Boy bands fend off zombies instead of preteen crowds
TORONTO — Flash back to the early 1990s and you might’ve found a young Nick Carter roaming the aisles of his local video store with VHS copies of Friday the 13th and Hellraiser in hand.
“Blood, gore, guts,” the Backstreet Boy singer says.
“That’s some of the stuff I love.”
Now after years of serenading teenage girls with Quit Playing Games (With My Heart), Shape of My Heart and other ballads, Carter is going back to his love for heart-stopping slasher movies by creating one himself.
Dead 7 teams Carter up with members of other boy bands including ’N Sync and 98 Degrees, who are resurrected to fight a zombie plague that’s infesting a small western town. It’s a concept Carter imagined after finding it tough to break into the acting world through auditions. So instead of playing in other people’s scripts, he decided to co-write one himself and got the production company behind the Sharknado series to foot the bill.
The result is a horror-western mash-up where Carter takes centre stage and fellow Backstreet Boys singers Howie Dorough and A.J. McLean play smaller parts.
Former ’N Sync members Joey Fatone and Chris Kirkpatrick, as well as O-Town singer Erik-Michael Estrada, make appearances too. Convincing all of them to sign onto the B-movie was actually pretty easy.
“The thing about musicians — especially boy-banders — they all want to act,” Carter says.
Dead 7 airs on U.S. cable channel Syfy on April 1. There are no immediate plans for the film to show on Canadian television.