A WILDER WEST
Sharkasaurus, gunslingers meet in new horror-comedy
It was nearing the end of a busy two-day shoot of the short film The Ballad of Sharkasaurus when the production suddenly became mired in an ill-timed comedy of errors.
It was mid-august and production was about to wrap at the CL Ranch just west of Calgary. Director Spencer Estabrooks and his crew were losing light but only had one more scene to get. Granted, it was one of the more complicated sequences. Without giving too much away, the scene required both some minor explosions courtesy of so-called “dirt cannons” ( basically, air cannons filled with dirt) and a setting sun. So timing was everything. But when the scene was ready to go, someone loudly yelled out “boom!” This was not meant to be a cue for the special effects team; it was just a diligent camera assistant who noticed a boom-mike had slipped into the shot.
But the special effects team thought it was Estabrooks calling for the effect to be triggered, which they did. So did actor-puppeteer Michael Roik, who was manning the elaborate Sharkasaurus suit and offered an appropriate reaction to the dirt flying around him. The other actor, Michael Shepherd, didn't respond at all. Having two actors named Michael probably didn't help with the confusion. But this miscued dirt-explosion, an unresponsive actor and an intruding boom-mike all made for what Estabrooks calls an unintentionally “ridiculous shot.”
Mild panic set in.
“The sun had just dipped under the horizon,” says Estabrooks. “That was it. That was our last chance to do it. It was like `Oh my God!' But we still had civil twilight or whatever.”
So, with no other options, they did it again as the sky continued to darken. Much to everyone's surprise, it worked wonderfully. “It just ended up being this beautiful silhouette shot,” Estabrooks says.
It all fits into that grand tradition in low-budget productions of taking advantage of happy accidents. Estabrooks is a Calgary filmmaker who has specialized in wringing both laughs and chills out of inexpensive horror-comedies over the years. So he is used to working under pressure. But this two-day summer shoot had the potential of turning into a fullblown cinematic nightmare, and not just because it tells the tale of a rampaging shark-dinosaur graphically chomping his way through an isolated town in the
Wild West.
“It was pretty crazy,” says Estabrooks. “There were a lot of challenges: COVID, for one. You think it's going to be fine because we're all going to be outdoors. But then there are scenes where two characters drink from the same bottle. The bottle has to be wiped down and we needed to work around it. There was a physical slap, but we didn't want people touching each other. There were temperature checks at the door and masks on all the time.”
Still, despite the heat, time restraints and COVID-19 restrictions, Estabrooks says there was a spirit of jovial determination on set, perhaps due to the fact that months of COVID isolation had led to pent-up energy.
“It was August, we were coming out of a lockdown and this was the first project people had worked on for a long time,” he says. “It was
the first chance to be creative and it was such a fun, big, ridiculous, goofy idea that everyone just had a really good time and had this positive energy to get it done and make it the best we can.”
In the past six years, Estabrooks has turned the fun, big, ridiculous, goofy idea of Sharkasaurus into an ongoing enterprise. The Ballad of Sharkasaurus makes its television debut as part of the 2020 Blood in the Snow Film Festival, a six-day celebration of Canadian horror that screens on Super Channel Oct. 28-Nov. 7. But the concept began back in 2014 with a Tremors-like horror-comedy short about Bible-thumping creationists and scientists teaming up to battle the sand-dwelling titular creature in the modern-day Alberta Badlands. In 2018, Canmore-based Renegade Arts Entertainment turned it into a graphic novel by Estabrooks and artist Jethro Morales, which
in turn is being developed into a full-length feature film. Along the way, there have been a variety of Sharkasaurus merchandising endeavours, including models, toys, masks and other goods.
But Estabrooks isn't one to patiently wait as a feature film slowly develops. So, in the meantime, he decided to charge ahead with a new chapter for his creation that would mix western and horror genres, terrain he covered with his 2009 zombie-cowboy hybrid Dead Walkers.
The Ballad of Sharkasaurus stars Julie Orton and Shepherd, who played different characters in the first film, as a tough gun-slinging cowgirl and a not-so-tough grizzled miner, respectively. Daniel Vasquez plays a dashing if overly verbose Mexican bullfighter and singer-songwriter Robert Adam plays his sheepish, guitar-wielding pal who also contributes the ballad in the title.
But this time around, Estabrooks was determined to make his ferocious creature more visible and enlisted artist Brian Cooley to sculpt a life-sized Sharkasaurus, which was partly paid for by a Kickstarter campaign that began in early March. Made up of PVC pipe frame, foam and latex, it was operated by Roik, an assistant and three official handlers who were tasked with carrying the bulky creature around between scenes. Estabrooks says Cooley was tinkering with his creation right up until the first day of shooting. To properly convey the gory havoc Sharkasaurus causes at the CL Ranch, Estabrooks also filled a fire extinguisher full of fake blood.
It's unclear whether audiences will laugh or gasp or perhaps a little of both when Sharkasaurus first charges into their view. But Estabrooks certainly eschews the less-is-more approach that Steven Spielberg took by keeping his shark largely under wraps in the first Jaws movie. Sharkasaurus is front-andcentre for much of the film.
“It's funny,” Estabrooks says. “It's meant to be fun and funny and a little ridiculous as well.”