Concluding our interviews with the filmmakers behind three upcoming horror films being co-produced by Larry Fessenden’s Glass Eye Pix and MPI Media Group (start tracking back through the previous stories here), we now come to BITTER FEAST and writer/director Joe Maggio. Although Maggio, unlike his Glass Eye stablemates, is a newcomer to horror, he’s an established indie filmmaker with the well-received VIRGIL BLISS, MILK AND HONEY and PAPER COVERS ROCK to his credit, “and I’m very excited to be working with Larry and Glass Eye,” he tells Fango.
BITTER FEAST will be the first of the Glass Eye/MPI trio to go before the cameras; shooting begins late this month, and Maggio explains the storyline: “James LeGros [from PHANTASM II and Fessenden’s THE LAST WINTER] plays a mad chef who kidnaps a food blogger whom he believes has torpedoed his career. The blogger is played by Joshua Leonard, who you may know from THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT and is in a film coming out soon called HUMPDAY. I’m very excited; James is really into his role, and I believe he’s honing his knife skills now.”
As with many of the movies he directs and produces, Fessenden will have an onscreen role in BITTER FEAST as well. “Larry plays a private investigator,” Maggio explains. “He’s a bitter ex-cop who is forced to reside in the shadowy world of the PI, and he’s the only one whose instincts are right. He knows the chef is up to no good.”Unlike most of Glass Eye’s productions, however, this one doesn’t reside in the realm of the supernatural or the surreal, and Maggio says that’s in keeping with his past projects. “My previous movies have all been rooted in reality,” he notes. “I go for naturalism in the filmmaking and performances, and I’m trying to bring that to this one, and have the horror spring from the sense that this is something that could really happen. There’s nothing fantastical about it; it’s just about a man who has a passion—in this case cooking—that he becomes too passionate about, and it leads him to do some very, very dark things.”
That realism will extend to the special makeup by Brian Spears, who’s becoming a regular member of the Glass Eye team. “He’s doing all of our blood and effects, and we’ve been working on different looks,” the filmmaker notes. “I think he’s excited because it’s not zombies and it’s not monsters. It’s more like someone who’s been beaten to a pulp, and he’s getting to work on effects based on what that actually looks like.” We’ll be keeping tabs on all of Glass Eye’s forthcoming features, so stay tuned to this site and FANGORIA magazine for further coverage.
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