If you’re going to be independent, you might as well take advantage of the freedom to be weird. The gleefully bizarre horror comedy Chompy and the Girls lives that philosophy. The film, opening this weekend exclusively at Malco Ridgeway, came to Memphis screens by way of Marty Lang, Assistant Professor of Film & Video at the University of Memphis.
When Chompy and the Girls begins, Jackson (Christy St. John) has decided to hang herself from the ceiling fan in her crappy apartment. When that fails, she changes course and decides to finally contact her biological father Sam (Steve Marvel) who doesn’t know she exists. When they finally meet in a park to try to sort out their relationship, they see a mysterious man stretch his mouth unnaturally wide and swallow a 10-year-old girl (Seneca Paliotta) whole. Then the entity they call Chompy (Reggie Koffman) turns his attention to the newly minted daughter-father team.
Lang, who began teaching at U of M this year, produced Chompy with director Skye Braband. The Florida State University graduate has been producing, writing, directing, and acting for two decades. “I started off producing because I felt like that was the area of filmmaking that I could learn the fastest,” he says.
He worked with one of his former students, Sarah de Leon, at Chapman University in Orange County, California. “We did a crowdfunding campaign for post-production on a website called Seed and Spark, and we were able to raise about $30,000 to help with our visual effects,” he says. “I had a lot of relationships in California that I was able to use to help us to finish the movie and then, once it was done, I helped find the sales agent who ended up selling the film and getting the distribution deal. And now we’re actually getting it out into the world!”
Chompy is driven by a positively feral performance by St. John as a punk rocker and unrepentant drug addict. “She was a real find when when we were casting,” says Lang. “She’s actually going to be on an HBO show that’s coming out pretty soon called The Sex Lives of College Girls. She’s just incredibly talented. That raw sort of anger was something that she brought that really fleshed out the character.”
Lang says he was able to give his students in film producing class a first-hand look at the little known aspect of film production. “We talked a little bit about marketing, and I was able to show the different versions of the poster that we had created for the movie and some of the social media work that we had done to get word out about our crowdfunding campaign,” he says. “As I was teaching the course, we were actually getting offers from distributors for the movie. So I would come into class and I would literally show them the offer sheet. I would take off the name of the distributor and any identifying numbers, and I would literally go through the contracts with the students so that they would know exactly what the terms were.”
On the last day of class, Lang says, “I was able to tell everybody that we had signed the deal on that last class. So it was perfect timing.”
Chompy and the Girls opens Friday, September 3rd at Malco’s Ridgeway Cinema Grill.