Category: films (Page 4 of 7)

A freakish brain tumor turns a little indie horror film into a half-decade long struggle, with the payoff -- a premiere -- in sight.

It’s hard enough to get an independent film made, what with the inevitable shortages of money, time, equipment and support.  But throw a freakish brain tumor and a half-decade of recovery into the mix, and your production schedule is pretty much guaranteed to crash.

That’s exactly what happened to “Ekimmu: The Dead Lust,” an ultra-low-budget horror film shot in Portland in 2004 but only finished-finished this week, just in time for its premiere.

Six years ago, when he thought he was just about done with the movie, Andy Koontz, the Portland man who wrote, directed, edited, and scored it (and, by the way, built the sets, did the lighting and makeup, and made the food the cast and crew ate) just about died from a life-threatening malignancy and the subsequent treatment it required.

On Saturday night, Koontz will be joined by his wife, Chrissy, his friends, family, and crew, and anyone else curious enough to buy a ticket, at the premiere of the completed feature-length film at a downtown church.  It’s only about five miles from his Southeast Portland home, but given how long Koontz has come, it might as well be on Mars.

In 2006, Koontz was 30 years old and finishing the first pass of editing and sound work on “Ekimmu.” He was already a musician of more than a decade’s standing, fronting the band Valhere, which released an album, “This Lonely Highway...,” recorded in Koontz's home studio.  He had made a couple of short movies, including one, “Clearwater: Abduction,” which had developed an international cult following.

“Ekimmu,” he remembers, was his effort to do “something I had never seen before.” Sitting in the producing and editing studio in his basement, Koontz explains his creative urge. “I can’t repeat something I’ve seen. I have to do my own thing,” he says. “And I saw Rob Zombie making movies, and I was inspired to see that another musician could direct films, and it got me thinking, ‘I can do this.’”

He nearly had, when he started to feel strange. “I was doing the sound editing and dialogue recording,” he recalls, “and I was working down here (in his home studio) with one of the actors. I told him that I was having dizzy spells. I actually have a recording of that conversation.”

The dizzy spells became more common, as did bouts of nausea. Then, one morning, he woke up with an overwhelming sense of vertigo.

“I felt like I was going to tumble right out of bed and through the door of the bedroom,” he says. “It felt like that scene in ‘Titanic’ where the people are tumbling down the deck of the ship.” The sensation became a daily ordeal — he could only sleep sitting an upright — and the diagnoses from his doctors were all over the map: allergies, ear crystals. Finally, an X-ray revealed a mass in the left side of his brain that turned out to be a medulloblastoma tumor, a type of malignancy most commonly found in children ages 3 to 8.

What followed was a battery of surgeries (11 on his head, 20 overall), chemotherapy, blood clots, feeding tubes, medication, incapacitation and despair. Because his tumor was the sort that is primarily found in kids, Koontz was treated at Doernbecher Children’s Hospital (he has added the hospital’s little-doll-girl logo to his impressive canvas of tattoos). The cancer itself was contained early in the process, but the removal of the tumor and the subsequent recovery was a long fight.

“I was in bed for two years,” Koontz remembers. “I went from 215 pounds to 140 pounds. I had to learn how to walk again. I still can’t play the guitar properly.”

By 2009 he started to feel more like his old self, but he still struggles with memory loss and other cognitive issues, suffers from nerve damage and pain, and finds himself extremely low on energy. “I have little ‘energy packets,’” he explains, “and I’ve learned to budget them and know when to use them.”

Throughout the ordeal, Koontz had some good fortune. Unlike a lot of musicians and indie filmmakers, he had a job that gave him health insurance (as it happens, he worked at the time in a non-editorial position at The Oregonian). He had a strong religious faith, which had been inculcated in his youth and continued through his musical career (“I performed in several worship bands,” he says) and in his adult life.

And he had Chrissy. The pair married young — he was 20, she was 17 — and Koontz credits her with keeping him positive and sane during his illness and recovery.

“To me, that woman is holy,” he says. “She possesses something that I don’t have. She’s my best friend and she’s my collaborator and she gets me. We do everything together. We edited this movie together.”

Finishing the film was almost a recuperation project for Koontz, but he more than once found himself on the verge of abandoning it, only to have Chrissy help him refocus and persevere.

“When I was sick,” he recalls, “there were five or six times when I nearly destroyed this movie. Literally. I wanted to burn the hard drives and all the notes. And she would say to me, ‘You’ll get through this.’ I wound up writing a song with that title.”

Of course, being told you’ll finish a job is one thing, and finishing it is another. When he finally did get around to resurrecting “Ekimmu” in 2010, Koontz discovered that the material that he had to work with from 2006 and earlier was technologically out of date. “The files were all in the wrong format,” he says, “and none of it was in widescreen or in HD.”

That turned out to be a bit liberating, artistically. “There were things in that cut of the film that I wanted to take out or rework,” he remembers, “and this was a good chance to do it.” He added new music. He also created a new character, an evil spirit whom he refers to as the Queen Demon. She appears sporadically throughout the film as a kind of chorus and was played by Portland actress and model Nina Tomica, covered in red latex paint and ominous tattoos.

Which brings up the question of just what kind of movie “Ekimmu: The Dead Lust” is. The name “Ekimmu,” from ancient Sumerian, refers to undead spirits who prey maliciously on the living (“sort of the beginning of the vampire legend,” Koontz explains).

The film, made for $9,000, is set in the fictional Northwest town of Briar Creek (actually Koontz’s hometown of Colton, Oregon), where a string of murders and inexplicable crimes baffle and frighten residents and authorities (Koontz, in his chunkier pre-cancer body, plays a killer in the early minutes).

It’s dark and bloody and a bit chock-a-block, but deliberately so. And it’s got a densely atmospheric score, including a rich and brooding rap song which Koontz composed with the Detroit-area hip hop artist Mic.Hunter.D, whom he met online.

“Comparing to something else would be hard,” Koontz says. “It’s kind of a mix of Italian horror, which I love, and Asian horror, and then a twisted, David Lynch-like story.”

There’s irony, Koontz admits, in premiering a film of this sort in a church (“I designed the posters and I took a lot of pentagrams off of the images,” he confesses). But perhaps it’s not so inappropriate when you think of the event as a celebration, marking six years since his cancer has been in remission. Koontz will perform music at the event — his first time singing on stage in 11 years — and he hopes that the film will be received in the spirit of fun in which he conceived and made it. There will be giveaways to all ticket buyers and, of course, a chance to meet and chat with the filmmaker.

It’s all a way, he says, of sharing his gratitude for the chance life has given him to finish his film and share it with an audience.

“I had brain cancer,” he says. “I spent six years being sick and thinking I’d never get this movie done. To go from that, and from wanting to destroy it, to be here and have it finished and show it to people....I could cry.”

“Ekimmu: The Dead Lust” will screen on Saturday June 23 at 9 p.m. at The Old Church, 1422 SW 11th Ave. Tickets are $15 in advance, $20 at the door. Full information