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Bayside family films fright flick

moviemain
Photos courtesy Rick McDonald

(A lot of) blood is thicker than water.

A fear-loving Bayside family has wrapped up its gory low-budget terror flick and will soon send the homemade horror off to some of the city’s biggest film festivals.

“This is my baby,” said Rick McDonald, 26, who directed the grisly $5,000 thriller, Lucifer’s Angels. “It’s a real achievement. We actually made a film.”

The gripping, guts-filled movie, which was four years in the making, plays on primal fears and is far from a typical slasher film, McDonald and his family said.

“I like to get scared. That’s the bottom line,” said Brian McDonald, 55, Rick’s uncle and right-hand producer. “There are so few movies that scare me anymore.”

So the clan threw cannibals and a killer clown named Mr. Smiles into the startling supernatural mix to promise an hour-long hellish ride.

The tale follows three groups of strangers who wind up in an area of the Catskill Mountains haunted by four wrongly executed mental hospital patients.

“When you don’t have a budget, you have to be 10 times more creative,” said Brian, a salesman by day.

Peppered with hidden Stephen King and Alfred Hitchcock elements, it is a “psychologically terrifying homage to classic horror,” Rick said.

“I was raised on horror movies,” said the IT specialist and New York Institute of Technology graduate. “This isn’t an amateur, student film.”

The eight lifelong residents of Bayside sacrificed nights, weekends and vacations to wrap shooting in 2012 and editing last week.

But the family that scares together stays together.

They’ll see the fruits of their labor — and parts of their hometown city suburbs — on the silver screen April 13, during a private viewing at MovieWorld Cinemas in Douglaston.

Then they hope to be featured in the New York City Horror Film Festival and Tribeca Film Festival.

“It was such a long project. It’s a great feeling that we could accomplish such a feat,” Brian said. “I’m looking forward to my real vacation in August.”

 

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