TRU student and director Reno Anastasio will release his newest horror-comedy film, Attack! Of the Viper and Cobra at the Slamdance film festival early next year. The festival will be held in Los Angeles, California, from Feb. 20-26, 2025.
According to the IMDb synopsis, the plotline follows the story of a woman named Alex who receives a surprise birthday gram from two low-budget strippers, Viper and Cobra. As a closeted lesbian, Alex is repulsed by the performances of Viper and Cobra and has a nightmare of her girlfriends being murdered by Viper’s supernatural and disembodied leopard print thong.
“The plot dynamic pays homage to the slasher films of the 80s, like Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street where there’s a killer who kills a whole bunch of people… then there’s what film critics have tokened ‘the final girl,’” Anastasio said. “Although it pays homage to those movies, the one major difference is that there’s no blood in mine. At one point, I was thinking of marketing it as the first slasher-horror where not a single drop of blood is spilled because the way the thong kills the victims is by suffocation or electrocution.”
Anastasio told the Omega that he hopes the film will attract young adult viewers, as the genre hasn’t been as popular in recent years.
“It is a genre that hasn’t been shot much [recently]. There haven’t been very many comedy/horrors made in the past two decades,” Anastasio said. “What’s been most popular in the past two decades has been horrors, just horrors or comedies, but not a combination, so it’s hard to say whether [a new demographic] will like it.”
The film’s post-production is being completed this year, but filming started in 2011. Anastasio reported that the film took longer than expected due to personal issues that occurred between filming and the completion of the project.
“[The film] took so long because I was involved in the military on a full-time basis. I was making a career in the Canadian forces as a logistics officer, and I developed a mental health issue as well … this delayed the post-production. There were a lot of times where the training involved in the military kept me from getting any editing done,” Anastasio said.
Attack! Of the Viper and Cobra took 14 years for Anastasio to complete, from the start of the filming process to the end of post-production. He reported that even though the film took longer than expected, the delay allowed for better editing software and special effects to be applied.
Anastasio told the Omega that he created the film without a production crew.
“I shot it with no crew. So I had to do all the pre-planning, everything involved in pre-production, set decoration, deciding wardrobe, casting,” Anastasio said. “It was all done by myself.”
If the film does well after release, Anastasio said he would be willing to film a sequel, noting that his friend, actor Troy Fromin (“Ox” in Saved by the Bell), would like to star in it.
For more information on the film, you can visit the IMDb webpage here.