Phil Messerer's Underbelly Blues needs YOUR support

You've all probably noticed that within the indie filmmaking community, the fund creativity site KickStarter has been gaining big exposure. It's a great idea: help fund artists and filmmakers with their ideas and movies and get credit. Depending on the pledge amount, you can get some interesting exposure for yourself such as pledging a grand gets you a date with one of the stars (pending a psych evaluation)

Philip Messerer has done just that. His breakthrough film: Thicker than Water (review here) was a revelation of vampire ingenuity warranting 3 spinkicks from yours truly. So Mr. Messerer dropped me a line that his new film is a bit if a turn...he's going pulp!

More than that he's flipped the casting upside down. Via the KickStarter site:

Rather than casting actors for parts, the director gathered 26 underground comic virtuosos and asked them to create their own characters (one for each letter of the alphabet). For the next two months the actors / comedians lent their characters to weekly improv sessions which were then turned into a feature length screenplay.

So what's this film all about?

The plot of Underbelly Blues follows a mysterious briefcase as it exchanges hands amongst the colorful denizens of the underworld. These include a corrupt cop, a sleazy strip club owner, a pair of lesbian strippers, an ex-military gun-for-hire who suffers from O.C.D. and has a penchant for creative torture, a Jewish pawnshop owner and his dominatrix mother, a British sophisticate who cooks crystal meth, a pair of surfer pot dealers, a legally blind albino gangster, a 7 foot tall, 400 lb neo-nazi, a sexual deviant redneck, a wild-eyed Mexican named Take It Easy, and a brilliant 'brain' called The Architect.

All of these characters are connected through a series of bizarre coincidences which inevitably lead to the downfall of corporate America as the rivalry between two soft drink companies goes out of control.

Well I gotta admit, this sounds damn fun right? Well let's all get it off the ground.

Here are some ways to support this project.

• The official site
• The KickStarter Page (Help support the movie!)

The best way to see what this is all about is via the video below. These improv rehearsals help to get what it's all about. If you want to see originality, it'll come from jaded viewers like yourself. Check out the video below and get the word out.

Categories: gangsta movies, independent cinema, indie film, kickstarter, pulp, Thicker Than Water: The Vampire Diaries Part 1