Marshall Canfield kicks ass, too!
Well, pardner, it turns out that what we’ve got here is a showdown. Two men, weapons drawn, all bets are off. Who will be the stronger … and who will survive?
In fairness, when it comes to movies in Champaign-Urbana the week of April 20, the guy with the famous thumb will probably lay a single-finger smackdown on these do-gooders and any other attention-seeker in sight. But that’s why C-U Blogfidential is here, folks, to pull up the underdogs by their bootstraps!
While everybody is huddling in perfect harmony over at the Virginia Theatre for Roger Ebert’s Film Festival, a very rare occurence will be taking place – the video release of two local movies in the same week. Now, we’ll have to stick an asterisk on RAMPAGE since it was originally made in Turkey with C-U’s own Dark Maze Studios providing a much belated English-language post-production job to ready it for the West. The legitimate local film actually comes out a few days earlier on Tuesday, April 21, when North American Motion Pictures of Woodland Hills, CA, releases THE SHOWDOWN.
Formerly titled SAND PRAIRIE, this pet project of Springfield/Pekin author Jim Conover is billed as “a classic Western” and follows the adventures of square-jawed Luke Canfield (Bob Handegan) as he takes up marshall status in a Texas frontier town and must dole out 19th Century-style justice on a gang of horse thieves. Impressively, the production marshalled enough coin to build a Sand Prairie set from scratch in little Hopedale Township near the Mackinaw River; you can find several photos of it at the official Web site as well as this page on Randy Wheat’s Imagemakers site.
CUBlog will bring you more information about THE SHOWDOWN as we get it (and Conover and North American decide to respond to our e-mail queries) so for now, dig on the original trailer below. To the best of our knowledge, THE SHOWDOWN will be the first indigenous production to be issued on Blu-ray as well as standard DVD.
~ Jason Pankoke