Local creeper feature to be shown at Mendocino Film Festival
MENDOCINO, CA — “Crabs!” is returning to its birthplace as the closing movie for the 2022 Mendocino Film Festival’s final showing. Born and bred in both Fort Bragg and Mendocino, the sci-fi horror spoof will make its debut at home on Sunday, June 5, at 5:00 pm in the Festival Tent located at 10701 Palette Drive, in Mendocino, across from The Hill House. Get ready for a campy adventure that owes its roots to classic cinema– from Godzilla to 50’s nuclear radiation leaks to gorefests. Follow the nerdy teenage heroes who must devise a way to save their town under assault from giant mutants. Along the way come quick pokes at small towns, inept law enforcement, the commonplace use of weed, bad fast food, foreign exchange students who massacre English, and school teachers who rate a 10 on the dream-girl scale.
The film is the brainchild of filmmaker Pierce Berolzheimer who has close ties to the Fort Bragg and Mendocino area. His parents currently reside here, and he also recalls nostalgic summertime visits here with his grandmother. He was determined to film Crabs! at the coast since writing the script years ago. “I wrote the movie specifically for Mendocino and Fort Bragg,” he said. “The whole idea came from the town. I planned the whole shoot to end up where the giant monsters fight at the end of the movie to be in the cove right off the cliff in Mendocino. I wanted to showcase the town as much as I could,” he added.
Berolzheimer stressed that the Fort Bragg locale was equally important. “I featured Mendocino in the film because it had the location for the end of the movie. We actually shot most of the movie in Fort Bragg,” he said. He credits Sharon Davis, of the Fort Bragg Film Commission Office, with providing all the needs for filming in Fort Bragg, including hiring on local crew. He noted that Erin Davis, as location manager, was vital in procuring scene locations. Unfortunately, location sites became a serious problem when they were lost a week before filming began.
Although new locations were found and established, Berolzheimer said he then had little time to rewrite some of the backgrounds of character stories that he had set in suburbia. Looking back, he said, “Everything that did go wrong went wrong for a reason. Everything turned out better for it.” One new site was able to substitute for three lost locations. The warehouse frequently seen in the film had many materials lying about that he used for the robot building scenes. Berolzheimer said that losing sites was “the most challenging problem. It meant changing the script to fit the new locations.” In other words, lots of rewrites and new lines for the actors.
His other major challenge during filming was the early loss of his lead male character. After the first full day of filming, the actor portraying Phil went skateboarding and broke his arm. Berolzheimer had to scramble for a replacement and dump the hours of film he had just made. Berolzheimer had twenty-four hours to recast the role. However, what could have been a serious delay turned out to the film’s advantage. He found someone who “was so great. The movie really benefitted from a recast,” he said. February of 2015 became a fortuitous time. The weather was cold but dry with clear skies for the twenty-two days it took to film all the acting scenes.
Berolzheimer has been a fan of monster sci-fi, creeper feature, and robot movies since childhood. His intention, he said, “was to make a movie that was fun, just pure fun. Something like a video I would have found on the shelf at Video World when I was a kid that would be a perfect movie for fifteen-year-old me. A conglomeration of all the different tropes, aesthetics, and story beats that made me love movies in the first place all crammed into one thing.” He described formulating his movie as “a giant monster movie like “Godzilla” or “Power Rangers,” a John Hughes’ style love story, and the critters and “Gremlins” style movie as well, all wrapped up into one thing.”
Berolzheimer’s path to his first feature film began with making stop-motion animations when he was young. “I never loved traditional school as a kid,” he said, “so I tried to convince my teachers to let me do animated projects instead of writing papers. I loved it, and in college, I convinced one of my professors to let me do independent projects in film.” After college graduation, he made his way into the filmmaking business, working with a producer who had posted a job opening on Craig’s List. In his next multi-task job on a film, he negotiated a seat at all production meetings in lieu of better pay. He points to this experience as when he learned how to make an independent film. Then came the opportunity in New York City to produce a couple of commercials.
The idea for Crabs! came from Berolzheimer’s memories of family vacations at Georgia beaches where horseshoe crabs were prevalent. “I just loved them. I thought they were fascinating, and they were ancient and hadn’t changed in millions of years,” he recalled. He added, “They’re so odd, and I loved that. I was obsessed with “Jurassic Park” and dinosaurs.” Years later, in college, he wondered why he had never seen horseshoe crabs in a movie. He said, “They seemed like they were animals ripe for creature features.” He then wrote a short as a college project but shelved it as too ambitious to make.
Much later, while driving cross-country, the project came up in his mind. He stopped at a motel for three days and wrote the script’s first draft. He never planned to show it to anyone. He saw it as something for later after he was established in the industry. While fundraising and editing the script of what was originally to be his first movie, one of his producers advised him to not make the film if his heart wasn’t in it. The producer pointed out that it would be a three to four-year project. He asked Berolzheimer if he would grow to feel stuck with something he hated. He then showed the producers his Crabs! script, and although they had no experience with special effects, they agreed to support making it happen.
With a slim portfolio of film work to show the film industry, he boldly decided to bring the shelved script of Crabs! to the screen. All of his shorts made in college were “specifically to try out things I’d never done before,” he said. “Crabs! was the same approach, a bigger version of those.” In retrospect, he believes his need for a new challenge drove him to take on a complicated and expensive vision despite his lack of experience. He explained that “it definitely was a big leap. I’m the kind of person who thinks I can work stuff out. I can feel my way toward a finished product. I’m really glad I did it that way because I like learning on my own.” Berolzheimer thrives by learning on the fly. “I’m teaching myself how to do things. It feels like the only way I can really understand it is to get my hands dirty and make a whole bunch of mistakes.”
Berolzheimer set aside shorts for the time being. A feature film had the potential to make money that shorts never earn back, and he had developed enough professional contacts to gather a film crew. It was also an opportunity to attend his version of film school. “Learn by doing” was already his philosophy. He wanted to learn as much as possible, although he knew making the film would take a long time. He later spent nine months in Vietnam learning the post-production process of special effects. He credits his cinematographer with ensuring they didn’t cut too many corners within the limited budget. By this time, along with additional Mendocino and Fort Bragg drone shots and green screen footage completed in Los Angeles, he was now years into the project.
Berolzheimer believes he accomplished his goal. “I wanted to make something that I didn’t see out there at the time. The horror movies at the time were self-serious, dark horror movies.” The campy horror movies, he thought, “felt cookie-cutter. They weren’t hitting the beat. They weren’t made out of love. I wanted it to be as genuine as I could and loving of the genre and the movies that came before. I wanted to pay respect to those things that I loved instead of poking fun at them. I didn’t want anything to be mean in the movie.” For example, he intended the character of Radu to repeatedly voice the audience’s understanding of how ridiculously other characters were behaving. The purpose was not a cheap shot at an outsider.
Berolzheimer is looking forward to his movie showing at the film festival and his Q&A session after the movie. After successful showings in twenty other film festivals worldwide, he said, “This is the festival I am most excited about.” He finally has his chance to see how the local audience reacts to the story filmed where they live. He appreciates the local community’s assistance to him and his crew during the filming. “Thank you to all involved and all the locals who made it happen,” he said. “If our reception wasn’t as great as it was, we wouldn’t have been able to do it. We were accepted with open arms from everybody.” Even Berolzheimer’s mother jumped in to help. He remembers about twenty people camping in her backyard during the filming. You can’t get more local than that.
To get more information about the Mendocino Film Festival and to purchase tickets, go to mendocinofilmfestival.org.
View more on The Mendocino Beacon