Director's Commentary

Bad Karma for me is a project that was… well… not as enjoyable as the others, especially coming after a work as successful and fun as The Fourth Place. There were a lot of issues with it… well, mainly with the lead actor.

The original concept for Bad Karma was to make a horror flick, using sound as the primary source of suspense. So I wrote this cheesy script about an unfaithful boyfriend being hunted down and punished by a Greek Mythological creature known as an Erinyes. After a while, it got the nod as being too cheesy, so I decided to cut out the establishing scenes and keep it as just one extended stalk and chase scene.

Hmmm... plot building scenes being cut out entirely... Sound familiar? Yep… it's exactly like what happened to the first PMS. Except in this case, it's a story being cut down to an extended chase scene instead of a fight scene.

Anyway, it still had a lot going for it, and I was quite excited going into it. But disaster struck during production. I wanted to try working with new people, so I asked Marc to be the lead actor. It turned out to be a bit of a mistake. On the first night of shooting he was not only late, but he turned up with a bunch of his friends… and they were all pretentious assholes, especially the guy Nate refers to as "Fat Leo". Dave and I were used to working quickly and efficiently, getting shots done quick and easy. Having Marc's friends around slowed production down to a grinding halt. They were loud, obnoxious, and I wanted to kick their stoopid poseur asses.

Anyway, then the girl that Marc brought along to play the psycho turned out to be pretty bad at the stunt work, and couldn't perform the stunts all too well (kinda like a female version of Simon). I eventually had her replaced… and the executive decision was made to replace the Senj character with Chris the Psycho from PMS, thus effectively making Bad Karma a sequel to PMS.

Production was continually plagued by Marc's lack of commitment and unpunctuality… and made worse by the fact that he'd boast to us about being an hour late because he was flirting with some chick… and then he'd have the nerve to say that he had to leave early. So we took two nights of this shit, and then we decided to just use what we had and not work with Marc anymore (after this experience I decided not to be friends with him period).

But for what it was to be, it was quite successful. Dave and I recorded a lot of sound effects and then I spent 9 hours straight putting the soundtrack together in the sound studio at uni, emerging from it at like 4 in the morning. And overall, the sound was pretty effective, and I got some pretty good grades from my sound lecturer in uni.

Next time, I'll make sure I make better choices when choosing people to play lead roles (although I made the same mistake again for Amy).