Production Notes
This idea came to mind around late 1997 when I got hooked on Resident Evil. Not too long after, I was blessed with Resident Evil 2. I wanted to make a movie that was not quite a comedy so much as it was a horror film, but not so much a horror film so much as it was comedy. I let the idea fester for a while until I started telling my good buddy Jeremy Strong about it in the Fall of 1998. He reacted by digging a hole in the woods in my backyard. I started asking him, "Jer, what are you doing?" "I'm digging" he responded. It was just like that scene in A Stir of Echoes. He was obsessed with the idea of having a zombie come up from the ground, so later that night, after he had completed the hole, we began shooting "The Living Impaired" with no script and very little pre-planning. We ended up with a 20 minute movie that many people thought was ridiculous but also hilarious. So, after that, I basically dropped my idea of making a well thought-out and even clever Living Impaired for many moons.
The idea sprung up again in the Summer of 2002 when I was looking for a movie to make. I was working on "Film Amateura" earlier that year and shut it down because I hated the script with a passion. I had a script for "The Living Impaired" written for October of 2002 and decided to shoot the whole movie on Black and White Super 8 film. Convinced, I could get 10 minutes of film out of a cartridge, I spent a large amount of my hard-earned money that I made working at McDonalds all year to pay for the film. We began shooting with Allyson Haas starring as the heroine, Michelle, in December of 2002. It was then that I realized you could only get 3 minutes out of those damn expensive cartridges. I was so flaborgasted that I cancelled the production and re-wrote "Film Amateura" (with all kinds of 'film-bashing' gags) and then began shooting it in March of 2003.
I still really wanted to make "The Living Impaied" so before Film Amateura was even finished, we began shooting The Living Impaired in late October of 2003. What ended up happening was yet another shut-down of the production. Assuming that I'd never get the damn movie done, I cut together what little footage I had of the movie and made a 26-minute version of "The Living Impaired" that I screened only once just 12 days before the premiere of Film Amateura. The sceening was at the Salvation Art Gallery and, of course, included a trailer for Film Amateura. It was screened, primarily, as a promotional tool for Film Amateura. After that one show, nobody would ever see it again.
Then I decided I was going to finish "The Living Impaired" once and for all! So I re-wrote the ending to the script to accommodate certain production restraints and made plans to shoot in the summer of 2004. Alas, my camera broke down and everything had to be put on hold. I (once again) was forced to re-write the remaining two acts of the movie and once again, "The Living Impaired" is in production and hopeful of being filmmed by the end of November. The movie should be finished and released by the Summer of 2005 (I don't want to promise any earlier than that).
So, we're shooting scenes now that are going to be edited together with scenes that we shot over a year ago, but that's the magic of movie-making. Hopefully, fans who have been waiting patiently for the finished product (that was originally promised in Hallowe'en of 2003) will be delighted by this cheesey, disturbingly violent and cynical, zombie epic.
Michael Fox
Writer & Director of The Living Impaired