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[Our thanks to Dejan Ognjanovic and the fine people at Fantasia for allowing us to reprint the following interview with Mladen Djordjevic originally conducted for the Fantasia blog.]

How did this screenplay come to be? Where did you get the idea for this story?

I relied quite heavily on my experience in shooting Made in Serbia (a documentary on Serbian porn-moviemakers), my friendship with porn actors, and on my trips throughout Serbia during the shooting and during the preparation of another project related to the Serbian mythology, with Milan Konjevic, six years ago. I wanted to connect this experience with some of my concerns related to the American horror, Japanese film, and also, I wanted to make a connection to camp, in the style of John Waters movies, with my "Black Wave" experience and see how that works in our Serbian mud. And then we have the story of snuff, which is a common theme in American and Japanese film

Years after his college sweetheart Kate perishes in a devastating house fire, Josh Higgins, a failed screen writer living a banal existence, has seen his life spiral out of control. Tortured by the tragedy, and the corrosive relationship that he shares with his wife Meg, Josh soon finds himself subjected to frequent panic attacks and a rampant case of insomnia. it isn't until he takes a seemingly harmless prescription of sleeping pills from his family doctor, that Josh is thrust into a disturbing sequence of events that illuminate an unknown ability to reach out and touch the past while amplifying the delusions he fears he's falling victim to.

Ah, Dolph, you great big manly man, you.

Arguably the hardest working man in action film today, Lundgren was not about to ride on the upcoming release of The Expendables. No, the theatrical release may be nice but the video market has been very good to Lundgren and coming nearly simultaneous to his big screen excursion is another in his growing list of self directed, manly man DTV action films.

Titled Dolph Lundgren Is The Killing Machine - yes, his name is part of the title - this is the sort of thing that merely needs to live up to the title to keep fans happy. And if the trailer is any indication it does exactly that, the promo piece boasting one heck of a body count.

US audiences have to wait until October to check this one out but Anchor Bay are releasing it in the UK on August 16th. Check the trailer below.

Now in it's third year, the It Project is a production market organized by PiFan - the largest genre film event in Asia - and their industry arm NAFF. For those unfamiliar, a project market is a forum for film projects to be presented to interested investors and potential partners, a sort of highly focused meet and greet where the participants are strictly limited and chosen by a board of industry professionals. It's a setup that allows investors to be confident that they'll be seeing the best of the current crop of developing projects and just being selected for a market such of this is a fairly big deal. So I've been rather happy to spend the past five days attending the It Project as a producer on Gareth Huw Evans' upcoming feature Berandal - his second feature built around silat martial artist Iko Uwais. And I'm even happier because this particular production market includes a set of jury-selected awards and Berandal has just won one of them. Here's the full announcement:

Viva Bianca's star has been on the rise for the past year, the Australian actress making a huge impression as Ilithyia in hit series Spartacus: Blood and Sand. And now she's ditching the toga - and just about everything else - to take on the lead role in Acolytes director Jon Hewitt's thriller X. A dark trip through Sydney's red light district, the film stars Bianca as a high class call girl on what she hopes will be the final night of her days as a working girl. Acolytes star Hanna Mangan Lawrence also stars.

By now you know the story. Erica [Amanda Fuller] does chores around a boarding house by day to earn her keep. At night she goes from bar to bar, around the city of Austin, looking for men to hook up with for sex. Men like Franki [Marc Senter], a young musician living the dream. But it's just sex. Nothing else except for a few moments of fleeting physical interaction and then she's gone.

 

Then Nate [Noah Taylor] shows up at the boarding home and he expresses a keen interest in Erica. A war veteran staying in town for however long he stays Erica finds the attention unnerving yet intriguing. She does not shy away from him despite his sharing of a troubled youth right off the hop.

 

But Erica does not get close to any man. Yet, she finds herself inexplicably drawn to Nate. But, if she opens up to him then her dark and sordid past will haunt them both and pull their relationship into a downward spiral they may not be able to emerge from...