SISTER BLISS

by Seth Roman (April 2000)

Sister Bliss - the Hong Kong heroine of zombie extermination, ridding the world of the undead with style, panache, and a tight leather outfit- is one of the stand-out characters of the comedy/horror film, Necromaniac, still in production. The comely "exterminatrix" is played by Amy Lynn Best, making her feature-film debut in Necromaniac. Best is also the co-producer of the film, who established the production company Happy Cloud Pictures with her partners, Bill Homan and Mike Watt. She is also the assistant director, company accountant, assistant make-up, costumer, casting and craft services. "And clapper!" she announces with a salute to herself. "I'm usually just screaming at everyone to shut up so we can finish up. I do what needs done at the time - not everything, but a little bit of different things."

Like the others on the production, Best is a Pittsburgh native. She studied engineering at the University of Pittsburgh for three years before deciding that it wasn't for her. At that time, she was living with her future husband, Mike Watt, a student at Pittsburgh Filmmakers. Having also studied acting, Best found herself starring in Watt's student epics - including the haunted house short, Tenants, an upcoming release from Sub Rosa Studios. And since student filmmaking requires that everyone lend a hand, Best found herself hauling equipment, setting lights, providing special effects, running sound, anything that needed done at a time when there were few people to do it. In short, she got a crash-course in filmmaking.

This filmmaking from hunger helped prepare Best for her first feature film. Entering into this enormous undertaking with her partners, the trio serve as the primary financiers, with the bulk of the film being shot in the home that the three jointly share, and still manage to have a blast while doing it.

"The whole project grew out of a word that Bill mispronounced at a video store. He was looking at [Jorg Buttgereit's] Nekromantic and accidentally pronounced it "necromaniac". Mike thought it was a neat word and something gelled. He came home and wrote the script within a week or two - revising it a few times. Bill and I really liked it, so we paired it down and kind of made it into all of ours. We had been looking for some sort of film project to do for a while and this just seemed perfect to do. So pulled together our resources, different friends and family members for cast and crew, and threw together a zombie movie."

Albeit a different sort of zombie movie. Necromaniac, which has been garnering no small amount of attention in the world of independent horror movies, takes place in a world where the walking dead are an everyday sight, the average citizen never giving a second thought to the zombie in his yard, short of calling someone to come and remove it. The main plot of the film involves a former police detective's investigation into the cause of the media-dubbed "Infestation", with the private exterminators Sr. Bliss and Simon McForman (Best and co-producer/ effects chief Bill Homan) working on their own in a subplot, until they are dragged into the conspiracy by the film's violent end.

Amidst all this sturm and drang are numerous gory set pieces involving the zombies as the victims of Best's and Homan's hacking and slashing. Exploding heads and gouts of blood are the highlights of these scenes, with Best's Sister Bliss leaping and bounding in a black overcoat, lace corset and thigh-high boots.

"Sister Bliss is a dominatrix/marriage counseling/zombie-killing nun. A very strong, very determined woman who knows what she wants and knows how she wants to go about getting it," explains Best, who had to learn numerous Martial Arts forms in order to capture her character's deadly expertise. "Being able to shoot the crossbow, twirl the sai - I learned to handle from Bill Homan. PKA [Pennsylvania Karate Academy, whose instructors assist with fight choreography] helped us prepare for the fight scenes. We trained there for about a year and a half."

Best's active role in the production requires intense concentration, as she is constantly working, both on camera or off, from the beginning to the end of each shooting day. I ask her if wearing so many hats is difficult. "Sometimes," she replies. "Especially if I'm wearing a small tight costume and making a big dish of lasagna and not being allowed to eat it til I'm done." Who won't allow you to eat? I ask. "Me! [laughs] The costume."

Best continues, "I don't favor one role over the other. It depends on what mood I'm in. There are some days where I just want to put on sweatpants and a hat and be behind the scenes, cook and do slate. Other days I really enjoy putting on the Sr. Bliss outfit and cutting up zombies. Still other days I enjoy the role of the pushy A.D., bossing people around, which is what you sometimes have to do to get all the scenes shot for that day. Sometimes I just want to sit down with the money and figure out our point system. Or go through our resume file and figure out who will be our next zombie."

With all the hard work, the question remains: is this the work Best wants to do for the rest of her life? Does she want to be a professional producer? "I don't know [laughs] I don't know if this is my life. I have to get more experience with it, before I decide. I'm not quite sure what a 'real' producer does, actually. My job is trying to keep the investments straight, make sure we have the money to pay for film, pay for processing - or at least on our lab account. Trying to get investors. Trying very hard to get investors. It's fun and I enjoy the production work as much as I enjoy the acting."

The three partners have worked hard to keep the atmosphere light and keep everyone's spirits up. Including their own. Results: "Extras are great and usually have a lot of fun. We've had everything from family members, friends of family, people who have sent us resumes - including a young actress with a resume longer than any I've ever seen in my life, who showed up with her mother. She actually turned out to be a lot of fun [and] she had a really great time. It's great seeing people who are just awed by the whole filmmaking process, they're content to just sit in a room and get all this gook applied to their face, then go down and get covered in more gook lying on our basement floor - and surprisingly, coming back the next time we call them."

The real surprise comes when you consider the length of time the film has been in production, with the same people doing roughly the same jobs. "The script was finished in April of '97, and we started filming in October of '98, so it's been over a year of production. It's difficult to do things right away when everyone's working a forty-hour work week, and have families too. When you're not paying anybody, you can't demand too much of their time. Everybody still seems pretty up and excited about the project. There have been a few times - especially when it gets late, we all get tense and tired and giggly and you can't get anything accomplished, but for the most part its been fun.

"I've gotten sick of it a couple of times. When I realize I can't walk through my house without sticking to the floor from all the stage blood all over the place. Really can't organize a house when you're worried about matching the next scene. You can't take up rugs or linoleum - or even paint. But all in all I really enjoy it." In addition to the stress of the job comes a more old-fashioned conceit, one still very much prevalent in even the world of low-budget filmmaking. The gender conflict.

"There are occasionallypeople not quite sure of my role. Thinking I'm just the writer's wife, and I'm just hanging around the set, without realizing just how much I have invested, along with Mike and Bill. It's not just the director's reputation on the line, it's all of ours. A lot of it comes from people [with the attitude] that the only woman on the set is usually the actress. And women can't possibly understand all the technical parts of the film. Which is what my character has faced, so it's apropos that I go through it, I guess.

"The first time we shot, a couple of [our new] crew members - without having read the script or anything - decided to "direct" me, telling me that I would be scared facing a roomful of zombies. They didn't realize that my character was a zombie killer by trade. I wouldn't be scared. It was my job. That's like an exterminator being scared of a few bugs. That was kind of irritating. But things seemed to have calmed down since that. Nobody hassles me anymore," she adds with a grin.

The movie, as low budget and independent as you can get, has found its supporters, both in the form of online fans and in the industry itself. "We'd been talking a lot with Debbie Rochon, who's been giving us a lot of encouragement and advice. We did a shoot with her up at the B-Movie Film Festival in Syracuse this past August. We grabbed a couple of guys who were attending the festival to play zombies. That was the first time that I did all make-up myself. It turned out okay - even though you can't see it really well on the film. And everybody [attending the festival] came out and watched and ask us what we were doing. Finding out we were doing a scene with Debbie - there was a lot of cutting murmurs of us shooting a "Z-Grade" zombie movie, but most people were real interested."

Best bristles at the "Z Grade" implication. "It's irritating to get that pigeon-hole because the people accusing us of that haven't seen any of the stuff we've done, haven't read the script - which is really good. We definitely are making a B-Movie, with all the gore and the violence, but the script I think is wonderful. Definitely an A-Class script."

Necromaniac is already known for some of its more outrageous moments of violence against the dead, but what about the all-important ingredient for a successful B-Movie (or such is the notion): sex. Best considers the question for a moment, then continues.

"Definitely, sex sells. And a lot of people who go into video stores - Like Incredibly Strange Video in Dormont, Pennsylvania [laughs] - will look for things with a lot of nudity and a lot of violence. I don't have a problem with nudity, but I don't see it as important [for our project]. There's no nudity in Necromaniac. There's scantily clad, but there's no nudity. This goes back to the film taking place in 24 hours. There's no time for a major sex scene. There's too much of a story for us to just throw in sex."

Necromaniac has recently passed the half-way mark. "We're maybe sixty-seventy percent done shooting," says Best. "Then we have to worry about editing, and conforming, mixing the sound track."

And what are Best's hopes for the future? What's coming up for the Happy Cloud clan?

"No idea. Uh! I'd like to finish the film. I think it's going to be really great seeing it sitting on a video shelf. Seeing other people rent it will be really cool. Of course, I'm hoping it will be an all-out success and make us millions of dollars and we'll never have to work again. As long as a few people think it's a really cool movie then I'll be happy. I'll be really happy if it's really successful though."