"There will be no drinking of beer on planet Tiki Puka Puka...it's all rum and fruit juice...and scantily clad women!"
MAXMILLIAN SLAPPY III, convincing the crew of the Commodore 64 to join his search
PROJECT: TIKI PUKA PUKA is the epic of the trilogy, timing out at over 20 minutes. It started out as a mad scientist movie and became an outer space monster fest. I had originally planed to turn a room in my house into a spaceship interior, but when that turned into too big of a project, we just went into a control room at Turner Broadcasting on a Sunday and shot all the space ship interiors there. My favorite prop is the washing machine head that Alyson Cook, AKA Security Chief Mindy Pendleton, turns when giving her "all systsm go" line. Shana Coley, AKA Lab Technician #1, was living in Boston at the time and knew I was stealing the knobs off trashed washers and dryers in preperation for my space ship construction. She garbage-picked the whole washer head and mailed it to me. Other favorite props include the Commadore 64 keyboard that Larry Morris, AKA Dr. Walt Walters, types on and the 30 year-old headphones that Hilary Meredith, AKA Communications Specialist Miriam Tate, is wearing. By the way, that's really Hilary's business title at the credit company she works for. Oh, and all the unlit cigarettes.
Andy McDaniel, who plays twins- Maxmillian Slappy III and Escobar Slappy IV- came up with the APACALYPSE NOW theme to the movie. I hadn't seen it in years when we were filming, so I just let him run with it and didn't get all the references until I started editing the movie. The other-worldly location for Planet Tiki Puka Puka is The Pasaquan, a truely amazing folk art complex near Columbus, GA created by Eddie Owen Mathews, also know as St. EOM. We made a donation and became members of the Pasaquan Preservation Society and they let us have the place for a Friday afternoon. Gwen Martin was the site manager and she said that until that day, there hadn't been anyone in drag there since Eddie died.
My Favorite scene has to be the chase scene with the Rock Monster, set to the tune Chicken Run. I had it coreographed in my head, but never played the song for my actors, so I had to sing the guitar part for them and try to get them to dance/run to a song they'd never heard. It still turned out perfectly goofy.
