Halloween has passed, but Thanksgiving isn't here yet, and as Brett Piper reports, the low budget monster movie production MUCKMAN soldiers on:

"We shot again last weekend. It was a good news/bad news situation. Bad news first: we had intended to finish all of principal photography by Monday but Ian and Jared, our replacements for the infamous Barker Brothers (as they shall be known until I get spiteful and mention their real names) were unable to make it up from Delaware due to car trouble. I have no idea when (or even if) they'll be available again. One of them is due to enter the Air Force soon and that will be that as far as he's concerned. We may find ourselves rewriting the script to ... (more…)

Stop motion critter from Brett piper's MUCKMAN

Brett Piper, diurector and co-writer of MUCKMAN, sent an update on the film's progress:

"Things seem to be getting a little back on track. We're still digging out way out of the hole crated by the defection two cast members but at least we're back to shooting. Last Sunday we picked up my friend Buzz Cartier (who played the melting scientist in the opening scene of BACTERIUM) at the famous Blairstown (FRIDAY THE 13th) Diner and spent a productive afternoon shooting the opening scene of MUCKMAN where dirt-bag producer Mickey O'Hara (Steve Diasparra) pitches the idea of a documentary on the elusive Muckman to his boss Otto Van Sant (Cartier). The ... (more…)

Filmmaker Brett Piper sent along this creature concept art for MUCKMAN, the monster movie which he is currently directing from a screnplay he co-wrote with Mark Polonia. Double click on the accompanying image to aprreciate it in all its scaly glory!

MUCKMAN cobines old school man-in-suit mayhem with Piper's stop motion animation (thank God someone is keeping the technique alive in feature length films!) and stars Alison Whitney, Anju McIntyre (formerly A.J. Khan), and Danielle Donahue.

stay tuned for more! (more…)

We resumed shooting last weekend (July 16th). I picked up Anju and Alison in Manhattan and drove them out Thursday night. Arriving in Wellsboro PA where Mark Polonia lives we stopped at a convenience store for gas and were greeted by a sight right out of a horror movie: swarms of moths, millions of them, so dense they blocked the windows of the store so you couldn't see in. When I went inside to pay the floor was littered with dead months.

We arrived at the location around midnight but still managed to get a few hours shooting in. The next day we shot for nearly nineteen ours and cranked out a butt load of footage. That night the moths were back, covering the windows of the cabin and ... (more…)

Filmmaker Brett Piper continues to blog the brutal details of his latest low budget film production, MUCKMAN:

We resumed shooting on MUCKMAN this weekend. Things went much better this time around. We were concentrating mostly on Alison Whitney's scenes and managed to finish everything we had scheduled, some of which went extremely well. We even got to use the Muckman.

Steve Diasparra, who plays low-life TV producer Mickey O'Hara in the movie, volunteered to don the costume and plunge into frigid water at 1:00 a.m. for a scene where Alison encounters the creature. At first we thought he'd gone into shock when he hit the water but he rallied and we got the shot. He wasn't the only one to ... (more…)

As I'm doing with SLIME CITY MASSACRE, auteur and SFX maestro Brett Piper is chronicling the progress of his new film, MUCKMAN, starring Anju McIntyre (formerly known as A.J. Khan) and Alison Whitney (BACTERIUM). MUCKMAN is a creature feature in the tradition of such bog boogeymen as SWAMP THING and MAN-THING. As befits any low budget effort, what goes on behind the scenes can be as entertaining as the final product. We don't do this for the money, folks--we do it because we love making monster movies. As Brett says of this warts and all depiction of the problems he's aleady ecoountered, "We may yet save some unwary would-be filmmaker from suffering our fate..."

Well, let's just say the ... (more…)