Exclusive Set Report from Sorority Party Massacre: Photo Gallery, Release News, and More!

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It’s been a while since we last reported on the slasher flick Sorority Party Massacre, but fear not! We hit the Simi Valley, California, set in early December, 2011, to not only witness a mock hanging and a bevy of scantily-actresses sunbathing but also chat with co-director Chris Freeman and one of the film’s stars, scream queen Eve Mauro. Read on for the details and extensive ocular candy!

Written and produced by Freeman (who co-directs with Justin Jones and who co-wrote last year’s feature Paranormal Incident), the slasher vs. college girls flick Sorority Party Massacre stars Kevin Sorbo, the previously mentioned Mauro (she of Wicked Lake fame, among others), Ed O’Ross, C. Thomas Howell (The Hitcher), Leslie Easterbrook (The Devil’s Rejects), Richard Moll (House), Ron Jeremy, Yvette Yates, and Tom Downey.

As for the film’s official synopsis, it reads like this: In danger of losing his badge, a big city detective agrees to aid a small town sheriff in a routine missing persons investigation only to discover that at least one girl has gone missing in the sheriff’s sleepy fishing town of Grizzly Cove each year for the last two decades. When a body finally emerges on the lake and suspects literally crawl out of the hills, the two lawmen realize they’re being toyed with, and to make things worse, the killer seems to have set his eyes on a group of sorority girls who are not only isolated by the lake but have their own nefarious plans in mind. Outnumbered and out of time, the two lawmen must solve the mystery of the missing girls or suffer the same fate.

Arriving early Saturday morning to set, the normally balmy SoCal enclave was anything but as a rather frigid wind cut through the Santa Susana pass as Freeman was prepping to shoot Scene #27, in which we’d find the girls sunbathing (and trying desperately not to shiver). This wasn’t your normal Simi tempest, however, given the destruction the region’s winds had wrought on Pasadena and neighboring communities in the previous days; and as it turned out, inclement weather had plagued the shoot for its duration.

It’s been challenging,” said the thirty-seven-year-old Freeman of filming Sorority Party Massacre “My assistant’s window was broken last night, and our DP has had no power for a week in his home, so that’s good. Fortunately it hasn’t been killing us on sound, as we’ve been working through it and shooting interiors and stuff, and we had back-up plans, but it is what it is, and the girls are still in bikinis and they are freezing!”

Adrian Kirk, Sorority Party Massacre

As for the location (the 140-acre Hummingbird Nest Ranch has previously served as the location for myriad productions including Sex and the City: The Movie and the television series “The Biggest Loser”, among others), “It’s been great! It’s insane. There are so many looks,” said Freeman, gesturing in varying directions. “You’ve got Virginia there and Mexico over there, and down there it’s the 1920’s in that house that was built by some Hollywood producer back in the day. The location’s been amazing although the weather has sucked.”

Having filmed a good deal of the feature in Big Bear, California (a locale which geographically looks quite different than Hummingbird), Freeman stated of the location switch, “It’s actually worked in our favor because our location in Big Bear, even though we had the lake, was so busy. Locking everything down would have doubled our staff, where with this place it’s so isolated and so gorgeous, so it’s been great.”

Regarding shooting on the RED camera, “It’s been amazing,” communicated the ever-enthusiastic Freeman of the footage he’d been getting, “and our makeup artist Tara Lang (of the series “Face Off”) has been great. She’s been building this severed head for ‘the hanging’ shot, and it looks so good! It looks so real that it’s creepy, and the location has allowed us more time to block those things and our stunts. I mean, we are hanging Leslie Easterbrook from the top of a building and her neck snaps, but because of the wind today we can’t do it. The location, though, has allowed us the room and the time to re-plan it, and I actually think the way we have re-tooled the scene will be substantially better.”

As for Easterbrook, Freeman gleefully allowed himself a moment to geek on the casting of the actress. “She’s so amazing! She looks like she’s no older than thirty-five,” Freeman effused. “One of my good friends is playing the creepy groundsman, and he has a scene with her and he was like, ‘I can’t believe the blonde from Police Academy is going to pull me into her chest!’ I was like, ‘Hey buddy, you are welcome!’”

Regarding her role of “Miss Fawnskin” in Sorority Party Massacre, Freeman revealed of Easterbrook’s character, “She wears this riding costume and carries this riding crop because that’s how her character is scripted, and I kept thinking, ‘I didn’t do this for this reason, but man, she’s amazing looking (in that outfit)!’”

Querying Freeman on the tone of the flick, “I think Sorority Party Massacre is like Hot Fuzz but with a lot of beautiful women instead of older English people,” he replied. “There are weird characters in a weird little town, and girls start showing up dead and on fire and hung and stung by bees, and that last one comes right out of Sleepaway Camp, and I’ll admit that! The reveals are great, but they aren’t going to be as great as the one was in that film. I mean, no woman is going to be revealed (in the third act) as a man! But we do have a lot of fun twists at the end.”

Regarding what Freeman had on his plate that day, “We are going to hang Leslie tonight,” said the filmmaker as production assistants scurried about, “and this afternoon we are shooting a scene where Leslie is torturing them and has them blindfolded, and she’s like, ‘Come to me. Come to my hand.’ And they are all fighting with each other trying to get to her first because the one that does will get to be the spokesperson for their sorority for a year and win a $50,000 fellowship that they can use for anything that they want.”

On working with Eve Mauro, who plays the character of “Brooklyn” in the film and who’s described as the flick’s “badass bitch”, “I would cast her in everything that I do forever,” Freeman glowed. “I started as a writer primarily, and I always write a part for her (in everything that I do) because that’s how great she is. She’s such a team player. We had weather issues, as you know, and she was the first one to come up and to give me a hug and say, ‘Don’t stress. It will all be fine.’ It’s one thing to show up and to be a pro and do to your work, but it’s another thing to come up and say, ‘I’m here to support you and your film.’ She’s just great! Stars shine and she’s a diamond in the rough.”

Eve Mauro, Sorority Party Massacre

As Freeman prepped a shot, I met up with actress Mauro in the comfy confines of the location’s main house, and to say she and I have a storied past would be an understatement. Our friendship commenced in 2007 in El Paso, Texas, on the set of Wicked Lake, where she greeted me with her command of “Spread your legs”, followed by her twirling of a pair of glow-stick nunchucks which she spun upwards with velocity toward my crotch in a game she called “Trust”. Yeah, she’s a wild-child with an infectious laugh, a killer personality and consummate professionalism, and as these things go, it felt like a return to summer camp as we reconvened on yet another set.

“I think it’s better to work in a genre with fans that know you rather than jumping all over the board,” Mauro, clad in a robe, said of her horror credentials and her Sorority Party Massacre inclusion. “I did The Steam Experiment a couple of years back, and that (too) was a thriller, and I just did (director John Lyde’s) Osombie, which is a zombie movie about Osama Bin Laden (photo below), and also The Vortex, which is a sci-fi movie (directed by Peter Paul Basler).”

Eve Mauro, John Lyde's Osombie

When questioned regarding the narrative of Osombie (which is currently in post-production), Mauro laughed, “It’s about my character, ‘Dusty’, and her brother, who goes off after 9/11 in search of Bin Laden to see if he’s still alive, and then I go out in search of him, and we find out that Al Qaeda has been keeping Bin Laden hidden away and that he’s actually a zombie, and we have to try to kill him. It’s really fun!”

This writer couldn’t help but to draw a comparison between Osombie’s narrative and that of director David Bradley’s outrageous 1969 film They Saved Hitler’s Brain, in which Nazis transport Adolph’s severed head to South America, where they press a scientist into service in an attempt to resurrect the Third Reich.

“It’s pretty much like that!” laughed the aware Mauro, whose genre savvy may just rival that of Oliva Munn’s. “It was fun. We shot it in Utah in the freezing cold, kind of like we did Sorority Party Massacre when we were in Big Bear last year, but then the road collapsed so now it’s December and a year later (for principal production) and all of us have gained fifty pounds!”

A production assistant arrived at that time to beckon to Mauro, indicating that due to the weather the poolside scene had been bumped forward, stating; “We are about to shoot Scene #26, the one in back with the blindfolds, so we’ll need to get you into actual wardrobe.”

“Oh nice,” replied Mauro with a laugh. “That means we need to put back on our clothes!”

Yvette Yates, Sorority Party Massacre

With Sorority Party Massacre having now wrapped, we caught up with Freeman again earlier this week, who informed us that the feature has been picked up for distribution by the Highland Film Group with an eye toward a 2012 fall release.

“I know I wrote it and shot it,” reflected Freeman of the film, “but I honestly think this movie is going to be a lot of fun. It’s a comedy, a buddy-cop movie, an action movie, a serial killer flick and most importantly a badass slasher, throwback horror film. Let’s just hope we can keep up the good work in post-production and actually deliver it properly!”

Freeman promised a clip exclusive to Dread soon featuring a scripted fight between Mauro and actress Marissa Skell (stay tuned) and also revealed, “We are going to release a Sorority Party Massacre calendar called ‘The Girls of Sigma Phi Pi’, lampooning the medium as well as giving us another excuse to show off some of the 12,000 photos we shot of these beauties (many of which you can see in the gallery on Page One).”

For more in the meantime be sure to “like” Sorority Party Massacre on Facebook and follow Sorority Party Massacre on Twitter.

Exclusive Set Report from Sorority Party Massacre: Photo Gallery, Release News, and More!
L_R: Ed O’Ross (Watts), Adrian Kirk (Jessie Lynn), Marissa Skell (Paige), Leslie Easterbrook (Miss Fawskin),
Chris Freeman (director), Yvette Yates (Sloan), Eve Mauro (Brooklyn)

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