MOST people think you need millions of pounds to make a feature film, but not 22 year old Enda Hughes from Keady in Co, Armagh. His debut feature, The Eliminator, which premiered at this year's Galway Film Fleadh, was made for the princely sum of £8,000 - probably less than the weekly cappuccino bill on Mission: Impossible. It's the first Irish attempt to make a real no budget trash exploitation movie in the mould of Robert Rodriguez's El Mariachi or Peter Jackson's Bad Taste.
The Eliminator is an action movie shot and set in Northern Ireland, but it bears little resemblance to any other film ever made about the North. "Our number one wish was to make something that wouldn't bore people, says Hughes, who has little time for most of the "Troubles movies" made in the last few years. "I wanted to give an alternative view of Northern Irish culture, or counter culture. It's not as black and white up here as people often paint it in cinematic terms. We didn't want to make yet another thing with all that `Who shot my Da?' stuff.
With car crashes, explosions, gun battles and special effects, there are similarities (albeit humorously twisted ones) with current events. It does deal with an illegal organisation operating out of Northern Ireland, its military commanders, and what happens when one shoots another," explains Hughes. But from then on things start getting more peculiar.
"The guy who was killed comes back from the dead as a zombie, and ends up raising an army of zombies. So a battle ensues between the hardman of the organisation and the army of the walking dead - you can read a lot into that if you want to! Then Cuchulainn, Finn MacCool and Saint Patrick appear at the end to make some very telling comments."
There's also a Vietnam scene, for no better reason than the director's belief that "you can't have an action film without a Vietnam flashback".
Hughes is a true movie addict who has been making short films on Super 8 for years, and even built his own personal cinema in a loft behind his parents house. There was no cinema in the area; it closed down about seven or eight years ago, so we built our own replica of the old Scala cinema in Keady, with velvet curtains and tip up seats and dimming lights. We used to have a crowd of 30 or so regulars.
After saving up £1,500 from money he'd made deejaying in a nightclub, he got his cousin, and co producer, Denis O'Hare to put up the other £1,500 for the shooting budget, as well as doing all the special effects production design and stunt: work. "I directed wrote it, did the photography and editing. So as a pair of producers, we didn't have to pay a lot of people. My brother Michael acted in it and got together a lot of the cast."
Some might think South Armagh a dangerous place for a bunch of film fanatics to be doing this kind of thing, but not according to Hughes. "Keady's a quiet wee town. We had to do a lot of running around in forests with mock firearms, and explosions and car crashes, but we went to the police beforehand, and they couldn't have been more helpful."
The Eliminator was one of six new Irish feature films premiered at the Galway Film Fleadh, and the only one not supported by the Irish Film Board. Hughes didn't go to the Film Board in advance of filming, "because we knew they wouldn't be interested in what we were doing", but an application for assistance in finishing post production was turned down.
"A lot of the films that get financed tend to be very `worthy'. I don't know why a film like The Eliminator isn't perceived as being just as culturally valid," says Hughes, who cites movies like Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead and Tobe Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre as the inspiration for The Eliminator. He insists he's "not a complete trashhead; the film I admire most is Raiders Of The Lost Ark", but the scripts in the pipeline certainly seem to follow the pattern established so far.
"We've got a script called Zombie Corps, set in a post apocalyptic Northern Ireland, when chemical wars are raging across Europe. Ireland is being used as a body dump, but the chemical fillout causes the bodies to rise again, so the Zombie Corps is sent to deal with them.
Another script, Frock Cop, is described as the world's first transvestite action movie. "It's about a tough cop who's forced to go undercover in drag, and he realises he rather enjoys it, so after work he starts putting on a dress and packing his .45 before he goes out to clean up the city. It's sort of like Dirty Harry meets Tootsie. The poster can say: `Justice wears a dress'." Watch out, Keady.
