“THE AWAKENING” (2005)

Starring: Tamra Ericson Frame, Mike Conway, Heather Guzzetta, Timothy S. Daley, Clay Finan, Keith Ford, Charles Oisten, Greg Parker, Blake Mitchell & Foster Boom
Written by Mike Conway, Kelly Johnston and Erik Manion
Directed by Mike Conway
Official Website
Midnight Sun Entertainmentt

Polly Staffle Rating: ***

Six thousand dollars isn’t a lot of money when you think about. Especially with the cost of living what it is these days. In fact, if you do the math on a 15-gallon gas tank at $3.00 a gallon, filling up just once a week, you will have spent over six grand in less than three years. You add a second car to the mix, also filling up just once a week and you get to that number in a year and a half. Like I said, it’s not much money. That’s why it is so amazing what Las Vegas filmmaker Mike Conway, 42, was able to do with his most recent release.

Conway shot “The Awakening”on a budget of $5,900. That’s $1,325 less than Robert Rodriguez used to make “El Mariachi.” And this isn’t a two people sitting in a room talking, Richard Linklater kind of film. This is a science fiction action picture with a cast of 40 and a super hero-like female character straight out of a comic book. She dumps over a van, picks up and throws a car and withstands the gun fire of a small army.

I was extremely impressed with what Conway did here. The key it seems is to do as many things as you can yourself, take as much time as you need to finish what you’ve started and use your home as your studio. Conway stars, co-wrote, directed, partly photographed, edited and scored “The Awakening.”

He also did it while keeping his day job as a banquet waiter at a Las Vegas strip hotel. Conway’s acting and score are great and the film looks at least as good as a ‘made for cable production.’ The story does get a little bogged down with too many characters and a bit of ‘geek speak,’ but overall “The Awakening” is an entertaining watch that feels bigger than it is. The movie had a 43-day shoot stretched over an eight month period. Many scenes were filmed in Conway’s house with his garage serving as the set for five different locations, including a lab, a radiation room, an autopsy room and warehouse scenes.

Conway didn’t do it all himself though. Kelly Johnston provided the films special effects that are also impressive. Johnston was basically new to the After Effects software and learned it in order to pull the digital magic off. He also served as co-writer and executive producer and opened his home for scenes as well. Erik Manion wrote the original story and was also credited for the script.

Shot on 24P video with the Panasonic DVX100, “The Awakening” tells the story of an everyday woman Lara (Tamra Ericson Frame) that is dying of cancer. Lara gets super human strength when her husband Dr. David Andrade (Conway) injects her with orange juice and exposes her to radiation. Actually, it’s not orange juice, so don’t try that at home. In the movie it’s a little something the good ol’ doc whips up in the government laboratory he works at. In actuality, Conway says he used mustard and milk. Ah, of course, that’s even cheaper than using orange juice.

Lara slowly realizes not only has her cancer vanished, but she can do unthinkable things. The downside is she starts to become more and more aggressive. She soon turns against her husband and makes herself a slutty super hero costume to walk the street and do whatever she pleases. In the mean time, the female director of the agency David works at becomes intrigued with Lara’s newfound power. So much so, Michelle (played by Heather Guzzetta of ‘Blade of Death’) decides to capture Lara and give herself super powers. Before it’s all over with, Lara takes on a secret government black ops force, throwing them about, taking off their heads in one fell swoop and ripping them in two, all the while bullets just bounce right off of her. David and Lara then barely escape a huge explosion and the scene is set for a super finale cat fight between Lara and Michelle. Only the showdown between the 5-foot-9 Tamra Ericson Frame and 6-foot-1 Heather Guzzetta never happens and Conway says there are no plans for a sequel.

“If someone wants to throw a lot of money at us then we can arrange the cat fight,” Conway said. “I imagine it would be like two terminators going at it. Right now, it’s not in the cards as it wasn’t part of the original script.”

That’s a shame. As is the fact Conway shies away from nudity in the film although we get a few digital gore scenes and Tamra Ericson Frame is better known as her alter ego Mandi Steele, who has a cult following due to the sexy poses on her website.

“Kelly and I wanted to play this off with some of the sincerity reminiscent of the more popular super characters,” Conway said. That can be respected as super hero girlfriends Vicki Vale, Liz Sherman, Lois Lane and Mary Jane Watson never showed any skin and neither did “Supergirl.” But at the same time this movie would have been perfect for a topless fight scene a la the kickboxing film “Angel Fist” or an Andy Sidaris type love scene.
“What you saw is probably the closest I’ll come to exploiting a woman’s looks,” Conway said. “I have a Sam Raimi/Peter Jackson like sensibility, when it comes to women in movies. A lot of women want to work with me because of that.”

What Raimi and Jackson did is what Conway strives to do with his film career. Conway doesn’t make exploitation films. He makes movies within his budget and hopes to be working with more of a bankroll in the future.

“Those two are definitely huge influences.” Conway said. “They make their movies with a childlike playfulness, yet they are wizards of the craft. My first two features, ‘The Black Crystal’ and ‘Terrarium’ (released as ‘War of the Planets’ by Lions Gate), found distribution and put me in Ed Wood territory with a lot of people. Some of that has to do with having such low budgets, but I want to take an inspirational cue from Miguel Coyula and his $2,000 movie ‘Red Cockroaches’ and aim high. I don’t want the lack of money to be an excuse for not making great movies. With ‘The Awakening,’ at least I feel that there is bang for the buck.”

Though Conway wanted “The Awakening” to play like a traditional comic book character movie, he also wanted it to be a little edgy like Paul Verhoeven’s “RoboCop” with heavy violence and a few humorously absurd scenes.

“I was afraid of making a fluff ‘Supergirl’ movie,” Conway said. “I think Kelly and Erik felt the same way. I like the angle of the story because it twists away from being politically correct. This girl enters a state of confusion and really lets loose her dark side unlike the ‘we have to fight nice’ good guys, like ‘Superman’ and ‘Batman.’ What’s kind of funny about the movie is that you have this dark tone, but you also have guys like goofy Donald, the lab assistant that is always eating and the main character David, who is kind of a Major Nelson sort of guy always putting his genie’s abilities down.”

Anyone that watches “The Awakening” definitely won’t be questioning Conway’s abilities. He got his start in film in 1980 and says he made a dozen or so shorts on 8mm before studying film production at the University of Arizona. He now has totaled around 40 shorts and three features on various formats. He is also a self-taught musician. Having trouble finding anyone to score his early works, he bought a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer in 1984 and has scored all of his movies since. For the time being, he’s just trying to enjoy what he’s doing.

“I’ve always done this for the fun and love of movie making,” Conway said. “It’s my dream to be recognized someday. Right now, I’m not exactly famous, so I want to continue learning and improving to take things as far as I can on a shoe string.”

Currently he said he has a number of ideas for his next project including a horror movie, a hitman script and a few sci-fi possibilities. Sometimes you just never know where things might take you. Conway holds an annual Las Vegas IndieMeet at his house. Filmmakers around the world come together to share demonstrations, films and ideas. At the debut meet in 2004 Conway and Johnston hit it off. Johnston attended with the idea for “The Awakening” on a back burner. He had his lead female actress in long time friend Tamra Ericson Frame, but no director. Johnston was impressed with the number of presentations Conway put on at the meet, including making blood, making squibs, scoring music, green screen and editing examples, that he approached him with his project. Conway had many of the essentials for the production such as the camera, lights, microphones and a motorhome with a generator, so Johnston knew they could keep the film’s cost low.

The way Conway goes about a film also helped with the budget. For one, he’s a stickler for not wasting any days when cast members are available for filming. “We could have said ‘no’ to shooting on desert cliffs on a windy, 34 degree night,

but everybody freezing made that one of the more memorable experiences,” Conway said. He also has his wife Sheila serving sandwiches and home cooked meals such as lasagna on many days. But a few script changes may have helped out the most. The screenplay originally had scenes with Lara floating and firing laser beams out of her eyes. Conway got rid of those right off the bat to make the film more feasible. Essentially, if you go into a project knowing what you are capable of and stick to that, you’re better off than getting in over your head and bailing on the film half way through.

“But you don’t know what you can or can’t do, until you start one, two or three projects,” Conway said. “Sometimes it’s a process to find yourself. Kind of like me! Start small, like with an eight minute short, and then work up. At least with so many video cameras around, it’s very cheap to experiment.”

So remember that the next time you are at the pump filling your tank with gas. Just think, you sell your car and ride the city bus, not only are you helping to not pollute our air, you’re easily on your way to funding your very own independent action movie. Or you could give the money to Mike Conway and get him moving on his next great film.

- CCF, June 2006