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    Lone Star Film Festival Insight

    Rover director draws inspiration from Heaven's Gate for cult film

    Lone Star Film Festival
    Nov 3, 2014 | 4:32 pm
    Rover movieplay icon
    Rover screens at AMC Palace 9 on Thursday, November 6, as part of the 2014 Lone Star Film Festival.
    Photo courtesy of Lone Star Film Festival

     Editor’s note: CultureMap has partnered with the Lone Star Film Festival to publish a series of filmmaker interviews conducted by LSFF organizers.

     

    Writer/director Tony Blahd pulled from his interest in cults and Heaven’s Gate to tell the story of a desperate cult leader who concocts a fake prophecy for his followers to make a movie in Rover (or Beyond Human: The Venusian Future and the Return of the Next Level). The film screens at the 2014 Lone Star Film Festival in Sundance Square at the AMC Palace 9 on Thursday, November 6.

     

    Lone Star Film Festival organizers spoke with Blahd about the inspiration behind and the process of making his first feature film.

     

     Lone Star Film Festival: What attracted you to the Heaven’s Gate story and the decision to relate that to the plot of Rover?

     

     Tony Blahd: The film sort came about in reverse. I was living in this amazing church and wanted to make a film about it. I knew the church was being demolished in four to six months, so I set myself to it.

     

    I wanted to first make a horror movie, because the dilapidated church was a great stage for that, so I delved really deep into cults, something I have always been fascinated by. I realized after writing about 30 pages that I don’t actually like horror movies, but I love cults.

     

    In my research, I found dozens of creepy Heaven’s Gate YouTube videos (including the ones of “Randall” shown in the film). In one video in particular, some of the Heaven’s Gate cult members discuss a movie project they were undertaking called Beyond Human. They had made concept art, had a script and were pitching to studios. The film was never made, but I was fascinated by what it may have been.

     

     LSFF: This is your first feature film, and a strong subtext of the film is about the process of filmmaking. Is that something you set out to do from the beginning, or did it creep its way into the film as you were going along?

     

     TB: I had never written anything before, so during that writing process, the questions I had usually just ended up in the script as questions. It’s really nice to have the safety net of writing about low-budget film. All of my anxieties and thoughts about the project just ended up going straight into the dialogue.

     

    Another benefit of the film-within-film subtext was the visual effects style. I had no money to pay an effects artist and personally I had very little experience with visual effects, but I still decided to learn for the film. I think that worked out perfectly because the unrefined style of the FX shots really matches the aesthetic of how the cult in the film probably would have wanted it.

     

     LSFF: You make great use of a somewhat limited space in the dilapidated church. Can you speak to the setting for Rover and the creative ways you developed the atmosphere?

     

     TB: A friend and I began leasing that abandoned church about 10 months before I began developing Rover. We made the money for the film hosting concerts, parties, film shoots, etc. And for about six months, I lived in the parsonage.

     

    By the time Rover came about, I knew every nook and cranny of that place. I knew which places would be great for which scenes. It also helped that our key crew (DP, producer, production designers, costume designers) all lived in the church with me during prep and production. The designers scoured the church and sourced a lot of props from things left behind.

     

     LSFF: As the screenwriter and director of Rover, did your vision of the script differ from the final product?

     

     TB: It definitely differs in some regard. We cut a few scenes out of the beginning and a few out of the middle. But the same basic story is still there.

     

     LSFF: The score lends so much to the atmosphere of the film. Can you tell us about the music in the film?

     

     TB: Heaven’s Gate was not a technophobic cult like many others are. For that reason, I was really drawn to the sounds of early electronic music and manual synthesizers. I really wanted Kraftwerk — a pioneer synth band from the ’70s — but their catalog is a bit expensive.

     

    So I looked for other artists that had that same manual synth, airy sound. The tracks I chose all sort of match that aesthetic in someway, and I gave the composer a lot of Kraftwerk and other early electronic stuff as reference. The score was composed pretty much entirely on synthesizers, which I think was a new process for the composer.

     

     ---

     

     The 2014 Lone Star Film Festival takes place November 5-9 in Sundance Square in Fort Worth. For more information, visit the festival website.

     
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    Movie Review

    Lazy 'I Know What You Did Last Summer' remake hooks nothing but nostalgia

    Alex Bentley
    Jul 17, 2025 | 1:45 pm
    Sarah Pidgeon, Madelyn Cline and Chase Sui Wonders in I Know What You Did Last Summer
    Photo by Brook Rushton
    Sarah Pidgeon, Madelyn Cline and Chase Sui Wonders in I Know What You Did Last Summer.

    When the original I Know What You Did Last Summer came out in 1997, it was riding the coattails of Scream, which came out in 1996. Like that film, it featured hot young actors of the time, albeit with a story that was much more standard than the inventive Scream. Still, it made enough of an impact for some studio executive to think it was worth reviving nearly 30 years later with its own legacy-quel.

    In the new I Know What You Did Last Summer, a group of five high school friends - Danica (Madelyn Cline), Ava (Chase Sui Wonders), Milo (Jonah Hauer-King), Teddy (Tyriq Withers), and Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon) - have reunited at the engagement party for Danica and Teddy on the 4th of July. While on an impromptu trip to watch fireworks on a twisty road in the nearby hills, Teddy goofs off in the middle of the road, causing a truck to swerve and drive off the cliff.

    A year later, having sworn to each other to not speak of the accident to anybody, they start getting stalked by a mysterious person in a fisherman’s slicker carrying a hook. With Teddy’s rich father, Grant (Billy Campbell), actively trying to cover up what his son did (as well as the fallout), it’s up to the group to figure out who is coming after them and how to stop that person.

    Written and directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, and co-written by Sam Lansky, the film doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel; in fact, it barely builds something that can roll. It might just be the laziest and most incompetent attempt to capitalize on an existing piece of intellectual property. There is almost zero effort put into establishing a connection between the members of the friend group, making them feel like strangers for the entire film.

    It doesn’t help that the young male actors in the film - which grows to include Wyatt (Joshua Orpin), a new fiance for Danica - serve no purpose other than to be generically good-looking. The most impactful of the men in the film is the returning Freddie Prinze, Jr., who - along with Jennifer Love Hewitt - has his old character from the first two films shoehorned into the new story. The filmmakers undercut any good feelings from their return by giving them hardly anything to do and then having Hewitt deliver the line, “Nostalgia is overrated.”

    The film as a whole never has a sense of momentum. The inciting incident is so tame - they even attempt to save the driver before the truck goes off the cliff - that the guilt they feel and the anger of the person going after them doesn’t feel warranted. Once the attacks start, it is shocking at how low-energy the sequences are, providing no sense of suspense or thrills. The filmmakers resort to the lamest of horror movie tropes, turning the film into a paint-by-numbers affair.

    Cline (one of the stars of Netflix’s Outer Banks) and Wonders (The Studio on Apple TV+, Bodies Bodies Bodies) are the clear stars of the film, but their characters are made into inert scream queens, negating any acting talent they possess. Hauer-King, Withers, and Pidgeon don’t bring anything interesting to their characters, existing merely to have someone else for the killer to go after.

    Even the worst films can have some kind of redeeming value if you look hard enough, but the only thing I Know What You Did Last Summer has to offer is that it becomes so comically bad by the end that you can’t help but laugh at its ineptitude. Both fans of the original and fans of horror movies in general will feel cheated by the experience.

    ---

    I Know What You Did Last Summer opens in theaters on July 18.

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