along the side of the road trying to see what was going on,” Wanger said. “A police woman who was still there told everyone to leave, but the guy who had made the original phone call was a total jerk and refused to move his car out of the way. So she argued with him for a little while to no effect and eventually she asked us to leave and try again another day. We found a more isolated location where we finished shooting a week or so later. So if you look carefully, you can see the scene was shot at two locations.”

It just goes to show when you are making a movie with a budget less than the price of a clunker used car, you just have to do what you can to get the job done. This was actually a student film Wanger made at Townson University, so he was able to use school equipment to film it, but he actually finished it at home on his personal Mac. And to think some people use their home computer just to look at porn, play on myspace and read film reviews.

- CCF, April 2006