This past summer and fall, the producers at Foresight Features shot a trio of genre films in Ontario, all in collaboration with PONTYPOOL author/scripter Tony Burgess. We’ve got comments from Foresight’s Jesse Thomas Cook on the movies, with exclusive pics by our own David Goodfellow from the set of the third to go to camera, SEPTIC MAN.

Foresight Features, which previously won notice with MONSTER BRAWL and EXIT HUMANITY, consists of Cook, John Geddes and Matt Wiele. “The three of us each formulated a basic idea for a storyline,” Cook tells Fango, “and we brought Tony, who lives just up the road, on board to turn those concepts into polished scripts. The crews for the most part were the same tight-knit, threadbare collective throughout the three productions. In May, we filmed the sci-fi thriller EJECTA [which we previously reported on here] in the remote wilderness of Grey County, starring Julian Richings [from CUBE and WRONG TURN among many others].

“In July, we moved our operation down to Toronto and filmed the visual-effects spectacle HELLMOUTH, starring Stephen McHattie in the lead role as a grizzled gravekeeper who is enticed out of retirement to manage a particularly evil cemetery at the gates of hell. HELLMOUTH is a very stylized throwback to 1950s Ed Wood and Hitchcock horror, shot entirely in a greenscreen studio, and features cameos by Canuck genre stalwarts Richings, Bruce McDonald and Boyd Banks, along with several actors seen in our earlier projects. Working with Stephen McHattie as the lead on this project was a dream come true for us and a huge step for our company, and reunites the writer and star of PONTYPOOL.”

September saw Foresight heading north, back to their base camp in Collingwood, and rolling cameras on SEPTIC MAN, which Cook describes as “kind of like THE FLY meets BURIED. I wanted to limit the movie to a single solitary set, where a guy would be stuck in a cesspool of sludge and slowly transform into a monster. I pitched this idea to Tony, and basically told him it would be like an updated version of the ‘man falls down a well’ myth. Tony took that notion and flipped it 180 degrees into this transgressive chamber play, adding elements of the prison-escape and superhero-origin genres. I was blown away by the story, and how he was able to transform it with a small-town water-crisis apocalypse as the backdrop, adding in two serial killers as a completely insane dynamic.

“So not only does Septic Man have to survive the septic tank, he also has to deal with these two guys who are guarding the hatch at the top,” Cook elaborates. “It becomes a battle of wits, but we’re never truly sure if they’re real or imagined, as there’s a point in the story where things just go down a rabbit hole and become this bizarre nightmare. My old pal Jason Brown [1st photo below with Cook, left, and Kirill Belousov] from MONSTER BRAWL played the lead role and also served as production designer, so the man who built the shit-tank was also the guy who had to suffer inside it. As he was building this massive chamber, he likened himself to the popes of ancient Rome, who spent their days lavishly designing their own tombs! We were able to add more genre talent in the supporting roles, with Molly Dunsworth [from HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN, pictured in 2nd photo below], Robert Maillet [Frankenstein’s monster in BRAWL] and Tim Burd signing on. All in all, we’re tremendously excited to unleash these three pictures in 2013!” Look for more on Foresight’s features in the future at this site and in Fango’s pages.

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