Fango heard from Andy Davis and Sandy McKeon, creators of ADELLE, the first feature from their Abandoned Cinema company that hits DVD from Elite/Hannover House in October, and they sent a couple of exclusive photos that you can see below the jump. Directed by Davis from a script he wrote with McKeon (who also co-stars), it’s described by the latter as “somewhere between ALICE IN WONDERLAND and FREAKS—a pony-cart ride into hell.”

ADELLE stars Madeline McNulty in the title role of a young deaf girl who is abandoned in the middle of nowhere by her parents in the 1930s. Her subsequent struggle to survive becomes a nightmarish odyssey populated by an assortment of strange characters, a few played by Leo Lunser, Tim Ryan and McKeon. “There are moments where we really hope the audience wants to back out of their contract with us as filmmakers,” Davis (whose previous credits include the zombie opus “2”, coming in August from Elite/Hannover, and the supernatural film I’M SORRY) tells Fango. “We want people to be uncomfortable, squirming in the seats. Adelle has never learned to communicate verbally or with sign language, so it’s very interesting how we communicate with the viewer through her senses. It’s a genuine creepshow, for sure, and I couldn’t be happier with the outcome.”

“I really enjoyed writing the script with Andy,” McKeon says. “It seems both our minds are twisted in the same direction, yet we are still able to complement each other and build upon each other’s thoughts in a great way.”

Filmed in the hot, mosquito-ridden backwoods of Maine, ADELLE was a challenging project for the indie filmmaking team. “Add to that the fact that we had plenty of dead things in jars,” Davis notes, “and it made for sticky and very stinky sets—the smell of death was literally everywhere. But Madeline was a true professional. I had worked with her on my first feature, MUD, when she was 6 years old. Each day, she came to the set prepared and ready to work. She never once complained, and despite the working conditions, she delivered an amazing performance.” The movie’s FX were created by the Shoggoth Assembly team, and the director adds, “They set us up very well with everything we needed to create the world Adelle finds herself in. There were moments when we would tell them what we needed, and they would look at us like we were crazy.”

Look for DVDetails on ADELLE soon; you can watch the trailer below, and see the Abandoned Cinema/ADELLE website here and Facebook page here.

 

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