This movie is an anthology feature made up of three horror tales.
It was produced & directed by independent filmmaker Joe Bagnardi.
The stories in this anthology are:Dead Man, The Maze & The Quarry.
Dead Man is a tell-tale heart type story that proves somedays you just can't keep a good man down.
The Maze is about a man who comes face to face with his own worst enemy: Himself!!!The Quarry is a Bigfoot story.
London After Midnight - from Pagan Film Productions, LLC.
This horror feature was written and directed by independent filmmaker Bruce G. Hallenbeck. The story follows paranormal investigators David London and Holly Gemini in their battle with the forces of evil, including demons and satanic cults.
This is a very ambitious project which began in 1997 and features scores of actors and locations. The movie stars David Louis, Prudence Theriault, Peter Hughes,
David Baker and Amy Kerr.
To view the trailer for London After Midnight see the Movie Trailers page.
To view photos from my appearance in London After Midnight see the Acting Credits page.
To view photos from the Upstate New York Area Premiere screening of London After Midnight see Out & About Page 2, and to view media coverage see the Media page.
Here are some kind words from reviewers about The Edge Of Reality:
" THE EDGE OF REALITY gives us just what we've been lacking since they quit making the Twilight Zone episodes... ...better than one would expect with the sound quality good and a great picture. But that has a lot to do with the nice editing job of Kirkendall. THE EDGE OF REALITY is a must see for any fan of old Twilight Zone
or Night Gallery episodes. All around, an excellent flick for the horror genre."
Unspeakable Magazine
" ...I was not disappointed. In the tradition of The Outer Limits, Night Gallery and
the eternal Twilight Zone, The Edge of Reality presents us with creepy setting, eerie stories and some of the darkest humor you can imagine... All in all, an excellent way to spend an hour or so. It is also an excellent teaching tool for new filmmakers."
PenguinComics.net
About the "Dead Man" segment:
" I really liked this one. The setting was perfect, the actors did their jobs competently and the special effects, while minimal were very well done... Use what you have on hand, and make it look right and work. In DEAD MAN, Director Joe Bagnardi did just that."
PenguinComics.net
" The directing and writing of the stories were great. The directing was sharp and it showed through the style of shots and camera angles used."
The Horror Review
" If you like TALES FROM THE CRYPT, TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE and
other such anthologies, Joe Bagnardi's EDGE OF REALITY (Brimstone Media Productions) is sure to please... ...we were thrilled to see it proven that a great homage film to such a beloved era can be made on a low budget... How refreshing! Now this is filmmaking we like to see."
themonsterclub.com
" The first story, DEAD MAN was our favorite. It's sheer creepiness when a sheriff's body won't stay buried... despite a number of attempts..."
themonsterclub.com
About "The Maze" segment:
" THE MAZE was wonderfully suspenseful, yet harked back to a TWILIGHT ZONE "style lesson in morality" type tale."
themonsterclub.com
The credits for the movie are as follows:
Pagan Film Productions and JB Productions presents"London After Midnight"
with David Louis, Prudence Theriault, Peter Hughes, David Baker and Amy Kerr
Director of Photograpy: Joe Bagnardi * Associate Producer & Editor: Jeff Kirkendall
Produced by Joe Bagnardi & Bruce G. Hallenbeck
Written and Directed by Bruce G. Hallenbeck
The credits for the movie are as follows:
JB Productions Presents"The Edge Of Reality" * Hosted by Bruce G. Hallenbeck
Associate Producer Jeff Kirkendall * Edited by Jeff Kirkendall & Joe Bagnardi *
Written by Joe Bagnardi & Bruce G. Hallenbeck * Produced & Directed by Joe Bagnardi
Starring: Bill Chaput, Bruce G. Hallenbeck, Mary Kay Hilko, Ron Rausch, Gary Secor,
Dan Bailey and Jeff Kirkendall.
The movie stills below are courtesy of Pagan Film Productions, LLC.
The movie stills below are courtesy of JB Productions.
Very Scary Productions - Other Projects Page 1
The Very Scary Productions Other Projects Pages provide information about projects from filmmakers and artists I'm working with or have worked with.
more detail, just click on the thumbnail to the right.
THE EDGE OF REALITYDVD
(The following is taken from The Edge Of Reality DVD Case Booklet)
About The Edge Of Reality - by Filmmaker Joe Bagnardi:
The Edge Of Reality is a horror anthology inspired by TV shows like The Twilight Zone,
Night Gallery, Thriller, The Outer Limits, Tales from the Darkside and Tales from the Crypt. The first story Dead Man is based on a short story in the tradition of Edgar Allen Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart. It's about a dead man who won't rest until he exposes his killer. The second story The Maze is about a man who faces his own worst enemy... himself! The third story called The Quarry is based on a true story written by President Theodore Roosevelt. It's about an encounter with Bigfoot as told to the president by an old mountain man named Bauman.
The Edge Of Reality from JB Productions has received several favorable reviews,
including one from the web site Unspeakable Magazine, where the reviewer said the
movie was "All around, an excellent flick for the horror genre."
About Filmmaker Joe Bagnardi:
Joe Bagnardi has been making movies most of his life. For over 30 years he has
made various types of movies. During a 22-year period he made 250 short films
ranging in length from 4 to 30 minutes. They covered all film genres including horror,
sci-fi, westerns, comedies, dramas, action films and even a musical. In 1992 he went
to Texas and worked on a werewolf film called Verdun Manor. He was assistant to the
director on that movie during a 2-week film shoot. After that he worked on three films
directed by Filmmaker Bruce G. Hallenbeck: Black Easter, London After Midnight,
and Bruce's latest The Drowned. He was cameraman on London After Midnight, and second unit cameraman on The Drowned. In 1995 and 1996 Joe wrote, directed and filmed his first feature called Shadow Tracker. The movie was officially released on
VHS in 1999 by Ei Cinema and re-titled Shadow Tracker: Vampire Hunter for the release. It was shown at the Philadelphia and New York City International Independent film festivals. It also received Videographer and Communicator Awards - one for camera work. Shadow Tracker was also shown on satellite TV on a channel called
The B-Movie Network. Joe's second feature was the anthology horror film Blood of the Werewolf, which was released in 2001. It was a co-production with Bruce G. Hallenbeck and Filmmaker Kevin Lindenmuth. The film was produced by Lindenmuth and sold to DVD in England, and in turn sold to various parts of the world. Joe was cameraman on the first story for Hallenbeck, and was the writer and director on his segment called MANBEAST.
Joe's latest movie is The Edge Of Reality, shot in 2003. It was edited by Filmmaker Jeff Kirkendall, and is being promoted through his site: www.veryscaryproductions.com.
For questions or comments about The Edge Of Reality, please E-mail Filmmaker
There is a line we walk ← The Making of The Edge Of Reality a line between good and evil by Joe Bagnardi
between what is real and what is unreal
between sanity and madness
and between life and dreams
a place with no boundaries
a place we call...The Edge of Reality
These are the very words that start out my horror anthology film The Edge Of Reality.
I was inspired to do this film because I have always been a great fan of horror anthology shows like The Twilight Zone, Night Gallery, Thriller, One Step Beyond, The Outer Limits and later Tales from the Darkside and Tales from the Crypt. Anthology films like Dr. Terror's House of Horrors, Creepshow, Tales from the Crypt, The House That Dripped Blood, and The Vault of Horror also inspired me.
I had dabbled in horror anthologies before with some short films I was doing. I then worked on my own first feature Shadow Tracker: Vampire Hunter, and later on Kevin Lindenmuth's Brimstone Productions werewolf anthology Blood of the Werewolf. I did camera work on the first story Blood Reunion for filmmaker Bruce G. Hallenbeck, and directed and wrote the third story Manbeast - kind of a Planet of the Apes film with werewolves. I always wanted to do my own anthology. It was going to be called Tales
of the Grim Reaper, but then I remembered an old song in an Elvis film called
"The Edge of Reality". It was in his film Live a Little, Love a Little. It was used during
a dream sequence in the film. The title to the song stuck in my head, and when it came time to do the anthology that title came back to mind.
I really like the music of Bob Mares. He had worked on Blood of the Werewolf, and
I enjoyed what he had done. I contacted him and asked if he could do some music for
the film and also devise a theme. I wanted a theme similar in tone to Rod Serling's
Night Gallery. Well, he sent me a CD with four cuts on it. One was perfect. I wrote the opening words keeping The Twilight Zone in mind. Then I called upon filmmaker Bruce G. Hallenbeck to narrate the opening and also to be the onscreen host ala Rod Serling. He gladly joined in and did a fine job. We did the dubbing at a local TV station, and
Colin Lovelock - an editor from Shadow Tracker - did the opening visuals. It was a very professional job and was perfect for this film.
We had various story ideas for the film. One short film I had already shot called
Sweet Sorrow was a contender. It was a love story/ghost story. It was shot on film but we decided to hold off on it for now. I had another story about a doll gone bad and also one about a killer flower. Many ideas came and went. We finally decided on three stories.
The first is called Dead Man, which is loosely based on a public domain short story from years ago found by actor Ron Rausch. It was by an anonymous author. He had asked me to do this story 15 years ago and I said "someday Ron, someday." Well 15 years went
by and I said "ok Ron, I'm ready to shoot it." Lo and behold he still had it in his cabinet. Ron himself played the Dead Man in it, and Bruce G. Hallenbeck plays the killer he comes upon. The film also has Mary Kay Hilko and Bill Chaput, who had appeared in Blood of the Werewolf together. There was a scene where I was in a boat with Bruce filming him trying to get rid of the body by sinking it in the water. Mary Kay had made
up the dummy body by putting bags of leaves into garbage bags and wrapping a sheet around it, then the rope. Bruce then sinks the body in the lake. He had a tough time doing it. The body would not sink. I just kept filming and finally the water got into the bags and slowly down it went. After it sunk I tried to hoist it up and it wouldn't budge. Come to find out that Mary Kay put rocks in the bags as well. Now here I am in a boat with Bruce sinking what looks like a dead body on a busy lake and now we are heavily anchored. Everytime we paddled we ended up going in circles around the fake dead and sunken body. Finally Ron and Mary Kay came to our rescue with a speedboat, and between the four of us we hoisted the fake body back on board and away we went. We laughed later and found out that neither Bruce nor myself were great swimmers.
The second story The Maze was based on a short film I did in 1978 called
Beyond the Twilight Zone. That film was about a hunter that kills poor defenseless animals (no animals injured) and then has to come face to face with a hunter dressed
like a professional safari hunter that chases him. The thing is the guy chasing him is himself. Finally at the end the safari hunter shoots him. We then see the hunter who was on the run holding in his hand the pistol that the safari hunter was holding. He has a gunshot in his head. Was he really hunted down like he hunted animals, or did he kill himself?
Anyway the new version The Maze stars Bill Chaput in duel roles - one as Harry Swift who is an alcoholic fired from his job and kicked out of his house by his wife. She has had enough of him. He is putting his stuff away in storage when he finds himself stalked by himself. His stalker is an inner demon that plans to put Harry out of his misery, or, put another way, his evil self who has had enough of Harry just like his boss and his wife. Harry is trapped in this maze of a storage facility in a battle with his inner demon.
During The Maze, when Harry's wife leaves him, she leaves him some suitcases full of his clothes to take with him. In reality Mary Kay, who loaded the suitcases, had put rocks into them so it would look like it was heavy for Bill to carry. We did a number of takes and Bill mentioned he had a bad back at the time. It is then we found out about the rocks. So in that scene Bill didn't have to act like the bags were full!
The third story is based on a true story that Teddy Roosevelt used to tell around camp fires when he used to go on his bear hunting expeditions. The film The Quarry is written by filmmaker Bruce G. Hallenbeck (Vampyre, Fangs, London After Midnight and
Blood of The Werewolf). Bruce also stars as old man Bauman - the man who knows the legend of the creature that stalks the woods. Ron Rausch and Gary Secor of Shadow Tracker play Greene and Donahue. They are two business men who want to get away from it all and escape their boring everyday office jobs. They seek out Bauman, who fills their ears with stories of the mysterious creature he went up against years before.
That creature is also known as Bigfoot.
Mary Kay Hilko worked all day on the Bigfoot makeup and even added $200 red eye lenses for the creature. Dan Bailey (Blood of The Werewolf) played the creature. It took him a long time to get the makeup off, and he actually wore some of it home with the red lenses in. People at his apartment complex were in shock when they saw him.
The film was shot all digital. Filmmaker Jeff Kirkendall - who is Associate Producer and Editor on the movie - helped out immensely. He added all the effects and titles,
and did a ton of publicity on the film. At the same time he is very busy doing his own
films like The Temptress, and editing Bruce's London After Midnight. Jeff runs his own
website called www.veryscaryproductions.com, where you can log on and check out his films, my films, and anything else he is working on. I couldn't have done it without all his help. We will be distributing the film and seeking foreign and domestic distribution.
We had our area premiere at a theatre in Saratoga called Broadway Joe's Theatre
and Grill. The movie played to a sellout crowd.
We hope that The Edge Of Reality is a success. We have many story ideas for the potential sequel Beyond the Edge of Reality. So be careful wherever you go in life or in your dreams - because you could walk that line, the line that is THE EDGE OF REALITY.
* * * To find out about movies for sale see the Very Scary Productions Merchandise page. * * *
