Written and Directed by Mia-kate Russell
Starring
Sophie Wright-Mendelsohn, Tahlee Fereday,
Alexandra Jensen, and Bailey Spalding
Available to Stream on Shudder August 28th
Synopsis
Set on a hot summer’s night in 1986 Australia, Penny Lane is celebrating getting into college with her longtime girlfriends Toni and Amy. The night, however, does not turn out as planned. After Penny’s jealous and troubled cousin Kat decides a cruel prank is in order, what begins as a thoughtless spiked cupcake game spirals into a night of bloodshed. In the Ozploitation tradition, Mia-kate Russell’s debut feature is a blood-soaked descent into love, betrayal and survival, infused with dark comedy and rage.
About the Director
An artist with an original voice and an unapologetic flair for thriller and horror storytelling, Mia-kate Russell’s directorial work is marked as much by darkness as it is at times a sly, even camp, humour. She has the gift of creating emotionally impactful stories that challenges the audience to examine their own behavior as her complex and flawed characters are forced to confront the consequences of their own. Mia-kate is committed to making wickedly entertaining character-based genre films with authenticity and a social conscience.
As a writer and director, her short films have won more than 30 awards and screened at prestigious festivals all around the world including SITGES, Screamfest and Shriekfest.
Her first short film Auditioning Fanny, starring Sam Johnson, won the Best Short Film award at the Phenom Film Festival (2012), her next short Swallow won multiple awards for FX Makeup and had the honour of being nominated for Best Picture at SITGES (2014), Death By Muff was a finalist of the ABCs of Death 2 and was included on the horror anthology ABCs of Death 2.5, Liz Drives (2017) won multiple awards at genre festivals both in Australia and overseas including Sydney Indie Film Festival and Monster Fest, and the award-winning Maggie May (2019) was a hit with audiences and critics at festivals all over the world, the last two surpassing 100,000 views each on online platform ALTER. Mia-kate’s work is featured in Alexandra Heller-Nicholas’s 2018 book 1000 Women in Horror.
Director: Mia-kate Russell
Screenwriter: Mia-kate Russell
Cast: Sophie Wright-Mendelsohn, Tahlee Fereday, Alexandra Jensen, Bailey Spalding, Ben O’Toole, Steve Le Marquand, and Fletcher Humphrys
Executive Producers: Jeff Harrison, Miet Engelhardt, John Sheedy, Joel Anderson, Jonathan Kier, and Matt Brodie
Producers: Julie Ryan, Ari Harrison, Andre Lima, and Carly Maple
Director of Photography: Liam Gilmour
Genre: Horror
Language: English
Runtime: 88 mins
