Edmonton Journal from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada • 25

The Edmonton Journal The Fringe C2 James Adams C4 Showtimes C6 leisure EDITOR: Alan Kellogg, 429-5345 Friday, August 22, 19B6 uts city on horror 1113, (C Flick I By JOHN DODD Journal Staff Writer Prom Night 1957, Edmonton. Pretty Mary Lou Maloney is about to be crowned Prom Queen of Hamilton High. Too bad her boy friend is jealous. Poor Mary Lou. When her boy friend secretly sets off a stink bomb on the high school stage, sparks from it ignite her pretty cotton dress.

The flames envelop her as the stunned graduating class watches. Mary Lou dies. She never got to be Prom Queen. Cut. Now it's Prom Night 1987.

Bill Nordham, who used to be Mary Lou's boy friend, has kept his terrible deed a secret for 30 years. He's now principal of Hamilton High. Vicki Carpenter, girlfriend of his son Craig, is the leading contender for the prom queen crown. But what's happening to Vicki? She's afraid "something" is trying to possess her. And no one believes her, not Craig, not her parents, not her friends.

Only Nordham knows what's happening and he's paralysed by his guilt and fear of the truth. Mary Lou Maloney is back from the grave to enact her terrible revenge against the students of Hamilton High. Cut. Yes, the horror films are back, if they ever went away, and The Haunting of Hamilton High will be Edmonton's first contribution to the genre. It's a production being shot this month at Highlands Junior High School, tuxedo rental shops and other locations around town.

Although the film stars Michael Ironsides (Top Gun) as Nordham, and Wendy Lyon (The Campbells) as Carpenter, the movie by its nature may be more memorable for special effects and stunts than acting. A kindergarten rocking horse talks, a corpse floats down a school corridor, students are electrocuted and a blackboard reaches out to grabs poor Vicki and pull her into the wall. Ah, school days. It isn't easy to film. A 60-second sequence like the blackboard scene is expected to take five shooting days, at $2,000 an hour.

Even the more straightforward (and more dangerous) burning of Mary Lou took the stunt people days to set up and plan, although director Bruce Pittman (The Painted Door) was able to shoot other scenes while preparations were made. The continuity people carefully recorded the position and appearance of the actress playing Mary PICTURES: Ian MacDonald I 1 tr i i A Filming tough work Stuntwoman Leslie Munro sh 'rS Just ask local extras a hot job for those who can take it -t i 1 1 i'st crv Jv I I i ii I If- t. they are going to allow you put on television (or in the movies) anymore. When we did Bullies, the censors in both the States and at the Ontario censor board asked for cuts in our burn." Sager says the Hunting of Hamilton High isn't just another routine slice-and-dice horror film. "I think it is intelligent.

It is a horror version of Back to the Future. It warps time. We're taking a lot of chances in terms of assuming that the audience will be intelligent enough to get these things." He said Edmonton was chosen for the filming because of good cooperation from the school board, because Edmonton's Allarcom is putting up money and because some of the schools available had just the right neo-gothic look. "One of them is even haunted, so they said. Two teachers just disappeared." But until now, no one has ever been grabbed by an angry Director Bruce Pittman and his assistant David Robertson sometimes a coffee break can help clear one's mind Lou in her last scene on the high school stage before the burning.

Enter blonde stuntwoman Leslie Munro of Toronto in the same dress Mary Lou wore, wearing a wig that makes her into a brunette. She stands shifting from one foot to another as her crew sprays an alcohol mixture along the back of her dress. They even paint portions of it with strong-smelling contact cement. The cameras roll and a crew member ignites the apricot-colored dress with a propane torch and jumps back out of camera range, leaving Munro alone and vulnerable on the fireproof ed stage. The flames leap up the back of her dress with a loud "whoosh." They flicker above her head.

She steps forward, begins; to turn. Seconds go by and the flames rage higher. Finally she falls to her knees, then crumples face forward to the floor, face forward, acrid smoke and flames still rising from her blackened dress. The crew instantly covers her back with foam from a fire extinguisher. Everyone applauds.

"I'm fine," Munro' mutters, still face down. A half-hour later, changed from her burned party dress and wig into T-shirt and shorts, Munro is exuberant. This was her first major, full-body burn as a stuntwoman. She prepared for weeks and had been nervous about it although not terrified. She survived without so much as a singe and the shot went well.

The only casualty was a celebratory bottle of Scotch that stunt co-ordinator Dwayne McLean dropped in after the stunt. "God, it's over," she said. "I've done a partial (burn), an arm or a leg but never when you are totally engulfed. You can hear youself go but you don't know you're on, fire because you can't see it. I guess by the 12th or 14th second, you start to feel it." Munro explained she was wearing a fireproof body stocking under her dress.

The wig, even the shoes, were fireproof and the flames never came near her face, the only exposed flesh. "I'm glad to have that under my belt. In a sense, it's a letdown because the moment of glory is gone and now, it's just another working day like anybody else. I'm going to have a little drink." The ambulance and the members of the Edmonton fire dapart-ment who were standing by outside the school pack up to go home. Now all supervising producer Ray Sager has to do is get the big burn scene past the film censors.

"Burns are very dicey things because you don't know how much UJ, Vi 7 ,1 I 4 i t't jf L.vVf sJV sjsiLjii i r-a En lj fir i i 1 i 'Sintii1i Jf PICTURE: Jim Cochrane PICTURE: Ian MacDonald The Bad The Good You'll feel like you're trapped on an endless journey from' Ontario to Alberta by foot in what's easily the best antidote to insomnia in the entire Fringe. Connoisseurs of gross-me-out humor won't want to miss Jeff Hirschfield's terrific Geeks in Love. It's tasteless, it's touching. Only a geek would miss it. The Fringe By LIZ NICHOLLS Journal Staff Writer Improbable, but true.

The Fringe is about to double. Again. By Wednesday, Fringe the Fifth had sold 65,000 tickets more than the entire festival last year. And it's typical of this astonishing event that the good news is the bad news. If you've left your Fringing for this final weekend, expect wall-to-wall company.

Besides the fact that you'll never walk alone, this means that the queue has become standard human geometry in Old Strathcona. Be prepared. If you're not keen on meaningful social interaction in the queue, take a book. Camp stools aren't a bad idea either. Tickets are up for grabs at each of the 13 theatres when the previous show there begins, but the entertainment-starved start queueing before that, long before that in the case of hot shows like Geeks in Love or Rap Master Ronnie.

If you're up for a last-minute gamble, check the big Fringe Board for sell-outs, changes and the schedule for outdoor shows in the Gazebo Park. It's a gigantic, non-stop theatre party. And it may be crammed, elbow-to-elbow with people who don't know you from Adam. But there's no neeo for alienation. Not while there's Alan Wpliams.

For his extraordinary one-man show King of America an intricate and hilarious argument linking alchemy, numerology and a race of white-skirrned Welsh-speaking Indians who are the rightful heirs to the continent Williams provides custom-made handwritten Albertan Fortune tickets on looseleaf paper. Each one contains a personalized mystical message from him. Ticket 22, for example, on the day I caught this brilliant show, told me that "brown shoes and a long black, cloak will lend an air of much-needed mystery to your actions." From now on, life will be different for me at $5 it's a steal. James would feel vindicated if you caught Paul Whitney's This is Oxo White? (Yardbird) and ignored the West Mall stuff at the beginning. He's still chuckling over First Stage (Ross Block).

Haul yourself and a kid or two to see Missing Link, according to Ron Chalmers, who also recommends a "superb" account of The Wind in the Willows, and (for older kids) Bleed Red, a new play about New Zealand teenagers. For me, Fringe the Fifth so far has veered wildly from the abysmal to the sublime. Rhinestones, for If the idea of cooling your heels in line gives you an urban anxiety rash, catch Sak Theatre. All week this exuberant troupe from Orlando, has been playing with huge, happy audiences in the Gazebo Park. And it's your chance to star in the classics like Dennis the Menace of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, or Sleeping Beauty and the Beast.

They're quick-witted, and they have a wonderful knack for creating good-natured comedy from audience participation. Even the victims love it. Every Fringee is full of insightful, astute advice for other Fringees on the terrific, the non-terrific and the far-from-terrific. His Fringe choices have given TV critic Bob Remington a new appreciation for his own beat. After a week of seeing shows like Chainsaw Love, he tells me rashly, "I'll never complain about sex and violence on TV ever again." The awful experience of Jacques Srrapp's Last Crepe has made him weep for joy at the prospect of a season of sitcoms.

For connoisseurs of comedy this weekend, he recommends Gordon Canola's All-Star Hog Report (Park Hotel) and Yikes! It's Fumin Mad (Yardbird). And he suggests you actively avoid The Old-Time Vaudeville Show (Yardbird). Rock music critic Helen Metella hasn't had a wonderful week at Fringe the Fifth. She reserves terms like "dull debacle" for Traps, which billed itself as a "dramatico musicale," and hypothesizes that Long John Baldry didn't read the script before he agreed to be in it. For your weekend delectation, she highly recommends one of the only Fringe shows she actively enjoyed the enigmatically-titled new musical Papa Died Under One of Those Great Big Heads On Easter Island: "zany plot, preposterous characters and a whirlwind of exotic locales." And she's going to catch Appearing Soon in a Country Near You, a Guerrilla Welfare production that opens late tonight (Cosmo).

Literary arts editor James Adams lucked out this week. Real Roxy is one of the few stage-video hybrids where the technology isn't just icing. (I caught The Kuttner Dimension and Adams owes me). David Mamet's A Life in the Theatre is "a wicked satire on backstage-onstage incest." And example, is a new play happening at Plaza 82. Be somewhere else.

The Gloaming, Oh My Darling gives me acid indigestion just to think about it. 1 11 think about Peter Gzowski, Peter Gzowski some other time when I feel stronger. DO NOT fail to make extreme efforts to catch Jeff Hirschfield's hilarious Geeks in Love, or Stewart Lemoine's bizarre and wonderful double-bill, What Gives? and Cocktails at Pain's. Grant MacEwan's spirited, inventive production of the Gary 'Doonesbury' Trudeau musical Rap Master Ronnie, is a treat..