Pulp fiction
T.S. Warren
The dangerous truths behind Lee Demarbre's latest Mexican-made flick The Dead Sleep Easy
Set in a hellhole Mexican border town full of gangsters, strippers and assorted grotesques, Lee Demarbre's terrifically pulpy new feature, The Dead Sleep Easy, walks the line between cinematic fiction and non-fiction like a celebrity DUI."I'm honestly surprised no one was killed making this film," admits Demarbre, whose five-member Ottawa crew got more excitement than they had bargained for when they headed to Guadalajara last winter. Canadian-born Mexican wrestling superstar Ian Hodgkinson has the lead, with real-life British celebrity gangster Dave (The Krays) Courtney, The Karate Kid's Martin Kove, Mean Girls' Talia Russo and Ottawa's Phil Caracas, star of the Harry Knuckles films, rounding out The Dead's international cast.
"There were three car accidents. In separate incidents our villain and female lead were rushed to hospital. Our producer's life was threatened. A group of Mexican extras went missing in the desert, and we were surrounded with real-life gangsters both on- and off-screen."
Just some of the on-the-record mishaps that the maverick 35-year-old filmmaker recounts of shooting in Mexico, which proved to be a sharp contrast from the carefree days of making the wacky Harry Knuckles film series (1998, 1999, 2004) and cult classic Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter (2001) in and around Ottawa.
The Dead Sleep Easy is only a $250,000 co-production between Demarbre's Odessa Filmworks and Robert Menzies' Zed Filmworks, playing festivals in Calgary
and Victoria and soon to hit the art house theatre circuit. Something of a tradition, it has its hometown premiere this week at the ByTowne Cinema, where Demarbre once worked as an usher. Among the actors planning to attend is sultry Latina singer Ana Sidel, who plays Maya, the flickering old flame to Hodgkinson's character The Champ, a washed-up wrestler who now works as muscle for mob-boss Tlaloc (Courtney). Since art keeps imitating life in this movie, seems only natural that Sidel and Hodgkinson once had a real romance going."Ana was a real trooper, I admire her so much," says the director whose lead actress finished the movie on crutches after dislocating her knee during an action scene in the first week of shooting. "It was a really bad injury. When you see the scene of her crying, those are real tears."
Fans of Demarbre's work are familiar with his penchant for cinematic cross-fertilization - a winning combination kung fu, action and horror genres. But his latest outing takes the tortilla.
Long-time collaborator, scriptwriter and fellow film fanatic Ian Driscoll has come up with a florid machismo tale of redemptive vengeance that referentially plays like a western, gangster and fight flick overlaid with film noir romanticism.
"I love Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett," Driscoll admits, "but this is veering more toward second-generation American crime writer Jim Thompson who wrote The Getaway and The Grifters."
As he does before starting any script, Driscoll watched the 1981 Bertrand Tavernier classic Coup de torchon based on Thompson's novel Pop. 1280. "Every movie I've written has something stolen from Coup de torchon."
Throw in a scene of Mexican wrestling, known as lucha libre, hallucinatory drugs and a subplot about migrants murdered by U.S. Minutemen and you've created excess verging on overload. Add to that an Ennio Morricone-inspired music score created by Michael Dubué, frontman for the Ottawa new wave band The Hilotrons, and you can tack on spaghetti western to the genre smorgasbord.
Ironically, the idea for a fictional movie surfaced when Demarbre was making a soon-to be-released documentary on the baby-faced Hodgkinson. Entitled Vampiro, it tells of the Thunder Bay-born wrestler's childhood of abuse, addiction and years of superstar fame in Mexico as El Vampiro Canadiense (The Canadian Vampire). Shooting on the documentary stopped for a few months while Demarbre and gang turned their focus to a blood-spattered 90-minute colour feature peppered with noirish black-and-white flashback sequences.
"Ian [Hodgkinson] would get a little freaked out when we did the scenes of him doing drugs," says the director. "They took him back to a really bad spot in his life, so he's drawing on a lot in those scenes."
"By the way," he adds with a hearty laugh, "in the movie those are lines of icing sugar."
With Demarbre behind the camera, the movie contrasts the barrenness of the Mexican desert with seedy sections of Guadalajara, a city of five million. Locations included a strip club controlled in the movie by ruthless kingpin Tlaloc. "We'd come across this place when we were shooting the documentary and it had all these fake coffins, so we thought, 'Perfect for The Dead Sleep Easy.'
By the time the crew returned to Mexico, the premises had been taken over by less, ahem, savoury types. That's when the fun started: Ottawa producer Menzies was threatened by a gun-toting gentleman who was under the false impression that the crew had insulted them.
"For the last two days of shooting in the club, it felt as if they could show up any time. It was terrifying."
But making the movie also had its lighter moments. About a dozen active and former criminal types are on screen. Some even turned out to be genuine gents with great tales to tell. Case in point, those aren't fake facial scars on Orzo Yllanes, who plays the mob's lieutenant. His ears were reattached after being ripped off by thugs who left him for dead in a ditch, a bullet in his head.
As for celebrity gangster, actor and author Courtney, whose lifestyle is said to have inspired Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, he boasted during a wrap party that he'd had part of his nose bitten off in a fight. Surgeons, he revealed, "took skin from my ass" to reconstruct it.
"Yeah it looks like it," piped up Knuckles' star Caracas, who plays the movie's humble Mexican migrant Carlito.
Silence fell upon the table like a shroud, recalls Demarbre.
"I thought: 'We're going to die, we're going die.' But Dave loved it. He respected Phil for it and burst out laughing."
The Dead Sleep Easy
At ByTowne Cinema, Feb. 22-25
