I don’t get enough chances to write about one of the seemingly most overlooked (and one of this writers personal favorite sub-genres – the melt movie! Obviously when I caught wind of Lab Rats, the newest production from Team Chameleon Studios i needed to get some more information about it and pass it on to you, the much appreciated reader. It’s what any loyal minion of the melt movie would do. I was lucky enough to exchange words with Lauren Parker, producer of Lab Rats, about her teams newest foray into horror. You can check it out below.
Be sure to check out their short film 6 Shooter as well after the interview – what they managed to do on one of the most shoe-string budgets I’ve heard of (£75 or roughly $115) is nothing short of impressive.
Let’s start it out simple for the kids who came in late: who are you and how are you involved with Lab Rats?
I’m Lauren Parker, I’m a freelance producer by trade but horror is where my passion really lies. From John Carpenter to Astron-6 I’m a self-confessed horror fangirl. I’ve been working on horror shorts and features for the past couple of years and my shorts have shown at Frightfest and on the horror channel. I’ve been involved with Lab Rats since its inception, coming up with the storyline with the rest of the crew and making sure we get a full scale melting effect in there somewhere! As the producer I get to oversee every step of the production through to the end and its been a while since I’ve been this excited about a project.
Without ruining any surprises, what is Lab Rats about?
Lab Rats is a full out body horror, harking back to the greats of the 80s like The Thing, Re-Animator, The Fly, etc.
It follows Kat and her eco-warrior friends who embark on a mission to expose the international bio-chemistry company, Ring-Amnion, as liars after a tip-off that they ran an animal testing lab – despite their public profile claiming otherwise.
The gang, and Kat’s 20,000 online followers, are eager to find out what Ring-Amnion have been hiding as they break into an old building, but they aren’t prepared for what they find inside…
It soon becomes apparent that Ring Amnion do indeed test on the living and not just animals – this is where the splatter showcase begins.
Why did you choose to have the main character be an animal activist?
We wrote Lab Rats, based around the idea that the one effect Jayne Hyman (our SFX artist) really wanted to do was a full on mutation/transformation. We decided that we wanted to involve experiments to achieve this and somehow our story was born. The fact our characters are animal activists, shows they are kind, good-hearted people which hopefully means the audience starts to care when they begin to melt, ooze and explode. As a crew we are very animal friendly ourselves, but none of us have ever gone to the extremes our characters do!
We occasionally like to break up the monotony of normal interview questions with a lightning round, sooo:
Street Trash or Slime City? Street Trash
Savini or Winston? Savini – he’s so charming in real life!
The Munsters or The Addams Family? The Addams Family
In keeping with the theme of our blog, drinking and horror, what would you suggest viewers indulge in when they finally set eyes on Lab Rats?
Anything green, the more fluorescent the better, look up a ‘kermit’ cocktail and thats the right shade we’re going for. Avoid anything that makes you feel a bit queasy as we can’t promise you won’t throw up afterwards, in fact we kind of hope you do. You may want to keep something strong on standby – if you manage to make it through the whole film!
Do you have any parting words of wisdom for any of our readers contemplating breaking into research facilities?
Don’t do it unless you’re happy to be the research subject, let Lab Rats be a cautionary tale for you. It should put you off for life if we do our job properly!
-You can find Scotty watching Street Trash for the millionth time one Twitter