Malevolence

Sin City cinephilia: Vegas-based filmmakers hope to make a mark with Malevolence

By Anthony Allison

Judging by a few brief, blood-soaked extracts, Malevolence isn't exactly a barrel of laughs. It's hard to be sure, though, because filmmakers Nick Groff and Mike A. Martinez were coy about screening anything but a few clips for reviewers ahead of their film's world premiere screening at the Palms Friday night--even if the production values look pretty slick for an indie flick with a shoestring budget.

But the Vegas-based cineastes call their crime action drama "a shocking and disturbing portrait of human nature at its worst." And one knowledgeable observer, who's seen the whole shebang, describes it as, "an orgy of violence."

Nonetheless, this digital video-shot production is noteworthy, if only because it's the one and only Nevada-made feature in this year's CineVegas film festival.

Groff, a 24-year-old from New Hampshire, met Martinez, 23, who was born in Vegas but grew up in Fairbanks, Alaska, at UNLV film school three years ago. After working together on a trailer for another feature, they felt ready to embark on this more ambitious project that, says Groff, "we independently wrote, produced, directed, shot and edited."

Malevolence combines half a dozen story ideas into one script--including the tale of a Mafia boss (played by the late Gordon Mitchell, who appeared, uncredited, in Spartacus, The Ten Commandments and the original Around the World in Eighty Days) and two brothers (Scott Brown and Steve Reaser), who get mixed up with the mob. Linking the various characters is that old Hitchcockian standby, a McGuffin--in this case, a bag around which the various subplots revolve, but whose contents remain teasingly undisclosed until the end.

Citing another obvious influence, Nick admits he's a big Quentin Tarantino fan, but insists Malevolence isn't yet another puppy-of-Reservoir Dogs. "Genre-wise, it sticks out as something original, not a Tarantino take-off," he says. "We're trying to be different."

Actor Jackamoe Buzzell plays a character who's definitely different--and not just because he's named Gray Corolla (nah, he doesn't drive a Toyota), but because he meets a sticky end early on. Buzzell, a 32-year-old former rock musician from Maine, gained 50 pounds to play the part. "I do a lot of commercials, I need my high cheekbones," he says. But joining the Robert De Niro (or Morgan Spurlock) school of heavyweight acting for the shoot was worth it. "I'm glad they cast me as they did, because it was so much fun jumping into a character and making it my own."

The budding filmmakers and their self-assured star are disarmingly frank about their ambitions, and their motives in submitting the film for the festival.

"All we're doing is trying to get in there and stick out," says Martinez, whose short "The Werewolf Cult Chronicles: Chimera" won a prize at last year's CineVegas. "Because we're just looking to build relationships with distribution companies."

Adds Groff, "I think Las Vegas has a big potential. We want to hire people and make more movies here. That's all we want to do." So he has a simple request for any wannabe producers out there: "Give us a lot of money to make a big-budget movie."

To help get it, he has the expert assistance of Buzzell, who has apparently learned precisely what it takes to move up in the movie industry: "You kiss ass. It's all about kissing ass and money, and that's all it comes down to. It's all about money, period."