Zombies are mindless idiots that roam aimlessly looking for their next meal. Sometimes, the people fighting them are just as dumb and narrowly focused as the zombies themselves. In the case of The Black Earth, the heroes are a couple of bumbling rednecks more concerned with getting another six pack than stopping the zombie outbreak in their small Southern town. Based on the comical antics of Kurt Angle and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin in the WWE of the early 2000s, Hank (Jefferson Traywick) and Johnny (Jon Dannelley) use their pest control skills to ward off the undead pests that are taking over the town of Black Earth. Along the way, they encounter more bumbling idiots and a hot babe or two, and take plenty of beer breaks. Before the film’s world premiere tomorrow night at the Plaza Theatre (tickets available here), writer/director James T. Warbington talks to Wrestling with Pop Culture about the film’s wrestling influences, the bands on the soundtrack and which wrestling personalities are likely to be appearing at the premiere.
Where did the name The Black Earth originate?
There’s actually a town called Black Earth, Wisconsin. They were OK with us filming there, so we just named the movie The Black Earth. The short film was an official selection at the Driftless Film Festival in Madison, the Iris Film Festival out of Pennsylvania, the Horror Emporium Insane Asylum out of Illinois and the Minneapolis Underground Film Festival. It was also listed as on of the top 50 shorts of 2011 on the Internet Movie Database. It piqued a lot of people’s interest, which helped us raise the money for the feature. The budget was about $2,000, which is really small. I drove to Alabama, the other director flew in from Pittsburgh and another guy flew in from San Jose, California to film it.
The short was filmed in Wisconsin, but the full-length was filmed in Alabama. Why was that?
The short film was just the first scene, where they’re all in the house together. There are few different actors in the feature film because the others were either really bad or just couldn’t make it to Alabama. But it’s the same two main characters. Quinn [Levandoski], who plays Jake, flew down from Wisconsin and will be at the premiere.
There are a lot of bands featured in this movie. How did you get so many bands to let you use their music?
I was in the Tone Deaf Pig-Dogs. I started the band in ’88 and they reunited about five years ago. I was like, “Dude, give me some music.” They were like, “Here you go.” I also played with Round Ear Spock for a while, then played with Andy Samford for a while, so they were glad to be on the soundtrack. I contacted The Real McKenzies and they said, “We’ve got a new album coming out, so don’t use any of the old stuff. We’ll send you a copy of our new album and you pick what you want.” Mojo Nixon actually contacted me and said, “Use what you want. But if you get famous, you gotta buy me a beer.”
How did you come up with the idea to make a zombie movie with characters based on wrestlers?
Remember when Austin would sing “Kumbaya” to Vince and all that? That was some of the funniest stuff I can remember so I said, “I wish I had two characters like that who just drink beer.” I’m a goofy punk rocker, so it made sense for that to be in the story. I like zombie comedies, especially if you don’t have a good budget. If you’ve got no budget, you’ve got to make fun of yourself. We were talking about writing these two crazy redneck brothers and I told co-writer C.L. Robbins, “They should be a lot like Kurt Angle and Steve Austin. They’ve got to think that they’re shit don’t stink, like when Austin kept playing guitar and couldn’t sing and was out of tune, but he thought it was great.” That’s what these two guys have got to be. The one brother never really fights, he just drinks. But no matter what, they think they’re invincible and awesome. Of course, they’re actually just lame rednecks who get drunk, So that’s where that idea came from.
They used to say that wrestling imitated life, but I’m starting to think that life imitates wrestling. Even when somebody’s making an entrance in the movie, we’d talk about theme music. So we had Sherri [Eakin] comes out with her big rocking ’80s song where you see her legs and she’s all sexy and she pours beer all over herself. That was all based around wrestling. Whenever something’s cool, Chris [Robbins] says, “That’s Diesel.” On the set that’s all you’d hear and there are all these outtakes of us going, “Dude, that was so fucking Diesel.” We’re talking about Kevin Nash, of course, because we’re cheesy wrestling goofy-asses.
The world premiere is tomorrow night at the Plaza Theatre in Atlanta. Where else will this movie be screening?
We’re going to play it in Atlanta, then it goes to Pittsburgh, San Jose, Chicago and Madison. We’ll have DVDs at all these screenings, and the DVD will be for sale online by December. It will also be available Amazon Instant Video and we’re trying to get it on Netflix or Redbox.
What can we expect from tomorrow’s premiere, aside from the movie screening?
The cast of "The Black Earth" from left to right: Jenny Nicole Helms, Jefferson Traywick, Sherri Eakin, Jon Dannelly and Quinn Levandoski
Chris is going to introduce it, then I’ll come out and we’re going to do a question and answer session afterwards. A majority of the cast will be there. So we’ll have Quinn coming down from Wisconsin. We’ll have Hank and Johnny (one’s coming from California, the other’s coming from Birmingham). Jenny Nicole Helms, who plays Sara, the bitchy girl, will be there. A lot of the crew will be there and the other director, Alex Traywick, will be there, along with co-directors C.L. Robbins and Corey Campbell. We all used to work on movies together and as years passed we all became friends and started hating the directors. So we created Family Curse Productions, which is a group of directors, editors and writers that has absolutely nothing to do with the people who we worked for before. We all love wrestling and horror movies, so it works out well.
Then we’re having an after party somewhere. Marc Laurinaitis will be there and his brother, Animal from the Road Warriors, should be there. My wife grew up with the Laurinaitis family, so they like to come out and support me. They actually bought their own tickets, so I saw their names on the ticket list. Johnny‘s not going to be there, which may or may not be a good thing. I don’t know.